Écoquartiers français et jardins collectifs : actualité et perspectives

Abstract

This paper reviews the relations between sustainable cities and community gardens, in particular between the emergence of sustainable districts and the concomitant enthusiasm for community gardens. Based on the corpus of entries for the National Eco-Districts Competition organized in 2011 by the French State, the article investigates the incidence of such a use of collective space in the projects. It then analyzes the projections and settings of urban sustainability which are thereby revealed. Collective gardens are generally promoted as creators of a sense of community, vectors of change, bringers of challenges, mobilizations and new practices. Faced with such ideas which tend to transform the garden into surety for the global planning project, the issue is also to include avenues of thought involving more strategic political and ideological conceptions to be found behind the promotion of city gardens.

Keywords

• urban agriculture
• sustainable
• nature
• community gardens
• city
• éco-districts