The Kitchen Garden of Virtues or The Garden of Values: The Community Garden as Landscaping Project

Résumé En

On the basis of a survey carried out in Marseille involving 42 people, the aim of the present article is to show that community gardens are today real landscaping projects, that is projects aimed at the 'landscaping' of a site. After describing the dynamic that they trigger in the low-income neighbourhoods of the city, it decrypts the project process which these cultivated areas give rise to. This highlights the various particpants among the planning body (local authority agencies, housing associations), the support teams for the planning body and for community organisation contractors, the project contractors, who increasingly are landscape architects, and the user groups which have been slow to make their mark in a systematic way. A further aim of this article is to distinguish the different logical bases governing the management of community garden landscaping projects. On one hand, it describes a logic based on the 'virtues' (vertus) of the kitchen garden, in which community gardens are conceived as multi-functional tools destined to do good. On the other hand, it analyses a logic based on the 'values' (valeurs) of the garden, in which the community garden embodies good, given physical form in a place. It then examines the impact of these differences of conception on the realisation of projects and in particular on the degree of involvement of the local residents at the community garden worksite. It concludes with the relative failure resulting from these distinct visions by considering that the process of 'landscaping' which gives rise to community gardens continues beyond the potential cessation of cultivation.