ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses changes and contemporary challenges that allotment gardens encounter in European cities. The perspective of urban political economy guides us in distilling these new and dynamic urban configurations from a complex macro-framework of the state of capitalism and the state of governability. The chapter describes the changing urban contexts for allotment gardens in European cities. It focuses on past and current processes of urban change, and reviews the character of the entrepreneurial city through economic, political and spatial prisms. The chapter presents ‘the impact of urban restructuring on allotment gardens’ which captures the impact of major urban processes on allotment gardens in Europe. It elaborates on the influence of specific changes on the structure, operation and meaning of urban allotment gardens. The political and spatial restructuring in the entrepreneurial city has been accompanied by a sharpening of social and economic inequalities and division within cities.
