ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way community garden activists theorise their work and the ways their practices reflect and are illuminated by other analyses of collective social action. Community garden activists embrace a politics of creation and collective imagination. Many political activities carried out by social movements fall outside of social movement scholars focus on state-directed protest and have been largely omitted from consideration. As in many social movements, community gardener's collectivity is plural, ambivalent and often contradictory and does not necessarily coalesce around a clearly articulated political philosophy or model of change. Community garden activists reasons for working in the ways they do though demonstrating analytical self-reflection are not necessarily nested within a wider theoretical framework such as Marxism or deep ecology. The benefits of community gardens are not evenly distributed. Constructive repertoires of collective action, despite their sustained and possibly increasing prevalence, have been given inadequate attention by social movement scholars.
