ABSTRACT
The variety of studies on urban agriculture suggest similarities across urban transformation worldwide. Simultaneously, they show the cultural specificity of the meaning of urban gardening practices across different cities. This chapter adds to this literature by studying the specifics of urban agriculture in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Exploring the meaning of urban agriculture in Utrecht has led to a study of the relation between Dutch urbanites, their physical environment, and food procurement. ‘Modern’ society deliberately separated rural from urban, and human from nature in the past centuries, making urban agriculture a contradictory practice. This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork with several urban gardens in Utrecht, paying special attention to the case-study at ‘Koningshof’. In the chapter, the observed and experienced gardening practices are interpreted as ‘holistic gardening’, synergising body and mind, and the social and ecological. By emphasising sensorial engagements of gardeners with the nonhuman environment, the chapter argues that experiencing the senses serves as a way to raise awareness of human-nonhuman connectivity, concomitantly challenging the conventional ontological dichotomies in contemporary Dutch society.
