ABSTRACT
In recent decades, community-based food growing, or urban agriculture, has begun to occupy a prominent place in political programmes of urban sustainability transformation. This chapter uses the example of London to trace the emergence of various initiatives to promote urban agriculture from a history of knowledge perspective. London is a particularly interesting case for such an enquiry because it had a pioneering function for urban agriculture in Europe. Already in the 1970s, London witnessed a rise of community gardening and city farming projects. Around 2000, NGOs, food policy experts, boroughs and the newly formed Greater London Authority, identified food and urban agriculture as a crucial dimension of their common attempt to transform London into a model of a sustainable city. The chapter identifies three formative episodes in each of which a different nexus of knowledge-making and politics came into being: open civic experimentation with new forms of land-use in community projects, the work of modelling and surveying the city in mission-oriented food planning scholarship and expert advice, and the mobilisation of knowledge in the form of a government-sponsored mobilisation campaign. As the chapter argues, these knowledge processes did not simply produce more objective or effective descriptions of the city but performed a new order of the city as a food-system and a space of community engagement.
