Community gardens in the canton of Geneva (Switzerland) are predominantly organised through municipal programmes. Because of their highly regulated character, they are at odds with dominant depictions of community gardens as contestatory, grassroots spaces. They, however, do not map perfectly either onto the accounts of institutional " organised garden projects " deemed to accompany municipal entrepreneurial strategies and/or the implementation of neoliberal governmentality. Critically engaging with municipal involvement in community garden and urban agriculture development, this paper draws attention to the contradictory ways in which municipal actors frame and govern these issues. Drawing upon a case study in the municipality of Vernier, it argues that the municipality's integrated urban agriculture programme serves different and contradictory functions and is simultaneously progressive and neoliberal. Indeed, while Vernier's programme clearly attempts at reversing processes of space privatisation and nature commodification, its focus on individualised action and choice contributes to reinforcing neoliberal modes of subjectification. This analysis, I hope, will encourage urban agriculture scholars to question their reliance upon a dichotomy between benevolent civil organisations and profit-oriented public institutions, and to account more precisely for the singular processes of neoliberalisation at play within the boundaries of their case studies.

Since the intensification of the search for sustainable urban planning, the ideal of the compact and green city characterized by high density, mixed land use and attractive green infrastructure, has become a desirable urban form at global scale. Urban greening, including urban gardening, has experienced a resurgence of interest. Within the frame of the compact city, the meanings, forms and functions of urban gardening have been re-evaluated for their contribution to urban sustainability, turning those spaces into a contested subject of negotiation. This qualitative study, conducted in the Swiss cities of Basle, Berne, Geneva and Zurich, investigates how the meanings of urban gardening are discursively (re)produced in political negotiation processes and how different rationalities of space produce a hegemonic order, constructing urban gardening sites as contested spaces. The findings demonstrate that urban growth strategies within the frame of the compact city, aiming at an efficient and resource-saving (re)organization of urban space, are discursively rationalizing current transformation processes. While so-called traditional forms of urban gardening are closed down, displaced to locations with less significance for urban development plans, or transformed in spatial and functional terms, new forms of urban gardening commensurate with the current ideals of urban landscapes and are emerging in the inner-city areas.

"During the past ten years, both public policies and scientific research have tended to pay increasing attention to what they refer to as ‘‘urban gardening’’ and ‘‘urban agriculture’’. In this paper I argue that the term ‘‘urban’’ poorly reflects the diversity of spatial references that underpin such projects. I explore the framing process of two competing agriculture and gardening projects in Geneva, Switzerland. I first show that the social and spatial frames of the projects, i.e. the central definition of a public and of a spatiality are inextricably linked. In the second part, I argue that by ranking the spatial units that ground the spatial frames of the projects according to the specific public they are aimed at, the most powerful actor makes competitive use of scale frames. This paper thus argues for more attention to the socio-spatial framing of urban agriculture and urban gardening projects. It contributes to the debate on the politics of scale by exploring how a scalar hierarchy is performed through the strategic deployment of spatial criteria by social actors. The hierarchy appears to be contingent and context specific, with prevalent notions of locality and proximity."

Affluent diets have negative effects on the health of the population and the environment. Moreover, the ability of industrialised agricultural ecosystems to continue to supply these diets is threatened by the anticipated consequences of climate change. By challenging the ongoing supply of the diets of affluent countries, climate change provides a population and environmental health opportunity. This paper contrasts two strategies for dealing with climate change-related food insecurity. Functional foods are being positioned as one response because they are considered a hyper-efficient mechanism for supplying essential micronutrients. An alternative response is civic and urban agriculture. Rather than emphasising increased economic or nutritional efficiencies, civic agriculture presents a holistic approach to food security that is more directly connected to the economic, environmental and social factors that affect diet and health.

In the context of urban densification and central urban areas' lack of open spaces, new forms of small-scale urban gardening practices have emerged. These gardening practices respond to urban pressures and open new modes of green space governance, presenting alternative and multifunctional ways to manage and revitalise cities. Focusing on the case of Geneva, the article unfolds two levels of discussion. On the one hand—and with reference to the theorist Haber-mas—it examines how multiple actors with different interests interplay and cooperate with each other in order to negotiate over open space, while discussing implications for local politics and planning. On the other hand, it describes how these negotiations result in new, innovative, and hybrid forms of public green space. The main findings indicate emerging forms of collaboration, partnerships, and governance patterns that involve public and private sectors and increase participation by civil society actors. Cooperation amongst several interested groups and the collective re-invention of public urban spaces increase these spaces' accessibility for multiple users and actors, as well as present possibilities for alternative and diversified uses and activities. This might underline the hypothesis that future cities will be governed in less formalised ways, and that urban forms will be created through spontaneous, temporary, mobile, and adaptive negotiation processes.

This study to establish the effectiveness donor-funded nutritional community gardens in the city of Masvingo in light of the fact that most of them have stopped working. The objectives of the study were to identify the reasons for establishing nutritional gardens in the city of Masvingo; to establish the causes of abandonment of the nutritional gardens by the beneficiaries; and to establish how the dilapidated gardens can be improved. The study focused on 7 of the 10 wards in the city of Masvingo. Of the 210 members only 70 (10 from each of the 7 gardens) were sampled for the study. The data collection instruments used in this research were structured questionnaires. Overall respondents felt that nutrition gardens were not economically viable as they failed to meet their basic needs like payment of school fees for their children, paying for accommodation rent, and so on. Donor-funded nutritional community gardens in the city of Masvingo were found not to be as effective as anticipated when they were introduced. The study recommends that there should be engines to pump water because the boreholes are too heavy; a programme should be in place to train garden beneficiaries in basic productive skills including those for marketing; agricultural extension workers should avail themselves to supervise the operation of community gardens to boost the confidence and productivity of the gardeners; awareness campaigns should be rolled out which sensitise the gardeners about the nutritional value of certain varieties of vegetables; water canals should be constructed for easy watering; and the gardeners should device means to assign night watchers to prevent thievery.

New forms of urban gardening are gaining a momentum in cities transforming the conventional use and functions of open green and public space. They often take place through informal and temporal (re)use of vacant land "that is considered to have little market value" (Chmelzkopf 1996: 364) consisting part of greening strategies or social policy. Increased adoption of such forms within urban areas underlies discussions of changing contemporary social and productive urban landscapes by raising important issues regarding new modes of land use management, green space governance and collaborative structures. This paper mainly focuses on the shifted meanings of the notion of open public space by referring to its openness to a diversity of uses and users that claim it and relates to the questions of access rights, power relations among actors, negotiations and the so called right to use and re-appropriate land (Hackenbroch 2013). By using examples drawn from the Greek and Swiss case, this paper advances comparative research under a European perspective underlining differences and similarities in urban gardening practices, social and institutional contexts, collaborative governance patterns, motivations, levels of institutionalisation, openness and inclusiveness of space between Northern and Southern Europe. More specifically the research calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives in relation to their multifunctional, spatial and socio-political aspects that affects new configurations of urban green areas and public space as well as related planning practices. Therefore it investigates: a) What are the driving factors in each context and what forms of space and governing structures do they generate? b) How do these growing spaces influence the usability and accessibility of open/public space? c) What are the potentials, constraints, future prospects and urban policy implications of such urban gardening projects for sustainable development incentives?