The authors would like to thank all the urban gardeners that participated to this part of the research, as well as the members of Comitato Borgata Mirafiori and the Urban Ecomuseum EUT/2 for their time together and exchange of knowledge and views. The Food Citizens? project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 724151).

Introduction

1Using photographs of the transformation of a nature park (Parco Piemonte) into an urban green project in a peripheral area of Turin (Italy), we discuss the different ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) that social actors developed over this changing urban landscape. In 2019, a sizable portion of the park was transfigured into a gardening project (Orti Generali) aimed at regenerating the area, proposing collective activities and attracting new food gardeners. Following a visual approach to the study of urban spaces (Krase 2012) the authors’ photographs as well as social media and archive images provide an account of this process and its aesthetics from the different perspectives of the social actors involved.

3After contextualizing the project as part of a new global aesthetic as well as Turin’s historical transformations, our step-by-step photographic analysis reflects on what this renewal entailed over time (longitudinal comparison). Looking at the evolution of the area of Mirafiori Sud and Parco Piemonte in particular, we reflect on what was removed, what remains, what was added, and on what basis. We argue that the transformation of the landscape mediated new visions, roles and power relations that came to play in the park and that are part of broader urban renewal processes. What became visible were new criteria through which the area was reorganized, corresponding to international models of urban sustainability and their aesthetic grammar as much as in opposition to some pre-existing local practices.

4Secondly, we reflect on the positionality of vision bringing the aesthetics of the project through a comparative lens: what is shown and what is not? What do gardeners, volunteers and project developers visualize from different perspectives? How is our attention as ethnographers and project developers differently focussed?

5Thirdly, we point out the ways in which these different visions framed collaboration in the gardens and influenced our relations with the project organisers, both facilitating and challenging our being together in the field, as planners and anthropologists (Crawford 2020). We argue that these differences speak of our different skilled visions, thus not only views or opinions, but forms of engagement with the natural, material and relational environment.

‘Designerly’ Aesthetics for Urban Farming

6As visual anthropologist Francesco Faeta argues, ‘all landscape construction, in the western tradition in particular, lies in the dialectic between order and complexity… through the defining input of the sense of sight’ (Faeta 2009: 11). He bases his observation on the work of Rudolf Arnheim on landscape architecture, which appeared in 1966 under the title Order and complexity in landscape planning in an edited volume dedicated to the psychology of art (Arnheim 1966). In our case, we are interested in how visual methods can enhance our understanding of ‘urban vernacular landscapes’ namely spaces shaped by a particular local organization, customs and relations (Krase 2012: 22). How do considerations of order and aesthetics inform urban agriculture projects? What makes a green space pleasing to the eye, and to whom? And how do diverse positionings, opinions and practices shape answers to these questions?

7‘Designerly’ aesthetics put the visionary intervention of design thinking at the centre (Cross 2019). This seems to frame the way in which international literature and planning practice on urban agriculture investigates potential transformations of post-industrial cities (usually of the northern hemisphere) into sites of sustainable food practices and social improvement (with relevant aspects of innovating and curating social involvement). Cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary scholarship proposes transitions in (life)styles and patterns of food consumption, showcasing social experiments in collective urban spaces, often authored by landscape architects in collaboration with rural sociologists, technology developers and urban planners. Redesigning the food field as a space for artistic and activist intervention, they focus on the urban space to develop innovative food economies, food communities and food topographies, addressing the issue of sustainable food transition through specific aesthetics, models and interventions for urban farming. While steeped in local networks of design and technology (in figure 1, we have selected three examples profiling Dutch cases), they profile multiple international urban case studies, including Italy.

8These books deserve aesthetic analysis in themselves as they are often image-driven, typeset and curated using high-quality graphics (including colour photographs, maps and infographics on photographic paper). They are designed to be appreciated not only for the content they communicate but also for their aesthetics. We have selected them to draw attention to the diversity of canons and disciplinary discourses around the transformation of urban spaces. While we believe that (visual) transformations of urban landscapes should be studied in their own terms and in the logic of their specific historical and social context (Krase 2012), we also realize that cosmopolitan grammars of visual and aesthetic representation play a real part in imagining, shaping and governing urban transformations.

Why Turin?

9Turin displays the traces and scars of continuous processes of re-designing its urban fabric, especially during distinctive urban development phases such as industrialization and more recently de-industrialization (epitomized by FIAT’s downsizing of local operations). Since the first half of the twentieth century, (car) factories had shaped the culture, geography and everyday life of the city (Jalla and Musso 1981). Each neighbourhood kept its own identity, however, often with their own markets (Jalla 1982: 84). Among the landmarks of contemporary Turin, in fact are the first FIAT factory (1898), the new hospital (1920) and the fresh fruit market (1934). A good visual representation of this fluid process and how it is conversant with ongoing, sometimes contradictory aesthetic practices of finding a human dimension in the city, is this installation at the Museum of the Car (MAUTO) in Turin:

13

14Video link: https://www.ortigenerali.it/​wp-content/​uploads/​2019/​12/​ortivideo2019.mp4?_=1

See: https://www.facebook.com/​ortigenerali/​

Thanks to the support of local volunteers, the park was furnished and decorated following a consistent visual identity (such as yellow frames, wooden DIY benches and a container) and has hosted several events. In this picture, visitors are looking at visionary images of the future of the city as part of the exhibition ‘Visions of Torino Stratosferica’.

See: https://torinostratosferica.it/​precollinear-park/​.

‘Characterised by a set or system of goods, places, buildings, spaces, sites, elements of the landscape whether natural or human-made, that are coherent and consistent, for physical or historical proximity, namely placed in an explicit relation between each other and interpreted and communicated as one unitary system, through tools that can ensure their identification, accessibility, intelligibility’ (Jalla 2007: 177).

18In other words, the city and its representation come to coincide in new forms of museography. While these processes share the ambition of re-designing the urban fabric with perspicuous interventions, they are premised on values and standards derived from global imagination exercises. While considering specific features of the city, these also relate to global urban trends (see also Dines 2012). In what follows, we visually document in an analytical manner how the global aesthetics of urban regeneration gradually took shape on the ground in Mirafiori Sud, thanks to stepwise and deliberate interventions both in the physical landscape of Orti Generali and in its virtual packaging through social media communication.

Urban Gardens at the Margins of the City

19Orti Generali developed within a broader process of renewal, planned for the urban green along the Sangone River in Turin’s southernmost neighbourhood Mirafiori Sud. Crossed by a border between two municipalities (Torino and Nichelino) and profoundly incised by the torrent Sangone, this area presents both the traits of the urban periphery (with dense and popular high-rise housing) and marginal rural land, albeit increasingly encroached by road and commercial infrastructure. In the public park Parco Piemonte, already appropriated by various actors such as spontaneous food gardens, homeless migrants and one transhumant sheepherder, Orti Generali established its gardening, didactic farming and sustainable leisure project.

20During Turin’s industrialization (FIAT opened its factory in Mirafiori in 1939), its peripheries turned into production sites and workers’ dormitories. Working-class families used the river for bathing and sailing, escaping from both the Fordist factory and the cramped high rises. The riverbanks were also a rural-urban frontier, a ‘rurban’ border space, accommodating residual farming, herders and shepherds.

21The industrial pollution of soil and waste deteriorated the riverine landscape, until bathing was eventually forbidden in the 1960s. The riverbanks were progressively abandoned to wild vegetation as well as to industrial and domestic waste, such as iron poles, plastic containers and car wheels, which accumulated over the years. As discussed by Barchetta (2019), who studied two other nature parks and riverbanks in Turin, in this city nature is tied to its industrial history and ruins. Similarly to other anthropologists investigating marginal landscapes (e.g. Lai and Breda 2011), Barchetta comments on the temporality of urban nature and collects ‘stories’, through which its social and environmental forces are ‘felt, imagined, negotiated, lived, narrated and reworked in institutional realities and everyday life’, such as those framed in the discourse of urban decay (degrado, Barchetta 2019: 124).

23Over the last few decades, some of these areas were used and maintained by urban gardeners who autonomously created plots for cultivation. This form of land appropriation is a widespread practice, often in marginal areas, along rivers and railways. The phenomenon developed in the 1970s, with the increase of the urban population and the industrialization of city peripheries, at a time of tumultuous internal migration (Tecco et al. 2016). The new factory workers were mostly coming from rural southern Italy and developed urban gardens at the city margins for both subsistence and recreation (Baldo 2012; Crespi 1982). Nowadays in Mirafiori Sud, these gardens are frequented by a variety of people including elderly men, novel immigrants, and unemployed residents - and in some cases through a complex system of informal transactions between acquaintances. The plots often include small cabins and an array of second-hand equipment and materials. Gardeners cultivate not only food but also long-term affective relationships with the space they take care of. For example, some of them had been cultivating the same plot since the 1970s: the garden was for them a place where to spend time with family and reconnect with their agricultural family background. As also underlined by Briceño-Leon (1989) in relation to self-made housing based on traditional knowledge, such forms of self-constructions become, in the case of poor and marginalized groups, a means for increasing self-confidence and gaining a sense of control over one’s own life. Moreover, as pointed out by a gardener, and former metal worker, all spontaneous gardeners develop zero-costs solutions. Urban waste is re-used in creative and functional ways: for example, doors are assembled from residue wooden boards, plastic containers are used as water receptacles, and bed nets as fences.

24These plots are de facto appropriated by marginalised city inhabitants, and are generally regarded as illegal, dirty and inappropriate. Unauthorized forms of gardening in public spaces are termed as ‘spontaneous’ (orti spontanei) by those who do not wish to criminalize this practice, such as some researchers, social workers and employees of the non-profit sector – including the managers of Orti Generali. On the other hand, the most common expression orti abusivi is loosely translatable as ‘illegal’ or ‘unlicensed’ gardens and often used by local inhabitants, journalists and public servants. The widespread practice of abusivismo edilizio, namely modified or newbuilds without proper licensing, is heavily connoted, associated with tax-dodging, environmental abuse or mafia-related money laundering. So to use the word abusivo underlines the illegal side of unlicensed gardening, namely as the undue appropriation of public land.

25Spontaneous gardeners’ ‘creative agency’ plays a role in (re)shaping urban landscapes through everyday practice (Newman 2015). Along the Sangone, some stepped and levelled the steep terrain into terraces. Others carved cave-like devotional chapels in the canyon-esque steep riverbank. More than 30 years ago, Italian anthropologist Amalia Signorelli (1989) studied entire spontaneous neighbourhoods in the peripheries of Naples. Traces of citizens’ self-management remained visible in these areas, in the forms of ‘complex overlapping and intertwining elevations, divisions, fillings, demolitions, connections, separations, additions […]’ (Signorelli 1989: 14). Like spontaneous gardens, such forms of self-management can be regarded as a form of resistance to social and economic marginality, lack of appropriate living environments and long-term inattention to local needs by the city administration. These were framed as illegitimate with urban renewal interventions and the development of social housing, which, as Signorelli (1989) argued, could be seen as a form of ‘forced acculturation’ reflecting a planner–inhabitant division, urban power relations, and class and cultural differences.

New Aesthetics

27The making of Orti Generali started with the transformation of this urban space in winter 2019. The clean-up and construction works relied on the mobilization of local volunteers and future gardeners, who engaged in this together with the gardens’ managers and contracted specialized workers such as agronomists and electricians. Maria Vasile participated too, learning to appreciate the diverse visions at stake around urban renewal, its function and aesthetics. The latter unfolded in decision-making processes such as what to remove, reuse, maintain, or develop, and on which criteria.

28Volunteers mobilised weekly to clean overgrowth and collect waste found on and under-ground, separating it for appropriate disposal. Piles of material had been abandoned and accumulated over the years: plastic boxes, glass bottles, cloths, metals parts, cars’ parts and domestic equipment.

30Orti Generali managers and volunteers dismantled the spontaneous urban gardens that had been recently abandoned after their gardeners had been informed about the project. This work consisted of undoing the gardens and constructions as well as collecting material and tools that could be reused in the project, such as gardening tools, ropes, and wooden boards but excluded all plastic containers, which were considered too ugly, damaged and unsustainable. The regulations of Orti Generali would in fact soon completely prohibit the use of plastic material in the new allotment gardens.

31Some of the materials thus became incorporated into the project, and some of their practical and aesthetic standards were also reproduced, in conversation with volunteers (who often had gardening and construction experience) and the few spontaneous gardeners who stayed and took part in the project. For example, reeds and canes used in the spontaneous gardens were inserted as decoration in Orti Generali’s storage units (figure 15).

33Orti Generali share similarities with a case analysed by Guano (2020) in the post-industrial urban peripheries of the Bisagno Valley (Genoa, Italy). Here, local activists (artisans, young and old residents) were critical of the proliferation of shopping malls, megastores and parking lots, described as a ‘cement flood’ (alluvione di cemento, Guano 2020: 8). Instead, they called for a new aesthetic sensibility beyond the frequent divide between the beauty of Italian city centres and the ‘cementification’ of their peripheries. While their activities (such as group walks, maintenance of the urban green, petitions for the official recognition of local heritage) allowed them to have a say in the future of the valley, Guano also elaborates on the ambiguity of their attention to aesthetics, which she suggests is to be analysed in relation to ‘the neoliberal template for the aesthetic consumptions of cities’ (Guano 2020: 21). While Guano nuances the processes that can occur around the aesthetic consumption of cities (showing how it can be used by local inhabitants), she also maintains that the only way to have these alternative development projects accepted and supported was to comply with shared standards of urban aesthetics such as the cultivation of ‘beauty’.

34At Orti Generali, the focus on aesthetics became apparent during the implementation of the project, with specific styles of organizing the land use and preference for specific materials. The ensuing canon was the emergence of a new, curated landscape, including straight lines between plots and cultivations, tool sheds and fences, which stood out in comparison with the previous spontaneous environment of the park. For example, new gardening infrastructure included wooden fences specifically imported from France called ganivelles, that were planted by volunteers to organize the gardening plots.

35These fences created a sense of order and homogeneity, which soon was extended by installing identical looking sheds provided by the organization in all gardens. The gardeners were allowed to construct greenhouses, however they were required to follow specific rules and standards: they should be aluminium and polycarbonate structures 185 cm wide and 195 high (Orti Generali, 07/01/2021 regulations). More generally, constructions in the gardens (e.g. fences, forcing tunnels) were required to be low and transparent, and the material used for the likes of pergola, small sheds, decorations should be only wood or iron. Such detailed regulations clearly differentiate the new allotments from spontaneous gardens.

37Throughout this campaign, the new aesthetics of the gardens expanded beyond the neighbourhood, to become iconic of the city’s post-COVID-19 renaissance. The broader, educated public it targeted was potentially more familiar with the cosmopolitan, ‘designerly’ aesthetic grammar that we introduced at the outset, than some of the residents of Mirafiori themselves. Curating aesthetics beyond the gardens’ physical existence and experience is also important in Orti Generali’s communication material (sign boards, gadgets such as t-shirts, publications, videos and website), which displayed bright colours and consistent fonts, according to one single visual identity, as it is standard practice in the communication design of corporate branding.

38In other words, the gardens are meant to be the object not only of food production and consumption but also of aesthetic consumption (e.g. Harvey 1989). In fact, the new shape and aesthetic of the common area of Orti Generali, through the planting of fruit trees, enlarged paths and new services such as recreational activities and a café offering local quality products, also target city-dwellers, beyond gardeners and volunteers. We associate the increased importance of aesthetics in urban gardening with the ‘designerly’ aesthetic standards discussed at the outset. This raises questions worth debating relating to the space remaining for participatory decision making: what space is left for local gardeners, their opinions and habits? How do they relate (if at all) to the new aesthetics of the area? Which shape do collaborations between project directors, gardeners and volunteers take, in a context framed by the logic of this aesthetics?

Framing Collaboration

39Urban renewal and ‘beauty’ are highly politicized tropes, even when they do not appear as such: ‘they form part of a wider political discourse about citizenship that intersects questions of power, control, belonging, rights, obligations and social justice’, as argued by Dines (2012: 2) in relation to the transformation of the historic centre of Naples (Italy). Anthropologists studying the transformation of urban spaces have argued that the existence of a dominant aesthetic is related to a hierarchy of values and unequal social relations and can stand in the way of grassroots governance (e.g. Herzfeld 2017; Herzfeld 2004; Signorelli 1989). Michael Herzfeld (2017) has exemplified how, in the case of Bangkok, the beautification of urban spaces often comes at the expense of the social needs of the poorest inhabitants, who may suffer eviction, the destruction of ‘vernacular architecture’ in the name of development and modernity (Herzfeld 2017). Beautification can also be related to historical conservation and the concept of heritage, which can be among the factors leading to gentrification (Herzfeld 2010).

40At Orti Generali, the globally recognized aesthetic grammar chosen by the project directors gave a framework for the participation of gardeners and volunteers. The diverse visions of the gardeners and volunteers (which reflected different social positions, ways of gardening and desired spaces) did not always find a space for expression in this framework. Opening up for consultations with everybody seemed to counter the need to make some headways with the project, so the project directors prioritized their plans and choices in the name of their expertise and long-term ownership of the project. As a consequence, the collaboration with gardeners and volunteers remained hierarchical and participation was only allowed within this framework.

41As mentioned, this became evident during the supervision of the volunteering activities, in the regulations for individual allotments, and through the cultural agenda of Orti Generali, which is another entry point into the relation between aesthetics and the promotion of a new, cosmopolitan culture for this space. For example, a fundraising event called Gran Galà was organized in the communal area of the gardens. The gardeners cooked products from their plots for the charity dinner, while non-residents and members of partner organizations including Slow Food visited the gardens for the first time. A special dress code for the event was to wear suits and elegant dresses with gardening boots, resulting in an ironic juxtaposition (as in the posters below) of chic and rural.

The posters specify program (fundraising dinner and auction), costs (20 euros), dress code and co-organizers of the event (including other European funded projects and local foundations).

https://www.ortigenerali.it

42Fabio Dei (2015) has argued that a dichotomous distinction between high and low culture can be nuanced by understanding new forms of production of difference, also in relation to the ways in which agricultural practices, traditions and landscapes are studied. In this perspective, the Gran Gala attempted to blend different practices such as gardening, cooking, charity dinners and elegant clothing. Similarly, the posters juxtapose images of elegantly dressed actors, vegetables, animals and gardening tools in a collage. At the same time, as this event was designed a priori, the needs, preferences and taste of the gardeners and the working-class history of the area were not taken into account. Some of the volunteers’ work did not gain much visibility or recognition (for example that of some elderly women from the area who took care of preparations). While one can infer that volunteers take pleasure in their participation, filling and diversifying their free time, thinking with them about their role and preferences could possibly help to develop peer-to-peer collaborations and ‘mixité sociale’ – one of the key terms of the project (Olivari 2011: 18).

44As observed in other parks and public spaces (e.g. Dines 2012; Newman 2015; Da Costa Oliveira and Fausto 2021), users and inhabitants often create their own margins for creativity and space for everyday planning, decision making and implementation of aesthetic preferences. At Orti Generali, for example, gardeners and volunteers also designed their own spaces in their individual plots. For example, some introduced pergolas, hammocks, or flags, while some also introduced hail-protection nets. The project directors reacted with one-to-one discussions, individual exceptions to the rules or the order to remove what they considered as inappropriate according to their standards – including trees above a certain height.

46While in this case the management of publicly viewable space became a process of negotiation and compromise, in other occasions, issues around collaboration and decision making at Orti Generali also led to conflicts among gardeners and project directors. For example, in the autumn of 2019, one of the gardeners called for the adoption of more sustainable practices such as not using motored tools for the maintenance of shared spaces and paying more attention to the quality of life of the animals of the farm. He highlighted that the attention to aesthetics was hindering the environmentally transformative potential of the project. Speaking from an environmental activist point of view, he underlined that he was being asked to collaborate in the maintenance of the area but had no say in the decision making.

47We argue that these different, potentially conflicting positions speak of different ‘skilled visions’, namely not only ‘views’ or ‘opinions’, but rather ways of envisaging expert practices as forms of engagement (with the land, with animals and materials, and with each other), which carry normative and aesthetic expectations about what the outcome should look like, and whose often divergent premises may be tacit, or left inarticulate (Grasseni 2009). While power relations are part of urban renewal processes, not only in Turin, this kind of aesthetic engagement encompasses more than a political dimension and is therefore personally felt in microscopic, everyday lived practices. As a third-party observer who nevertheless participates in and literally sees both points of view, namely their visions and premises, the ethnographer’s position can play a role here.

48During her participant observation at the gardens, Maria Vasile was asked by the project directors to moderate two meetings addressing these frictions, during which both sides presented their reasons. Having a position herself, Maria also proposed to organize and facilitate a larger meeting between some volunteers, gardeners and the project directors. On these occasions, and recurrently in exchanges with the project directors, Maria underlined the importance of developing a systematic and active involvement of local gardeners and residents in decision-making processes, inviting the project directors to think of a governance model that would help voicing and considering different visions for the area, beyond the resolution of one-to-one negotiations or conflicts. This resulted in frank conversations. As Maria underlined tensions and contradictions to the project directors, based on her conversations with new and old volunteers, some of whom began to participate less, voicing a sense of displacement, they in return pointed out how her ‘vision’ was that of an external researcher and not of a practitioner, idealizing spontaneous gardeners and the will and ability for people to decide for the best.

Conclusion

49As urban greening and sustainability became a central governance theme in Turin’s city administration, the regeneration of riverbank areas such as Parco Piemonte was increasingly discussed as a priority. Cities such as Cape Town, Detroit and Paris offer similar examples of the way in which post-industrial peripheries are reshaped through greening and urban gardening projects (e.g. Newman 2015; Draus et al. 2014; Gould and Lewis, 2016). Our visual journey reveals how skilled visions and power relations are interrelated in both the transformation of (green) infrastructures and notions of participation (Newman 2015). Newman argues that processes such as those of greening Paris can be contextualized as part of a global ‘green turn in urban policy, planning, and design that is swiftly becoming ensconced as a global orthodoxy guiding the ways cities are being built, reimagined, and inhabited’ (Newman 2015: xv).

50Similarly, to those processes, and in line with the international literature we outlined at the outset, some of the urban renewal projects at the peripheries of Turin aim to promote not only a reclamation of natural spaces but also new services, forms of citizen engagement with the public space as well as aesthetic consumption experiences. With a photographic diary, we highlighted how diverse and sometimes conflicting visions of the urban green emerge in the practice of urban green renewal. We discussed the tensions between aesthetics, social inclusion and participatory governance, connecting them to the possible role of the ethnographer.

51Crawford (2020) argues that planners need anthropologists to highlight the contradictions that are part and parcel of the planning practice, as planners can become stuck in particular ways of doing, constrained by funding needs and implementation timing. The international sustainability literature does not usually dwell on how to incorporate time and open-endedness in successfully funded projects, thus lacking models of (and ways of assessing) participatory governance that recognize the importance and diversity of visions. Having the possibility to delve in and compare different ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007), ethnographers gain a deeper understanding of the ‘experts’ social roles and questions of ‘professional intimacy’ (Herzfeld 2020: 19). This means taking into account the political but also emotional, cultural and social aspects of the (professional) lives of those whom they engage with, and one’s own.