• 1 Karam Karam, Le Mouvement civil au Liban : revendications, protestations et mobilisations associati (...)
• 2 Bassel Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, London, Pluto Press, 2015, (...)
• 3 Janine A. Clark, Bassel F. Salloukh, “Elite Strategies, Civil Society, and Sectarian Identities in (...)

2Lebanon has long been a hotbed of sectarian divisions and divisive politics. If one were to sketch a timeline of contentious politics in modern Lebanon, one would find a striking progression starting from communal, and often sectarian, social structures in the 19^th century, through the formation of political parties and non-state groups during the second half of the 20^th century, until the end of the Lebanese civil war in the 1990s.1 The immediate post-civil war era saw the emergence (and re-emergence) of interest-based civil society organizations (CSOs)2 that were meant to treat the “previously neglected fields of activism in Lebanon –– human rights, ecology, public freedoms, and democracy,” and therefore, often retained a national scope and were cross-sectarian.3

• 4 United Nations, “Conferences | Environment and Sustainable Development,” United Nations, accessed F (...)

3At the international level, the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to multiple discourses on environmental issues, from global warming to environmental justice, culminating in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) (or the Earth Summit in Rio) in 1992, and the release of the Agenda 21 action plan, and in 1997, the adoption of the Kyoto Protocols.4

• 5 Aziz Choudry, “Global Justice? Contesting Ngoization: Knowledge Politics and Containment in Antiglo (...)
• 6 Ibid., p. 30

4In parallel, the 1990s saw the “NGOization” of many anti-globalization movements across the world.5 NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) are said to have eclipsed the grassroot discourse and knowledge on environmental matters. Despite their financial capacities, NGOs have typically failed to point the finger at the real culprits of environmental destruction and have been accused of propagating power and global capitalism.6

• 7 Janine A. Clark, Bassel F. Salloukh, “Elite Strategies…”, op. cit.
• 8 Marie-Noëlle AbiYaghi, Léa Yammine, Risha Jagarnathsingh, “Civil Society in Lebanon: The Implementa (...)

5A similar set of allegations have been leveled on CSOs (Civil Society Organizations) in Lebanon, which often end up being controlled, co-opted or intimidated by powerful interests, particularly by sectarian political parties.7 Moreover, being reliant on international funding for their subsistence, CSOs often end up abiding by donor’s agendas, and therefore become “less reactive to contextual needs and opportunities.”8

• 9 Mona Harb, “New Forms of Youth Activism in Contested Cities: The Case of Beirut,” The International (...)

6In Lebanon, the last decade saw a new form of activism emerge, which is non-partisan and critical of the sectarian clientelistic regime; and moreover, organizes outside the “rigid” structures of NGOs. Therefore, it is able to organize “freely” within “a comfortable space to debate and experiment creatively.”9 Another particularity of those new activist groups is that they are often constituted of professionals, intellectuals and artists who are contesting harmful projects and policies. Like many of their counterparts on the global scene, they are working on issues relating to public spaces and commons, the right to the city, and the environment.

• 10 Lil-Madina Initiative, “Sayda Madina Yafi’a (Saida a Youthful City),” Lil Madina Initiative (blog), (...)
• 11 Ibid.

7One of such activists’ groups, Lil-Madina Initiative, was established in 2013 in the city of Saida, 30 km south of Beirut, by a group of professionals from the fields of architecture and urbanism, in response to changes that were threatening the city. They saw that, as a result of different urban tendencies and policies, the city was gradually losing its cultural and spatial heritage that was essential to its identity.10 Moreover, the city was on the brink of major urban developments that were threatening important ecological systems, such as its complex water systems (which includes rivers, streams, and an ancient irrigation network) and its historic orchards that still form green corridors in and around the city.11

• 12 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, n° 53,October 1, 2008, p. 23.
• 13 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 181.

9However, mobilizing people around ecological concerns, and engaging the public on its “right to the city” is not a simple matter.12 The pioneering French sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, who first coined the concept of “right to the city,” stood bewildered in his concluding chapter of his 1970s book, La Révolution urbaine [The Urban Revolution], as he wondered about the “extraordinary passivity” of people affected by the large development and infrastructural projects.”13 This article will try to dig into this matter, not by asking what might lead to passivity amongst populations, but rather, by interrogating the mechanisms that might eventually make them act and form movements and collectivities.

• 14 Chris Pickvance, “From Urban Social Movements to Urban Movements: A Review and Introduction to a Sy (...)

10It is true, as Chris Pickvance has written, that “urban movements [are] not spontaneous responses to objective inequalities or deprivations but [form] more easily under certain social and political conditions than others.”14 Studying contexts where it is harder for movements to form is quite revealing. In the case of Lebanon, which is driven by clientelism coupled by harsh neoliberal policy, it could potentially unravel the cracks in the capitalistic system — interstices in which activists can start working. This paper is contributing on this front by reflecting on the experience of Lil-Madina Initiative, in the secondary city of Saida. It will explore the opportunities that environmental and urban activists can use to mobilize ordinary people to form a collective power for the sake of the environment and the right to the city in contexts dominated by clientelism and neoliberalism. When do environmental and urban activists mobilization strategies succeed and when do they fail? Who are the people who join environmental battles and under what conditions are they impelled to join?

• 15 Claire Langhamer, “‘Who the Hell Are Ordinary People?’ Ordinariness as a Category of Historical Ana (...)
• 16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Univesity of California Pr (...)
• 17 Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, Be (...)

11It is true that the term “ordinary people” is a malleable term that can mean different things at different times.15 Nevertheless, using this term, and therefore looking at the Lebanese scene through a binary lens, placing subjects of will and power on one side and dominated elements of society on the other can help in clarifying political and social processes. The argument advanced in this essay follows the French scholar, Michel de Certeau, and the tradition he initiated of placing, on one side, those who produce and impose “strategies,” and on the other, those who are consuming those strategies and, through tactical practices in their daily lives, are able to resist and impact what is imposed.16 We are left with: where to place the professional activists? These activists are those who hold knowledge and make “it possible to redefine alternative forms of urban development, both by breaking down the technocratic rationale behind exploitative metropolitan growth and by providing legitimacy for a new city.”17 For Manuel Castells they are “operators” for urban social movements. In this article, however, they play a more leading and instigating role.

• 18 Anne Burns, “Action Research.,” in James Dean Brown and Christine Coombe (eds), The Cambridge Guide (...)

12To understand their role, this article will mainly concentrate on the experience of Lil-Madina Initiative which opens up the possibility to gain an insider’s perspective on the issue at hand since the author of this article is one of its founders and a direct witness of its work. This article mainly draws on an action-research methodology, and more specifically on a methodology that has the researcher and author of this article as, to quote Anne Burns, an insider “interested in resolving, reformulating or refining dilemmas, predicaments or puzzles in their daily lives through systematic planning, data-gathering, reflection and further informed action.”18

• 19 Kathryn G. Herr and Gary L. Anderson, The Action Research Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Fa (...)

13When undertaking an action research methodology, and especially when it is a self-reflective action research, there are often questions of the validity of the research that come up. These are especially questions related to the potential “bias” of the researcher or the “transferability” of findings.19 This paper addresses this issue by backing the experience of Lil-Madina Initiative with other initiatives and experiences, mainly from Lebanon, but from other places as well. The author learns about these other experiences through written work that has been published, or in depth semi-structured interviews conducted with the key activists involved.

• 20 Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice, trans. Steven Sampson, Chicago: Unive (...)

14The article starts with the experience of producing knowledge, an exercise that is believed to hold power,20 but that is unfortunately, in itself, not powerful enough to convince the political patron nor to mobilize people. The second experience is that of mobilizing those who are directly affected by a certain controversial project, which can only happen if there is direct material loss on the part of the affected people. The third experience is that of taking advantage of an extra-ordinary moment in time. In this experience, the article will discuss how the urban and environmental activists rode the wave of the 17^th of October general uprising in Lebanon. By holding the right knowledge, they could make claims resonant with the demands of demonstrators, and therefore mobilize a critical mass to stop a big World Bank funded dam project in the Bisri valley. The final experience is that of the creation of a community garden in Saida. It is perhaps the most revealing of all. While the experience of stopping the Bisri dam utilized an extra-ordinary moment to mobilize people, the community garden was mobilizing people through their everyday life.

• 21 Paul Kingston, “Patrons, Clients and Civil Society: A Case Study of Environmental Politics in Postw (...)
• 22 Ibid., p. 60.
• 23 Ibid.
• 24 Ibid., p. 62–63.

15In the 1990s, Lebanon saw the establishment of the Ministry of Environment and subsequently the creation of major biosphere reserves.21 As noted by political scientist Paul Kingston, this development was not the outcome of a sudden environmental awakening on the part of the political elites of Lebanon. It was rather a repercussion of the creation of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) during the United Nations Conference for the Environment and Development in 1992, which was “a fund designed to provide seed capital for the creation of biosphere reserves.”22 Simultaneously, there were different environmental voices on the side of civil society and environmental experts who had prepared the ground for the protection of the different biospheres.23 The knowledge and the advocacy of these environmentalists, coupled with new attention from international donors, convinced several political patrons to embark on the creation of major nature reserves in their respective regions of influence.24

• 25 At several occasions, while meeting with people from Wastani, they remembered petrified that some o (...)

19Lil-Madina Initiative activists initiated extensive surveys of the different layers and elements on the site. They met with people in the project area to understand their concerns and priorities. They were hoping to find allies and assemble a lobby amongst their ranks. However, there was almost no one opposed to the project in Wastani, not even farmers who otherwise felt a sense of pride for their piece of land. The majority of the people felt that the land-pooling and subdivision project was going to increase the worth of their land, since it would now be serviced by roads and rezoned to allow for urban development. Those who had concerns were too afraid to speak up, for fear that they would lose their ability to gain favors from the main patron of the city and felt that their ability to negotiate advantages for their land in the new project would be compromised.25

• 26 See Howayda Al-Harithy et al., “Saida Urban Sustainable Development Strategy; Action Plans Report,” (...)
• 27 Ibid.
• 28 Lyne Jabri, “Clientelism and the Destruction of Ancient Water Systems in Saida,” Jadaliyya - جدلية, (...)
• 29 Ibid.

23The mayor of Saida and Member of Parliament, Bahia Hariri, publicly advocated for environmental programs for the city.26 They met and considered the proposals by the Lil-Madina Initiative, which were developed in conjunction with architects and urban planners. However, the municipality was simultaneously developing plans that portrayed a very different agenda. That latter plan was put into action when, in June 2014, a contractor was commissioned to bury a segment of one of the rivers into a new culvert, and this despite the Member of Parliament’s public commitment to preserving the city’s natural water resources.27 Later, it surfaced that the biggest land owner in Wastani had bought a big portion of lands just before the project of land land-pooling and re-subdivision and played an active leading role in the planning process.28 He was guiding the process and exerting pressure in a way that served his own interests by raising the value of his lands in the new plans, even as environmental and public interests were compromised.29

• 31 Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power..., op. cit., p. 226.
• 32 Ibid., p. 234.
• 33 Ibid., p. 226.

25In a study on a major development project of the 1970s for the town of Aalborg, Danish planner and geographer Bent Flyvbjerg has shown that Francis Bacon’s tenet that “Knowledge is power” is not reflected in the reality on the ground.31 Throughout Flyvbjerg book, Rationality and Power, he demonstrates that power has the ability to control, produce and dominate rational processes.32 He writes, “power procures the knowledge which supports its purpose, while it ignores or suppresses that knowledge which does not serve it.”33 From the experience in Saida, political patrons certainly ignored and suppressed the knowledge that was produced by the environmental and urban activists who did not have the power to make their opinions heard. And therefore, the question arises as to how one might form a voice powerful enough to bring a critical mass of people on board; especially when considering that producing research, articles, public talks, books and exposing contradictions has been demonstrated not to be sufficient to mobilize people in a place like Lebanon.

• 34 Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, op. cit., p. 33.
• 35 Emmanuel Bonne, Vie publique, patronage et clientèle: Rafic Hariri à Saïda, Institut de recherches (...)
• 36 Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience, Princeton Univ (...)

26Ever since its inception as a modern state, Lebanon has been driven by sectarian clientelism. As the political scientist, Bassel Salloukh, has bluntly explained, the “institutional weakness of the Lebanese state allows private organizations managed by members of the sectarian/political and religious elite to hijack its role as a social services provider.”34 Clientelism and patron-client relations have been a historical cornerstone of society in Lebanon.35 In fact, there is a pre-requirement for patronage to exist: the existence of a source of supply for the patrons which can increase their power and feed their clientele base.36

• 37 Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, op. cit.
• 38 Reinoud Leenders, “Nobody Having Too Much to Answer for: Laissez-Faire, Networks, and Postwar Recon (...)

27This source of supply became easily available with the creation of the modern Lebanese State with its laissez-faire liberal economic system. Quickly, state institutions fell prey to different political and sectarian leaders who were able to exert control over public resources to increase their wealth, power and grip over their clientele base. 37This situation has been amplified in the post-Civil War era; the Taif agreement, signed between the warring parties, has guaranteed the distribution of “the spoils of public office, privileges, and state resources” amongst the political leaders.38

• 39 Melani Claire Cammett, “Partisan Activism and Access to Welfare in Lebanon,” Studies in Comparative (...)
• 40 One clear mundane example can be taken from recent events: with the economic collapse that hit the (...)

28In such conditions, ordinary people accessing jobs, welfare, and social assistance benefits often requires declaring loyalty to political patrons or parties. At times, this would even entail proactive political engagement such as participating in partisan demonstrations and riots.39 Regretfully, even for those who are not aligned politically with a party or political leader, and may be disheartened by the corruption in the political system, circumstances will undoubtedly arise during their lives that will compel them to use power networks and seek favors or even protection.40

• 41 See: John Clarke, “Enrolling Ordinary People: Governmental Strategies and the Avoidance of Politics (...)
• 42 Lynn A. Staeheli et al., “Dreaming the Ordinary: Daily Life and the Complex Geographies of Citizens (...)

29In general terms, ordinary people go on with their everyday lives,41 which are, in-themselves, intertwined with the practices of citizenship.42 In Lebanon, everyday life means engaging with different clientelistic structures. Activists, through their work, are calling for antagonistic stances towards patronage, stances that are harder to take for most people. This is probably one of the main reasons why it is difficult for them to find allies amongst a more general public.

• 43 For a similar argument relating community gardens see: Karen Schmelzkopf, “Incommensurability, Land (...)

30Moreover, the neoliberal system has commodified environmental resources, such as water and land, for so long that their values in relation to the common good have been outweighed or even forgotten by most people. This is very clear, for example, in the case of historical orchards or agricultural lands that remain within the perimeter of cities until today and which are not valued according to their social, historical, environmental or even productive worth — values that are often seen as “incommensurable” in relation to their real-estate value.43 Matters of the environment are therefore not perceived as urgent by people who tend to only mobilize when their personal interests are affected.

• 44 Urban Activist Workshop Day 1, September 21, 2015; Urban Activist Workshop Day 2, February 10, 2015

31In 2015, Lil-Madina Initiative, in collaboration with another activist group, Public Works, organized an Urban Activism workshop. The aim was to bring to the table different urban and environmental activist groups from various parts of Lebanon to share knowledge, learn from each other’s experience, and build solidarity amongst the groups.44

• 45 “Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Boutros Park,” Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Boutros Park, a (...)

33The campaign was launched in 2012 after the municipality of Beirut announced that it was going to build a highway planned since the 1950s that would cut through the Hekmeh neighborhood, one of Beirut’s historic neighborhoods. The Hekmeh-Turk axis was part of the master plan for the city of Beirut, put forth by the French architect, Michel Ecochard, and was conceived in the 1950s during an era of nation building for the nascent Lebanese state.45 The project was halted in the 1970s with the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

• 46 “An Obsolete Plan from the 1950’s,” Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Boutros Park (blog), March 2, (...)
• 47 “The Proposal,” Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Boutros Park (blog), February 23, 2014, [online] (...)

34Like many of the urban and environmental initiatives in the past decade, the Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Botros Park campaign was started by several professionals. It brought on board traffic experts, engineers, urbanists, architects, and representatives from other disciplines. Professional and scientific studies were produced to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the highway in solving traffic problems, highlighting the new problems the highway would create. Moreover, they asserted that the project would “destroy the continuity of the neighborhood, the architectural heritage of this historical quarter, and the environment and landscape.”46 Alternative plans were proposed, including a traffic plan and a plan to transform the lands and buildings that were expropriated for the construction of the highway in the 1970s into a park that would cross the Hekmeh neighborhood and tie it together.47

• 48 “Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Boutros Park,” op. cit.
• 49 Activist from the Stop the Highway, Build the Fouad Botros Park, Interview 1, interview by Lyne Jab (...)

35By 2015, the campaign succeeded in stalling the project. Nevertheless, it is not the wealth of rational information that was gathered by the experts that convinced the municipality to stop the project. According to one of the members of the campaign, the main reason for the success of the campaign was that activists were able to convince owners of the affected neighborhoods that their plots were worth much more than how authorities had priced them.48 When the pricing of the land was adjusted, the amount of expropriation alone exceeded the budget that the authorities had accounted for in the project.49

• 50 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Cambridge (England)/Ne (...)

40A couple of months later, the Qaya’a committee succeeded in receiving promises from public authorities that the road would be diverted around the neighborhood instead of crossing it. These favorable outcomes were important, but it was also clear that the Lil-Madina Initiative had succeeded in mobilizing local people only to a certain extent, remaining unsuccessful in reaching larger audiences in their bid to protect the historical Sultanieh Road and the Sidon Aqueduct and to stop the highway project altogether. They were thus unable to create, what Sidney Tarrow defines as, “shared meanings that inspire people to collective action” and that “shap[e] grievances into broader and more resonant claims.”50 Activists were unable to mobilize ordinary people for the sake of the more abstract causes of the environment or for the ideal of the “right to the city.”

• 51 “Lebanon Protests: How WhatsApp Tax Anger Revealed a Much Deeper Crisis,” BBC News, November 7, 201 (...)
• 52 “Lebanon Protests,” op. cit.

41Things would change dramatically starting on October 17^th 2019, which marked the beginning of a major uprising across Lebanon. The protests were ignited by a series of events, among which were a strike of wheat and fuel importers, followed by a sharp loss in value of the Lebanese pound,51 and major forest fires around the country. These simultaneous crises revealed the moral, functional and financial bankruptcy of the state. Fuel was added to the fire when the government proposed new taxes on tobacco, petrol and on voice calls via messaging services precipitating a major cross-sectarian uprising.52 People took up main squares across cities in Lebanon, shutting down the country for several weeks while demanding the resignation of the government and the return of the funds that were considered to be stolen by the corrupt political elite.

• 53 Activist on the National Campaign for the Protection of the Bisri Valley, Interview 3, interview by (...)

44As a matter of fact, no environmental campaign benefitted from the October 17^th uprising as much as The National Campaign to Protect the Bisri Valley. The campaign was initiated in 2017. Some of the main activists who initiated the campaign had previously worked against other controversial projects, including the Janneh Dam in the north of Lebanon and the Fouad Boutros Highway in Beirut; and had therefore drawn lessons-learned from other experiences.53

• 54 Ibid.
• 55 Ibid.

45In Bisri, the activists worked on mobilizing the local population by organizing community meetings in different villages. More broadly, the activists aimed to mobilize the general Lebanese public mainly through the campaign’s Facebook page and other national media outlets.54 They decided early on to change the name of the campaign from “Stop the Bisri Dam,” which was used at the very beginning, to the “National Campaign for the Protection of the Bisri Valley.”55 They framed their cause as a “national” cause: the dam would have not only impacted the livelihood of people and destroyed their valley; it would have destroyed a precious national ecosystem and heritage sites. More importantly, the project has a high probability to fail, since the type of soil in the area does not hold water, and can even be hazardous in a region prone to earthquakes.

• 56 Ibid.

46As with many urban and environmental campaigns, well-designed images were disseminated on social media to trigger the emotions of the general public, showing the visual appeal of the site and the dreadfulness of the official project. Furthermore, similar to other activist campaigns, scientific and professional studies were conducted to reveal the dangers and negative impacts of the project. All of this material was shared with public officials and the World Bank in an attempt to stop the loan.56

• 57 Ibid.
• 58 Ibid.

47While the Facebook page of the campaign was gaining popularity, and more people were becoming aware and supportive of the campaign, on the ground it was much harder to mobilize people.57 Some of the affected locals did eventually join the campaign, but not enough to generate a critical mass able to topple the government plans and stop the World Bank loan from going through.58

• 59 Ibid.
• 60 Ibid.
• 61 Bent Leenders, “Nobody Having Too Much to Answer For,” op. cit., p. 179–80.
• 62 Activist on the National Campaign for the Protection of the Bisri Valley, Interview 3, op. cit.

48According to one of the main activists working against the dam, the campaign benefitted greatly from the fact that the corruption for this project was widespread and involved many political parties and public officials on all sides of the political spectrum, implicating even those who usually act as political opponents.59 In fact, the Bisri Dam project stood as a clear case of the corrupt apportionment between most political factions in Lebanon that wanted to profit from the project, and in so doing, increased the national debt.60 The Bisri Dam project was a palpable demonstration of the post-Civil War and post-Taif agreement culture that distributes “the spoils of public office, privileges, and state resources” amongst the political leaders.61 This fact was very well exposed by the activists working on the campaign. In fact, at times their statements caused them to be threatened and even physically harassed and assaulted.62

• 63 Activist on the National Campaign for the Protection of the Bisri Valley, op. cit.

49It is not a coincidence that the start of the 17^th of October uprising, with its rallying cries being the fight against corruption in political elite circles, propelled the campaign against the Bisri Dam project which quickly rose to be one of its movement’s central causes. From that point on, the main activists on this campaign no longer needed to function as organizers, since different groups organized themselves. When they called for demonstrations to stop the project, a torrent of people arrived in Bisri from all parts of Lebanon. They broke the gate to the project area and camped and demonstrated on-site, all in view of news crews and reporters.63 This is when the campaign turned into a movement and its outcome was the halting of all works on site; and a year later, the revocation of the World Bank loan.

• 64 Permaculture and agro-ecology promote holistic, natural, regenerative and ethical approaches to agr (...)
• 65 Later, some of the participants would receive a training of trainer (TOT) by the same NGO, to be ab (...)

53A call was made on Lil-Madina Initiative Facebook account for any person living in Greater Saida who wished to receive a small parcel of land for planting in the newly named Nohye El-Ard (which translates into ‘We Revive the Earth’) garden. Ten people joined the community garden initiative and the members were trained in permaculture and agro-ecology64 through a local NGO, the Soils Permaculture Association of Lebanon.65 Simultaneously, they collectively cleared the site and prepared the land. They then carved trenches and filled them with wood and organic material, and created no-dig raised garden beds following the German technique of Hügelkultur. Finally, seeds were sowed into the beds according to companion planting methods.

• 66 Raj Patel, “Food Sovereignty,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36, n° 3, July 1, 2009, p. 663–706, (...)

56Moreover, members of Nohye al-Ard became aware of the principal of food sovereignty, described by Raj Patel as “the right to produce and eat [one’s] own food […] without having to rely on other people, organizations, or governments for handouts.”66 By rediscovering their relationship to the land, members of Nohye al-Ard became more critical of the corporate control food production and were therefore more aware of their right to access land for the sake of food sovereignty.

• 67 See: Lil-Madina Initiative, “Wiladat Sahat Eliya; ’Awdat al-Siyasa ila al-Masaht al-’ama fi Sayda ( (...)

58A Sunday market was then established in Nohye al-Ard community garden. In parallel with the market, public events and performances were organized to promoted the land as a public space, and soon enough it became a popular site for visitors from Saida and beyond. Nohye al-Ard community garden quickly came to represent an alternative model for public spaces, one that stood in contrast to municipal parks and plazas.67

• 68 Almost all the work in the gardens was based on voluntarism, whether for establishing the gardens o (...)

59The number of members in the Nohye al-Ard community garden increased with every new season. By the end of the two-year agreement, the garden comprised nearly 50 members, who came from different social and political backgrounds, professions, age groups, etc. Of course, this meant that they needed to organize themselves, which they did by creating a number of committees: a committee for the market, a technical committee that organizes planting and overlooks pest control, a committee for irrigation, a committee for social media, a committee for marketing, etc. Some of the activities were the responsibility of the respective committees, while others were done by all members communally.68 As they organized themselves and built a community around the garden, a new network based on solidarity and mutual aid was created amongst the members who would otherwise have never met in their everyday lives.

• 69 Rina Ghose and Margaret Pettygrove, “Urban Community Gardens as Spaces of Citizenship,” Antipode, 4 (...)

62While the Nohye al-Ard initiative is currently going through uncertain times, for the people who were involved, a new ethos was created that stands in contrast to clientelistic relations and market economy dynamics, and seeds for a new understanding of citizenship and civic action were sowed. In fact, as Rina Ghose and Margaret Pettygrove have shown, community gardens are often “conceived as spaces through which citizens can challenge dominant power relations and claim rights to the city.”69 Most importantly, they are spaces that can sensitize ordinary people about issues of environmental care and stewardship, and can provide what professor of landscape architecture, Anne Whiston Spirn, has called, “landscape literacy.”

• 70 Anne Whiston Spirn, “Landscape Literacy and Design for Ecological Democracy: The Nature of Mill Cre (...)
• 71 Ibid., p. 15.

63Indeed, the story of Anne Whiston Spirn in West Philadelphia is quite revealing. At the end of the 1980s, she found herself unable to persuade public officials, developers, and ordinary people of the importance of paying attention to the environmental injustices affecting Mill Creek, one of the poorest neighborhoods in West Philadelphia.70 Thus, she arrived at the conclusion that there was a landscape literacy problem and, together with students from the University of Pennsylvania, she initiated an environmental education program for school children organized around the urban watershed in West Philadelphia. The initiative transformed into a program on landscape literacy and community development and, by the end of the program, Spirn noticed that it has engendered new attachments with the landscape which she recognized as the basis for any change on the ground.71 Nohye al-Ard initiative was motivated by similar aims in the hopes that the new attachments forged between people and land would form a solid basis from which to tackle the nation’s environmental challenges.

• 72 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, op. cit., p. 17.

68Finally, the Nohye al-Ard experience has clarified that for mobilizing ordinary people in a clientelistic market economy, urban and environmental activists should start from their everyday life. Nohye al-Ard brought natural systems and cycles –– planting, pruning, composting, reaping –– into everyday routines and opened spaces for such embodied forms of environmental and ecological awareness to exist. While the whole process did not create a palpable environmental change, it nevertheless promoted landscape literacy and made space for the development of a counter culture; a new culture of the everyday through which, according to de Certeau, the “fatality of the established order” may be, with time, effectively “subverted.”72