Although community gardens are nothing new in Santiago, the conditions that support the current movement seem to favor the small-scale articulation of alternatives to a political-economic model –and we should also say a coexistence model– in deep crisis.
Year: 2015
Role: Author
In: Rufián Revista, 22 (1).
Online version (spanish): http://rufianrevista.org/?portfolio=islas-fertiles-los-huertos-comunitarios-de-santiago-como-espacios-de-articulacion-del-poder-popular
PDF version (spanish): https://www.dropbox.com/s/hew3xpbpz4r34mk/Rufian22_poderpopular.pdf?dl=0
Growing food in the city isn’t really anything new. In Santiago, this practice has been linked to its own growth process and in particular to the phenomenon of migration from the countryside to the city, which has resulted in the regular formation of orchards in the gardens of the houses of these new inhabitants, who, by in general, have settled on the outskirts of the city. A phenomenon, then, that in principle has developed in a private and organic way, perhaps as a direct translation of practices brought from the countryside; a practice maintained many times in a ritual way and in some cases in a romantic way, which has spread at least during the last two centuries in our city.
Today, however, we find ourselves facing a different Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture, constituted as a movement and, therefore, self-conscious, within which community gardens appear –one of its forms of expression– as relevant spaces to review under the lens of the articulation of popular power, due to the particularities of the relationships that these spaces are capable of establishing between the people who inhabit them, as well as between them and their environment. To do this we will begin by making a brief review of the history of this movement, and then we can focus on what is happening today.