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McAllister, Jane (2026) Scaling-up city farms: a model for growth and resilience. In: Re-scaling the rural: essays on ruralities across disciplines and scales. Rurality . ORO Editions, Novato, California (USA), pp. 122-135. ISBN 9781966515050
The paper argues that city farms form networks of co-dependency at the scale of urban villages within the city, and are motivated by a need to repair and care for the socio-material landscape. In so doing, they develop a local ethos of sustainability, more immediately experienced in rural communities than necessarily our cities.
City farms are local not-for-profit, uncertain microcosms of the city; microcosms because they practically and ethically interweave simple and complex ‘activities’ to achieve stability. Uncertain, because to be sustainable, their futures rely on the gifting of land and labour, where care is reciprocal with a community's formation.
The research presents city farms as an attempt to repair this condition by prioritising autonomy as “care-in-common” (Esposito, 2013) through practices of ‘task’ and ‘gift’, arguing that their ‘motivational’ and ‘operational’ practices are an attempt to undermine the ‘partitioning’ of existence.
The paper will example how ‘city farms’ provide a motivational and operational model to stabilise and sustain uncertainty through a co-dependency of ‘care’, using live projects, told as a series of ethno-graphic portraits from workers on the farms. In arguing that their practices are testimonies attempting to repair our modern lifestyle, it will show how these city farms develop, and what their contribution might be in providing a model to re-think an unpartitioned life.
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