Critical nature: regenerating human experience and society through gardening

Nature and society have traditionally been separate in modernity, where the identity of the latter was founded on the exclusion of the former from its boundaries. If in the seventies the environmental crisis brought nature to the forefront of the public debate as “environment”, the natural world seems to have recently captured growing appeal mostly in everyday life and, quite unexpectedly, in the context of ordinary urban life. This article focuses on a specific array of civically engaged urban practices relating to nature, and these may be grouped under the label of collective and critical gardening. Our research question is whether and how nature offers an imaginary and practices effective in coping with the crisis experienced by Western societies since the end of the last century.