Genuine advancement towards sustainable development requires broad-based popular supportfor prioritising the environment in our pursuit of social and economic progress. Since citieshave become the dominant human habitat of the century, it is especially critical that urbanpopulations adopt such sentiments. Yet, rapid urbanisation is severing perceived andexperienced links between people and nature, engendering an ‘extinction-of-experience’ asmodern life-styles are adopted and we cease to depend on local resources.Interdisciplinary perspectives on social learning suggest that communities that practicallyengage with nature constitute key forums for the creation and storage of knowledge andexperiences.This study goes further by investigating social learning and practice in locally managed greenareas which are also open to the public, in order to explore their capacity to nurtureexperienced based learning among wider sets of urban citizens. Extensive participatoryobservation and in-depth interviews have been conducted in a number of community gardensin Berlin over a period of 6 months.Findings show that community gardens support institutionally diverse sets of locally anchoredcommunities-of-practice where experienced based learning about nature is generated andstored.. Interestingly, local practice also nurtured experienced based learning about social,political and economic dimensions of life in the city.It is suggested that such open and experimental form of green area management hold promisefor tackling extinction-of-experience among the distinctively heterogeneous urbanpopulations of today. It also contends that community gardens foster progress towardssustainability on the local level through intertwining ecological and social concerns inlearning and practice on the ground.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-44297 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Bendt, Pim |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Stockholm Resilience Centre |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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