Des jardins pour maintenir l’ordre ? Enquête ethnographique dans un quartier populaire strasbourgeois

A growing body of literature examines community gardens which, for a decade, are developing in cities across the world. Valued for embracing sustainable and social concerns, political and media discourses in France tend to associate these initiatives with a “right to the city” claimed by urban dwellers. However, this assessment is nuanced as soon as one investigates the spatial and social discrepancies existing between those gardens, that is, the places in cities where they are located and the people involved in their management. An ethnographical research, conducted between 2016 and 2019 in a working-class neighborhood of Strasbourg, reveals the disciplinary mechanisms at play when community gardens are articulated with top-down social policies and urban renewal projects. Using a foucaldian lens, this article demonstrates the governing of people’s behaviors through and by these urban spaces. First, the greening and ordering of the neighborhood is primarily about safeguarding public security and order. Second, allocating space for gardening participates in defining which practices and behaviors are allowed or not, and in relegating those accused of deviance. Finally, encouraging – under constraint – gardeners to formalize a community organization consists of imposing certain behaviors and contributes to excluding the most deprived ones