Visions of the urban green: interrogating urban renewal in Turin’s periphery

The article investigates urban gardening in Turin with ethnography, historical analysis and photography, using both the authors’ photography and sources from social media and private archives. The authors collaborate to analyse ‘community’ gardening through a critical anthropological perspective which centres on the hegemonic power of aesthetic assumptions about the urban green. As a post-industrial, multicultural city, Turin illuminates the dialectic of gentrification vis-à-vis socioeconomic and cultural diversity, which is a crucial dynamic of many urban renewal trends towards ‘green cities’. We highlight the homogeneity of an aesthetic regime vis-à-vis the diversity of ‘skilled visions’ of social actors and its restraining effects on participatory governance. We contribute to ongoing debates in urban anthropology and visual studies, concerned with urban regeneration agendas in the de-industrializing cities of the Global North.Global Challenges (FSW