Analysis of Urban Farming Practice Through the Lens of Metabolic Rift Case Studies in the City of Chengdu (China) and in the City of Freiburg (Germany)

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Analysis of Urban Farming Practice through the Lens of Metabolic Rift Case studies in the City of Chengdu (China) and in the City of Freiburg (Germany)

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree Doctor of Philosophy (Dr. phil.) of the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Yang Liu

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany 2019

Dean: Prof. Dr. Daniela Kleinschmit 1st Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Axel Drescher 2nd Supervisor: PD Dr. Philipp Späth 2nd Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Annika Mattissek Date of Defense: November 14th, 2019 Acknowledgements

The current research was fully sponsored by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) from 2014 to 2018. Without the financial support of CSC, this research project would never have had the chance to get underway, and its generous funding ensured the outcome of this PhD dissertation. Therefore, the author has indescribable gratitude to CSC for its full support. Then, I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Dr. Axel Drescher for his generous supports throughout the whole process of my PhD research, especially during the tough dissertation writing process. Prof. Drescher’s support for my research was full and thorough. He not only offered valuable academic advice with his expertise in urban farming studies, but he also strengthened my morale and self-confidence at the all tough moments of my research. Prof. Drescher’s patient guidance and advice guaranteed the right direction of my research process and ensured the final accomplishment of this dissertation. I would like also to thank to my supervisors, Dr. Philipp Späth and Prof. Dr. Annika Mattissek; their suggestions and requirements enabled my dissertation to follow rigorous scientific writing standards and to be grounded in feasible themes. Also thanks to Prof. Daniel Leese as my second supervisor in the first two years of my research. Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Tim Freytag, the dean of the Environment and Nature Resources Faculty of the University of Freiburg and his secretary Frau Inga Armbruster. They offered me great logistical support after some office administrative turmoil, and organized the office room arrangements for me. For the same reason, I need to thank Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Kahle, who kindly arranged the office room opportunity for me at his department of Forest Growth. Next, a great deal of appreciations is addressed to everyone who supported my field research and interviews at Chengdu and Freiburg. For the Chengdu field research, I need to thank my dear colleagues at the Partnerships of Community Development (PCD) Chengdu Office, Mr. Zhou Junchuan, and the dedicated people at the NGO “Ai You Xi”. Thank Tian Feng and He Lei for recommending the urban farming practitioners in their networks to me as my research interviewees. Thanks go to Lin Niang and Gu Niang for their specific arrangements for interviews for me at the district of Shui Jing Fang. Thanks also go to Hu Min for organizing the transcription volunteers for my research, and to all the transcription volunteers who contributed their time and effort to do the tedious transcription tasks regarding my Chinese interview contents. For the Freiburg field research, I need first to thank Mr. Gerhard Schiff, who enthusiastically helped me to make connection with potential interviewees. Thanks for the special workshop organized by the Freiburg Transitional Town Movement and their members; I met half of my Freiburg interviewees through their network. Thanks to my friends like Frau Esther Muschelknautz, and Ratchada Arpornsilp, they recommended to me the urban gardeners they knew in Freiburg. Most important of all, my deepest gratitude to all the urban farming practitioners I met both in Chengdu and Freiburg; thanks to each of them for spending hours of time (min. one hour – max. seven hours) with me for my interviews. I deeply appreciate their great willingness to share their experiences and opinions of urban farming practices, their personal stories and childhood memories about nature (even some very personal or confidential experiences) with me. Thank them for their greatest generosity and trust to me, and for providing me with valuable data regarding their urban farming or gardening practices! i

I will never forget my friends at Freiburg and back home, who offered continuous supports and tireless encouragement throughout the years of my studying and research time at Freiburg in Germany. They played like the torches at my darkest moments, and they cheered for me at every step of my progress. Julia Koch, Li Li, Jasmin Marston (with great support for the initial editing work), Ines Gavrilut, Marvi Eiland, Kerstin Hennies, Ning Xu, Kui Li, Wei Juanyi, the young ladies in the “Let’s Talking about Life” support group, the cool ladies in “We Love Urban Farms” support group, thank you all cordially! One special thank to Lars Michaels, who offered great generosity of time, space and heart with me in my difficulties! Another special thanks to lovely Miss Tang Yu, who kept sending her positive energy to me and sharing her smart and beautiful thoughts with me! And all my thanks to my family, mostly to my dear forever-young-spirit Mother, for her full love, full encouragement, and full support! Finally, thanks to Randy Kritkausky and Carolyn Schmidt, my long-term colleagues and friends from ECOLOGIA. Thanks to Randy for his deep understanding about the ecological thoughts in my PhD thesis, and for sharing with me his Native American ancestral spirits and natural wisdoms! Meanwhile, most sincere thanks to Randy and Carolyn for their kindest help as native English speakers in editing drafts of my dissertation and making it much more readable; Carolyn contributed her full time and energy to complete the tedious and painstaking editing work throughout 250 pages of the manuscript and guaranteed the final language quality of my dissertation.

Zusammenfassung

Diese Dissertation basiert auf zwei parallelen Forschungsinteressen: „Mensch-Natur-Interaktionen“ und „urban farming“ bzw. „urbane Landwirtschaft“. Das integrierte Forschungsinteresse dieser Arbeit besteht darin, die Wechselwirkung zwischen Mensch und Natur durch eine empirische Untersuchung von individuellen Praktiken der urbanen Landwirtschaft zu verstehen. Die im Konzept des sozial-ökologischen Metabolismus verankerte ‚metabolic rift theory’ wird als Kerntheorie zur Analyse der Mensch-Natur-Interaktionen anhand der urbanen Landwirtschaft herangezogen. Der allgemeine Forschungsansatz bestand darin, zwei gegensätzliche städtische Milieus (Chengdu, China und Freiburg, Deutschland) zu untersuchen, um Erkenntnisse darüber zu gewinnen, inwieweit urbane Landwirtschaft die Mensch-Natur-Interaktionen sowie möglicherweise auch einige der tiefgreifenden metabolischen Risse heilend beeinflussen kann. In dieser Arbeit wird die Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Natur als sozial-ökologischer Stoffwechselprozess verstanden, bei dem Mensch und Natur Ressourcen und Abfälle, Energie und Entropie austauschen. Wenn der Austauschzyklus im Gleichgewicht ist, könnte der sozial-ökologische Stoffwechselprozess über Jahrtausende hinweg stabil verlaufen. Allerdings haben Industrialisierung und Urbanisierung unter der treibenden Kraft des Kapitalismus das Gleichgewicht des Austauschs zwischen Mensch und Natur zerstört. Der sozial-ökologische Stoffwechselprozess hat im Zuge einer Reihe von Intensivierungsphasen ein beschleunigtes, nicht nachhaltiges Tempo erreicht. Um die Phasen des sozial-ökologischen Stoffwechselprozesses vor einem historisch-materialistischen Hintergrund zu beschreiben, wurde ein lockeres Cluster von Konzepten aus dem ökologischen Marxismus als übergeordneter theoretischer Rahmen dieser Arbeit gewählt. Das Konzept des ‚metabolic rift’ wird als Kerntheorie entwickelt, um die unterbrochene, losgelöste, entfremdete und antagonistische Mensch-Natur-Beziehung unserer Zeit zu beschreiben. Vier Dimensionen des ‚metabolic rift’ – ökologisch, erkenntnistheoretisch / kulturell, sozial und individuell – werden spezifisch ausgearbeitet, um zu demonstrieren, wie die Natur durch die industrielle Produktion und die urbane Lebensweise sowie durch die vorherrschende kapitalistische Weltanschauung systematisch objektiviert und externalisiert wurde. Als theoretischer Beitrag dieser Dissertation zum gesamten Rahmen des ‚metabolic rift’ wurde das originäre Konzept des ‚cultural rift’ definiert und verwendet, um die Nuancen der Analyse zu verschärfen. Urbane Landwirtschaft als weltweit aufkeimende Bewegung wird empirisch praktiziert und bereits theoretisch als Lösung für die Bewältigung vieler Herausforderungen des städtischen Lebens erforscht. Allerdings wurden die vielfältigen Potentiale dieser Betätigung im Hinblick auf die Milderung und Heilung der zahlreichen Probleme, die durch den ,metabolic rift’ entstehen, bisher noch nicht in einem systematischen und umfassenden Rahmen untersucht. Um diese Forschungslücke in Bezug auf die Funktion und Bedeutung der urbanen Landwirtschaft zu schließen, wurden im Rahmen dieser Promotion in den Städten Chengdu (China) und Freiburg (Deutschland) einschlägige Feldforschungen durchgeführt. Die in diesen beiden Städten und Ländern erhobenen Daten werden durch die Linse des ‘metabolic rift’ analysiert. Es wird anschließend diskutiert, wie urbane Landwirtschaft in Chengdu und Freiburg praktiziert werden könnte, um auf die ökologischen, erkenntnistheoretischen, kulturellen, sozialen und individuellen Dimensionen des ‘metabolic rift’ in den jeweiligen historischen, kulturellen und politischen Kontexten zu reagieren.

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Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung in Chengdu zeigen, dass einige der dortigen Praktiker der urbanen Landwirtschaft den ‚metabolic rift’ wahrnehmen und gezielt Maßnahmen ergreifen, um auf die vier Dimensionen der Problematik zu reagieren. Die meisten Menschen betreiben jedoch städtische Landwirtschaft aus Gründen der Lebensmittelsicherheit (um auf die soziale Dimension des ‚rift’ zu reagieren) und aus erkenntnistheoretischen und kulturellen Gründen (um auf epistemologische und ‚cultural rift’ Probleme zu reagieren). Wenige der interviewten Menschen nannten ökologische und individuelle Gründe (um auf ökologische und individuelle ‚rift’ Probleme zu reagieren). Vor dem Hintergrund des komplizierten sozialen und politischen Kontexts Chinas zeigen die Ergebnisse aus Chengdu, dass dort mehr Menschen urbane Landwirtschaft als Mittel zum Lebensunterhalt, zum Erzielen von Einkommen oder auch als persönliche Praxis (z.B. zur Stärkung von Achtsamkeit) und zur Persönlichkeitsentwicklung betreiben. Weniger Menschen betreiben dies aus umfassend reflektierten, gesellschaftlichen und ökologischen Motiven. Die Ergebnisse aus Freiburg zeigen, dass dort die meisten urbanen Gärtner diese Tätigkeit aufgrund eines ganzheitlicheren Verständnisses der verschiedenen Dimensionen des ‘metabolic rift’ ausüben, um die damit verbundenen Probleme anzugehen. Die bemerkenswertesten Erkenntnisse aus den Freiburger Befunden im deutschen Kontext, im Gegensatz zum chinesischen Kontext, sind das hohe Bewusstsein und die Sorge der Menschen für ökologische Nachhaltigkeit (d.h. zur Bewältigung ökologischer ‚rift’ Probleme), ihre Begeisterung für die kollektive Arbeitsatmosphäre in Gemeinschaftsgärten (z.B. um soziale ‚rift’ Probleme zu lösen) und wie sie sich, ihrer Körperintuition folgend, der Natur zuwenden, um geistige und körperliche Arbeit in Einklang zu bringen (z.B. um individuelle ‚rift’ Probleme zu lösen). Die Schlussfolgerung dieser Dissertation lautet, dass urbane Landwirtschaft ein wertvoller ganzheitlicher Ansatz zur Behebung der vielfältigen Dimensionen von ‚metabolic rift’ Problemen werden und somit für einzelne Menschen, Gesellschaften und Ökosysteme von großem Nutzen sein kann, wenn die Menschen ein allumfassendes Verständnis des sozial-ökologischen Stoffwechsels im Kapitalismus haben und sie anfangen, über die materialistische, hedonistische Lebensweise in der Tretmühle der kommerzialisierten Gesellschaft nachzudenken, und die Probleme der unterbrochenen, losgelösten, entfremdeten und antagonistischen Realität der Mensch-Natur-Interaktion erkennen. Als weiterführende Studien werden Untersuchungen vorgeschlagen, die sich mit der positiven Mensch-Natur-Verbundenheit und dem intrinsischen Wert der Mensch-Natur-Interaktion befassen.

Abstract

This dissertation is grounded in two parallel research interests: “human-nature interaction” and “urban farming”. The integrated overall research interest is to understand the human-nature interaction through empirical research on individual people’s practice of urban farming. The metabolic rift theory, rooted in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism, is applied as the core theory to analyze the human-nature interaction through urban farming. The general research approach has been to use two contrasting urban milieux (Chengdu, China and Freiburg, Germany) to develop insights into the functions of urban farming to affect human-nature interaction and to heal some of the profound metabolic rifts. In this dissertation, the relationship between humans and nature is understood from the aspect of a socio-ecological metabolic process, in which humans and nature exchange resources and wastes, energy and entropy. When the exchange cycle is in balance, the socio-ecological metabolic process could last stably on the scale of millennia, but under the driving force of capitalism, human society’s development of industrialization and urbanization has broken the balance of human-nature exchange; the socio-ecological metabolic process has been running at an accelerated unsustainable pace throughout a series of upgraded phases. A loose cluster of concepts derived from Marxist ecology is formed as the overarching framework to articulate the phases of the socio-ecological metabolic process in a historical-materialistic background. Meanwhile, as the core theory, the concept of metabolic rift is developed to describe the actual disconnected, detached, alienated and antagonistic human-nature relationship on the planet today. Four dimensions – ecological, epistemological/cultural, social and individual – of the metabolic rift problems are specifically elaborated to demonstrate how nature has been systematically objectified and externalized by the capitalist industrial production and urban living patterns, as well as by the dominant capitalist worldview, value and belief system. The original concept of “cultural rift” has been particularly coined in this dissertation as a theoretical contribution to the overall metabolic rift framework. Urban farming, as a burgeoning worldwide movement, has been empirically practiced and theoretically studied as a solution to deal with many urban life challenges, but its multiple roles in repairing the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift problem had not yet been examined under a systematic and comprehensive framework. In order to fill this research gap concerning the function and significance of urban farming, the relevant field researches have been conducted in the cities of Chengdu (China) and Freiburg (Germany); the empirical research findings in these two cities and countries are analyzed through the lens of metabolic rift. Attempts are conducted to discuss how urban farming could be practiced by the urban farming practitioners in Chengdu and in Freiburg to respond to the ecological, epistemological, cultural, social and individual dimensions of metabolic rift problems in the two countries’ different historical, cultural, social and political contexts. The findings of the Chengdu research show that some Chengdu urban farming practitioners have been able to perceive and take action to respond to each of the dimensions of metabolic rift problems. However, most of the people engage in urban farming for food safety reasons (i.e. to respond to the social dimension of rift problems) and for epistemological and cultural reasons (i.e. to respond to the epistemological and

cultural rift problems); a few of the people have ecological and individual reasons (i.e. to respond to ecological and individual rift problems). The Chengdu findings also indicate that, given the complicated social and political context of China, more individual urban farming practitioners at Chengdu take farming as a self-supporting method for income or for personal practice (e.g. mindfulness) and personal development, and fewer individuals do farming for deep social or ecological reflection. The findings of the Freiburg research demonstrate that most Freiburg urban farming practitioners engage in farming for reasons based on a more holistic understanding of the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift problems; they practice urban farming as a comprehensive approach to solve these multiple dimensions of rift problems. The most notable features of the Freiburg findings, in the German context as opposed to the Chinese context, are people’s high awareness of and concern for ecological sustainability (i.e. to deal with ecological rift issues), their enthusiasm for the collective working atmosphere in community gardens (i.e. to deal with social rift issues), and their body intuition to go to nature and to balance mental and manual work in the natural world (i.e. to deal with individual rift issues). The final conclusion of this dissertation is that urban farming could become a valuable holistic approach to repair the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift problems, with great potential benefits to individuals and to societies and ecosystems, when people have an overall understanding of socio-ecological metabolism under capitalism, when they start to reflect on the material hedonistic treadmill living pattern in commercialized society, and when they realize the problems of the disconnected, detached, alienated and antagonistic human-nature reality. At the end, further studies focusing on the positive human-nature connectedness and the intrinsic value of human-nature interaction are suggested as future study directions.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements……………………….……………………………………………………….………………………………………………………i Zusammenfassung....……………………………………………………….…………………………………………………………………….……..iii Abstract……………………….……………………………………………………….…………………………………………………………………….……….v Table of Contents……………………….……………………………………………………….……………………………………………………....vii List of Abbreviations……………………….……………………………………………………….…………………………………………..…….ix List of Figures……………………….……………………………………………………….………………………………………………………………..x List of Photos……………….……………………………………………………….………………………………………………………….………….….xi List of Tables……………………….……………………………………………………….………………………………………………………………...xii

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Interest on Human-Nature Relations ……………………..……………………………………………..………1 1.2 Research Interest on Urban Farming…………………………………….………………………………………………….………3 1.3 Major Research Gaps……………………….……………………………………………………….……………………..……………….…….5 1.4 Research Objectives and Research Questions…………………….….………………………………………………….…..6 1.5 General Structure of the Dissertation ………………………………….……………………………………………………….…..7

Chapter 2 Literature Review: Theoretical Framework

2.1 Theoretical Genesis and its Application in Social-Ecological Studies…………………………….9 2.2 Theoretical Basis – Marxist Ecology Rooted Social Metabolism…………………………………….13 2.2.1 Disciplines Integrated under Marxist Ecology…………..…………………………………………..……...14 2.2.2 Industrial Production and Social Metabolism from a Historical Materialism Perspective……………21 2.2.3 Upgraded Versions of Social Metabolism under Capitalism…………………………….…………25 2.2.4 Major Tendencies of Social Metabolism under the Capitalist System………….……………37 2.3 The Core Theoretical Concept – Metabolic Rift………………………….………………………………………………41 2.3.1 The Marx Origin of Metabolic Rift………………………….……………………………………………………….42 2.3.2 Metabolic Rift – Material Rift and Immaterial Rift…………..……………….………………………….46 2.3.2.1 Ecological Rift …………………………………………………………………………………………………….…….46 2.3.2.2 Epistemological Rift and Cultural Rift (as hypothesis)…………………………………………..…..47 2.3.2.3 Social Rift …….…………………………….…………….……………………………………………………….……..50 2.3.2.4 Individual Rift …………………….…………………….……………………………………………………….……..52

Chapter 3 Literature Review: Urban Farming Functions

3.1 Discussion of the Term of “Urban Farming”…..……………………………………….………………………….…..61 3.2 Brief Review On Urban Farming Studies………………………………………….………………………………….……62 3.2.1 Brief History of Urban Farming: from Ancient Civilizations to Present Trends..…..63 3.2.2 Theorizing Urban Farming………………………………………….………………………………………………………66 3.3 Urban Farming Discussion Under Metabolic Rift Framework ………………………………………73 3.3.1 Repair Ecological Rift………………………………………….………………………………………………………………77 3.3.2 Repair Epistemological and Cultural Rifts …………………………………………………………………..…80 3.3.3 Repair Social Rift………………………………………….……………………………………………………………………...84 3.3.4 Repair Individual Rift………………………………………….…………………………………………………………….…89 vii

Chapter 4 Approach and Methodology

4.1 Overall Methodological Philosophy………………………………………….…………………………………………………..95 4.1.1 Political Ecology Methodology as the Basis……………………..…………………………………………….95 4.1.2 Research Methodology Design for Urban Farming….……………………………………………………97 4.2 Research Targets and Research Places….……………………………………………………………………………….……98 4.3 Operationalizaiton of Metabolic Rift Theory in the Empirical Research of Urban Farming……………………………………………………………………………………………..…………………..………………99 4.4 Field Research and Data Collection…………………………………………………………………………………………….100 4.4.1 Sampling Methods………………………..……………………………………………….…………………………………….100 4.4.2 Data Collection Approaches………………………..…………………………………………………………….………104 4.4.3 Data Collected………………………..…………………………………………………………….……………………….…..…106 4.5 Outline of the Collected Data…………………………….……………………………………………………………………………106

Chapter 5 Finding of Chengdu (China) Research

5.1 AgriCulture in China’s Urbanization Context…………………………………………………………………….…109 5.2 Research Site – Chengdu………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….114 5.3 Dynamics of the Urban Farming Practice at Chengdu…………………………………………………..….118 5.3.1 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Awareness of and Response to Ecological Rift ……….118 5.3.2 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Response to Epistemological and Cultural Rift………..129 5.3.3 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Response to Social Rift………………………………...……………….148 5.3.4 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Response to Individual Rift…………………………………..…..….166

Chapter 6 Finding of Freiburg (Germany) Research

6.1 Research Site – Freiburg in German Context…………………………………………………………………………188 6.2 Urban Gardening Practitioners’ Response to Rift Issues at Freiburg………………………..193 6.2.1 Urban Gardening Practice for Ecological Concerns…………………………………………….…………191 6.2.2 Urban Gardening Practice for Cultural Needs………………………………………………..……………….198 6.2.3 Urban Gardening Practice for Social Reasons………………………………………….………………….….203 6.2.4 Urban Gardening Practice for Individual Benefits……………………………………………..………..…211

Chapter 7 Comparative Discussion and Conclusion

7.1 Comparative Discussion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………231 7.1.1 Prominent Urban Farming Features in Chinese Context…………………………………….…………233 7.1.2 Notable Features of Urban Gardening Practice in German Context……………………………236 7.2 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……238 7.2.1 Remaining Messages about Urban Farming…………………………………………………………………….239 7.2.2. Limitations of the Research…………………………………….………………………………………………………….241 7.2.3 Future Study Directions…………………………………………………………………………………………………….….242

List of References……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………243 Appendix: Field Research Interview Guideline Questions…………………………………………..…….267

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List of Abbreviations

AD Anno Domini AI Artificial Intelligence ANT Actor-Network Theory BC Before Christ CO₂ Carbon Dioxide CUS Critical Urban Studies ESB Ecological Sustainable Behavior FAO Food and Agriculture Organization HEP Human Exemptionalism Paradigm IDRC International Development Research Centre IT Information Technology ITPS Intergovermental Technical Panel on Soils LCA Life Cycle Assessment MFA Material Flow Analysis MR Metabolic Rift theory RUAF Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security SES Social-ecological System Theory SIFS Subversive and Interstitial Food Spaces SLF Sustainable Livelihoods Framework SWB Subjective Well-Being UAF Urban Assemblage Framework UNDP United Nations Development Programme UPE Urban Political Ecology US the United States of America VR Virtual Reality WWI First World War WWII Second World War

List of Figures

Figure 1 The three thought traditions of urban metabolism research: Marxist ecologies, industrial ecology, and urban ecology …………………………………………………………………………………………………….…….…11 Figure 2 Urban metabolism research in four network clusters and the Marxist ecologies in two network clusters: metabolic rift and urban political ecology…….………….…………………………………….………....13 Figure 3 Theoretical Framework – Understand Social Metabolism in Marxist Ecology…..……………………..20 Figure 4 Unclosed Loop of Treadmill Production & Living……………………………………………………………..…….…..39 Figure 5 Treadmill Living Pattern………………….…………………………………………………………………………………… 39 Figure 6 The satellite views of Chengdu and Freiburg from 80km above, and the areas within the red circles are separately the general urban scale of Chengdu and Freiburg.…………..…………….....98 Figure 7 Field research process…………………………….…………………………………………..…………………………………….……..100 Figure 8 Scrutinizing with naked eyes the recognizable aerial image of farming patch and polygonizing the naked-eye-recognizable farming patch….…………………………………………………..…….101 Figure 9 Marking all the 60 naked-eye-visible farming patches within the San Huan Road……………...…..102 Figure 10 Randomly selected 20 polygons as the sites for field research, and spot in the red circle is one of the first visited research sites at Chengdu……………………………………………………….…102 Figure 11 Chengdu’s Location in China…………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..114 Figure 12 Google earth map of the landscape of Chengdu 30°39'40.47"N, 104°05'11.86"E Time: 12/1999…….…..115 Figure 13 Google earth map of the landscape of Chengdu 30°39'40.47"N, 104°05'11.86"E Time: 2009……………..115 Figure 14 Google earth map of the landscape of Chengdu 30°39'40.47"N, 104°05'11.86"E Time: 2015……………..115 Figure 15 Google earth map of Huayang district, the southern suburb of Chengdu Time: 2001…….……...116 Figure 16 Google earth map of Huayang district, the new municipal center of Chengdu Time: 2015..116 Figure 17 The scrolling drawing of the street view of Shui Jinfang district in the 1960s…………...... 117 Figure 18 The piece of left over farming land (polygonized area) where Songdaye worked for 60 years…..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..131 Figure 19 Drawing of the Big Mountainous Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1970-80s) by Tianfeng…….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….….………………172 Figure 20 Drawing of the Mountainous and River Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Wangwei…………………………………………………………………………………………...... 173 Figure 21 Drawing of the Rural Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Helei…..…...... 173 Figure 22 Drawing of the Rural Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Guomin...... 173 Figure 23 Drawing of the Rural Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1970-80s) by Baoma…..174 Figure 24 Drawing of the Township Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1970s) by Luoling……….174 Figure 25 Drawing of the Suburb Living Neighborhood of Chengdu in Childhood Memory (1990s) by July….….174 Figure 26 Drawing of the Living Neighborhood at Chengdu in Childhood Memory (1960-70s) by Chunmei……..175 Figure 27 Drawing of the Living Neighborhood at Chengdu in Childhood Memory (1990s) by Tangyu……….….…175 Figure 28 Freiburg’s Location in the state of Baden-Württemberg and in Germany……………..……………..189 Figure 29 Drawing of the Childhood Natural Memory (1950s) by Caroline…………………………………….…….…216 Figure 30 Drawing of the Childhood Tree and Natural Memory (1930-40s) by Hartmut………..…….………..217 Figure 31 Drawing of the Childhood Tree House and Natural Memory (1980-90s) by Patrick……….…....218 Figure 32 Drawing of the Childhood Time Memory (1990s) by Variana…………………………………………………..218 Figure 33 Drawing of Hamburg Suburb as Natural Playground in Childhood Memory (1990s) by Lisa ………….….218 Figure 34 Drawing of Natural Playground in Childhood Memory (1990s) by Mickey…………………………….219 Figure 35 Drawing of Suburb Natural Playground in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Brian………………….219 Figure 36 Drawing of City Natural Playgrounds in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Laura ………..………….219 Figure 37 Drawing of Suburb Natural Places in Childhood Memory (1960-70s) by Christine ……….…....220

List of Photos

Photo 1 The on-ground view of the visited research site in the above red circle………………………………………102 Photo 2 The sceneries before and after the demolishment of the collective urban farming plot……………..126 Photo 3 The scenery before and after the establishment of the roof edible garden belonging to a roof coffee shop…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..………………………………126 Photo 4 Songdaye in the leftover farming land at a city center area of Chengdu………..………….………………..131 Photo 5 Vacant farming plot, crops grown by Xiedaye, 2016……………………………………………………………………..135 Photo 6 The 24 Jieqi Calendar exhibited on the wall inside the Paotong elementary school…………………..146

List of Tables

Table 1 Research Questions of Political Ecology……………………………………………………………………………………….…..17 Table 2 The Change of Industrial Three Shifts with the Escalating of Social Metabolism 1.0-4.0……….….36 Table 3 Urban farming practitioners interviewed at Chengdu, China…………………………………………………………107 Table 4 Urban farming practitioners interviewed at Freiburg, Germany………………………………………………….…108 Table 5 Non-Organic Farming Methods (Non-OF) ………………………………………………………………………………………119 Table 6 Organic Farming Methods (OF) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………..119

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Chapter 1 Introduction

"Mom, buy me that dragonfly !” — Yuan Bao, 5 year old city girl

This work is based on two parallel research interests: analysis and reflection on the human-nature relation and interaction, and the worldwide surging phenomenon of urban farming. The integrated overall research interest of this dissertation is to understand the human-nature interaction through empirical research on individual people’s practice of urban farming. The theory of socio-ecological metabolism and a loose concepts-cluster of Marxist ecology will be developed as the theoretical framework to understand the complex of human-nature relations in a historical-materialistic background. The concept of metabolic rift will be applied at the core of the socio-ecological metabolism framework to analyze how humans and nature interact through urban farming practices. 1.1 Research Interest on Human-Nature1 Relations As Homo sapiens evolved in the process of interacting with nature during more than a two million year time span, we human beings as a whole and as individuals can not live without nature. Specifically, empirical and scientific evidence is gathering together to demonstrate the inherent and intimate connection between human society and the natural environment and the instinctive need to maintain and enhance the interactive relation between human and nature (Catton and Dunlap, 1978; Wilson, 1984; Naess, 1995; Louv, 2008; Kellert, 2012; Selhub and Logan, 2012; Weber, 2013). However, in the last several centuries of accelerated processes of industrialization, urbanization and globalization, the inherent, intimate and instinctive connections and interactions between human and nature have been gradually broken up. The reality of the human-nature relation on the planet today is about disconnection, detachment, alienation and antagonism, and nature has been gradually objectified and externalized from humans’ cognitive systems.

1 Human-nature is an expedient or convenient analytical distinction, but its use does not mean that I agree with such a binary view of the complex human-nature interaction. 1 Firstly, evidence of the human-nature disconnection can be found in the rapid urbanization process, in which people keep moving from natural rural areas to concrete-covered city areas, giving up their direct physical connection with nature. It is reported that the human population is approximately 7.6 billion today and is conservatively predicted to be 9.5 billion by 2050; at that time, 67% of the world population will live in cities and many of them will be mega-cities (UN, 2012). Secondly, the human-nature detachment can be demonstrated by changes in living patterns; the modern and western urban lifestyle has become the dominant lifestyle worldwide. The urban lifestyle focuses on goods consumption and material hedonism, which places high demands on natural resources and produces vast quantities of wastes. In the last decades, the combination of urbanization, industrialization and globalization has scaled up the negative ecological impacts of urban lifestyle such that they affect the whole planet. For example, in 2016, Science Magazine produced a special issue entitled “Urban Planet”, which acknowledged the urban lifestyle as the dominant one around the globe (Science, 2016). Thirdly, the tendency of nature externalization has been happening increasingly with more and more advanced application of high-technology. Human development, from Neolithic to modern times, has always involved the implementation of tools and technologies; there has always been an accelerating tendency for human societies to externalize nature. However, only in the industrial society of modern times, with its rapid development of science and technology, has the externalization of nature been intensified and amplified. The most advanced technologies, such as digital inventions and devices, keep people indoors and distance them from nature. People are disconnected from concerns around natural and environmental issues, and there is a cognitive and mental disconnection from nature. People’s understanding of the relationship with their surrounding natural environment as it existed in the Neolithic era has been changed, and is now completely different in today’s modernized, industrialized and urbanized era of High-Tech. In the academic world, there are many different understandings, analyses and interpretations of human-nature relations (Glaser, 2006), but none of these describes the human-nature relation from the perspective of their disconnectedness; there remains a “black box” in relation to the mechanisms of antagonistic human-nature relations. In this dissertation, the concept of “metabolic rift”, under the framework of the socio-ecological metabolism, will offer a chance to open up the “black box” and provide the theoretical lens to analyze the reasons behind the disconnected human-nature relations in modern society. “Metabolic rift” is an environmental sociological term developed from Marx’s analysis of the main ecological crisis in the middle of the 19th century. Originally, Marx used the concept of a “social-ecological metabolism break” to illustrate the problem of soil fertility within the capitalist industrial production of agriculture, and to explicate the antagonistic relation between town and country, human society and nature associated with the rise of capitalism (Foster, 1999). Marx argued that capitalist agricultural production drives human labor away from their farmland and toward concentration in urban factories, and that this process breaks the natural metabolic interaction between humans and the earth (Foster, 1999). With the expansion of the city and its population and with the extension of the transportation distance between the sites of production and consumption, what people extract in the form of nutrition from the soil cannot be returned back to the soil in the form of human waste, and instead, these nutrient materials have to be accumulated as pollution in towns (Foster, 1999; Liu, 2013, unpublished). 2 The notion of a “social-ecological metabolism break” was not only applied by Marx to illustrate the materially tangible ecological problems in his time, such as the soil fertility degradation, the loss of forests, the pollution of the cities, or the Malthusian specter of overpopulation, but even more importantly, it was used to reflect a more abstract immaterial relation between humans and nature, which Marx designated as human-nature alienation (Foster, 1999). There are two levels of human-nature alienation implied in Marx’s literature. One is the mental level of alienation for each individual and the other is the institutional level of alienation for the society as a whole (Foster, 1999). Marx gave more explicit elaboration for human society’s alienation from nature, such as the antagonism of town and country, but gave little specific explanation about each human individual’s mental alienation from nature. What Marx explained clearly is that no matter which level of alienation is examined, these intangible and immaterial alienation problems derive from the break of the socio-ecological metabolism (Liu, 2013, unpublished). After Marx, his notion of a “social-ecological metabolism break” was latent for almost 100 years until John Bellamy Foster (1999) resurrected the concept with the term of “metabolic rift”. Since then, the concept of metabolic rift has been used to describe different environmental issues in today’s sustainable development discourse (Forster, 1999; Schneider and McMichael, 2010). The concrete and tangible parts of the metabolic rift issues have been mostly covered by the studies of environmental scientists and ecosystem researchers, while the abstract and intangible notion of human-nature alienation has also been studied by metabolic rift scholars with specific and theoretical connotations and designations. In order to avoid any inconvenient terminological confusion and to ensure the whole discussion can be conducted explicitly, I adapt a pair of new terms – “material rift” and “immaterial rift” – to designate respectively the concrete-tangible and the abstract-intangible metabolic rift problems. All in all, in this dissertation, these tangible material rift problems and intangible immaterial rift problems will be studied under the socio-ecological metabolism framework with the theories of “metabolic rift” at the core and as the core. 1.2 Research Interest on Urban Farming Over the last two decades or so, a widespread discourse and practice surrounding urban farming has been emerging around the world as concerns over the ecological impacts of urbanization are increasing. There is an international tendency to turn to farming as a solution to deal with many urban life challenges. In developed countries, urban farming researches tend to study the ecological and community-benefited functions of urban farming, such as recycling organic waste, saving energy, adjusting city microclimates, conserving biodiversity, rethinking consumption, raising environmental and health awareness, de-alienating human-nature relations, building farmer and consumer relations, encouraging local spending, and strengthening the sense of community, etc. (Astee and Kishnani, 2010; Ackerman, 2011; Besthorn, 2013; Borysiak et al., 2016; Corcoran et al., 2017; Demailly and Darly, 2017). In developing countries, scholars tend to emphasize the social and economic functions of urban farming, including confronting food shortage, providing nutrients, increasing income, and/or buffering unemployment and so on (FAO, 2007; Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010; De Zeeuw, 2011; Hamilton et al., 2014). Urban farming is a very interesting phenomenon and relevant topic, specially suitable to be studied under the socio-ecological metabolism framework and to be analyzed by the metabolic rift theories, because the concept of metabolic rift was developed out of

3 Marx’s analysis of the rural farmers’ separation from farming, from farmland, and from the self-production of food, while urban farming is the phenomenon of the urban residents’ connection or re-connection with farming, with earth, and with the self-growing of food. In fact, the urban farming phenomenon points straightforwardly in the direction of solutions and the methods to repair the metabolic rift problems, including both the material rift problems and the immaterial rift problems. Urban farming practice is a bilateral process through which we can closely and conveniently study the reciprocal interplay between the individual urban farming practitioners and their farming practices. Urban farming practice is an activity that happens at the direct interface of human-nature interaction on a daily-life based occasion and frequency; this offers us the chance to intimately scrutinize the human and nature interactive relation in a micro scope. Meanwhile, on the macro scale, we can examine each individual’s urban farming choice and practice in the context and broader background of the socio-ecological metabolism of each specific country. Through these individuals’ self-expressed motivations and benefits of urban farming practice, we can grasp how these social-ecological factors are influencing their living pattern, their daily lifestyle choice, and their perception of the disconnection with nature in the overall socio-ecological metabolic process. As the result, we can also better understand the underlying reasons for their choice of urban farming as their personal and individual response to cope with those challenges and problems they are experiencing in the city and modern living circumstances. For all these reasons, I would like to say that such a PhD research on urban farming is interesting and contributes to understanding the multiple layers of human-nature interaction in contemporary society. Additionally, since the urban farming movement is spreading all over the world, in both developed countries and developing countries, so a research of urban farming based on a contrastive study of the cases from a bit contrary backgrounds is an interesting research idea. At the same time, under the framework of socio-ecological metabolism and in the language of metabolic rift theory, different development stages and social milieus would indicate different motivations and expectations of urban farming. Only when different and contrasting cases are covered in one research project, can complementary cases would work together to demonstrate a more complete picture about the meaning and function of urban farming to heal the rift problems. For these reasons, the current research will take two cities separately, one from China and one from Germany, as the research sites in which to conduct the empirical case studies of urban farming. It is hoped that what could not be demonstrated in the Chinese urban farming cases could be verified in the German cases, and vice versa. China, as a developing country, is a high Gini coefficient society (Xie and Jin, 2015), where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps enlarging, with the result that different income classes of urban dwellers practice urban farming with very different motivations and for very different purposes. Furthermore, since China is as a country with four thousand years of history of agriculture (King and King, 1911), it would be interesting to study whether and how its agricultural culture and traditions are being revived in the form of urban farming in the international context and popularity of urban farming, as well as under the modern discourse of sustainability. Germany, as a developed country with a long history of industrial development and urbanization processes, has an earlier awareness and reflection on the social and ecological aspects of issues, and therefore, the urban farming practitioners in Germany would possibly have very different motivations and purposes to practice urban farming.

4 1.3 Major Research Gaps Firstly, Marx analyzed farming, the farmer, and rural aspects of the socio-ecological metabolism, pointed out the break-up situation of the socio-ecological metabolism in the industrialization and urbanization process, and created the conception of “human-nature alienation” in his earlier philosophic thoughts. However, Marx’s elaborations were not yet very systematically organized; and his thoughts and analyses were only sporadically scattered into the whole picture of his anti-capitalist thinking and did not develop into an integrated theoretical framework. In addition, Marx’s elaboration of metabolic rift and his idea of “human-nature alienation” were based on his observation of the socio-ecological metabolic process of his own era in the 19th century, which was a time that the industrial production, technological evolution and the urbanization process had not yet developed as exponentially as today, and thus, the human-nature relation had not yet alienated as distantly and profoundly as today. So there is a necessity to elaborate the socio-ecological metabolism in a more systematic and specific way; the situation and the causes of the socio-ecological metabolic rift problems in modern times should be studied and described in an updated socio-ecological metabolism context with more precise details. Secondly, even though Marx noticed environmental and ecological problems in 19th century Europe, and recognized the tangible and material metabolic rift issues, started pondering the intangible and immaterial aspects of human-nature relations, and even pointed out the tendency toward alienated human-nature relations in a more and more mechanized production condition, however, overall, Marx did not give enough attention to or specific explanations about the human-nature disconnection and alienation problems. Similarly, scholars after Marx, especially the new metabolic scholars appearing in the last two decades, apply the framework and language of the metabolic rift theories, but most of their elaborations are not based on a comprehensive understanding of the human-nature interaction in the entire socio-ecological metabolic process; their understanding of the human-nature relationship is not yet systematic or complete. Therefore, there is a need to integrate Marx and other metabolic rift scholars’ understanding with other human-nature perspectives and theories provided by the scholars from other schools and disciplines. Specifically, the environmental-and-social studies disciplines, like environmental sociology, political ecology, and urban political ecology etc., will be considered to complete the socio-ecological metabolism framework. Concepts like “nature deficit disorder”, and “deprivation of nature” will be used to complement the metabolic rift theories. Thirdly, the reason to integrate environmental sociology, political ecology, and urban political ecology into the socio-ecological metabolism framework is that these environmental-social studies tackle only the surface problems or only the structural issues of human-nature relations. They have produced insufficient analysis of the fundamental causes of the current human-nature alienation, and thus can hardly provide more micro-scale, individual-level and daily-life based understanding of human-nature interaction. For example, in environmental sociology, environmental deconstruction cannot advance or recognize urgent material relationships, so it has only limited utility in a world of very real environmental problems. In political ecology, studies cover many topics, such as environmental justice, environmental politics, and power structures in environmental governance, but there is little analysis about the individual’s values, needs, living choices, and how these personal life preferences are established within the material, cultural and institutional influences. In urban political ecology, even though they have noticed that the city is now the place requiring most of the goods and 5 resources from nature and producing most of the wastes and CO2 emission on the planet, the urban political ecology scholars have not yet systematically taken consumption-centered urban living and the consumer-culture-influenced urban lifestyle as a central topic, and have studied their causal relation with urban metabolic rift problems only in fragments. So, it would be very interesting to develop a human-nature theoretical framework which can analyze the interactively functioning and bilaterally restricted mechanism between human society and the natural environment, and to explore the value system, moral standards, and thought origins that influence people’s environmental behavior. Fourthly, in urban farming related researches and reports, the meanings and functions of urban farming are only studied sporadically with respect to its environmental role, its social role, its economic role, or its casual and recreational role. Also, there is disproportionate emphasis on the role of the accessibility, affordability and availability of food, but none of these roles or functions have been discussed under a comprehensive enough framework; when talking about urban farming’s function to fulfil individual benefits, most of the existing research only uses a few words to summarize it. In this current research, with the metabolic rift theories and under the socio-ecological metabolism framework, a comprehensive discussion will be conducted to analyze how urban farming can support each individual person to deal with all the ecological, epistemological, cultural (as hypothesis), social and individual dimensions of rift problems. 1.4 Research Objectives and Research Questions The first research objective is to build an integrated theoretical framework to describe the comprehensive socio-ecological metabolic process in the development of capitalist industrialization and urbanization from the critical Marxist ecology point of view; to construct the metabolic rift theories from the ecological, epistemological, hypothetical cultural, social and individual dimensions; to apply the socio-ecological metabolism framework as the context, and to implement the innovative metabolic rift theories to analyze the cases in Chengdu (China) in regards to urban farming’s functions to repair the multiple dimensions of rift problems. The attached questions for this research purpose are: Q1: What are the dynamics of the ecological, social and individual processes of urban farming practice in Chengdu (China)? Who are the people practicing, promoting and involved in urban farming? Where and how do they practice urban farming? What are their motivations to do urban farming? What are the benefits they gain from doing farming? How does urban farming help to deal with the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift issues on a farming plot scale? The second research objective is to test the hypothesis about the possible existence of the hypothetical cultural rift. The hypothesis is to assume that in the modern industrialization process in which the culture and traditions of an agricultural society gradually disappear, or in the urbanization process in which people move from their rural homeland to a new urban place, there would be a break-up happening between the people and the traditional culture, which was once developed in historically and ecologically influenced local agricultural production activities; and then to apply the hypothesized cultural rift theory to analyze the possible role of urban farming in

6 repairing the cultural rift issues among the urban farming practitioners at Chengdu, China. The attached questions for this research purpose are: Q2: What are the cultural and traditional reasons for urban farming practices in Chengdu (China)? Does the older generations’ farming practice have some influence on people doing farming today? Does “where do people come from” and “where did they grow up” have some effect on their decision of farming practice? Could urban farming help to fill the cultural aspect of rift (as hypothesis)? The third research objective is to apply the above mentioned theoretical innovations (i.e. the overall socio-ecological metabolism frameworks, the metabolic rift theories, the cultural rift hypothesis) in a comparative study of the urban farming practices between China (Chengdu) and Germany (Freiburg). The attached questions for this research purpose are: Q3: Given the different economic development phases and different historical, cultural, social, and political contexts of the urbanization process, what are the similar and different characteristics of the urban farming practice in China (Chengdu) and in Germany (Freiburg)? How do the urban farming practitioners in China and in Germany understand or experience the multi-functions of urban farming differently? Which rift problems could be best responded to by urban farming practice in Chengdu and Freiburg, respectively? 1.5 General Structure of the Dissertation Following this overall introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive literature review of the theoretical framework applied in this dissertation. It includes three parts of elaboration: first, it introduces the genesis of the socio-ecological metabolism theory; second, there will be an attempt to construct the theoretical framework of socio-ecological metabolism, which is rooted in Marxist ecology and consists of the disciplines of environmental sociology, political ecology, urban political ecology, environmental history and historical materialism, followed by an attempt to describe the four phases of the industrial social-ecological metabolism evolution; third, it elaborates carefully how the academic world has been working on the issues of material rift and immaterial rift, and the backbone concepts of the immaterial rift – epistemological rift, cultural rift (as hypothesis), social rift, individual rift (e.g. nature deficit disorder and nature deprivation). Chapter 3 will review the literature on urban farming, beginning with the terminological discussion of “Urban Farming”, followed by a brief introduction of the world urban farming history and the existing analytical frameworks of urban farming, and then discussion of three “myths” in regard to the existing urban farming studies. Finally, there will be a comprehensive introduction and analysis about the multiple urban farming functions through the theoretical lens of metabolic rift, that is, to elaborate the urban farming functions from all the ecological, epistemological, hypothetical cultural, social and individual perspectives. Chapter 4 will introduce the qualitative research methodology applied to the current research, including the introductions of the overall methodological philosophy, research targets, research sites, field research methods and data collection processes, etc. Specifically, the field research interview guideline questions will be explained, the

7 selection of Chengdu and Freiburg as the research sites will be justified, and the outline data analysis will also be introduced briefly. Chapter 5 will deliver the findings of Chengdu urban farming research in a Chinese urbanization context, in which the relevant social and ecological conditions of China will be introduced, the cultural and historical background of the Chinese agricultural traditions will be mentioned, and the brief urbanization process of Chengdu and its urban farming situation will be summarized. Then the major content of this chapter will analyze the collected Chengdu urban farming research data under the framework of socio-ecological metabolism. The dynamics of the urban farming practices in Chengdu will be thoroughly discussed according to the metabolic rift theory in all the ecological, epistemological, cultural, social and individual aspects. Chapter 6 will discuss briefly the findings of Freiburg urban farming research in the German context. As a reference study site, the Freiburg urban farming case analysis will not be as comprehensive as the Chengdu case, but the key messages from the Freiburg urban farming practitioners and the most prominent features of the urban farming practice in the German social-ecological context will be recorded and discussed from the metabolic rift theory based on four dimensions (i.e. ecological, cultural, social and individual) of urban farming motivation and functions. Chapter 7 will be the discussion and conclusion of the entire research. The discussion will be conducted as a comparison between the urban farming cases in Chengdu (China) and Freiburg (Germany), and six major finding points will be covered and summarized. In the end, remaining issues regarding urban farming will be discussed, the research weakness will be reflected upon, and the conclusions with future research suggestions will be delivered.

8 Chapter 2 Literature Review: Theoretical Framework

Humans created a flying machine named “civilization” and tested the invention by launching it from a very high cliff; humans defined the success of the flying machine by checking whether it is still “in the air”; as long as people sitting inside the flying machine feel themselves still “in the air”, they asserted the success of their invention. However, the reality is that the flying machine is in free falling movement under the law of gravity – the closer the “civilization” crashing to the ground, the faster it drops in accelerating speed. — Daniel Quinn, in novel Ishmael

As explicated in the chapter of introduction, my parallel research interests are to understand the human-nature interaction and to study empirical cases of human-nature interaction in the practice of urban farming. With respect to the understanding of human-nature interaction, even though there have been many theories on this topic, most of these theories emphasize the connections between humans and nature, but have not yet given enough attention to the actual disconnected, separated and alienated elements of the human-nature relationship. There remains a “black box” in relation to the mechanisms of the antagonistic human-nature facts which are becoming manifest all over our planet. However, the concept of metabolic rift is an exception; it offers a chance to open up this “black box”, and provides the theoretical lens to analyze the reasons for the human-nature disconnected relation in our recent world. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to offer a review of literature on the metabolic rift theory, and to build up an overarching theoretical framework that will serve the metabolic rift theory at the core and as the core. The review of literature and the structure of the overarching theoretical framework will start with a brief introduction of social metabolism, which is the theoretical genesis of the metabolic rift theory, and will then follow with an attempt to build a theoretical understanding of Marxist ecology, which is comprised by a batch of Marxism influenced theories and offers a Marxist critical perspective in this thesis to interpret the escalating versions of social metabolism in a capitalist industrial development history. Then, the rest of this chapter will work on the articulation of the core concept of metabolic rift, which will be applied to account for the material and immaterial dimensions of the human-nature alienation problems. 2.1 Theoretical Genesis and its Application in Socio-Ecological Studies As we know today, the term “metabolism” evolved from its original root in the scientific study of individual organs and living organisms. The earliest written reference

9 to the original idea of metabolism can date back to at least the time of Sanstorious (1712 [1614]), an Italian medicine professor, who meticulously weighed and recorded his dietary intake and also his excretion (Newell and Cousins, 2015). Much later, within biological and ecological analysis, the concept of metabolism was applied to all biological levels, from a single cell to the whole ecosystem (Odum, 1969). In the system-theory approach, metabolism has been generalized to describe the relation between organisms and their environment (Foster, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2006a). When referring to “metabolism” as a metaphor to understand the interactive relationship between human society and the natural environment, there are multiple but confusing terms, including but not limited to terms such as urban metabolism (Molina and Toledo, 2014; Newell and Cousins, 2015), traditional urban metabolism (Newell and Cousins, 2015), socioeconomic metabolism (Fischer-Kowalski and Hüttler, 1998), industrial metabolism (Ayres, 1989; Ayres, 1994; Molina and Toledo, 2014), agrarian or rural metabolism (Molina and Toledo, 2014), regional metabolism (Molina and Toledo, 2014), national metabolism (Molina and Toledo, 2014), anthropogenic metabolism (Brunner and Rechberger, 2002), social metabolism (Marx, 1981, cited in Foster, 1999), socio-ecological metabolism (Foster, 1999), socio-environmental metabolism (Swyngedouw, 2006a and 2006b), and metabolic rift (Foster, 1999), etc. Given different research epistemologies and practices (e.g. data collection, analysis and discourse), the term of metabolism has been applied very differently in each field (Newell and Cousins, 2015), although the layman outside the study field would think they are all referring to the same phenomenon. Even for many metabolism scholars, it is still a very difficult task to identify the distinct characteristics in each metabolism related research school or study field. Given the gradually increasing popularity of human-nature related metabolism as an emerging aggregated field of study, there are now scholars starting to study this concept from etymological and terminological perspectives. With the purpose of better understanding these bewildering terms related to metabolism, several attempts have been made in the last years to categorize them. Among these attempts, Molina and Toledo (2014) in The Social Metabolism: A Socio- Ecological Theory of Historical Change, have tried to summarize the past and present usages of the concept of social metabolism, and collected many very different groups of metabolism notions under this single term, such as industrial metabolism, urban metabolism, agrarian or rural metabolism, regional metabolism, and national metabolism. Molina and Toledo’s understanding of the concept of social metabolism originates from Marx’s (1976, 1981) analysis of human-nature metabolic relation, but they go far beyond the original concept and its connotation, and apply it as an umbrella term to cover a large variety of human-nature metabolism discussions. My paper will also use the term “social metabolism” as the basic concept of my theoretical framework, but it will be different from Molina and Toledo’s usage of that term. I will apply the term of social metabolism in a more conservative way; I will follow its original roots in Marx’s analysis of soil fertility degradation, and elaborate my understanding of the human-nature alienation rooted in industrial agricultural production, the antagonism between rural and city, and the intrinsic contradiction between capitalism and natural geochemical characteristics. Molina and Toledo (2014) also distinguish two types of metabolic processes: the tangible (e.g. material flow) and the intangible (e.g. economy, policy, governance); they declare that this distinction is their innovative contribution to the discussion on metabolism. However, in the later articulation of the concept “metabolic rift”, I will argue that before Molina and Toledo, McClintock (2010) had noted the immaterial,

10 intangible dimensions of the metabolic process, and had elaborated these intangible metabolic issues from the metabolic rift perspective. The current writing, my entire dissertation, is actually inspired by and based on McClintock’s innovative notion of the three dimensions – ecological, social and individual – of metabolic rift. An exclusive section later in this chapter will conceptualize the concept of metabolic rift and its different dimensions. Another attempt to categorize the different schools of research on human-nature metabolism is an enlightening article published by Newell and Cousins (2015), who take “urban metabolism” as the overarching term to conceptualize the socio-ecological metabolic process on the city scale. By applying bibliometric analysis, they attempt to converge the different socio-ecological context oriented applications of metabolism in the study of “urban metabolism”. Even though it is arguable to squeeze all human- nature metabolism studies into such a single term as urban metabolism, Newell and Cousins’s effort to summarize the different clusters of applications of metabolism is still very valuable for both the metabolism scholars and amateurs to acquire some basic knowledge about the boundaries of each metabolism study field. In Newell and Cousins’s article, the bibliometric analysis, with subsequent mapping, indicates that the application of urban metabolism can be categorized first into three ecology groups (Figure 1): industrial ecology, Marxist ecology and urban ecology; within each ecology school, there are sub-groups of metabolism studies (Newell and Cousins, 2015).

Figure 1. The three thought traditions of urban metabolism research: Marxist ecologies, industrial ecology, and urban ecology (Source: Newell and Cousin, 2015)

11 In the category of “industrial ecology”, there are two dense but distinct network clusters of metabolism studies, labelled respectively as “traditional” urban metabolism and Vienna School of socio-economic metabolism (Figure 2). For industrial ecology scholars, they conceptualize metabolism as a biological organism, emphasize to quantify “flows” and “stocks”, or optimize and reduce material “throughput” in the human-nature metabolic process. They apply the methods such as Material Flow Analysis (MFA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as their main analytical tools. Researchers in these two fields are theoretically influenced by key figures like EP Odum (1953, 1968, 1969), HT Odum (1983, 1996), Wolman (1965), and Fisher- Kowalski (1998, 1998, 1999), etc. The main difference between the two clusters of industrial ecology is that, though both understand metabolism as material flows and stocks, the Vienna School of socio-economic metabolism takes also not-so-material factors such as labor, capital, property, income distribution, and consumption, etc., into consideration (Newell and Cousins, 2015). In the “Marxist ecology” network (Figure 2), according to Newell and Cousin (2015), there are also two, but isolated, clusters of metabolism: Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and Metabolic Rift theory (MR). They both utilize the metaphor of metabolism to investigate socio-ecological issues with the inspiration of Marx’s theorizations of metabolism. For Marxist ecology scholars, metabolism is a socio-ecological complexity; they emphasize how the dynamics of the nature-society relationships shaped outcomes, and apply historical materialism and qualitative approaches to analyze the complex socio-ecological interaction. Some of the current active scholars in the Marxist ecology metabolism group include but are not limited to Harvey (1996), Swyngedouw (2006a, 2006b), Gandy (2002, 2004, 2005), and Heynen (2006, 2014), etc., who elaborate mostly on UPE; and Foster (1999, 2000, 2010, 2010), McClintock (2010), Clark (2005, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2010), York (2005, 2008), Schneider and McMichael (2010), who contribute greatly to the burgeoning of MR. Since Marxist-ecology-rooted metabolism theory will be the theoretical basis of this entire dissertation, and especially because the concept of “metabolic rift” will be employed as the core concept throughout this dissertation, these themes will be elaborated upon in forthcoming sections. One distinct difference between the two clusters need emphasis here: although both are based on Marxist analysis, UPE tackles inequality, power struggles, and other political issues of the social-ecological relation, while MR focuses on the aspect of alienation, detachment and antagonism of the human-nature, socio-ecological, city-rural relations, or namely, all the “rift” issues of the metabolic cycle. Finally, Newell and Cousin (2015) turn their attention to “urban ecology”, which has overlapping research interests and theoretical base with industrial ecology, and even share the same key theoretical scholars, EP Odum (1953, 1968, 1969), and Wolman (1965). However, urban ecology studies have a relatively weaker application of the metaphor of metabolism. The urban ecology cluster takes metabolism as an ecosystem, emphasizes the internal complexity of urban ecosystem process, studies how ecosystem functions indicate sustainability, and uses ecologically informed complex systems models to analyze the hybridity of the nature-society-distinction, such as the material interchange between city and countryside (Wolman, 1965; Giradet, 1997; Newell and Cousin, 2015).

Figure 2. Urban metabolism research in four network clusters and the Marxist ecologies in two network clusters: metabolic rift and urban political ecology (Source: Newell and Cousin, 2015, p710)

2.2 Theoretical Basis – Marxist Ecology Rooted Social Metabolism It is hard today to trace precisely the earliest application of the concept of metabolism to describe the dynamics of socio-ecological interaction. We can roughly know that its origins date back to the 19th century, a time when scholars and thinkers in Europe’s intellectual communities were applying analogical reasoning to understand human social structure and mechanisms together with the structure and function of living organisms and the natural environment (Swyngedouw, 2006a; Molina and Toledo, 2014). For example, at that time scholars from both social and natural sciences agreed on the similarity between social evolution and natural evolution, and believed that biological and ecological principles, notions, and even only assumptions such as natural selection and competition were applicable to human society. It was in such an intellectual atmosphere of the 19th century in Europe that the biological notion of metabolism was applied to explain social activities through their involvement with their natural surroundings; and the use of the term “metabolism” was widespread in the emerging social sciences, and many social science scholars were familiar with the term, including Marx and Engels (Swyngedouw, 2006a). It is not certain whether Marx was the first to coin the term “social metabolism”, but Marx was undoubtedly influenced by Liebig’s term “Stoffwechsel” (metabolism in German) to describe the interaction between human society and its ecological environment (Foster, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2006a). Marx was the first to systematically analyze the human-nature metabolic relation, integrate the understanding into his broader analysis and criticism of capitalism, and refer to the term of “social metabolism” in his writing Capital (Marx, 1976, cited in Foster, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2006a; Molina and Toledo, 2014). More precisely, social metabolism should be termed

13 “socio-ecological metabolism”, because the social metabolism connotes how the human social activities intertwine with their surrounding ecological environment in the human- nature metabolic process. However, since my current research is based on Marx’s theoretical analysis on the issue, for which his own designation is “social metabolism”, out of respect for Marx’s original contribution, I will keep using the term “social metabolism” on many occasions in this dissertation. Thus, the term “social metabolism” is interchangeable with the term “socio-ecological metabolism” in this dissertation, and the connotation of both of these terms will take Marx’s original understanding of the interplay of social and ecological conditions and processes in a capitalist system as the fundamental theoretical base. My academic interest and attempt is to start from the original understanding of social metabolism, Marx’s contribution, and to build up a more structured theoretical basis of social metabolism that integrates also other Marxist ecology related theories, developed by later scholars from varied disciplines inheriting Marxist views to understand the human and nature interaction in a capitalist system. Thus, Marx’s original and innovative contribution, together with other ecology related theories derived from Marxist philosophy and ideology, would offer a plausible theoretical basis of Marxist ecology for my PhD research to illustrate the comprehensive and complex picture of the human-nature denoted as social metabolism, or socio- ecological metabolism. 2.2.1 Disciplines Integrated under Marxist Ecology Marxist ecology, in this writing, will be applied only as a loose term to encompass the trends of Marxist philosophy or ideology that arise from the concerns of contemporary socio-ecological issues. There will not be a unified ideology of Marxist ecology in the way as there is in orthodox Marxism, and the boundary around the concept of Marxist ecology will also be loose. Broadly speaking, Marxist ecology seeks to answer modern or contemporary ecological questions that classic Marxism could not answer, especially in light of urban expansion, mass consumption, and the consumer culture which has emerged accompanied by technological innovations, which Marx and Engels and other early Marxists did not foresee. The knowledge and theories, to be applied in this current writing to build the Marxist ecology analytical perspective, are rooted separately in fields such as environmental sociology (including the resurrected social metabolism), political ecology, urban political ecology, and a part of environmental history and historical materialism (Figure 3). All together, this knowledge and these theories will form a loose but associated understanding of Marxist ecology, which will be applied as the broad theoretical basis of this dissertation. 1) Environmental Sociology Even though the analogy between human social structure and function and biological or ecological structure and function was very popular in social science communities in the 19th century, and was adopted by the major figures in sociology like Émile Durkheim and Marx Weber (Molina and Toledo, 2014), it is still a mystery to know why sociology stopped giving attention to the human-nature issue for a very long time. As a new discipline or sub-discipline, environmental sociology was only established in 1978, when Catton and Dunlap (1978) published their trailblazing article Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm. They argued there is an old human-nature understanding, which they called the “Human Exemptionalism Paradigm” and contended that human need “New Paradigm” to connect with the realities of the human-nature relation. They asserted that humans have been organizing society (mainly the western world)

14 according to a prevalent pre-ecological worldview that humans control nature by exploiting its exuberant resources, while insufficiently recognizing human society’s ultimate dependence on its ecosystem (Catton and Dunlap, 1978; Catton and Dunlap, 1980). A new paradigm would advance a new worldview, which is based on the post- exuberant fact that nature resources are indeed finite; this new paradigm will be applied as the worldview throughout my entire research. After the establishment of environmental sociology, themes like governments’ response to environmental issues, humans’ response to natural disaster, social impact assessment of environmental issues, social impact of the shortage of energy and resources, social inequality and environmental risks, public awareness and environmental movements, public environmental attitude changes, national comparisons of environmental issues and policies, large-scale social changes related to the environment, population growth, and the rich-poor gap in environmental topics started to be studied by environmental sociologists (Hannigan, 2006). However, these themes are mostly human-social centered thinking, taking environmental changes as only a backdrop while focusing on how people react to or are affected by these changes and problems. This is actually the inertial thinking of sociology, to take human needs as its core concern. Yet, a real new paradigm calls for environmental sociology to move from a social oriented human- nature relation study to a more complicated, profound, essential analysis of human- nature interaction. “Treadmill of production”, a concept developed by Schnaiberg (1980), describes the essence of the industrial production pattern, which combines mass production and mass consumption and is accompanied by underlying environmental impacts of massive natural resource depletion and vast waste creation. Starting from Schnaiberg’s contribution, I will apply the treadmill theory in this writing, and further developing it to describe two layers of treadmill patterns: one is at the production stream where the treadmill system is designed by capitalism to encourage mass production, marketing and consumption; the other is at the stream of individual living where each person is involved in the capitalist system to work painstakingly hard and to consume unconsciously “mad”. Another essential and groundbreaking analysis of human-nature relations in the field of environmental sociology is the theory of metabolic rift, whose term was coined by Forster (1999) but originated from Marx’s analysis of the antagonistic condition between the rural and the urban, and the alienated relation between human and nature under a social metabolism framework. Metabolic rift theory illustrates multiple dimensions of the ruptured conditions of socio-ecological metabolic process, which contains not only the material and tangible ecological dimension of human-nature interaction, but also encompasses the immaterial and intangible social and individual dimensions of human-nature interplays. 2) Political Ecology Political ecology is a relatively young subject developed in the 1980s (Watts, 2001; Bridge et al., 2015). Its emergence is very relevant to the social and political crises and problems in the 1960s and 1970s, a restive era with widespread social tumult, political and economic convulsion, anti-war, civil rights, women’s rights and environmental movements, political assassination, decolonization, emancipation, cultural reinvention, and re-appropriation of nature; political ecology emerged directly from this global milieu (Bridge et al., 2015). Reflecting these global crises, political ecology scholars tried to construct an alternative understanding of the world from a more Marxist perspective. They contended that the contemporary ecological problems are trapped in the structured causes of capitalist industrial production, unequal power relations,

15 political conflict and social struggles over nature appropriation and ecological distribution (Perreault et al., 2015). Political ecology pays close attention to the social construction of nature; its intellectual roots are stem from Marxist scholarship. As Watts (1983b) in Silent Violence argued, “the capitalist production of natural resources, cannot be understood apart from the social relations of production through which they are given meaning and value”. Harvey (1982), in The Limits to Capital, also pointed out concisely “nature is produced by capitalist relation of production”. Harvey’s The Limits of Capital, together with Smith’s (1984) Uneven Development, are considered to be the two specific academic origins of the discipline of political ecology. Such Marxist origin also defines the critical DNA of political ecology, sharply questioning the old socio- natural ordering and inquiring about the possibilities for a new mode, by interrogating “who produces what kind of socio-ecological configuration and for whom! (Heynen et al., 2006a)” (Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Heynen et al., 2006b). The term “political ecology”, a combination of “the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy” (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987), is understood as a systems perspective on relationships between land, soil, vegetation, and other organisms (i.e. ecology) in a broad, generous context with the materialist perspective on capitalism, markets, social structure, and population (i.e. political economy) (Robbins, 2015). Political ecology is characterized by its adoption of its diverse theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, but has never been constrained to its historical field of origin. Agrarian political economy, resource governance, indigenous livelihoods, and peasant studies are some of the fields that political ecology conventionally drew from. In its early formation, political ecology gave its research concern to social justice and structural political change, highlighted the struggle, interests, and plight of marginalized populations, developed its research interests on agrarian dynamics, resource conflict, deforestation, conservation, resource governance and landscape, and expanded enough to cover food and health, production and reproduction, contemporary and historical, rural and urban issues, community and household organization, and global North and South divisions. As a growing field, political ecology is continuing to evolve by exploring new spaces, scales and themes, and pushing its research boundaries outward into new theoretical, empirical, methodological and spatial frontiers (Bridge et al., 2015; Perreault et al., 2015) With regard to environmental issues, political ecology basically asks five types of questions (Table 1), which cover the topics of environmental knowledge, environmental change, environmental identities, environmental politics, and environmental governance. My current research focuses mainly on the first three questions, which are relatively “weak” topics in both political ecology’s theoretical studies and empirical researches, while the environmental politics and environmental governance will only be mentioned when they become relevant to the empirical findings of my research2.

2 Such preference of my research interest is influenced by 1) my personal research interest, which concentrates more on people’s (especially individuals) inner knowledge, awareness, and identity in respect of their natural environment, instead of exploring people’s organizational details in facing environmental issues; 2) my research ability, which is not capable to construct a full political ecology study on urban farming, which should be able to examine all the social, economic and political aspects of ecological process, for my lack of knowledge of economics

16 Environmental Knowledge How and what do we know about nature?

In what way are nature and society transformed, and how does Environmental Changes the metabolic relationship affect different social groups?

How are social subjectivities shaped through differential Environmental Identities access to and control over nature?

Through what sorts of social arrangements and forms of rule Environmental Politics do people manage nature, and to what effect?

In what ways and for what reasons do people mobilize Environmental Governance politically around nature and natural resources?

Table 1. Research Questions of Political Ecology

Political ecology also adapts the notion of social metabolism to its concern and analysis in a broad sense, highlighting the accelerated throughput of energy and materials (goods and waste) between a society and its biophysical environment. I will apply some of political ecology’s broad understanding of social metabolism to describe the general socio-ecological metabolic processes of industrial development under capitalist political, economic, and cultural influences. Although these political-ecology related perspectives of social metabolism are somewhat abstract and general, they are good references for looking at the macro picture of the interrelated capitalist production-consumption system, the underlying material and waste flows, the intertwined political-economic regimes and the ubiquitous power relations and struggles. Political ecology is also characterized by its radically experimental research attempts, including its adaptive and flexible methodologies with the ability to advance rigorous empirical assessment of socio-environmental situation and to freely borrow the methods and conceptual apparatus from related fields. Due to these experimental and flexible characteristics, political ecology’s methodologies will provide the overall basic methodological reference for my current research. 3) Urban Political Ecology (UPE) Urban political ecology is derived from political ecology and shares many of it ideologies and concerns about ecological justice, equality and power relations. However, political ecology at its inception was mostly applied to the rural areas and the regions of the global South, mainly tackling issues of rural and agrarian economies, and the inequality and power struggles in post-colonial developing countries or the “Third World”. Thanks to scholars like MaCarthy (2002), who first started to apply the principles and ideology of political ecology to the “First World”, and latterly also Swyngedouw (2004), Kaika (2006), Huber (2013), and Hevnen (2014), together, they have guided a shift in political ecology scholarship to urban and industrial development. These UPE scholars plausibly argue that urban space is the place where many problems of concern to the political ecology field originate; this is especially true for the cases of environmental and ecological concern. Urban political ecology is a theory partially rooted in the notion of Marx’s social metabolism and political ecology, but it presents an important departure away from political ecology’s conventional rural, agrarian and “Third World” path, moving toward urban socio-ecological and political metabolism (Heynen et al., 2006b). Urban political

17 ecology studies issues such as urban living and urban lifestyle of consumption, which have been unjustifiably ignored as the driving forces behind many environmental issues and have been customarily neglected as the origin of many global environmental problems (Heynen et al., 2006b). Urban political ecology applies the notions of “agency of nature” and “actor-network theory” asserted by Latour (2005) to remind us that even though it is legitimate to strengthen a marginalized actor by increasing his or her living standards through consumption within the human society boundary, the resulting human domination over nature by its exploitation should not be ignored (Zimmer, 2010). Urban political ecology will be applied to supplement Marx’s archaic weakness in analyzing the accelerated and intensified pace of production and consumption during the 200 years of capitalist development, and the consequent planetary urbanization and its massive socio-ecological metabolic process (Heynen et al., 2006b; Liu, 2013, unpublished). Marx’s original analysis of social metabolism had a limited understanding of the roles played by consumption-centered urban living and consumer-culture- influenced urban lifestyle in maintaining the vibrancy of the capitalist system and exacerbating the global metabolic rift problems (Liu, 2013, unpublished). However, today, the studies and research of urban political ecology have been based on the consensus of understanding that it is in the process of rapid urbanization, on the terrain of the urban, and with the urban lifestyle of consumerism that the accelerating metabolic transformation of nature and the escalating formation of metabolic rift become most visible in all the ecological, social and individual dimensions. 4) Environmental History and Historical Materialistic Analysis Environmental history studies human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasizing the roles that humans and nature play respectively and interactively to influence each other. Environmental history is believed to have emerged from the background of the U.S. environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. According to White (1985), the sign of the birth of environmental history as an academic discipline started from the publication of The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to its History, by American historian Marlin (1947), but he denied himself to be the founder of the school of environmental history. As an academic concept, the term “environmental history” appeared in Nash’s (1972) article American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier for the first time. As a strong multidisciplinary subject, environmental history draws widely on both humanities and natural science, and consists of various sub-disciplines of research and studies. One perspective of environmental history’s scope is the broad environmental and human consequences of world population increase, technological innovation, and production-and-consumption change in human history, especially in the modern and contemporary human history of industrial revolutions (Worster, 1988; Grove, 1994). In a general sense, environmental historians also have the interest to study how people think about nature, that is, their attitudes, beliefs, values and worldviews towards nature emerging from the historical process of interaction with nature (Dovers, 1994; Star, 2003; Warde and Sorlin, 2007). In my elaboration, these just mentioned themes of environmental history will be applied to describe the phases of the accelerating social metabolic process in the industrial history of human society. Historical materialism is a theory of history originally created by Marx and systematically explicated by Engels, both of whom insisted on the natural or the material foundation of human history. Historical materialistic analysis understands human existence from a fundamental reality that all human beings, their activities and the civilizations they have created survive and are sustained in the material conditions

18 offered by nature (Swyngedouw, 2006a). As a theory, analysis or interpretation, historical materialism has been applied, modified and expanded by Marxist or non- Marxist scholars since its origin. The fundamental connotation of historical materialism, in Marx’s own words, is that: The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relationship to the rest of nature…The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men…[M]en must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history”…The first historical act is thus the production of means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. (Marx, 1846 [1974 3 ], cited in Swyngedouw, 2006b) In simple words, historical materialism is a new interpretation of human history as a materialistic fact. However, this materialistic fact, for Marx, is not regarded as a pure materialism-determined fact, but should be understood in a dialectical approach (Foster, 2000; Swyngedouw, 2006a and 2006b), which means that, on the one hand, natural and material conditions are the lasting precondition for human beings, and on the other hand, human beings have the physical and mental forces and capabilities to engage with natural and material conditions, and to mobilize, modify, transform these conditions. These natural and material based human and nature interactions take place through what Marx defined as the act of “laboring”, and are in fact also what Marx called “metabolic relations”, which implies the circulation, exchange and transformation of material elements, with the effort of human laboring activities, namely, human production (Swyngedouw, 2006a and 2006b). All in all, to this point, it is clear that Marx’s theory of historical materialism is intimately incorporated in his other theory of social metabolism, and in both theories, human labor or production are understood as the critical joint through which the socio-natural metabolism has been taking place as the foundation of human history. In Marx’s more specific elaborations, the theory of historical materialism examines the union of production materials, productive forces, social relations of production, means of production, and human productive capacity, and their roles to determine human organization and development (Fromm, 1961). One of its specific study interests, for example, would be to analyze the means of production, such as tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, and human knowledge and abilities, in terms of using these means in their relation with the forces of labor. In the next sections, the environmental history briefing and the historical materialistic analysis will be applied to quickly review the socio-ecological metabolic process in history, especially during the period of human industrial production, a time in which the social metabolism has become obviously accelerated and escalated. Specifically, the details of industrial production, including the production forces, means, relations, and capacities, etc., will be exhaustively scrutinized from the perspective of historical materialism interpretation. *** The first reason that these above introduced concepts and theories could be loosely synthesized under the framework of Marxist ecology, is that they either have shared philosophy and ideology with Marxism, or are derived from conventional Marxist theories,

3 Marx, K. (1974). The German Ideology (ed. C.J. Arthur). London: Lawrence and Wishart. (First published 1846, Cited in Swyngedouw, 2006b)

19 or were directly referred to in Marx’s original elaborations. The second reason to select these theories of Marxist ecology to form the theoretical basis of my current research is that each of them can be adapted to explain one aspect of the contemporary socio-ecological issues, which belong to a more comprehensive and enormous process called social metabolism. Maybe each theory can only explain a little part of the system, but if the knowledge could be applied together under the synthetic framework of Marxist ecology (Figure 3), they can draw a comprehensive background picture of how the socio-ecological metabolic process gets accelerated and escalated in the development of capitalist industrialization, urbanization, modernization, and globalization.

Figure 3. Theoretical Framework – Understanding Social Metabolism in Marxist Ecology (Self-drawn by the author, 2018 )

Among these Marxist ecology theories, “metabolic rift” specifically tackles the social metabolism concept directly, revealing the causal relations among capitalism, social factors and environmental consequences; “environmental sociology” and “new paradigm” generally depict the unpleasant human-nature situations from a broad aspect of Marxist analysis; “political ecology” displays the critical spirit of Marxism to understand the human and nature relations and offers flexible and experimental research methodologies; “urban political ecology” studies the capitalism-influenced city lifestyles and consumption patterns and their impact on the environment; “environmental history” and “historical materialism” apply some of Marx’s holistic perspective to reflect the dialectic human-nature interactive relation, and in this writing, will emphasize more humans’ dominating influence on nature since the first industrial revolution. Finally, even though the concept of “treadmill” shares the least direct association with Marxism, it illustrates the essential industrial production model of mass-production-and-mass-consumption amalgamation, and if incorporated into the Marxist ecology framework, helps to explain the mechanism of capitalist production and its essential feature of natural resource depletion and vast waste creation.

20 The following sections start out from a historical perspective to review human history along with industrialization, urbanization, modernization, and globalization since the first capitalist industrial revolution. Historical materialistic analysis will be used to discuss the beginning of the first industrial revolution and to introduce three of the essential shifts that ensued from the technology innovations of production; then I will demonstrate that, with the intensifying and complicating process of industrialization, there is the accelerating and escalating process of capitalist production and consumption, both of which have “innovation and novelty” as their driving force. 2.2.2 Industrial Production and Social Metabolism from a Historical Materialism Perspective Taken from an environmental history perspective, a better understanding of Marx’s overall analysis of capitalism and his specific understanding of the socio-environmental metabolic process should be framed by the awareness that “it was in the rapidly changing context of the 19th century Victorian industrial city that Karl Marx formed his ideas about capitalist society” (Knox and Pinch, 2006). To answer questions such as “how did the 19th century industrial city develop into the type it became” and “how did social metabolism become complicated by capitalist logic and influence”, it is necessary to look back into the history of the industrialization process at its inception, and to understand capitalist industrialization as a continuous and accelerating process of socio- ecological transformation. As we know today, industrialization started in the 1760s’ England countryside with the invention of the steam engine. From that time onwards, industrialization has accelerated humans appropriation of raw materials from the natural environment as well as their generation of wastes which could not return back to nature properly. Since then, the socio-ecological transition and human-nature interaction have been taking place in an intensive depleting manner. Of course, looking through human evolutionary history, the human-nature interaction has always been in process and accelerating; modern industrialization was not the first time that human society massively invaded the biosphere and extracted natural resources, but rather the second major socio-ecological transition in human history. The first major transition happened about 10,000 years ago, when the major human activity of production shifted from “collecting-hunting” to “agriculture” (Cipolla, 1973; Steinberg, 1986; Wrigley, 1988; Barca and Bridge, 2015). During the first agricultural revolution, the revolutionary change of the pattern and magnitude of human-nature interaction was engendered by humans’ increasing ability of collective organization. Since then, for the first time in history, humans have gained the collective power to intervene extensively in ecological metabolic processes, with impacts on spatial land use, energy consumption, mineral extraction and human settlement: transfiguration of the wild natural landscape into agricultural landscapes (e.g. irrigated and terraced fields, vineyards, orchards); intensification of the use of animate working power (e.g. human and animal power); extraction of mining elements (e.g. iron, bronze, gold, copper) and their employment in human living, production, or military usage. An overall achievement of civilization was the aggregated power to exploit all sorts of natural resources to build human settlements (e.g. villages, towns, cities, or fortifications). However, even though human-nature interaction and the socio-ecological metabolism have been processing and accelerating throughout human history, only after being spurred by the exponentially developed technologies of modern industrialization and being guaranteed and protected by the capitalist-favored institutions, has the magnitude

21 and complexity of human-nature interaction been tremendously intensified. In addition, industrialization not only amplifies the appropriation of raw materials and the generation of wastes through mass production, it also gives rise to the privatisation and commodification of labor, land and most natural resources, and even reconfigures humans’ physical and mental conditions which have been influenced by the predominant and diffusively existing culture of consumerism in capitalist societies. In summary, industrialization leads to the “appropriation of ecological surplus in the form of rapid growth in the technical composition of capital, the geographical expansion and temporal acceleration of social metabolism that has sustained the growth of labor productivity over time” (Barca and Bridge, 2015). During the era of industrialization, three features of production decided the incessant expansion and magnification of industrial production, and further determined the acceleration and intensification of the social metabolic process. I call these three features the “three shifts” – power shift, production shift, and space shift – of industrial production, which appeared with the first industrial revolution and manifested as the revolutionary transition from agricultural production to industrial production. The three shifts demonstrate in fact three types of change of human’s organization of production: power shift is about the change of energy productivity; production shift is about the change of production pattern and relationships; and space shift indicates the change of production scope and scale. Along the 250 years of the industrial development process, these three essential shifts of production and the tendency of their intensification have been intimately associated with the accelerating and intensive changes of the socio- ecological metabolic process on this planet; with the development of industrialization, the three shifts always moved to new escalated versions every time the social metabolism moved to a new phase. In other words, the degree of intensity of the social metabolism in the industrialization process is relevant to the change and degree of the three shifts of industrial production. Because of such close association, any further understanding of the acceleration of social metabolism will require the awareness of the existence of the three shifts as preconditions. The following is my detailed articulation of these three shifts, starting from the phase of the first industrial revolution. Type 1 - Power Shift: from animate to inanimate working power From the application of new technologies to the organization of labor workers in new ways, the first industrial revolution launched many new forms of production, but among these new forms, one of the profound changes in the production process of industrialization was the shift from animate working power (i.e. human and animal power) to inanimate working power (i.e. non-human and non-animal power). This shift led to an enormous increase of energy productivity by applying non-living working power for the production of commodities (Barca and Bridge, 2015). Since then, industrialization has been a powerful accelerator of entropy4 and has profoundly and continuously reconfigured the chemical composition of the atmosphere as well as the organization of living and non-living matter in the biosphere over the last 250 years (McNeil, 2000). The accelerating generation of entropy from industrialization has thus been producing chaotic and disastrous environmental and ecological consequences in a continuously intensified process of social metabolism. Problems like air, solid or liquid pollution and the various natural resources depletions could all be understood under this

4 Entropy is the thermodynamic property of concentrated energy, which, when employed to move machines, is then dispersed and lost forever. This is known as the second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) and is understood as a metaphysical limit on the industrial economy.

22 conception of entropy, accelerated by industrialization, and yet more intensified in each new development phase of industrialization. By allowing human power to be replaced by non-human non-animal power on a massive scale, the first industrial revolution not only greatly changed the chemic- ecological conditions in great amount, but also enabled a qualitative shift in the organizational logic of economic life. Yet, the replacement of human power does not mean the emancipation of human labor; instead, as will be explained later, workers in industrial factories were institutionalized as an inseparable part of the capitalist production system, staying in an oppressed position. However, the replacement of human power did start to indicate some significant change, in the economic sense that human labor was no longer treated as mere labor power but also as a significant component of the capitalist concept of market. This means that human labor became individually a consumer, who not only contributed to the capitalist system by working to produce commercial goods, but also helped to maintain the system by purchasing the goods in markets with their labor wage earned from the work. The ultimate importance of markets drove the capitalists in the early phase to extend their markets through colonialization. Gradually, after the markets became saturated, both industrial development and social metabolism moved to their next phase, in which the role of consumers and their consumption became more important than before, and the innovation of technology and the novelty of goods became the crucial trick for stimulating consuming behavior. Type 2 - Pattern Shift: from manual to mechanized production Since the very beginning, industrialization indicated a change in human production patterns, which, at the time of the first industrial revolution, were about the shift from manual to mechanized forms of production. However, the overall change, in industrial history, is based on the accelerating process of the mechanization of labor. When the shift appeared with the first industrial revolution, it was a completely new social order, a revolution “based on organized mechanical production” (Williams, 1983). The first shift from manual to mechanized production emerged in England’s industrial textile mills, when many of the former manually organized work were replaced by machines, and the former casually and freely organized workplaces – family workshops, which were sporadically scattered in the countryside with multiple living and working purposes – were then replaced by the factory workshops which were crammed with workers and designed exclusively for the sole purpose of mechanized work. Thus, mechanized production is characterized as relying on “a formerly autonomous and physically dispersed workforce came to be concentrated and disciplined in the factory system” (Barca and Bridge, 2015), and developed the practice of training the workforce to obey rules, or codes of behavior, to create the maximal benefits of the mechanized production, even including punishment to correct disobedience. Obviously, however, mechanization does not imply that the machines do all the tasks which were previously done by human labor. Rather, mechanized production intensified the control over labor through precisely designed steps, a detailed process in which “human labor becomes the living component of a mechanized and automated process, made up of inanimate power sources, complex mechanical cluster, and organization schemes aimed at regulating the input-output flow of energy and materials, labor, commercial products and waste”, and “all that was needed was a disciplined and subdued workforce to make sure that power did not go to waste, and market demand large enough to absorb the sheer volume of goods coming out the labor productivity speeded factory system” (Barca and Bridge, 2015). Instead of being emancipated by

23 mechanized and automated production, human labor has been rather mechanized as part of the machine. This attribute has never been changed in a capitalist production system, and instead, it has been even continuously accelerated in all phases of capitalist production. Even when the workplace has been changed from workshop to office, and the machine has been changed from machine tool to computer, and the task has been changed from physical labor work to brain labor work, computer-based work is still an upgraded and extended form of mechanized production, a highly designed and controlled system, for deepening labor’s connection with the machine. Furthermore, the mechanized pattern even goes beyond the capitalist production system and permeates the capitalist living system. The invention of the smartphone could be understood as the most current and upgraded version of mechanized pattern, in which many people are mechanized, or more precisely to say, they are digitalized or cyberized as a “cyborg”, an extended part of smartphone; or in other words, the smartphone has virtually become an organ of the addicted human user (Bershidsky5, 2014; Vold6, 2018). Type 3 - Space Shift: from rural to urban working and living style In the capitalist production system formed during the time of the first industrial revolution, after undergoing the first two aforementioned shifts, the subsequent shift, was the change of production space and scale. With the shift of power (i.e. from animate to inanimate), and the shift of production pattern (i.e. from manual to mechanized), what increased was the energy productivity and labor productivity, both of which led to the direct result of production concentration and expansion, and also the immediate consequence of an increase in the sheer volume of goods, which were produced by the upgraded industrial factory system. Such industrial factory production needed their final commodities to quickly arrive to their markets and be close to their consumers, and the city thus gradually became the ideal place where factories were agglomerated; then it also became the place where the factory workers clump together. These factory workers, however, did not initially work in factory workshop and operate machine tools, but had been engaging in agricultural activities for generations. The combination of the “pulling forces” in the city and the “pushing forces” in the countryside led to the assembling of former farming migrants in the city, a massive population shift known today as urbanization, which has been lasting till today and which has been upgraded to its new version of globalization that involves more international mobility. The underlying driving force bringing huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas has never changed in capitalist society, in which capital accumulation and profit growth are always the ultimate driving forces of urbanization. In addition, the historical context of agrarian enclosure and dispossession provides another aspect to understand how the capitalist system created the proletarian workforce (Schneider and McMichael, 2010) who were dispossessed from their local resources and livelihoods (Caprotti, 2014), and could only survive by relying on the jobs offered by factories and capitalists. For these precarious laborers, after moving from countryside to cities, the center of their lives become to deal with the high mechanized and disciplined factory working tasks and to cope with the new challenges around their city life,

5 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-09-08/got-a-smartphone-you-re-probably-a-cyborg, Source: Bloomberg.com, article of “Got a Smartphone? You’re Probably a Cyborg”, by Leonid Bershidsky, 2014. Latest retrieved: December 10, 2018 6 https://singularityhub.com/2018/03/02/are-you-just-inside-your-skin-or-is-your-smartphone-part-of you/#sm.0001rmf4xz6lqdzothd2mvxifi7t4, Source: Singularity University Blog Website, topic on “Are ‘You’ Just Inside Your Skin or Is Your Smartphone Part of You?”, by Karina Vold, 2018. Latest retrieved: December 10, 2018

24 including but not limited to: low wages, dirty and harsh urban living environments, health issues under grim working and living conditions, and the painstaking experience for adapting to urban survival through learning new knowledge and skills. In 1800, only 3% of the world's population lived in cities (UN, 1977; Šlaus and Jacobs, 2011), compared to more than 50% since 2008 (UN, 2007). The acceleration of the rural-to-urban shift or space shift is closely related to the expanded and intensified course of development of the world capitalist system, which has experienced consecutively the phase of urbanization, of globalization, and the coming phase of “planetary urbanization”, a phase in which every nook and cranny of the earth is now directly or indirectly enrolled in assuring the expanding reproduction of the urbanization process, and the energy, materials, goods, and labors flow intensively on planet scale (Heynen et al., 2006b; Swyngedouw, 2015). 2.2.3 Upgraded Versions of Social Metabolism under Capitalism From the first industrial revolution onwards, capitalist production in each of its development phases has been impairing nature, namely by appropriating natural resources and generating pollution, in a similar way. This is because the features of capitalist production, as the aforementioned three shifts, have been functioning always in the similar but accelerated way to drive the intensity of capitalist production. Because of these different levels of intensity, the following articulation will divide the development of capitalist production into four phases with each phase possessing some features that could contribute to the intensification of social-ecological metabolism in the evolving process of capitalist system. Learning from the German governmental promoted industrial project, which has been named as "Industry 1.0 - 4.0", I will label the four phases of capitalist industrial production with a seemingly similar but actually opposite term - "Social Metabolism 1.0 - 4.0". The conception “Industrial 1.0 - 4.0” reviews the development of industrialization from an anthropocentric perspective of industrial achievements, which emphasizes the progress of productivity, effectiveness, and a growth-guided and efficiency-oriented understanding of the capitalist production system, with no consideration of the pressures on socio-ecological metabolism from the accelerated industrial development. “Social Metabolism 1.0 – 4.0”, on the contrary, attempts to interpret the last 250 years of industrialization from the aspect of the socio-ecological metabolic process, which involves the consideration of human-nature interaction into the accelerated capitalist production, and emphasizes some of the consequent deterioration that has been revealed in all the ecological, social and individual dimensions. The articulation below will demonstrate that within a capitalist production institution, the constant pursuit of profit and the endless accumulation of capital have been valued always as the central doctrine of production and living, and all the organizational molds, production patterns, consumption culture, and lifestyle rituals have to be institutionalized as the routines of capitalist system, as long as they serve capitalist production and its core values. The degradation of environmental quality, the decline of collective social values, and the wane of individual physical and mental conditions, have been either intentionally or unintentionally externalized out of the consideration of the capitalist value system.

25 1） Social Metabolism 1.0 – Era of the Steam Engine and Industrial Revolutions – Featured by Mass Industrial Production (1760s – early 1940s) The first phase, Social Metabolism 1.0, covers the earliest period of industrialization, starting from the first industrial revolution, spanning across the early industrial development till the dawn of WWI. The representative technology of this era is the steam engine, and the feature of this phase, from the industrial perspective, has mostly been mentioned in the above discussion of the three shifts: the first massive use of inanimate power, the beginning of mechanized production, and the start of the current urbanization process. However, if examined from the social metabolism perspective, which emphasizes the pressures imposed on the socio-ecological metabolic process, then the feature of this time is the “mass industrial production”, which started to require high inputs of energy, materials and human labor, triggering natural resource exploitation, energy consumption, and commodity flows, and creating the emerging industrial pollution issues in big cities like London and the others at that time. It was starting from the era of Social Metabolism 1.0 that mass production with high- intensive energy-material-labor inputs became the feature of industrial production, and the production pattern changed from a loose organizational mode to be a highly controlled and mechanized process. In addition, with the shift of working and living from rural to city, city life started to become the trend of mainstream living expectations and reality; the dispossessed farmers were forced to give up their countryside life and agricultural knowledge and move to the city to learn new knowledge and skills for adopting and surviving in urban circumstances. During this early stage of industrialization, mass production was the feature that drove the intensification of social metabolism, because for the needs of mass production, resource, energy and labor flows were mobilized. The commodities manufactured at this stage were only the result of mass production, and the role of the market at this stage was more likely the consequent demand of mass industrial production. However, after all the domestic and overseas markets were grabbed, colonized and occupied, after the frontline of the possibility of the traditional form of markets was pushed to disappear, the feature of the social metabolism gradually moved to its next phase, in which consumption started to play a role as important as that of production to stimulate economic growth and spur the booming of capitalist development. 2） Social Metabolism 2.0 – Era of Assembly Line and Fordism – Featured by Mass Production and Mass Consumption (later 1940s - 1980s) Social Metabolism 2.0 is a subsequent and intensified version of Social Metabolism 1.0. The symbolic starting point of Social Metabolism 2.0 could be regarded as the invention of the factory assembly line and the establishment of Fordism, a concept which outlines the basis of a capitalist societal structure dominated by an industrialized system of mass production and mass consumption. The time span of Social Metabolism 2.0 is approximately from the 1910s/1940s to the 1980s. The years in the 1910s were the time of the invention of the automotive assembly line, a symbol of industrial manufacturing process designed to produce huge volumes of standardized low-cost goods. Later in the 1940s, the years right after WWII, was the time that the Fordism system was established, representatively in the United States. Taking the implementation of the assembly line as its technical precondition, Fordism was a comprehensive capitalist system with integrated social, economic, policy, managing and manufacturing elements, and gained its economic expansion through mass production and mass consumption.

26 Examined from the production pattern shift aspect, Fordism achieved two critical changes to the industrial production pattern. First, compared to the mechanized tasks in the earlier industrial era, Fordism changed further the way people work with machines by breaking down complex machine tasks into much simpler pieces, and thus, each unskilled worker had just a single and repeating machine task to handle. Second, Fordism not only caused the “technical division” of labor (i.e. the working tasks that were needed to be done) but also the “social division” of labor (i.e. the working skills which the people were available to do) so that lower educated people worked on simple assembly line tasks while higher educated people worked on office or managerial tasks (Tolliday and Zeitlin, 1987; Knox and Pinch, 2006). Furthermore, what made Fordism a revolutionary step ahead of the preceding industrial systems was its invention of a new way of organizing the whole society by combining production inseparably with consumption; entire national policies and powers were mobilized to guarantee such a combination (Knox and Pinch, 2006). The merging of production and consumption must happen with the precondition of two major complementary principles of Fordism management (Tolliday and Zeitlin, 1987): on the one hand, the assembly line must offer to produce simple, standardized, relatively low quality but usable and affordable low- cost products (Burrows et al., 1992); on the other hand, workers must be paid with fairly higher “living” wages (Tolliday and Zeitlin, 1987), so that they could afford to purchase those products7. The collaboration of these two principles led to the massive increase in both supply of and demand for the products, and that is, the combination of “mass production and mass consumption”. For the capitalist system, the combination of mass production and mass consumption is essential, because it promises profitability and economic growth, a goal based on the capitalist belief of wealth acquisition and capital accumulation. In order to further maintain its functioning, the capitalist system sets up a whole “regime of accumulation” or a “macroeconomic pattern of growth”, which was first developed in the US and then diffused in various forms to Western Europe after WWII. It consisted of domestic mass production, with a range of institutions and policies supporting mass consumption, including economic policies that generated national productivity and demand, internal labor markets, job and social stability, and the social contracts that entailed family- supporting wages and raised family incomes. These nationwide applications of institutions and policies for the ultimate purpose of supporting mass production and mass consumption can be understood as Keynesianism, a comprehensively institutionalized capitalist system (Knox and Pinch, 2006). Take the US case in the 1940s for example: “at the time the car was produced, it was just what consumers wanted (affordable, reliable, simple to drive and maintain); at the same time the production system suited the labor market of American cities, which at that time were crammed with migrants from many European nations. The relatively simple jobs on the assembly line could be undertaken by migrants since they required limited training or knowledge of English” (Knox and Pinch, 2006). “Improved labor productivity in the form of Fordism settlement extends beyond the workplace and permeates to consumption and lifestyle choice” (Huber, 2009). At the same time, the government started to invest in infrastructure, such as the construction projects of roads and highways for operating cars. Meanwhile, the state promoted the movement of urbanization and suburbanization, which finally boosted the development of both the automobile industry and the housing market, which further stimulated all the up and

7 It is also an industrial management system called Taylorism, which is a technique of labor discipline and workplace organization, based upon supposedly-scientific studies of human efficiency and incentive systems.

27 down streams of housing related industries and businesses, including the upstream industries of steel, cement, and wood, and the downstream businesses of all sorts of retailing, selling and manufacturing. The above analysis of Fordism and the concrete case of the US demonstrate that an institutionally organized capitalist system is able to use its power to manipulate nationwide policy at the macro level. Taken from the capitalists’ own perspective, the Fordism era is a more refined version of the capitalist system, which has thoroughly institutionalized to serve the capitalist goal of economic growth and wealth accumulation, through mobilizing immense amounts of materials, resources and commodities. Taken from the perspective of social metabolism, in the phase of Social Metabolism 2.0 there is a deeper and further degree of socio-ecological metabolic process running under the ruling of the Fordism-represented capitalist system, whose power has reached to every level and every trivial aspect of social life. The following is going to demonstrate that capitalist power during Fordist time has controlled individuals’ daily-life based choices; and its influence even reaches to the level of philosophical thinking, which works with the belief system issues of capitalism. Co-existing with the institutionalized production, policy, and management capitalist system of Fordism, is what is usually regarded as the broad cultural and philosophic movement of Modernism, which started emerging with the Renaissance, burgeoned in the Enlightenment, fruited in the late of nineteenth and early of twentieth centuries, and flourished with the prosperity of Fordism (Knox and Pinch, 2006). Modernism is the ideological component of the capitalist production and living system with the belief in progress. Modernist thoughts are characterized by the ideological belief that the application of rational thought and scientific analysis will lead to universal progress; these thoughts lead to social engineering, to the belief that human society could and should be improved by rational planning with scientific principles. This Modernist ideology has become pervasive and entrenched in capitalist societies. For a concrete example, city planners, who belong to the group of professional technocrats (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2010; Swyngedouw, 2015), have been playing a critical role to tell the people what is the “right” way to live in a modern society and to guide people to believe that shopping, or consumption-oriented lifestyles in general, can bring them happier lives. There are plenty of cases showing that contemporary architectural design themes and city planning projects have been intentionally prepared with the purpose of guiding people to go shopping, to spend money, to experience hedonism, and to contribute to profit making and economic booms, with little regard for social and ecological consequences 8 . This is the fundamental indicator of a striving for realizing the Modernist ideologies of progress, co-existing with a management regime ruled by the urban intellectuals, the techno-managerial class (Swyngedouw, 2015), who are deliberately educated and trained to practice and to service the Modernist ideologies ruled by capitalist value and belief. Because of being influenced by the capitalist logic and being designed and organized for meeting the capitalist needs but not for fulfilling people’s actual human needs, the rationally planned and deliberately well-designed urban life has resulted in what the Chicago school has pointed out: that “city lives are fragmentized” city working and living leave people “both unsupported in times of crisis and unrestrained in pursuing ego-centered behavior” and “fragmentized city social life leads to society

8 The concept of “Enlivenment” criticizes the rational thoughts of modernism, which is an ideology lacking the awareness and understanding of human-nature interaction, also missing the recognition and appreciation of ecological beauty and aesthetics. It is a problem existing and accelerating throughout the Social Metabolic phases 1.0 – 4.0.

28 disorganization and is reinforced by the weakening of social norm resulting from the divergent interest and lifestyle among various groups in the city” (Knox and Pinch, 2006). Let alone the fact that the natural and semi-natural places around the peripheral area of the city have been encroached upon in the process of implementing the rationally planned city development projects, inhibiting people’s chances to stay in more naturally and ecologically compassed living environments, and leaving urban residents exposed to risky urban hazards. To understand these social and ecological costs of advanced capitalist life from the social metabolism perspective, the capitalist production, living and belief system have in fact shaken the socio-ecological metabolic foundation of the capitalist system and led to multiple crises. In the 1970s, the Fordist system started running into trouble; the Western economies experienced slow or nil economic growth, rising inflation and growing unemployment, much of which was a result of the 1973 oil shock. This oil crisis increased the overall cost of raw materials, sent the capitalist system the warning of resource exhaustion, and raised some elites’ and intellectuals’ attention to the widespread environmental degradation inside the system. The Club of Rome published their famous report The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), and for the first time in history there was a growing collective concern over the ecological issues of the planet. In addition to the ecological degradation and multiple layers of economic crises, the overall 1970s capitalist crisis also destabilized the ideological basis of Fordist capitalism, modernism. Even though the concept of modernism had its positive contribution in terms of supporting the economic and material prosperity in the main capitalist countries, the notable economic, social, and ecological degradation events were demonstrating that there was a significant degree of disillusionment with the concept of modernism and the application of advanced technologies and comprehensive planning (Harvey, 1990; Knox and Pinch, 2006; Neumann, 2015). In addition to these aforementioned intensive and conspicuous crises, some intrinsic contradictions also started to emerge from the essential basis of Fordist management. Specifically, Fordist mass production led to market saturation of mass-produced goods, and poorly produced assembly-line products increased consumers’ hostility to uniform, poor-quality goods, further worsening the saturated market problem created by the mass consumption strategy. As a result, Fordism became a victim of its own success. Struggling in the 1970s crises, both Fordism and Keynesianism imploded and capitalism as an institution started moving to its next phase in the 1980s and 1990s.

3） Social Metabolism 3.0 – Era of InfoTech and Globalization – Consumerism as Dominance (1990s-2010s) With the wide application of information technology, new telecommunications, and other internet-based high technologies, the capitalist world has upgraded to its new version of industrialization and urbanization, and arrived at the new era of globalization. World populations during this era can move both domestically and internationally in large amount. Even though the mobility of labor is believed to be one of the requirements for higher productivity in the growth economy, it is also the direct cause of city sprawl and suburbanization. At the same time, material flows and resources mobilizations are also now running on the global scale, as a result of the consumption- driven new capitalist system, with the feature of consumerist culture, in which people are encouraged and addicted to buy, to purchase, to consume as the ultimate purpose of life. Taken from social metabolism’s perspective, because of more intensive and faster material, energy and commodity flows, capitalism is now moving to its new version of Social Metabolism 3.0, which started in the 1980s and is an ongoing process today.

29 The phase of Social Metabolism 3.0, or the era of globalization, will be described with the application of three concepts: neo-Fordism, neo-Liberalism and post-Modernism. Neo-Fordism, also called post-Fordism, is still an ongoing course that needs to be defined more precisely in the future. In this current writing, the term will mainly refer to the themes of industrial production and consumption, and other general socio-economic phenomena. Neo-Liberalism will be used here to indicate all the market-based political- economic ideas and policy issues. Post-Modernism is a content-rich concept which would apply to a broad range of subjects, but in this dissertation, it will represent the cultural, aesthetic, arts and architectural values of the era of globalization. Even though the characteristics of globalization cannot be completely covered by the connotations of these three terms, and their definitions and applications might still be controversial among scholars, because these terms carry some of the key traits of the era of globalization, so they will be used as the annotation to understand the features of the era of globalization, that is, the phase of Social Metabolism 3.0. One of the characteristics of the era of neo-Fordism is its upgraded version of mechanization, which includes three points: First, the expanded application of the assembly line; Second, the increased specialization of industry; Third, and most predominant, is the invention of the computer and the application of internet-based information technologies. The assembly line developed at Fordist times does not disappear under neo-Fordism. Instead, with the world specialization of production in the context of globalization, most assembly lines and labor jobs have been moved from developed countries to developing countries, where the workers quickly become mechanized in that production system. Specialization, during neo-Fordism, not only happens along the assembly line or within a single sector, but has now occurred across the industrial sectors. Instead of a single firm running from raw materials to finished product, the production process is now more fragmented as individual firms become more specialized in their areas of expertise. As a consequence, the individual worker becomes more atomized in such multiple-layer of divided and fragmentized working conditions, which put the workers at risk in at least three ways: 1) they have to endure the boring, tedious and humdrum tasks; 2) they can be easily replaced by other workers because of the repetitious low-skill jobs; 3) they may also later be replaced by industrial robots or artificial intelligence (AI). Meanwhile, under neo-Fordism, white collar positions and computer-based jobs start to emerge in great amounts due to the invention of computers (Knox and Pinch, 2006). The wide use of computers leads to industrial specialization and the upgraded version of mechanized production patterns. A white collar worker with the use of a computer is now becoming a part of the computer’s processing and programming, and at the same time, the computer is also becoming the extended part of the worker’s body and brain. Such an upgraded pattern of mechanization becomes more obvious with the revolutionary invention and widespread application of Internet-based information technologies, which have become the most innovative technological power for the era of neo-Fordism and globalization. The wide application of new information technologies has fundamentally changed people’s working and living patterns. The computer and its latest version of smartphone for the neo-Fordism era, like the importance of vehicle for Fordism time, has been profoundly involved into people’s lives, and has been at the center of the capitalist system’s production and consumption. Taking the smartphone, or more specifically, the sensational iPhone for example, its role in recent society illustrates how it could mechanize and even enslave people in both the production and consumption systems.

30 In the production system, the workers who stand beside the assembly lines to fit together the parts of the iPhone, are each assigned only one tiny, trivial single task among thousands of assembling procedures, and have to repeat the single movement of the task for thousands of times a day (Liu, 2013, unpublished). The iPhone assembly line tasks are precisely designed and strictly controlled steps, and the highly restricted and disciplined labor working experience for the workers is in essence a process of mechanization, in which their body becomes the living component of the assembly line9(Liu, 2013, unpublished). In the consumption system, the iPhone consumers are allured and become addicted, through Apple Inc.’s marketing strategies, and because of modern people’s general belief in technology, to buy generation after generation of new iPhone, to “give up” their own control of their daily life to an iPhone arranged and ruled living routine, and to have their hands and eyes tied up with that gadget and to bind their brain with the information delivered through that digital device (Qiu, 2017). Thus, in the behavior of iPhone consumption, the consumers’ body becomes an extended part of the smartphone, and at the meantime, the smartphone has substantially become an “organ” of the addicted human users, as a cyborg in its early form and stage. Such new info-tech triggered consequences like informatization, digitalization, and cyberization are regarded by me as the escalated version of mechanization in living. In this case, both the labor workers’ and consumers’ intimate bond with the iPhone, and other digital devices alike, demonstrates the essential fact of the hybridization of human and machine. It also demonstrates that the evolution of mechanization, which started in the field of production in the early phase of industrialization, has now moved from the working field to other fields of human life in the phase of Social Metabolism 3.0. The above example of the iPhone has actually brought out another characteristic of the time of neo-Fordism — the consumption-dominated driving force of the capitalist system. As aforementioned, in the era of Fordism, the combination of mass production and mass consumption led to enormous growth in manufacturing, drove down unit exchange value, and opened markets for mass consumption, but at the same time it caused over-production and market saturation. In principle, when markets become saturated, the original material functionality and utility value of products will no longer be sufficient to attract people to consume further (Jackson, 2009; Armstrong, 2012). To avoid market saturation and to induce continuous product demands, industrial production must proceed in a more accelerating process of “creative destruction” in which innovative technologies and novel products can continually emerge and overthrow existing technologies and products (Jackson, 2009; Leonard and Conrad, 2010). Because of this production logic, innovation and novelty, the two interrelated tricks of capitalist economic life, have been moved to the center of the neo-Fordist capitalist system. As a result, new strategies of capitalist production and marketing – closer association with industrial design, commercial advertisement and media – are created, products are designed for niche markets based on consumers’ individual interests and desires, and are prepared for increasing more actual consumption behavior

9 This is a research finding in my Master Thesis (2013) based on field research in the electronic manufacturing factory Foxconn. Foxconn was and maybe still is the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer measured by revenues, and was famous for manufacturing Apple products like the iPad, iPhone, and iPod. Foxconn had thirteen factories in Mainland China and employed about 1.2 million people till the time of 2013. The majority of the Foxconn employees were young rural migrant workers and most of their tasks were standing and working beside the assembly lines. In 2010, a series of suicides happened among Foxconn workers in its different factories and fourteen people committed suicide. The frequent suicides in a short period of time among Foxconn workers attracted a flood of media attention. Reports from journalists, universities, and even from some of the Foxconn workers themselves provided different angles on working and living conditions at Foxconn. What drew my attention was that different information sources mentioned one fact in common, that the assembly line tasks at Foxconn were humdrum, boring, repeating treadmill work (Liu, 2013, unpublished).

31 or for promoting potential sales (Knox and Pinch, 2006; Jackson, 2009). In order to achieve the goal of more consumption, industrial designers start widely to implement the concepts of “planned obsolescence” and “perceived obsolescence”, which smartly tempt the consumers to drop off quickly the old versions of certain products and then rush for new versions of the product (Leonard and Conrad, 2010). Meanwhile, the advertisements join the collusion by continually telling people that if they acquire the latest promoted product, they will become more desirable and successful (Kilbourne, 1999). Here, the constantly and frequently innovated generations of iPhone are a perfect example to illustrate how these tricks of industrial design and marketing are working on consumers. As a further result, the consumer-targeted niche marketing leads to a consumption- oriented production strategy, and the importance of creating demand for novelty consumption has even outweighed the importance of technological innovation, because people’s needs and desires have now become the pivotal driving force of all the demand and behavior of consumption. Finally, in neo-Fordist times, consumption becomes less and less relevant to people’s basic and real needs, but more and more for the sake of creating profit and spurring growth; the capitalist society thus arrives at its era of consumerism, a consumption-oriented and -dominated form of a capitalist system. In other words, capitalism at this stage survives because of the consumers’ consumption demands, which are induced and controlled by deliberately promoted industrial innovation and purposely designed commercial novelty (Jackson, 2009; Leonard and Conrad, 2010). In such consumption dominated forms of capitalism, the capitalist economy mobilizes all its resources, power, rules, norms, institutions to create restless need for consumption, quite like how Fordism and Keynesianism organized the capitalist system. The difference in the era of globalization is that the entire capitalist system has more free- market-oriented institutions, policies and regulations to serve the goal of consumption. Since the 1980s, in most capitalist countries, the market has been bestowed with more power, and the states give up their role and responsibility to the free market, which is responsible only for accumulating capital, maximizing profit, enlarging markets and encouraging consumption. Scholars call this period neo-Liberalism, a capitalist system that leaves all the economic, political and social life to the free market through privatization, deregulation, free trade and other regimes, leading many of the political and social relations into commercialized relationships. Neo-Liberalism offers the critical political-and-economic policy support for the consumption-oriented capitalist system. During the era of globalization, the dominant culture is influenced by the post- Modernist ideology, and the entire operation of the capitalist system exists in a milieu of consumer culture, in which both people and society are defined by consumption- dominated value systems. Marxist scholars have argued that post-Modernism is the logical cultural partner to neo-Fordism (Jameson, 1984; Harvey, 1989). As mentioned earlier, capitalist social processes and all the decisive parts of the system are interrelated with the capitalist logic of profit and economic growth. In the era of neo-Fordism, the institutionalized system of capitalism (Social Metabolism 2.0) has now escalated to a new version, in which all the rapid innovation of technologies, the mobility of population, the expansion of urbanization, the city planning, space designing, the production and the sharp growth of consumer goods, and a shopping centered lifestyle are now more highly interrelated and integrated with a rigorous capitalist logic for its need of profit. Its power has reached to influence more trivial aspects of social life, more daily-life based choices. Again, taking city planning as an example, in order to

32 design the city space to serve the purpose of creating profits, the capitalist system not only regulates the production and consumption, but also regulates thoughts, minds and aesthetic tastes, defining what a city should look like and what a city life should be. The capitalist power of regulation has been suffused in the society with its quiet but dominating influence through the role of city planners, architectures and technocracies. City spaces are decorated or designed in strong marketing sense of arts and tastes, with the bombardment of advertisements; the internal architecture of these spaces of consumption is carefully constructed to encourage people to spend their money (Goss, 1993; Knox and Pinch, 2006). In an attempt to attract people to spend time and money in these new shopping malls, various dramatic architectural forms are employed, special events, activities, and festival marketplaces are organized (Knox and Pinch, 2006), and people staying in these spaces are unconsciously forced to immerse themselves in these materialist value atmospheres. Such postmodern culture of material consumption can be well represented by the growing popularity of suburban shopping malls and the mall-centered lifestyle in the process of suburbanization. In Harvey’s argument, suburbanization stimulates a “commodity fetishism”, which is an obsessional tendency for households to compete with one another and display their wealth through consumer products (Harvey, 1978; Knox and Pinch, 2006). Meanwhile, suburbanization is also the process of encroaching on the natural surroundings with commercial surroundings, depriving city children’s accessibility to the free playground of nature, and alienating city residents from nature. If the suburbanization process leads to the consequence of alienating city people from nature and fetishizing them with material commodities due to capitalism’s intrinsic driving force of production and consumption, then here it is necessary to mention again the role of professional technocracies, the whole techno-managerial class, whose professional knowledge of city planning in fact enhances the situation of “alienation” and “fetishism”. Furthermore, with respect to suburbanization, Harvey also argued that the new urban geographic arrangements driven by the needs of capitalism, namely, the massive processes of suburbanization, represent a shift from the “primary circuit” of capital that emphasizes investment in the production system to the “secondary circuit” of capital that invests with various consumption funds, including investing in the built environment which would attract potential consumption behavior (Harvey, 1978; Knox and Pinch, 2006). Neo-Fordism, neo-Liberalism and post-Modernism are all ongoing phenomena in today’s era of globalization and therefore the observation, discussion and understanding of these phenomena is ongoing, without conclusive description or comment. However, what is already clear is that together with the fetishism of commodities, the culture of consumerism, consumption-centered urban lifestyles, and the increased urban population, all of which are happening in the development of urbanization and globalization, the throughput of material consumption has also arrived at an unprecedented level in human history (Knox and Pinch, 2006; Jackson, 2009). A wider and faster degree of material-ecological aspect of social metabolism is just occurring in our generation. Meanwhile, the other co-existing social-psychological aspect of social metabolism is also happening in a larger and deeper degree. Both the material (material- ecological) and immaterial (social-psychological) aspects of social metabolism are now intimately intertwined and imposing influences on other features of the current era of Social Metabolism 3.0. Also, what is even clearer is that only when the specific features of the era of neo-Fordism, neo-Liberalism and post-Modernism – such as the efficiency of production, the specialization of labor, the application of new information

33 technologies, the invention of high tech devices, the mechanization of working and living, the process of urbanization, suburbanization and globalization, the mobility of humans, the dominance of consumer culture, the extraction of resources, the flows both of commodities and waste streams – are linked and analyzed together, we understand better the big picture about how the prosperity of a consumption-centered urban life and a consumption-dominated capitalist system have established an unsustainable socio- ecological metabolic process, in which not only the ecological conditions are deteriorating (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; Rockström et al., 2009; United Nations Environment Programme, 2012), but the social and psychological dimensions of human living are also collapsing (Jackson, 2009). Global ecological conditions continue to deteriorate at an alarming rate, using a variety of criteria of different global ecological evaluation. The concept of Planetary Boundaries estimates that two out of nine planetary boundaries have been broken through; one is the loss of biodiversity due to the demand for food, water and natural resources and the other is the radically changed biogeochemical cycles of phosphorous and nitrogen as a result of many industrial (incl. industrial agricultural) production processes (Rockström et al., 2009). The famous concept of Ecological Footprint was calculated in 2013 with the result of “1.6 planet Earths”, which means that the planet’s ecological services had been used 1.6 times faster than they were able to be renewed (Global Footprint Network, 2013). Another even earlier established symbolic evaluation of global catastrophe, the Doomsday Clock, has been warning human society since 1947 that the likelihood of man-made global disasters are coming very close, and in the latest estimation, the clock has been set at “two minutes to midnight (the sign of a real disaster)”, due to “the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change” (Doomsday Clock Statement, 2018). Social and individual consequences of Social Metabolism 3.0, compared with those of Social Metabolism 2.0, have been showing in more profound but also more tiny and imperceptible ways. Postmodern culture, or consumer culture, in city spaces, produces a fragmentized populace who are bewitched by the glamour of consumption and material goods, possessing neither individual awareness nor collective institutions to resist these dominant marketing powers in their lives (Knox and Pinch, 2006). “Material goods were always capable of carrying symbolic meaning, and were often used to establish social position”, but in postmodern times, “[they have] been so deeply implicated in so many social and psychological processes” (Jackson, 2009). Consumer culture leads people into emulation, status competition, self-completion with purposeless careers, and finally people are left with an empty self. This leads to further fragmentation and anomie, as every part of living has been divided into small unconnected pieces by the capitalist city designed life and entertainment. All kinds of social recession, like increased drinking, drug consumption, moral decline at work, breakdown of communities, loss of trust, loss of identity, and rising political apathy have been recorded. On the individual level, clinical depression, stress, anxiety, angst, and fear are reported to increase, even though with discrepancy with degree in different countries, but the tendency is statistically consistent (Knox and Pinch, 2006; Jackson, 2009).

4） Social Metabolism 4.0 – Era of VR & AI – Virtual Feeling, Virtual Nature, and Virtual Everything (2010 onwards) Social Metabolism 4.0 is a hypothetical prediction of capitalist industrial development used in this dissertation, and it is built on two references. One factor refers to the project Industrial 4.0, a concept and project supported by the German government around 2011.

34 According to the available project introduction brief, Industrial 4.0 will be based on the development of high-technologies like virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things, big data analytics, machine learning, cloud systems, cybersecurity and adaptive robotics (Lee et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2014; Sarvari et al., 2017). The other reference comes out of my years of personal observation and experience of the relevant developments and changes happening in China, a country that has been attracting both worldwide “old money” and “new money” for investment or speculation in the last two to three decades. I have noticed that since three years ago, there are very frequent and concentrated news reports about the vast amount of investments rushing to VR, AI, and other internet and big data based high technologies in all sorts of Chinese press and media. Being aware of the capitalist principle of “follow the money”, I realize such news and financial phenomena just imply that AI technology and the others alike are the latest industrial innovation hot points, and the research and application of AI technologies is going to be a substantial trend in the new phase of the industrialization process. At the same time of the last three years (2015-2017), there is a phenomenal change occurring in China’s society that, very suddenly, all kinds of daily-life based applications of the “Smartphone, Internet, AI” combined technologies become ruling in Chinese people’s lives. Specially, when these technologies are cooperating with a super convenient online payment system and exponentially growing online retailing business, a speedily escalated socio-ecological metabolic process and its radical prospect have been fairly displayed in front of us. Take a concrete example for understanding: continuously for three years, from 2015 to 2017, during every single November 11th of the year, a Chinese online shopping festival, the Chinese version of “Black Friday”, a commercial carnival day organized by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, had total sales during each time of respectively, $14.3 billion 10 , $17.8 billion 11 , and $25.3 billion12 in USD. It means that during a single day in 2017, they sold a total of $25.3 billion worth of merchandise, which also indicates that the equivalent amount of materials and natural resources were requested to manufacture these amounts of goods to satisfy these Chinese online shoppers. Remember, this is just the amount of a single day, not yet taking into account the other 364 days, during which time these Chinese consumers did not necessarily stop their shopping behaviors. Even though the development of these AI, VR and other new information technologies are just at their embryonic period of formation, and as a new industry phase, the era of VR and AI is still in its dawn time, I have a strong hunch that vast amounts of fresh capital and new money are coveting the emerging new market opportunities being created by the innovative and revolutionary AI and VR technologies. Tracing these restless and reckless new monies, tracking their intuitive sense for profitable chances, the future picture of the era of VR and AI is no longer so difficult to imagine. To prepare for living in such an unavoidable scenario of a world ruled by VR and AI technologies, caution about the risk of digital products and advanced devices and about

10 https://www.businessinsider.de/alibaba-singles-day-sales-2015-11?r=US&IR=T. Source: Business Insider Deutschland, International, article of “This is What it Looks Like When a Company Sells $14 Billion in Merchandise in a Single Day”, by Hayley Peterson, 2015. Last Retrieved: April 21, 2019 11 https://www.businessinsider.de/alibaba-completely-smashed-its-singles-day-record-2016-11?r=US&IR=T. Source: Business Insider Deutschland, International, article of “Alibaba Completely Smashed its Singles' Day record”, by BI Intelligence, 2016. Last Retrieved: February 14, 2019 12 https://www.businessinsider.de/alibaba-singles-day-total-sales-2017-2017-11?r=US&IR=T. Source: Business Insider Deutschland, International, article of “Alibaba's Shopping Holiday That's Bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday Combined Just Brought in $25 Billion — This Is What It Looked Like”, by Tara Francis Chan, 2017. Last Retrieved: April 21, 2019

35 the consequences of a deeper and more uncertain degree of human-nature metabolic interaction pattern, should be made here, concerning confusion and bewilderment in the future. Take VR glasses for example: the device stimulates virtual sentient perception, which detaches people more from the reality, as a concrete way to detach human from nature. Virtual reality experiences will build humans’ perception with only virtual nature and virtual reality (Selhub and Logan, 2012) and then humans’ perception will be ruled and controlled by a virtual, digitally created illusionary world. If such a scenario of the virtual world comes true, then it must be regarded as a further escalated version of mechanization in the phase of Social Metabolism 4.0. Please do not think the VR technology has nothing to do with real life research on the empirical topic as urban farming. As shown in a later chapter of my research findings, there will be some Chinese urban farming practitioner (i.e. a school teacher) referring to using VR glasses and relevant technologies to bring people (i.e. school students) to “experience” the urban farming practices in the virtual world of reality. There is a claim that with the development of the Internet-, IT-, AI- and VR-based life, people will have more de-materialized affective lives, which would guide people to be less life-addicted to material consumption (Perreault et al., 2015). However, the real fact is that the Internet- and IT-based social and cultural life are in fact dependent “upon mobilizing a range of minerals; upon feverish resource grabbing, often through tactics of dispossession, in socio-ecologically vulnerable places; upon production chains that are shaped by deeply uneven and often dehumanized socio-ecological metabolisms to render it useful in hardware manufacture; upon a recycling process that returns much of the e-waste to socio-ecologically dystopian geographies of suburban informal wastelands” (Perreault et al., 2015). These cases indicate that dematerialized life is not real, and the informatized and digitalized life still needs to rely on material flows as its material basis, and this is also the fundamental basis for any single human political, economic, social, cultural activity. However, this very obvious fact has been neglected so long, and the illusion of human civilization and the belief in the advanced technologies like AI, VR are still regarded as future truth by mainstream society. But the caution should be mentioned again that the predictions of the phase of Social Metabolism 4.0 in this dissertation are alarming: that the capitalist driven socio- ecological metabolic process would guide people to a semi-science-fiction like world, or the final reality might even go beyond any scientific fiction’s imagination.

***

Power Shift Pattern Shift Space Shift

Social Metabolism 1.0 Animate Æ Inanimate Manual Work Æ Rural Æ (1760s - early 1940s) (Stream Energy) Machine Work City

Social Metabolism 2.0 Wood, Coal Æ Mass Machine Æ Rural Æ (later 1940s - 1980s) Oil, Electricity Assembly Line City (Foreign City)

Social Metabolism 3.0 Oil, Electricity, Coal Æ Assembly Line Æ Urbanization Æ (1990s-2010s) Nuclear Æ Natural Gas, Computer, Smartphone Globalization Solar and Wind Energy Social Metabolism 4.0 Coal, Oil, Electricity, Gas, Smartphone Æ Globalization Æ Solar and Wind Æ Nuclear, AI/VR Devices Planetary Urbanization (2010 onwards) Shale Gas

Table 2. The Change of Industrial Three Shifts with the Escalating of Social Metabolism 1.0-4.0

36 Before my present research, a proliferating body of work has begun to explore how human and non-human worlds interact through networks of technology development, political power and policies, and social relations for the extraction of raw materials and the disposal of waste. Such a human, non-human, matter, technology and social power relation linked process is defined as a social metabolism process (Swyngedouw, 2015). However, my research promotes a deeper understanding of social metabolism, by comparing it with a pure industrialization perspective. A quick glimpse of the escalating four versions of Social Metabolism, above, demonstrates that the development of human society over the last 250 years, if taken from the historical perspective of industrialization, is a process of increase of energy and labor productivity, development of production patterns, progress of technological innovation, variation of product novelty, meanwhile, accompanied by a life philosophy, ideology and culture of the populace pursuing materialist hedonism and consumerism in a gradually urbanized and globalized living style. But if viewed from the perspective of social metabolism, the unprecedented materialist hedonism and its incessant escalation in material goods consumption is based on mass production and consumption, and thus in essence based on material, natural resource, energy, commodity, and waste flows, which are guaranteed by an industrially, politically, economically, socially, culturally and ideologically synthesized capitalist institution. 2.2.4 Major Tendencies of Social Metabolism under the Capitalist System For social metabolism scholars, socio-ecological metabolic process is the essential human-nature relation, and industrialization and its synchronous partner, urbanization, have been functioning respectively as the direct cause and the direct driving force that accelerate and intensify such essential human-nature relation of socio-ecological metabolism. The city, as the place where production meets consumption, requests most of the human commodity goods; the city lifestyle, as the mainstream lifestyle, shapes most of the material, energy, resource and waste flows on our planet (Heynen et al., 2006b). Urbanization, no matter whether it was an incipient process just beginning from a town scale, or arriving at the scale of planetary urbanization as today, has never been a simple process of dense and heterogeneous assemblage of accumulated socio-natural things and gathered bodies in a concentrated space, but rather a capital driven process based on globally structured socio-ecological metabolic flow, fusing the social with the physical matter transformed into useable, ownable, and tradable commodities in such a capitalist logic controlled social-metabolic process (Coe et al., 2007). While industrialization and urbanization are accelerating and intensifying the socio- ecological metabolic process as a whole, more specific ecological, social and individual dimensions of tendencies have been germinating and growing alongside the process of industrial social metabolism. Some of these tendencies are the degradation of ecological and environmental conditions which have been known and been discussed widely; some other social and individual levels of tendencies are running in more silent or invisible ways which can hardly be perceivable in a short period of time. If the observation can be taken in a longer enough time scope, however, these latent tendencies will become more intelligible and understandable to the general public. The following are three of the representative tendencies developing in the intensified industrialization and urbanization process, and notably, they are also the three relevant tendencies to which the urban farming practice is trying to respond.

37 Tendency of Ecological Degradation The resource depletion foreshadowed by the Club of Rome’s report The Limits to Growth in 1972 raised the awareness of imminent scarcity in nature among the global elites, and they started to worry about “the allegedly feeble prospects for sustaining capitalist accumulation” in the long term, and pointed to urbanization as “the main culprit of the world’s accelerating resource depletion” (Meadows et al., 1972; Swyngedouw, 2015). As has been asserted several times before, the describable links among urbanization, modern urban lifestyle, industrialization, production, consumption, ecological degradation, and resource depletion are already evident, although technically, it is still an extremely challenging task to estimate the accurate contribution of production and consumption to energy use, ecological degradation, and climate change. Especially, it is even more impossible to calculate with precision if a separation is required between the basic production and consumption that is necessary for human beings’ physical and psychological health, versus the overproduction and consumption that have been excessive, wasteful, or not necessary for such health (Friends of the Earth, 2010). However, these contentions can hardly deny today’s sheer actual socio- ecological fact and tendency: the world is undergoing an unprecedented mobilization of planetary urbanization, which refers to the situation that every corner on this planet is now involved in supporting the expanding reproduction of the urbanization process, which drives the flowing of energy, materials, commodities and labor, creating the production of waste, the depletion of resources, and the emission of GHGs on a planetary scale. Therefore, as long as the overall tendency of planetary urbanization can be recognized as the real fact and key driver of the capitalist social metabolism, then the occurrence of ecological degradation – including climate change, ecosystem damage and biodiversity loss, deforestation, resource extraction and mining, and all kinds of pollution, all types of waste problem, all sorts of water issues – should also be expected and accepted as unavoidable and irreversible tendencies we must face (Swyngedouw, 2015). Tendency of Treadmill Living The treadmill of production is theorized by Schnaiberg in the late 1970’s based on his observation of the Fordism system (Schnaiberg, 1980). A “treadmill production” pattern (Figure 4, represented by the thick dashed line) could be depicted as a consistent feature of the industrial production system that extends over all four phases of Social Metabolism 1.0 - 4.0. Schnaiberg coined the concept as a social critique of capitalist industrial production and its energy and material intensive production-consumption pattern, which, on the one hand, constantly invests high energy, resource and innovative technology to produce massive novel products to accelerate the replacement of old products; on the other hand, through the strategies of marketing, advertising and the more diffuse cultural, ideological and value-system influences, stimulates consumers’ endless requests for novel products for economic expansion and needs of capital. In addition, by applying the concept of treadmill production, Schnaiberg wants particularly to emphasize that the mass production-consumption pattern will inevitably demand massive amounts of natural resources as raw materials for manufacturing, and generate tremendous amount of wastes and pollution, most of which cannot be recycled for further industrial reproduction, finally leaving the industrial production loop unclosed (Figure 4). This is what often would be ignored by the major industrial system.

Figure 4. Unclosed Loop of Treadmill Production & Living (Self-drawn, by the author, 2018 )

Figure 5. Treadmill Living Pattern (Modified from: Online movie The Story of Stuff, by Leonard, 2007)

As illustrated above in Figures 4 and 5, an economic growth and capital accumulation oriented treadmill production system (Figure 4) induces the “treadmill living” pattern (Figure 5) at labor’s individual level, by combining his or her roles as both the worker and the consumer. In Figure 4 (represented by the thin dotted line), the treadmill living pattern has been illustrated as a parallel partner of the treadmill production pattern, showing how the treadmill living pattern contributes to the unclosing of the industrial production loop. The person has to cdeal with intensive and tedious working tasks at the workplace, and dget bombarded by media and advertisements of myriad novel products to estimulate actual consumption behavior and then cwork again, dget ads bombarded again, econsume again, and cdeagain…and then live continuously in a treadmill routine which can be harmful instead of helpful for the individual’s personal well-being, as shown in the dropping of the happiness index (Durning, 1992; McKibben, 2007; Leonard and Conrad, 2010).

39 One argument describes the treadmill as a political-economic system based on manufacturing and driven by a fundamental belief that social welfare and wellbeing are advanced through economic growth. The constant expansion of production and consumption are the key instruments of social policy, around which it is thought that there is a convergence of intersects between capital, labor and the state (Gould, et al., 2004). However, now, there is reason to doubt whether the goal of social welfare and wellbeing and labor’s interest could be actually fulfilled. Tendency of Degenerative Health Issues When people emphasize all the benefits that industrialization could bring to humans, a crucial aspect of industrialization is often being forgotten: people’s working environment and living conditions have been dramatically changed in the industrial system, and these changes have deeply altered humans’ disease patterns throughout industrial history. In early industrial societies, with the development of industrialization, the “tyranny of nature” was replaced by the “industrial hazard regime”, which was characterized by an unprecedented intensification of work hazards existing in the industrial factories and workshops, and which led to a negative connection between work and health (Merchant, 1980; Sellers and Melling, 2012). Then, with the improvement of working conditions, as well as the development of medical science, those intensive and hazardous working condition-related diseases, like respiratory and infectious diseases, were slowly well controlled, and people’s health record greatly improved, especially in industrial countries (Armelagos et al., 2005). However, other human diseases caused by intensified working patterns (e.g. modern office and computer work) and urban lifestyle (e.g. treadmill living and couch potato) started to rise as new threats for health. The working pattern and lifestyle related diseases, such as immune system dysfunction, all kinds of chronic pain (e.g. neck, shoulder or back pain), and other chronic diseases (e.g. cardiovascular problems), are now more frequently reported as clinic visiting reasons; non-communicable diseases like those associated with sleep deprivation, overweight and obesity have risen alarmingly, and healthcare costs are increasing accordingly (Armelagos, 2005; Bodenheimer et al., 2009; Dehaene et al., 2016). Energy dense diets and sedentary lifestyles have exacerbated the fact that human metabolism is failing to effectively balance input-output for many bodies (Dehaene et al., 2016). Taking the overweight issue as an example, researchers are arguing that the obesity crisis is simply one amongst many of the complex and inter-connected urban challenges of the 21st century (Rayner and Lang, 2012). Meanwhile, the mental illnesses, such as the widely suffered depressive symptoms, have been occurring worldwide. “Unipolar depression”, for instance, has been “ranked as the third leading cause of the global burden of disease in 2004” and is “predicated to move into the first place by 2030, surpassing infectious and heart diseases, and cancer” (Wan, 2012; Weber, 2013). The fundamental epidemiological shift from a prevalence of infectious diseases to more degenerative diseases has become an evident tendency (Sellers, 1997; Armelagos, 2005), carrying broad ecological, social and individual implications under the general industrialization and urbanization process. *** *** To sum up, all the above elaboration is my attempt to describe the social metabolism rooted in a Marxist ecology based framework, which is loosely structured with the application of the environmental study disciplines as mentioned so far in this section. Rooted in Marxist ecology, the analysis of the “Social Metabolism 1.0 - 4.0” dissects

40 the industrialization and urbanization process as socio-ecological metabolic circulatory flows, which have been organized through predominantly capitalist relations, sustained by socio-physical conduits and networks, and nurtured by particular imaginaries of what nature is or should be (Swyngedouw, 2015). Taken from the historical materialism perspective of social metabolism, we have seen that the upgrading process of industrialization is also the acceleration process of urbanization and the intensive process of energy and resource depletion. From this historical aspect of analysis, the contrast between the unprecedented advance in the forces of capitalist industrial production and the enormous environmental, social, and individual costs just becomes self-evident, especially for these once latent tendencies. Moreover, by applying Marxist ecology’s critical analysis of capitalism and its essence, we get to know that the intricate and ultimately vulnerable dependence of capital accumulation on nature will deepen and widen these tendencies continuously (Heynen et al., 2006b). The ultimate purpose of my painstaking attempt to draw this overall understanding of social metabolism within the critique of Marxist ecology is actually to prepare to serve a better understanding about the core theoretical concept of this PhD dissertation, that is, the concept of “metabolic rift”, which will be employed in the later chapter to analyze my empirical research on “urban farming”. In the next section, I am going to scrutinize on the “metabolic rift” theory, which, inherited from Marx’s critical attitude, takes a fastidious look at the problematic side of the socio-ecological metabolic process which has been ruled under the capitalist system. The main task of the next section will be to analyze how these metabolic rift problems are intrinsically created by the antagonism between rural and urban areas, the alienation of human and nature, the expansion of production and consumption, the distance between core and periphery, and the discrepancy between modernity and tradition in the capitalist process of accumulating capital (Forster, 1999; Foster et al., 2010). 2.3 The Core Theoretical Concept – Metabolic Rift13 The recent widely perceived global ecological crisis requires social scholars to respond to the challenges raised by environmentalism; numerous thinkers, from Plato to Gandhi, have had their work revaluated with ecological analyses (Foster, 1999). Within environmental sociology, a great number of classical sociological texts have been unearthed and reinterpreted with the expectation of explaining and solving today’s environmental problems. Among these resurrected classical texts, Marx’s works have also been re-studied with fruitful findings. It is well-known that Marx left illustrious accomplishments in Capital with his analysis of class struggle, labor oppression, and his critique of capitalism, but the majority of his intellectual contributions to critical issues such as soil fertility decline, ecological degradation, and human-nature alienation had been previously neglected. Fortunately, Foster, J.B. (1999) dug out Marx’s works and published the milestone paper Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, which not only virtually announced the establishment of the sub-discipline of metabolic rift theory under the research branch of environmental sociology, but also provided a systematic conceptual basis for the study of metabolic rift theory. The first imperative of this section is to review, through Foster’s exegesis, how the notion of metabolic rift was initially created by Marx in the context of the urban- rural antagonism emerging in the 19th century in Europe.

13 About 70% of the content in this section “2.3 The Core Theoretical Concept – Metabolic Rift” is the same as I elaborated in my Master Thesis (2013, unpublished). The texts of the Master Thesis, concerning epistemological rift, social rift, and individual rift, are used directly in the current writing.

41 2.3.1 The Marxian Origin of Metabolic Rift The concept of “metabolic rift” has been widely applied in recent years, but Marx never employed this exact term in any of his writings. It was Foster who conceptualized Marx’s socio-ecological metabolism break as a “metabolic rift”. What Marx wrote originally was: Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns. In this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself (Marx, 198114, cited in Foster, 1999). What Marx tried to convey here is that both capital-driven large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture force the agricultural population to give up their rural farming land and to resettle their life and work into crammed city areas. The disruption between the large population and farming land leads to the soil fertility degradation problem because the soil fertility and its elements are consumed by the urban population in the form of food and clothing, but these elements cannot be returned to the soil on the farming land because of the long-distance trade in food and clothing. This thus decreases the fertility of the soil and causes a rift in the elements’ cycle, as Marx elaborated: Capitalist production collects the population together in great centers, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth: i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil (Marx, 197615, cited in Foster, 1999). The “metabolic interaction between man and the earth” is Marx’s definition of the social-ecological metabolism, and his use of “prevent” and “hinder” is Marx’s implication of the rift generated in the metabolic cycle, namely, the occurrence of a metabolic rift. Although the concept of metabolic rift was not coined directly by Marx himself and the notion of metabolism was not an original invention from Marx, Marx’s prominent accomplishment cannot be denied because he was the first person who systematically elaborated the concept of metabolism in the dynamics of the socio- environmental circulation (Foster, 1999). Marx offered a clear sociological insight to understand the dominant environmental crises in his time – soil fertility degradation and city pollution – and their association with the intrinsic flaw of the capitalist production relation. Marx established the framework of socio-ecological metabolism, which can be employed to explicate the tangled interrelations among capitalist agricultural production, soil nutrient, the fertilizer industry, agricultural revolutions16, the flaw of capitalist

14 Marx, K. (1981). Capital, vol. 3. New York: Vintage. (Cited in Foster, 1999) 15 Marx, K. (1976). Capital, vol. 1. New York: Vintage. (Cited in Foster, 1999) 16 The first agricultural revolution, a gradual process occurring over several centuries, associated with the enclosures and the growing centrality of market relations. Technical changes improved techniques of crop rotation, manuring, drainage, and livestock management; the second agricultural revolution occurred over a shorter period (1830-1880) and was characterized by the growth of a fertilizer industry and a revolution in soil chemistry; the third agricultural revolution is still occurring since the 20th century, and involved the replacement of animal traction with machine traction on the farm, the concentration of animals in massive feedlots, together with the genetic alteration of plants, monoculture, and the more intensive use of chemical inputs—fertilizers and pesticides (Foster, 1999).

42 production, and the rural-urban antagonism. By applying the metabolic rift theory, Marx revealed three crucial facts from these intrinsic relations: First, the material metabolic rift problems, namely the ecological problems, are the result of both the industrial agricultural production and the urban factory production under the ruling of capitalism; Second, to heal up these rifts, people will not find hope in science and technology within the capitalist system; Third, these material ecological rifts have their immaterial roots and their intangible meaning in the human society itself. This abstract notion has been elaborated in Marx’s earlier philosophic works on the conception of human-nature alienation (Foster, 1999). Over the last decade or so, contemporary environmentalists have extended the metabolic rift theory from agricultural ecosystem analysis to other ecosystem discussions. For instance, there is the analysis on atmospheric rift in the form of climate change and the discussion of a marine ecological crisis (Clausen and Clark, 2005; Clark and York, 2005; Schneider and McMichael, 2010). According to the explanation of metabolic rift theory, these atmospheric and marine problems are unavoidable within the capitalist industrial production, because there is an intrinsic contradiction existing between capitalist production and ecosystem regulation. Schneider and McMichael (2010) contended that there is an asynchronous rift happening between the capitalist production rhythm and nature’s regular tempo. Applying Martinez-Alier’s (2002) concepts – “economic time” and “geochemical-biological time” – they argued that in the “economic time”, given the inherent need of capitalism to extract natural resources to sustain accumulation, natural resources have to be exploited according to the “quick rhythm imposed by capital circulation and the interest rates”; while in the “geochemical-biological time” natural resources are controlled by the rhythms of Nature, which proceed in a million year time span. Optimistic capitalist belief has thought of science and technology as the solution to repair the ecological rifts caused by the contradiction between capitalist production and the ecosystem regulation. Marx, however, took soil nutrient science and its technological application in the fertilizer industry as a counterexample to argue that capitalist large-scale agriculture prevents any truly rational application of the new science of soil management. “All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility (Marx, 1976, cited in Foster, 1999).” Clark and York (2008) illustrated this issue with the notion of “rifts and shifts”. They noted that capitalist expansion creates a cycle of rifts and shifts, and under the working of this cycle, whenever there is an attempt to address a metabolic rift at one place, it will simply lead up to a metabolic rift in other place. European people imported guano as the solution to the 19th century’s fertilizer crisis, but soon the ongoing expansion of capitalist food production increased the demands for fertilizer which guano could no longer satisfy17. Later on, the invention of synthetic fertilizers replaced guano as the new solution of the urgent soil fertility problem, but again, with the large amount of usage of synthetic fertilizer, it caused the worldwide problem of eutrophication (Foster, 1999; Clausen and Clark, 2005; Perdikaris et al., 2012) and the global crisis of peak phosphorus (Neset et al., 2008;

17 The demand for fertilizer was so much that Britain and other powers initiated explicit policies for the importation of bone and guano, and they even raided Napoleonic battlefields and tomb fields to collect human bones. The international commerce in guano started around 1840: the Britain monopolized Peruvian guano suppliers and the United States passed the Guano Island Act to grab any islands rich in guano (1856). However, soon the expansion of capitalist food production increased the demands of fertilizer which guano could no longer satisfy. By the start of 20th century, guano had been nearly completely depleted, and was eventually overtaken with the discovery of superphosphate.

43 Cordell et al., 2009), which soon dampened the exultation over artificial fertilizer. McClintock (2010) contended that the rift is not just a matter of spatial shift but also a matter of scale. The increasing demand for nutrients not only shifted the supply of nutrient from human waste to guano, from Europe to South America, but it scaled up also the nutrient cycling from a local scale of on-farm material metabolism which dealt with only local soil, crops, livestock, manure and human waste, to a gigantic-global scale world affair that involved the material metabolism and the immaterial social metabolism intertwining together. Human-nature alienation (Feuerbachian naturalism) is an earlier notion of Marx than his later thoughts on metabolic rift, but he translated this early abstract and intangible notion into more concrete and material terms through his later conception of “irreparable rift” in the social-ecological metabolism (Foster, 1999). Marx’s earlier works made more directly philosophical attempts to account for the complex interdependence between human beings and nature. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote “Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature (Marx, 197418, cited in Foster, 1999). ” This indicates Marx viewed humans as part of nature; as he wrote in Capital, “It is self-evident: out of nothing, nothing can be created…Labor-power itself is, above all else, the material of nature transposed into a human organism” (Marx, 1976, p.323, cited in Foster, 1999). Even though the later introduction of the concept of metabolism gave Marx a more material, solid and scientific way in which to depict the complex, dynamic human- nature interchange, his notion of human-nature alienation preserves a space in Marx’s metabolism theory for reflection on the immaterial and intangible aspect of the human- nature relationship. This is essential for understanding the long-lasting quality and sustainability of the interaction between human society and its natural conditions. Marx’s notion of this intangible but virtually existing human-nature alienation offers the opportunity for the later metabolic rift scholars to explore further the formation of the immaterial metabolic rift. The articulation of human-nature alienation complements the material aspect of the metabolic rift analysis, and this effort completes the metabolic rift theory as a multi-dimension elucidation of the disconnected human-nature relationship.

*** Metabolic rift theory as a general and powerful conceptual basis has strength to analyze the comprehensive phenomenon of rural-urban antagonism from the rural agricultural production perspective, as Marx had demonstrated for us. However, what Marx did not yet elaborate clearly is the socio-ecological metabolic breaks driven by the lifestyle and consumption in city living. Before moving to the next section and elaborating on the metabolic rift theories, the last few paragraphs of this section will discuss some of the metabolic rift theory’s limitations in analyzing the urban-lifestyle-and-consumption- driven metabolic rift problems referred to above in the recent world rapid urbanization context. Marx himself did not give much attention to human-nature relations from the consumption perspective; rather he gave special attention and analysis to the human- nature relation defined in agricultural production. He emphasized the metabolic rift between “human production and its natural conditions (Foster, 1999)” instead of

18 Marx, K. (1974). Early Writings. New York: Vintage. (Cited in Foster, 1999)

44 between “human consumption and its natural conditions”. Marx did not give his equal attention to the consumption-driven metabolic rift problems because of the relatively lower productivity and smaller throughput of his time than that of today. As the earlier section on “Social Metabolism 1.0 - 4.0” has demonstrated, the social metabolism during the last two hundred years has been accelerated and escalated exponentially, and consumption has even been enshrined as the driving force of the incessancy of capitalist economic growth and the continuity of the capitalist system. By contrast, the development of technology and productivity have reached such an unprecedented high degree that massive quantities of products produced by today’s technology and productivity are in such an enormous amount and varied diversity that the capitalist economy has to incessantly entice people’s desires to consume all these material goods. Only in this way can capitalism find the legitimacy to justify and satisfy its own desire for capital accumulation. Even though Marx had discovered that all the capitalist excesses were rooted in the system’s desire for capital accumulation, Marx was nevertheless unable to predict the extent to which the capitalist production mechanism could spread its influence around with its commercial and economic power, and therefore had no idea how these commercial and economic powers would penetrate into every perspective of living. The ways and scales that the capitalist lifestyle, consumption behavior and material aspiration have been unconsciously and diffusively allured and influenced by the ubiquitous commercial advertisement bombardments are also out of Marx’s imagination. What should be further argued is that although Marx did link soil fertility problems in rural agricultural production with food and clothing consumption issues in urban areas, and while he did refer to the “waste of industrial production and consumption” at London as the example of city pollution, and even as he pointed out that “the failure to recycle nutrients to the soil had its counterpart in the pollution of the cities and the irrationality [of] modern sewage systems” (Foster, 1999), his main focus remained absolutely on rural, agrarian and production issues. This is because Marx’s metabolic rift theory originated from and was based on the investigations of Liebig’s soil fertility declining problem in the context of agricultural production in 19th century Europe. This led Marx to focus his analysis on the metabolism cycle of rural agricultural production rather than on urban living. Even though Marx took London – the largest and most polluted metropolis of his time as the reference to argue his concern over urban issues, the sprawl speed of the urbanization process happening around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries has outweighed by hundreds of times the case of London in the 19th century. The ensuing changes of such rapid urbanization processes were not what Marx could foresee from his era. One of the most critical changes resulting from the worldwide urbanization process is that the characteristic of capitalism is no longer defined according to its size of production but by its abilities to innovate and to create novelty, and by the actual and potential magnitude of consumption. When the urbanization process shifts billions of rural people to city areas, it not only changes their role from agricultural producers to industrial producers, but also transfers them from self-sufficient producers to dependent consumers, from basic-vital needs to non-vital needs – “city affluence generates new and artificial, unnecessary needs requiring the increased production of goods and services….city life’s needs are satisfied through technological chains requiring higher energy and resource input” (Shiva, 1988). Once the repressed laborers turn into consumers, and get in line with capitalism at the point of consumption, the repressed become the oppressor, and nature becomes the object of oppression.

45 2.3.2 Metabolic Rift – Material Rift and Immaterial Rift In his paper Why Farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through A Lens of Metabolic Rift, McClintock (2010) clarified three dimensions of metabolic rift problems: ecological rift, social rift and individual rift. Among the three dimensions, the ecological rift problems are related to tangible, substantial material objects and are measurable in theory. Therefore, in this writing, ecological rift is also equivalent to the term of material rift (Liu, 2013, unpunished); the social and individual are relevant to human-nature alienation and are not materially tangible or quantitatively measurable, and therefore, the social rift and individual rift will be recognized together in this thesis as the category of immaterial rift (Liu, 2013, unpunished). My reason to categorize these rift issues into the groups of “material” and “immaterial” is for pragmatic purposes, to use the relevant terms with convenience. A few metabolic rift scholars, including myself, have gotten inspired by the notion of the three dimensions of rift problems and would like to contribute something to the new theoretical framework that has just been initially outlined by McClintock. Therefore, in addition to these original three dimensions, other rift concepts have been gradually conceptualized by these scholars and other dimensions of rift issues are theorized and added onto the original three dimensions, as attempts to further develop McClintock’s notion. The concept of epistemological rift, created by Schneider and McMichael (2010), and the concept of cultural rift, which is particularly hypothesized by me for this dissertation, can both be categorized into the group of immaterial rift and will be elaborated upon later in this Chapter, after have articulated the material dimension of rift, namely, ecological rift. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, all the material and immaterial rift problems discussed in this Chapter will be further elaborated in discussing the empirical topic of urban farming practice, which is regarded as a practical response and solution to repair the multiple dimensions of rift problems. 2.3.2.1 Ecological Rift Social metabolism, the socio-ecological circulation, should be first understood as all forms of material circulation, that is, all the material, resources, stocks, and elements running and cycling in the ecological system. If all the cycles function in a proper way, namely to take place within an appropriate amount and in a naturally tolerable pace, all the materials taken from nature would finally return back to nature and be absorbed by nature. However, when the circulations cannot function in the right way, namely, human society takes too much from nature, surpassing its carrying capacity, and produces too much waste that cannot be absorbed by nature, we call this situation unsustainable, and the environmental problems would thus take place. In the language of social metabolism, these environmental problems indicate the breakup of the socio-ecological circulation on the ecological dimension, that is, the ecological dimension of metabolic rift, or ecological rift in McClintock’s term. With the development of capitalist industrial production and consumption, today, the scale of the material rift problem, or ecological rift problem, has been expanding as large as the entire planet, even extending to Earth’s orbit in space (e.g. masses of defunct, artificially created space debris), but it can be also as small as taking place in a garden size. According to the explanation of metabolic rift theory, no matter which scale and what type or form of rift problems – including climate change, ecosystem damages and biodiversity loss, deforestation, resource extraction and mining, and all kinds of pollution, all types of waste problem, all sorts of water issues – all are generated within the capitalist industrial production, because of the earlier mentioned intrinsic contradiction between capitalist production and ecosystem regulation. Just take

46 a look about the recent catchy environmental topics: the most dominating environmental topic of climate change and its main cause CO₂ emission, the emergent waste crisis occurring this year in the US and in some European countries caused by the abrupt China Trash Ban, the current popular topic over the hazards of plastic microbeads and another plastic related topic about the Great Pacific garbage patch, the increasing public concern about the bee vanishing issue, and the not so well-known ecological issues of eutrophication and phosphorous peak, so on and so forth. Each of the cases can be traced back to the cause: their roots in the capitalist production and consumption. There are so many examples of concrete environmental problems and I will select three of them, which are representative in gaseous, liquid and solid forms, to briefly illustrate how they are involved in the actual rupture situation of the socio-ecological circulation. The first case concerns climate change. CO₂ emission, as the widely accepted main culprit of the greenhouse effect, has been created through the industrial production process of fossil fuel drilling, combustion and emission. The industrial process of CO₂ emission can be understood as the break-up of the carbon cycle, in which the carbon had been slowly sequestered in the dead ancient forests through millions of years of geochemical-biological time. The second case is the aforementioned issue of the scale- up of ecological rift, the fertilizer crisis in 19th century Europe and the guano trade, and the further developed problem of peak phosphorus and eutrophication. If to be summarized from the material rift perspective, the scale-up of the fertilizer crisis is essentially about the break-up of the phosphorus cycle, an ecological issue which goes wrong in two lines: on the one hand, the phosphorus cycle is broken at the local scale, with the reduction of the phosphorus input to farmland caused by the industrial shift of rural labor to cities and by the increasing demand for phosphorus from mass industrial agriculture. Meanwhile more and more phosphate rock has to be mined to replenish the loss of phosphorus on the farmland, and leading to the peak phosphorus problem; on the another hand, the phosphorus that is taken away in the form of food from the farmland finally ends up being concentrated in the water bodies, leading to the eutrophication problem. The third case is about the unrecyclable plastic waste issue, which is partially a carbon cycle issue again, but I want to emphasize its root in mass industrial production, the dominating consumer culture, and the underlying driving force of capitalism. 2.3.2.2 Epistemological Rift and Cultural Rift (as hypothesis) In their paper Deepening, and Repairing, the Metabolic Rift, Schneider and McMichael (2010) combined the concept of metabolic rift with the concepts of local knowledge from Geertz (1983) and situated knowledge from Haraway (1991) to indicate that, besides the material ecological rift happening in industrialized agricultural practice, there is also an immaterial rift, which they termed epistemological rift, taking place in modern agricultural practice. Reflecting their anthropological roots, the concepts of local knowledge and situated knowledge seek to study human cultural survival and its relation to ecological conditions where a culture developed. A local ecosystem has endemic plants, animals, insects, and other living organisms, and local knowledge that develops within this local ecosystem contains special localized characteristics (Yos, 2003). Schneider and McMichael contended that there is an immaterial knowledge rift occurring when capitalism, equipped with its market ideology, forces and mechanism, overspreads its influence to the local level and breaks the local traditional human-nature interaction. How? Schneider and McMichael argued that all knowledge is local context-affected and historically and geographically bound, and that knowledge is situated within complex

47 social constructions and local ecological conditions. Local agricultural production, as a form of local culture practice, consisting of agro-ecological knowledge and local ecosystem knowledge, is thus situated within the social-ecological conditions. However, this local agro-ecological and ecosystem knowledge would be lost in the process of peasants’ proletarianization caused by capitalist production and accumulation. Schneider and McMichael explicitly delineated two situations of local knowledge’s privation. In the first situation, people remain in the countryside, but become waged agricultural laborers. Despite the fact that they are still engaged in working farming activities, waged farmers lose their right to make production decisions and thereby are deprived of the capacity to produce and reproduce their historically inherited local agricultural knowledge in relation to their local agro-ecosystem. In the second situation, peasants move from countryside to cities and work in the industrial sector. In this case, people not only physically leave their farming land and take away with them the ability to cultivate nutrient soil, but they also take away the culturally and geographically specific knowledge of agro-ecological practices which they will not use in the city settings (Schneider and McMichael, 2010). Based on the analysis of these two situations of deprivation of local knowledge, Schneider and McMichael define three layers of “capitalist violence” related to the deprivation of local agriculture practices. First, people who hold the knowledge of agricultural production and local ecosystems are forced off their farming land by capitalist production relations. Second, people who carry “agro-ecological wisdom” are set to work for humdrum capitalist production tasks. Third, a more abstract layer of capitalist violence cuts people’s epistemic link with the land, agricultural practices and knowledge, and finally, with nature itself (Schneider and McMichael, 2010). Capitalist interventions with previously autonomous agricultural producers destabilize the generationally selected local knowledge, the time-tested cultivation practices, and the community negotiated land tenure (Yos, 2003; Salleh, 2010). Schneider and McMichael explain the fundamental mechanism by which capitalist production relations bring out the epistemological rift in light of Marx’s concept of “value”. From the classic political economy perspective, value reflects social relations and consists of two types. One type is the “use value” which takes account of labor’s value and nature’s value. The other is the “exchange value” which emphasizes profit. In a capitalist production system and market oriented social structure, use value has been ignored while exchange value has been amplified, and therefore the overall capitalist value system cannot reflect true social relations, but only abstract relations. The abstracted value relations of capitalist production take labor and nature as just commodities or raw material and their only use is to be extracted for capitalist production and accumulation (Clark and Foster, 2010; Schneider and McMichael, 2010). In the past several decades, because of capital’s exclusive pursuit of exchange value, local agricultural production elements – land, labor and local knowledge practice – have been “transformed into fictitious commodities to accommodate a market economy” (Yos, 2003). Hypothesis: Cultural Rift In reference to the knowledge of the above mentioned epistemological rift, I would attempt to propose a hypothesis here that, in the process of industrialization, urbanization and globalization under the driving force of capitalism, with people’s movement from rural to city areas, from agricultural to industrial societies, from developing to developed countries, there is also another type of immaterial rift – cultural rift – taking place. Moreover, I argue that there are two types of cultural rift.

48 The first type happens across different cultural spaces through global capitalism expansion and migration, rising up two layers of rift, at the local rural community and in urban life. The second type occurs across the temporal scale within one society, with the rapid industrialization and urbanization: the earlier agrarian culture shared in older generations can no longer be inherited by the younger generation. The first type of cultural rift, in the local rural community layer, happens when the increasingly global economic system opens remote areas for extracting resources, introducing their commodities, bringing outsiders; consumerism to outlying villages (Horowitz, 2015). The local community’s culture has evolved in the local ecological and social environment and developed through generational transmission, but with the physical presence of outsiders, the influence of their belief systems and their economic values, and the access to external markets, the localized culture has been deviated from its original path and lost the links with the local natural, social and historical conditions. Meanwhile, pulled by the economic value and outside culture, the local farmers, who possess the local and traditional knowledge and practice local culture in the form of viable living strategies, either stop practising the ecologically, socially and historically valuable local culture within their own community and replace the local culture and lifestyles with commercial culture influenced lifestyles; or they move out of their local culture environment, embracing directly the commercial life by migrating to cities. However, after these people have migrated to cities, they in fact expose themselves to more major cultural vulnerabilities. The rural and agricultural homeland community, where the migrants grew up, have influences imposed on their thoughts, customs, lifestyle and living patterns, which keep the personal in line with his or her memories, feelings, and sense of safety that were formed in their earlier life experience. Because these earlier life experiences were developed in the homeland cultural settings, this implies that when people move out of their homeland community to a new place with a potentially radical new social and biophysical environment, where they are no longer able to practice their earlier thoughts, customs, and lifestyle, there would be a cultural break occurring with their new life under a new culture. As a consequence, migrant people’s sense of place, familiarity, safety, and home-feeling would get lost in such a new culture (Dean, 1999; Carr, 2015) In addition, Berkes (2012) pointed out that “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief” of one culture is evolved by “adaptive processes”, and handed down through generations by “cultural transmission”, a process that always involves endemic living beings and the local environment (Dean, 1999; Yos, 2003, Horowitz, 2015). This indicates that ecologically based culture would form a crucial component of local people’s cultural heritage and identity (Moore, 1996, 1998; Graham et al., 2000; Horowitz, 2001; Rumsey and Weiner, 2001). However, when local people move with these cultural heritage and identity to other places, where the ecological and social culture does not support the immigrants’ connections with their original cultural heritage or identity, these migrated people would feel a great sense of loss of their own cultural support, as well as their own identity. Such a loss is especially unbearable in the process when immigrants are still in the middle of adapting to the new culture and building their new identity. The second type of cultural rift hypothesized here is about the disappearance of the agriculture related customs, traditions, lifestyle and belief system, etc. within one society but throughout a historical line. This is a commonly occurring phenomenon during the general industrialization process, in which industrialized agricultural production replaces traditional agricultural production; the concentrated and

49 commercialized food supply system replaces more family based and community scattered food systems; the reliance on machines, gadgets and devices replaces simple and more natural style living; and modern, commercial influenced lifestyles replace more traditional self-sufficient ones. To sum up, cultural rift is a hypothesized concept and as yet lacks literature to support its further conceptualization. However, the following literature review of the world urban farming practices, and the later field research chapters, will provide more empirical evidence from the urban farming participants’ perspective to prove that the farming practice is partially their individual reaction to cope with some of their inner feeling which I define as cultural rift. 2.3.2.3 Social Rift After discussing the possible existence of the above two type of rifts, it is a bit challenging to elaborate on the concept of social rift, because the term “social” overlaps with some of the connotations which have been discussed with respect to the epistemological rift and the cultural rift. As I will demonstrate below, all three concepts refer to rural labor’s migration from rural to urban. The slight difference would be that the epistemological rift focuses on the knowledge aspect of rural labor, the cultural rift emphasizes the aspects of life memory, lifestyle, and cultural identity of rural labor, and here the social rift will deal with the rural laborer’s role as a wage worker. To avoid complication, the discussion in this section will follow McClintock’s original connotation of social rift, that the formation of the social dimension of rift issues consists of three streams of commodification: capitalizing farmers as wage labors; privatizing communal land properties; and commercializing the food production and distribution processes. Labor: Capital and Wage Labor McClintock (2010) argued that ecological rift should be understood within the context of social processes, especially the formation of wage labor. He drew on Marx’s theory of capitalist primitive accumulation to describe the link between capital and wage labor and explained how primitive accumulation causes the separation of farmers from their land, thus producing a large number of wage laborers who are needed and can also be easily manipulated by capitalist production. For capitalist production, the most ideal wage laborers are people who do not own their land and cannot produce their own food, and therefore have to be dependent on the jobs offered by capitalist factories for survival. To produce such ideal wage laborers, dispossession and proletarianization of farmers is the prerequisite. Capitalism, as McClintock pointed out, has great power to create a host of institutions and policies – consolidation of land, structural adjustment program, urbanization, land market, expansion of natural resource extraction, and integration into a global economy – to systematically support the dispossession and proletarianization of the farmers (McClintock, 2010). To commodify farmers as wage laborers has three results in this social rift discussion. First, for the wage laborers remaining in the countryside, they lose their right to decide whether to practice local knowledge or not, and this aspect of social rift overlaps the notion of epistemological rift as articulated earlier. Second, for the proletarianized farmers who move to cities as newcomers, they often “discover on arrival in urban centers that prospects for employment are slim” (McClintock, 2010). In the condition of labor commodification, laborers are only valuable if they have the skill to produce the products which capitalists can sell for profits. Without the required skills, laborers have no market in which to sell their own labor and thus become valueless. That is the moment that the social rift takes place: in the urban setting which is dominated by

50 capitalist production and market logic, new farmer migrants suffer from the feeling of uselessness, because the agricultural skills and knowledge which they brought with them and which once supported their rural lives suddenly become worthless in the city context. Third, for the longer-time-settled city dwellers (whose parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were rural migrants), they cannot escape the fate of being treated as labor commodities even though they are more skilled in urban survival than their rural migrant ancestors. Under market logic, no matter how skilled the laborers might be, the final destiny for them is still to sell their labor to make profit for others or to maximize their labor’s exchange value to increasing their income. Often, they spend their increased income for more consumption and material needs, and their lives are entangled in all kinds of commercial relation without extrication. As such, they are trapped into the aforementioned treadmill living pattern in which they deal with intensive and tedious tasks by selling their labor, and then spend their income for consumption and material hedonism. They live continuously in a treadmill routine which can be harmful instead of helpful for their subjective well-being (Durning, 1992; McKibben, 2007; Leonard and Conrad, 2010). This labor issue related social rift overlaps with some of the individual rift problems that will be discussed in the next section. Land: Privatization of Commons In addition to the commodification of labor, McClintock (2010) examined land commodification, illustrating how the systematic theft of communal land property is of great assistance in ‘setting free’ the agricultural population as a proletariat for the need of capitalist production. Therefore large pieces of collective farmland must be privatized and commodified under the power of capitalism. Meanwhile, to commodify land is not only the means to dispossess farmers but also the ends to extract land resources. In capitalist production, land is “production input and commodity for exchange” and is “bought and sold as a ‘fictitious’ commodity under the expansion of laissez faire economic liberalism”. Within this free market logic, land as a resource is “over- exploited for short-term gain with little consideration of its long-term productivity” (McClintock, 2010). Farming land, as the “protective covering of cultural institutions” in previous agricultural societies, has been simplified as a mere commodity for exchange in modern industrial societies, and can no longer be integrated into the holistic system in which land plays the role of receiving the implementation of local knowledge, culture, traditions, and social structures and institutions. Instead, “(land) reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted…the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed…human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure” (Polanyi, 2001). Commodification and privatization of land lead to the disappearance of the conventional collective property regime, which would have functioned to preserve both ecological conditions and social relations. Studies by common property scholars have justified common property regimes in facilitating sustainable common-pool natural resources management by rural communities (Ostrom et al., 1999). “Throughout the economic history, common property as social institutions has played positive roles in natural resources management from economic pre-history up to the present” (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop, 1975). Meanwhile, the regime of commons has also been proven to be an institutional guarantee of a community’s solidarity and a precondition for building social trust. Commons regimes produce dense social networks and social capital and encourage social members to have frequent face-to-face communication to build emotional interaction and understanding, and hence increase the potential for trust and

51 reciprocity (Dietz et al., 2003). However, the privatization of commons damages these trustful social relations. With the growing of a social rift under a capitalist land tenure mechanism, the former agricultural practices, social networks, and traditional landscapes which were once developed in the common regimes are now abandoned (McClintock, 2010). Food: Commercialization of the Whole Process In McClintock’s (2010) illustration, food is the third and the most understandable and accessible example for grasping the attribute of capitalist commodification and the manifestation of a social rift. In the capitalist agro-food production system, food is treated simply as a commodity to be sold and bought according to market logic, while the ecological and social-cultural values that once existed in the traditional food production process have been excluded. New commercial mechanisms of agro-food production and consumption replace the traditional ones. In the new relations, agro-food production becomes increasingly processed by industrial factories which take profit as the ultimate aim; most people no longer grow and make their own food and change their preference from whole foods to packaged and canned foods for the reason of convenience and cheap prices. In the rapid transformation of the agro-food system, the pervasive use of patented seeds, artificial ingredients and genetically modified crops, and the popularity of fast food restaurants signify that the gap between people and their food is enlarging. Without knowing where the food comes from, what seed it is selected from, by whom it is planted, whether genetic technology has been applied, how it is processed, and when it is transported, people easily forget their connection with nature and with other people and are more likely to lose their positive attitude toward food and the agro-food production system, and finally turn to underestimate either the ecological or social values embedded in food. In the profit-oriented capitalist market, food is merely treated as a commodity to be sold and bought according to capitalist market logic, and such treatment “effaces the complex waves of relations running through its production, distribution, preparation and consumption” (McClintock, 2010). In the traditional food production process, the person who cooked or processed the food had closer relations to the person who grew the crops and produced the raw materials of the food, and the food consumer was also more familiar with the path that his or her food had passed through from the crop field to the plate. In the close links of food production, distribution, preparation and consumption, specific social-economic relationships were established among farmers, producers and consumers, and particular agro-food culture and traditions were also developed in such social connections. If people become separated from their food making process, it also indicates that people are disconnected from the rich and colorful social relations which would have been experienced in the food production process from the crop field to the dinner table. Arguably, the tie of trust among people in a closely connected community is usually more reliable than that of the commodified food production society where people have no idea about whether the farmer uses pesticides or whether the manufacturer added toxic ingredients. 2.3.2.4 Individual Rift In McClintock’s (2010) definition, individual rift happens when the individual person moves away from the working and living environment of nature in the countryside and settles into city life. Working and living in cities indicates that a person can no longer intimately engage with nature and cannot witness his or her intrinsic interaction with nature in a cognitive sense. Therefore this person is deprived of his or her sensitivity to

52 perceive the truth relationship with nature. Selhub and Logan (2012) offered scientific evidence to prove that human’s mental health is intrinsically affected by interaction with nature, as the deprivation of nature in a person’s life does harm to the brain functions to different extents. Employing Marx’s concept of alienation from labor and from nature, McClintock (2010) articulated that individual rift first arises from people’s alienation from the fruits of their labor, and this interacts with the foregoing wage labor problem. Due to the division of labor under capitalist production, a wage laborer no longer owns the finished product resulting from his or her own endeavor, nor can the results of the production be used for his or her own needs and purpose. Instead, the worker produces it as commodity for the capitalist’s purpose of capital accumulation. Sohn-Rethel (1978) accounted for the labor division of capitalist production as the result of the division between intellectual and manual labor. Dickens (1996) furthered that notion and argued that the division of social science and natural science encouraged the division of labor, deepening humans’ alienation from nature as a result of the “inadequate understanding of how these knowledge connect with one another in the process of producing the concrete outcomes in which we are interested”. Braverman (1974) revealed the flaw of labor division by arguing that the more that the science engaged with production, the less a worker understood the process of production. Again, taking the workers in the Chinese factory of iPhone production for example, standing by the assembly lines, each of them is assigned only one tiny divided task among thousands of assembling procedures, and after repeating the monotonous movement of the single task for thousands of times a day, they become sick of the treadmill work and gain no sense of accomplishment, since they do not own the whole experience of the production and cannot really feel or understand their contribution to the whole process of production 19 (Liu, 2013, unpublished). The alienation between labor and its fruits, labor specialization, and science’s increasing engagement with production causes people to over-believe in science and to be addicted in technology. We witness the power of science and technology on a small scale but forget that it might cause a worse situation on a larger scale. Engels (195920, cited in McClintock, 2010) criticized people’s over-confidence and reliance on technology application, which usually does not address the root cause but rescales up the problem. Taking the iPhone and its producer Apple Inc. as an example again: their marketing strategies make use of people’s belief in technology to boast the features of their latest products – iPad, iPhone or iPod – to lure people to purchase these gadgets where the so- called-most-advanced technologies are embodied and convince the customers that these new gadgets will bring them a brand-new experience of life and get them out of the anxious, depressed, distracted daily hassles of urban living. However, the fact is that these new gadgets bring them “screen addiction” and leave them far away from “nature immersion” – the true balm for different sorts of mental disorders (Selhub and Logan, 2012). At this point in my analysis referring to “nature immersion” leads us to the discussion of the second type of individual rift in McClintock’s definition – alienation from nature. McClintock (2010) argued that the expropriation and commodification of land and nature specifically, and the development of urbanization and the antagonism of nature and human society in general, rive off and create an invisible rift between people’s

19 The information is from my Master Thesis field research findings, which were collected through my individual interviews with the Chinese workers in the factory that manufactured iPhone in 2013. 20 Engels, F. (1959). The Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress. (Cited in McClintock, 2010)

53 perceived relation with nature and their real relation with nature. In the perceived relation, people externalized themselves from nature. With the cognitive and experiential understanding associated with much of modern society and education, human beings are not regarded as part of nature; but in the real relation, humans are a functional organism existing as a part of the larger ecosystem. McClintock called this as “the internalized dimension of metabolic rift which perceives the self as external to environment”. The alienation from nature has been well documented in the researches of developmental psychology, education and evolutionary biology. McClintock summed up the findings of Orr (2002), Kahn and Kellert (2002), and Louv (2008) to state how the alienation from nature could affect children’s development: “The shift from direct to ‘increasingly abstract and symbolic’ contact with the outside environment in the contemporary political economy limits effective, cognitive and evaluative development in children, leading to a raise in childhood behavioral problems, namely, ‘nature deficit disorder’” (McClintock, 2010). The term “nature deficit disorder” was coined by Louv (2008) in his awakening book, The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder to accentuate the modern children’s deprivation of nature. He discussed how this condition affects children’s mental, physical, and spiritual health, as well as their cognitive capacity because of the changed relationship with nature. Drawing on his nature-filled childhood memories, Louv compared the American children’s play-in-nature experience of his generation (known as baby boomers, born in 1946~1964) with that of the recent generation. As Louv remembered, in his childhood, farmland and woods were still the most typical American suburban landscape and these places were also the most enjoyable playground for kids of his time. Outdoor adventures, no matter whether wading in creeks, climbing trees, breaking branches, sniffing at flowers, picking fruits, tasting wild berries, or capturing fish, chasing after dragonflies, catching fireflies, or tormenting anonymous insects were all filled with curiosity, fascination, joy and happiness. Louv regarded the baby boomers as the last generation of Americans who still had an “intimate and familial attachment to the land and water”. “Many of us now in our forties or older knew farmland or forests at the suburban rim and had farm family relatives. Even if we lived in an inner city, we likely had grandparents or the older relatives who farmed or had recently arrived from farm country during the rural-to- urban migration of the first half of the twentieth century”, Louv recalled. But for the American children today, their connection with farming is disappearing, “for the young, food is from Venus, farming is from Mars”. In addition to the severance from food and farming, modern urban kids have been deprived of nature in a great many ways and meanings. Louv illustrated this claim with many empirical cases throughout his book. He provided varied “diagnoses” of nature deficit disorder as the consequences of the deprivation of nature: children tend to stay in air-conditioned rooms and watch TV or play computer games; to immerse in electronic products and over-rely on technologies; to play at indoor organized sports arenas instead of free play in natural multi-choice spaces; to name more cartoon animal characters than native species in their neighborhood communities; to take no account of which cannot be Googled, and so forth. The costs of alienation from nature – the nature deficit disorder – include but are not limit to the diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses, and the rise of cultural autism (Louv, 2008). "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." ―A fourth-grader in San Diego (Louv, 2008)

54 The term nature deficit disorder is by no means a medical diagnosis, but was created as a catchy medical-pathological term to alert us to the negative effects young people are experiencing as the result of detaching from nature (Sullivan, 2006). For more scientific readers, without solid scientific proof Louv’s notion of nature deficit disorder and his empirical cases may sound more or less like mere anecdotes. Fortunately, Louv’s weakness has been remedied by two ecological therapists, Selhub and Logan (2012). In their book Your Brain on Nature, Selhub and Logan provided many instances of valid medical and psychological evidence to prove that humanity has maintained a vital bond with nature during our millions of years of evolutionary process, and an individual’s mental health depends on the benign bilateral relation with nature. The disconnection with nature in the modern and urban living and working patterns not only generates vital individual mental health problems like depression, stress, and anxiety, etc., but also leads to individuals’ indifference toward environmental issues and problems, and finally, leads to environmental crises. Humanity’s historical contact with nature carried over into a sense of affinity between human and natural settings and all living things. In medical dictionaries the “affinity” is designated as the term of “biophilia” (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson (1984) proposed that biophilia could be understood as an “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” and this is a unique influence that nature imposed on the human mind, in terms of cognition and behavior (Kellert and Wilson, 1993; Kahn, 1997; Kellert, 2012; Selhub and Logan, 2012). This natural influence drew our prehistoric ancestors close to adequate water21, nutrition, and shelter with the feeling of satiation and security, and also alludes to modern era boys’ desire to climb the trees and conquer the limbs with joyful and rewarding feelings. “The tree-climbing DNA is developed from the two-million-year communion with nature. Before we had ladders, ropes, cranes, and mechanized cherry pickers, we still had a hungry desire for eggs, fruits, honey, and other nourishment found on high places; our post-meal feeling of satiation was often dependent on tree-climbing skills. For children, the joy and happiness typically outweighs the fear of the climb…..It may be difficult for youthful urban dwellers to legally…scale local trees, an emerging intervention called tree- climbing therapy is starting to take root… (F)indings show that participation in tree-climbing programs fosters an increased concern for the environment and motivates subjects to be involved in efforts toward its conservation” (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Unfortunately, nowadays, people’s instinctive linkage with nature has been relentlessly cut by the accelerated antagonism between country and town, the general alienation between nature and human, the technologically addicted modern life, and the over- commercialized consumption behavior. City living and the inevitable daily hassles like “traffic, noise, quarrels at home and work, disagreements with neighbors, encounters with incivility, and locking horns with customer service departments” produce negative feelings such as “annoyance, agitation, anxiety, frustration, worry, or a general sense of irritation” and generally block the individual goal of mental well-being (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Besides the daily hassles, working conditions in the modern world require strict planning, abstract thinking, creativity, and so-called cognitive flexibility, and as well as the central requirement of self-control. In addition, a contemporary

21 Scholars have argued that the capacity to find drinking water has acted as a major source of natural selection during human evolution. This explains why water features often elicit high levels of liking and preference and why both children and adults have strong preference for scenes and landscapes with water or water properties (Kellert, 2012).

55 consumption-oriented lifestyle society gives city people an overwhelming amount of choice. This calls for a tremendous amount of energy to run the pathways of executive functioning in the brain (Selhub and Logan, 2012). All these lead to the problem of “inhibition fatigue”. “Inhibition” is a crucial brain regulatory function, and it works like the orchestra conductor in our brain to divert brain energy away from distractions and toward important attentional tasks. However, in the modern world, with its multitude of distractions, the filtering systems needs to work overtime to keep the brain focusing on important things thus causing inhibition fatigue in the brain (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Just as physical fatigue decreases the immune system’s defense function and increases the rate of attack of various diseases, mental fatigue also increases the chance of varied mental disorders. The following will take “attention fatigue” as a concrete example to explain how this mental disorder function works. When studying why many office workers experienced mental fatigue, psychologist William James noted two distinctive forms of attention: “voluntary attention” which needs sustained effort and control from the brain, and “involuntary attention” which requires no conscious effort or control from the brain. James found that office workers who were involved with drudging detail and uninteresting jobs had to pay continuous voluntary attention to their tasks. This required a tremendous amount of effort and inhibition function, and thereby caused inhibition fatigue as well as attention fatigue. By contrast, people who were interested and fascinated in their jobs would find it easier to stay on task with energy and not over-do control efforts with conscious thought. These people only needed to pay the effortless involuntary attention to their work (James, 189022, cited in Selhub and Logan, 2012). In addition to the daily hassles and demanding working conditions, what has already been emphasized in this thesis is that modern urban life is characterized by its central activity of consumption, which is in fact the embodiment of a kind of religious zeal for technology. It is exactly such fanatical consumption of technologies that plays an essential role in detaching urban individuals from nature. How did Selhub and Logan prove this fact? They took Smartphone and Facebook as two of the most popular examples to illustrate how the fashionable screen culture and the advanced information technology alienate one individual from another individual, as well as from nature. They cited psychologists’ research findings to demonstrate that immersing in Smartphone and Facebook leads to a decrease in empathy and increase in narcissism. Empathy is defined by psychologists as the ability to exhibit an emotional monitor and response to someone else’s emotional states by interpreting the subtle cues of distresses or needs. Heavy Internet users were reported having low scores on such emotional intelligence, and the scores of empathic concern in North America were found dropping 49 percent since 1980 (Selhub and Logan, 2012). The phenomenon accompanying the dramatic drop of empathy is the rise of narcissism. Narcissism is a term used by psychoanalysts to describe the personal state of self- absorption and self-admiration, which tends to have the consequences of exploitation, manipulation, aggression, shallow relationships, and the loss of emotional intimacy. Some recent studies document significant increases in narcissism among young people; data show that about 89% more students answered almost all personality questions in a narcissistic direction in 2009 compared with 1994 (Selhub and Logan, 2012). A narcissistic person has low or no observation of and concern for the natural world, and has low or no interest in staying with nature. Even having a chance encounter in nature,

22 James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. (Cited in Selhub and Logan, 2012)

56 a narcissistic person can hardly stay in nature with mindfulness, which requires getting- back-to-nature with conscious thought, paying attention to the natural details, building emotional connections with nature, or in other words, a true immersion in nature. Nature immersion benefits the health of individual, entire human-beings and the planet, because a mindful immersion in nature restores the brain, buffers the stress from daily hassle, affords opportunity for contemplation, enhances altruism, and cultivates a greater depth of environmental concerns (Selhub and Logan, 2012).

*** *** Since all arguments point to capitalism as the causation of all sorts of metabolic rift – material as well as immaterial rifts – then we cannot avoid taking a glimpse at the underlying reasons which led the capitalist system to pursue profit as its absolute goal and to commodify almost everything as its exclusive strategy, while neglecting the material and immaterial rift problems that it induced all along the line. Here, I will quickly discuss the root of the formation of the capitalist’s worldview and belief system, and also briefly summarize the consequences of the thorough implementation of the capitalist value system, which has been discussed throughout this Chapter. The environmental sociology concepts – Dominant Western Worldview and Human Exemptionalism Paradigm – are the keys here for us to understand the relevant context (Catton and Dunlap, 1980). European countries experienced a long history of being ruled under the influence of Christian religion throughout the medieval era, and people were enslaved by prescribed thinking and behavior dictated by God’s decree. With the burgeoning of capitalism, and in the attempt to emancipate human beings from religious dogma, Enlightenment thinkers believed that by using reason and science, “natural law” would be uncovered and nature could be subdued. Enlightenment scholars asserted that given the right social conditions and institutions, human beings could be perfected, and if equipped by advanced science and technology, the material growth could be endless and the progress of human civilization could continue forever. A worldview of anthropocentrism thus gradually developed in the claim of human beings’ independence, uniqueness and intelligence with the booming of capitalism and the withering of religious influence. In addition, the western anthropocentric worldview, or namely, the capitalistic worldview, was accompanied by Europeans’ “discovery” of the New World, as well as the westerners’ achievement in science and technology. The European’s expansion into the New World brought them the illusion of an affluent world without limits of resource – an “age of exuberance” (Webb, 1952; Catton, 1980), in which they believed that human society would never meet the limits of planetary carrying capacity due to the New World’s surplus resources. Meanwhile, the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the growing power of technology boosted the westerners’ confidence in human beings’ intelligence, and converted the ancient anthropocentrism into modern arrogance toward nature (Sessions, 1974; Ehrenfeld, 1978). Catton and Dunlap (1980) designated the anthropocentric western worldview as the Dominant Western Worldview (DWW). They argued that in the age of exuberance, western society formed its belief system standing behind the dominant worldview, and at the core of that belief system, there were the beliefs that: ‐ humans are fundamentally different from and dominant over all other creatures on earth; ‐ humans are masters of their destiny and they can choose their goals and learn to do whatever is necessary to achieve them;

57 ‐ the world is vast, and thus provides unlimited opportunities for humans; ‐ the history of humanity is one of progress, and for every problem there is a solution, and thus progress need never cease (adapted from Catton and Dunlap, 1980). Based on the DWW, capitalist thoughts suppose that humans are exempted from the laws of nature, and builds the corollary assumptions designated by Catton and Dunlap (1980) as the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm23 (HEP). The assumptions under this human exemptionalism paradigm indicate that: ‐ humans have an exceptional nature stemming from their unique cultural heritage, including language, social organization, and technology; ‐ human societies do not depend on the biophysical environment for their physical existence and for the means of pursuing the goals they value; ‐ humans, by their intelligence, have liberated themselves from ecological principles, environmental influences and natural constraints; ‐ the more urbanized human society and the more sophisticated human technology demonstrate that human beings can be further removed from the biophysical environment and are able to alter the environment to suit their own needs (adapted from Catton and Dunlap, 1980). It is DWW and HEP that view humans as separate from and above nature, encourage the reckless exploitation of nature and resource extraction, and cause the exponential increases of human population, the scale and influence of human societies, as well as their technological and organizational complexities (e.g. SM 1.0 – 4.0). Under the logic and worldview of capitalism, nature has been objectified as merely a material resource and “free” gift, the value of living has been reduced to material hedonism, and human needs have been narrowed to be technology-hijacked aspirations and wants. The materialistic and technological success of capitalism has attracted the whole world to copy such capitalist worldviews regardless of their ecological, historical, cultural, social or political contexts. All the production mechanisms, social institutions, cultural and ideological preferences are now determined by the human-dominated value system, and the influence of DWW and HEP has been ingrained in almost every corner of the capitalism-affected world. The capitalist belief system is now dominating the world in the form of a westernized development pattern and lifestyle, by controlling the world financial systems, marketing system, and the media and discourse manipulation. The influences of DWW and HEP are so profound and pervasive that our recent human- nature interactions have been confronting the basic laws of thermodynamics24; the continuously accelerated socio-ecological metabolic process and the up-graded versions of social metabolism 1.0 – 4.0 are the historical materialistic evidence and results of the influences. However, the metabolic rift problems, both the material and the immaterial rifts, are warning us that DWW and HEP should no longer be viewed as workable. An even more essential and eye-opening explanation of the profound flaw of DWW and HEP, as well as of the entire capitalist worldview and belief system, according to Weber

23 Although the notion of “paradigm” would be rough for understanding the concrete phenomenon, this term could describe the shared image of some phenomena, and could manifest certain consensus of value or interest. 24 Schnaiberg (1980) argued in The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity that human society depends on energy flows from nature and thus is not exempt from the two basic laws of thermodynamics: 1) matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can only be transformed; 2) all energy transformations are accompanied with the change of degradation, from more to fewer forms, a state named as Entropy. We, human beings, like any other species on Earth, ultimately depend on nature and the laws of thermodynamics cannot be repealed.

58 (2013), is about the fundamental errors of the Cartesian dualism which separated the human mind away from the real world and understood the real world as dead and mechanical. “We deny the world’s deeply creative, poetic, and expressive processes…All the sciences, whether natural, social or economic, try to grasp the world as if it were a dead, mechanical process that could be understood through statistical or cybernetic analyses. Since Descartes’ groundbreaking revolution of separating…our minds [and] the material world…humankind’s most noble endeavours have focused on separating reality and all its parts into discrete building blocks – atoms and algorithms” (Weber, 2013)25. In the face of such profound causes and roots of the current disconnected, separated and alienated human-nature relation, the sense of frustration and being overwhelmed is my true feeling. The re-understanding and the re-establishment of a benign human-nature relation is crucially important but takes time for most people. However, there are also people who cannot wait, and are starting to take actions to de-alienate and rebuild their personal connection with nature at the call of the instinctive human need for contact with nature. Urban farming practice is one of these actions that many people have started to engage in. Urban farming has become an attempt for city residents to explore the possible interaction with nature. Or, in more pragmatic terms, urban farming is becoming the specific tool and approach for city individuals to respond to the tangible and intangible metabolic rift problems. The following Chapters will discuss all the theoretical (Chapter 3) and empirical (Chapter 5 and 6) details in regard to urban farming practice.

25 This is just a small part of the notion included in Weber’s discussion on “Enlivenment”, which is not only another interpretation system to understand the disconnected, separated and alienated fact of the current human-nature relation, but it sets up also the new understanding of the human-nature interaction and proposes to get things, people, and oneself to live again, to be more full of life, to become more alive. With the concept of Enlivenment, we get a starting point from which to identify the various neglected areas of reality that are hidden in the blind spot of modernist, scientific thinking, enlightenment habits of thought (i.e. the rational and technocratic understanding of human agency and which is to some extent responsible for the technocratic disasters of the current un-sustainability of our industrialized and urbanized planet). Weber understands that the main flaws of the Enlightenment approach are its reliance on dualisms of thought (i.e. binary or dichotomous thinking), rational discourse, the Newtonian subject- object split, and the third-person-perspective; Enlightenment has no use for notions of life, sentience, experience, subjectivity, corporeal embodiment, feeling, self-expression, emotional expression, meaning and expressiveness, situational-contingent-and-particular, existential need, interpretation, intention, desire, first-person-perspective, and poetic interior sense, etc., which Enlivenment would fully propose. Weber contends that neither Anthropocene nor Biocentric is precise, instead, enlivenment is that “Humanity is a part of nature, and nature is a part of Humanity” and he asserts that “Enlivenment is the Romanticism 2.0” (Weber, A. 2013. Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics).

59 Chapter 3 Literature Review: Urban Farming and Its Functions

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. — Masanobu Fukuoka, natural farming advocate and author

The planet we are living on today is ever more an urban place, and the earlier frequently mentioned term “planetary urbanization” precisely illustrates this enormous scale of the urbanizing of our planet, a fact that “every nook and cranny of the earth is now directly or indirectly enrolled in assuring the expanding reproduction of the urbanization process” (Swyngedouw, 2015). The world urbanization process reached a turning point in the year of 2013 when for the first time in human history the population in the city outweighed the population living in the countryside. The urban environment based daily life, supported by the capitalist system of mass production and consumption and essentially surviving at the cost of massive natural resource extraction as well as serious environmental destruction and pollution, is now the dominant living pattern for more than half of the world’s population. Moreover, this urbanization trend is becoming an irreversible process, as the percentage of the world’s urban population is predicted to be about 66% by 2050 (Science, 2016). The irreversible increase of urban population and their consumerism-influenced lifestyle are the reasons for multiple layers of challenges that human societies have to face together. First, cities and city life have become the roots of the overall world environmental degradation. The sustenance of current urban life is responsible for 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005), for the accelerating mobilization of all natural resources, materials and elements, and for producing most of the world’s waste (Swyngedouw, 2015). Second, city life places city people under the conditions of over-crowding, provision pressure, unemployment risk, interpersonal conflicts and various trivial hassles. In general, the oxymoronic city life, which is both over-crowded but also distant and fragmentized, leads to societal disorganization and is reinforced by the weakening of social norms resulting from the divergent interests and lifestyles among different groups in the city (Park, 1961; Knox and Pinch, 2006). Third, city life leaves city individuals unrestrained in pursuing ego-centered behavior through

60 maximized urban material living and consumerism on the one hand, but also leaves the person both physically and mentally vulnerable and unsupported in facing multiple personal crises in the urban living situations of competition, atomization and alienation. In face of these multiple urban-driven challenges, questions arise along the irreversible process of urbanization: How could the city provide people a better life with these challenges? How are the individuals affected by city living conditions? How do they cope with the city challenges from their individual perspectives? To cope with these challenges, there is an emerging global focus on a desire for the sustainable city in this era of planetary urbanization. City people around the world have started to react in their own ways to better their life as they wish. Over the last decade or so, a widespread movement surrounding urban farming has emerged in many cities; accumulating evidence has documented to demonstrate that green and productive cities have the potential of being more sustainable (Holland, 2004; Viljoen, 2005; Mougeot, 2006; Tidball and Krasny, 2006; Van Veenhuizen, 2006; Beilin and Hunter, 2011; McClain et al., 2014; Taylor and Lovell, 2014; Tornaghi, 2014; Clintock et al., 2016; Samangooei et al, 2016; WinklerPrins, 2017c). There is a gradual understanding of the need to embrace urban farming as something integral to urban life to facilitate city individuals to manage their daily life in coping with all kinds of challenge (Smit et al., 1996; Koc et al., 1999; van Veenhuizen 2006; De Zeeuw et al., 2011; Taylor and Lovell, 2015; Opitz et al., 2016; WinklerPrins, 2017c). This chapter is an effort to review the worldwide research achievements hitherto on urban farming studies by introducing the classic urban farming literature, the key empirical research angles, and the theoretical research frameworks. However, the main purpose of this chapter will be to introduce the urban farming functions in responding to urban life challenge under the theoretical framework of metabolic rift in a broad social metabolism view of understanding. That is, to understand the functions of urban farming as the possibilities to repair the metabolic rifts problems aforementioned in Chapter 2. 3.1 Discussion of the Term “Urban Farming” This dissertation uses the term “urban farming” to indicate relevant cultivation activities conducted in city spaces. However, besides the term “urban farming”, there are dozens of other terms that have been used to describe the activities of growing or producing food in city space. “Urban Agriculture26” is the most comprehensive and commonly used term, which emphasizes the city food production industry as a whole, including not only the growing of vegetables, fruits and herbs, but also the production of fowl, livestock, aquaculture, and even entomophagy (Smit et al., 1996; Mougeot, 2000). “Urban cultivation” is another increasingly used term, less inclusive than urban agriculture, but also including cultivation both of plants and animals (WinklerPrins, 2017c). In addition, terms like “metropolitan agriculture”, “urban horticulture”, “urban gardening”, “urban edible gardening”, “home gardening”, and “family farming”, etc., have been applied to describe the city space cultivation activities in English language written documents. In many non-academic and less rigorous occasions, some of these terms are practically interchangeable, and even in academic situations, as long as the

26 A widely accepted and frequently adopted definition of Urban Agriculture was elaborated by Smit et al (1996): “Urban agriculture can be defined as […] an industry that produces, processes, and markets food, fuel, and other outputs, largely in response to the daily demand of consumers within a town, city, or metropolis, on many types of privately and publicly held land and water bodies found throughout intra-urban and peri-urban areas. Typically urban agriculture applies intensive production methods, frequently using and reusing natural resources and urban wastes, to yield a diverse array of land-, water-, and air-based fauna and flora, contributing to the food security, health, livelihood, and environment of the individual, household, and community.”

61 definition could be properly addressed, there will not be authoritative objection to any of the terms selected. In this writing, “urban farming” has been selected as the “official” term to indicate most of the relevant cultivation activities in my research in both the Chengdu and Freiburg cases. There are five reasons: 1) my research focuses on a relatively narrow sense of agriculture27, mainly on growing plants, including edible plants – vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruit trees, etc.; 2) most of my randomly selected interviewees in the field cultivate only plants, not any animals; 3) in my field research and interviews, urban farming is the easiest phrase and immediately understandable term for the interviewees and other stakeholders when I started to introduce the purpose of my appearing in their plots or gardens; 4) the Chinese term “城市農耕”, which is the most widely used to indicate the relevant urban food growing activities in China, is mostly translated as “urban farming” in dictionaries; 5) I was working for urban farming projects in the city of Chengdu in China before I started my academic career, and “urban farming” is the term I have been very used to through the years. For these five reasons, I unify the use of “urban farming” in my dissertation, even though in most of the Freiburg cases, interviewees should be more properly under the category of “urban gardening” practitioners, who arrange part of their garden with edible plants (vegetable, culinary and medicinal herbs, fruit trees), and another part of the garden with flowers and other ornamental plants. In addition, given variously cited and literature review references and varied forms of cultivation of urban edible plants in my empirical research, the terms “urban agriculture”, “urban cultivation”, “urban gardening” and the others will be unavoidably mentioned; there will be a mixed use of all these terms accompanying the main use of “urban farming” in this dissertation. By the way, a few words about the indication of “urban” in the use of the term “urban farming” in this writing. In most of the empirical cases of my research, the randomly selected urban farming participants and their farming or gardening plots are located right inside the city space. Therefore the urban farming space indicated in this dissertation would not intentionally contain the scale of peri-urban areas28, but in very specific cases, when the interviewees’ farming practice locates them in the peri-urban area, I will then point this out specifically. 3.2 Brief Review of Urban Farming Studies From receiving attention to becoming popular, the latest round of popularity for urban farming did not take a long time. The growing attention to urban farming has been demonstrated by the prominent international organizations like FAO, UNDP, IDRC, RUAF and others. An increasing number of research studies and publications have also been focusing on urban farming from various aspects and with diverse topics. There are the publications of urban farming edited in a comprehensive collection, such as Smit, Nasr, and Ratta’s (1996) classic contribution to Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities, first published in 1996, Rene van Veenhuizen’s (2006) edition of

27 If drawing on the urban agricultural definition from Smit et al. (1996), which includes all the aquaculture, livestock, horticulture, agroforestry and other miscellaneous type, the variety of urban agricultural produce can be listed as diverse as that of the conventional agriculture. The inventory will be as long as to include the conventional agricultural produce of fish, meat, milk, eggs, manure, vegetable, fruits, fuel, nuts, compost, timbers, herbs, flowers, mushroom, and so on. But in this writing, since the urban farming has been confined to plant or edible plant growing, therefore the urban farming produce refers mostly to the plant produce like vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers and so on. However, the broader sense of urban agricultural produce will also be mentioned when necessary. 28 Peri-urban farming plots are located at the city periphery, often within one-two hours driving distance with public or private transportation.

62 Cities Farming for the Future: Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities, and the latest published document Global Urban Agriculture, edited by WinklerPrins (2017c); there are also the publications edited from more specific subjects related to urban farming, such as an earlier one edited by Koc, MacRae, Mougeot and Welsh (1999), For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable Urban Food Systems, concentrating on urban and poverty related food issues, including urban farming, and Agropolis: the Social, Political and Environmental Dimensions of Urban Agriculture, a collection of case studies edited by Mougeot (2005). In addition, there are growing numbers of research papers and scientific articles studying urban farming from the perspectives of history, farming techniques and plot management, functions and restrictions, potential and trends, participants and organizations, urban planning and city sustainability, policy and governance, North and South comparisons, as well as theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. Meanwhile, urban farming has been studied from very different aspects, mainly urban farming produces, techniques, types of space used, locations, forms of tenure, degree of permanence, participant and stakeholders involved, purpose of farming, organizational mode, governance, and other aspects (Smit et al., 1996; Schlesinger, 2013). The following section is a very quick selective summary of these publications, starting with a glimpse of urban farming in history. 3.2.1 Brief History of Urban Farming: from Ancient Civilizations to Present Trends “The history of urban agriculture can be told beginning at any time and place in human history” (Smit, 2002), because food from the soil is the most essential for life and has always accompanied urban settlements throughout human history. Therefore it is hard to give a precise starting point of either time or place for urban farming. However, for building some basic historical impressions of urban farming, some ancient civilizations’ cases could be mentioned as reference. In ancient Greece, even though the land and weather conditions of their city-states were not optimal for farming conditions, archaeological findings demonstrate that these city- states were always surrounded by farmland, cultivated terraces, and aqueducts, and were highly self-sufficient. Taking one of the ancient Greek kingdoms, Mycenae, for example, even though the Mycenaean civilization (1600-1000 BC) was known as a commercial one and relied for its wealth upon trade by sea, the citadel had always its own farmland in the surrounding area, because they could not count on trade to provide food with any security, but had to grow the crops by themselves (Kagan29, 2007). Archaeological fieldwork and aerial imagery have unveiled massive structures within or on the edge of the urban settlements built by ancient civilizations, to be used wholly or in part to grow crops or shrubs, ornamental, medicinal and other non-crop plants (Mougeot, 1994). The most recent evidence is from a news report on laser techniques: in early 2018, archaeologists using aerial laser mapping techniques detected a hidden ancient Mayan urban structures under the jungle of Guatemala; the discoveries show that ancient Mayans cultivated intensively in and around their urban habitat, and left large scale sites

29 https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205/lecture-2. Source: Open Yale Courses, video of “Introduction to Ancient Greek History”, Lecture 2 – The Dark Ages, Lecture Chapter 3: The Citadel, Farmland, Burials and the Oil Trade [00:16:07], by Professor Donald Kagan, 2007. Last Retrieved: April 22, 2019. The transcription of the lecture content in regard to Myceneaen citadel and farmland: “…The Mycenaen civilization was a commercial one, that relied for its wealth upon trade and that meant trade by sea more than by land. The citadel is always surrounded by farmland, and of course, you cannot live in ancient society, if you are not surrounded by farmland, because the food that comes from the soil is essential for life, and you can’t count on trade to provide it to you with any security. Later on, when times are more secure, there is trade for grain as well for everything else, but when you’re settling a place in the first place, you can’t rely on somebody bringing it to you. You are going to have your own people working it., and bringing it up to you themselves. So, the citadel and the farmland surrounding it, make up fundamentally the unit which is the Mycenaean kingdom…”

63 ruins of agricultural fields and irrigation canals in places which are covered with dense rainforest today. Scientists believe these urban agricultural structures were functioning during the time between 1000 BC and 900 AD (Guardian30, 2018; BBC31, 2018). Other ancient urban agricultural cases, in various forms, are found all around the world: the sky garden in ancient Babylon (approx. 1800-500 BC), the walled gardens in ancient Egypt (1500 BC), the planned complex of garden houses in the ancient Roman Empire (approx. 128 AD), the monastery farms and castle gardens in later medieval Europe (approx. 400-1400 AD), the riverine horticulture of pre-industrial cities along the Mississippi river in North America (peak 1050-1250 AD), or the floating farming-bed Chinampas in Mexico (functioning approx. 1200-1900 AD). Other examples which can be found in African and Asian countries like Ghana, China, India, Java, Pakistan, and Myanmar, etc. (Mougeot, 1994; Smit et al., 1996). All these overview cases suggest that it is very common for pre-industrial human civilizations to develop urban agriculture systems to ensure a food supply for their urban residents, and someone even argued that these intensive urban food productions are what allowed these societies to create their civilizations (Smit et al., 1996). The separation of agriculture from cities is very recent in the urban history of humanity. Mougeot, citing Marshall’s notion, argued that the exclusion of agriculture as a permanent urban function in western contemporary urbanism resulted from the prevailing 18th century Western European philosophical view, which “opposed natural to artificial, nature to civilization, natural man to urban man” (Marshall, 1992, cited in Mougeot, 1994). Along with this fundamental human-nature antagonism philosophy, Mougeot believes that the Industrial Revolution reinforced the separation of urban and farming (Mougeot, 1994). Specifically, the Industrial Revolution accelerated labor specialization; urban factory laborers and rural agricultural laborers and their tasks were strictly distinguished. Detailed reasons and mechanism that caused the urban and farming separation need further studies, but the consequences were that such separation has been gradually formalized in the process of industrialization and urbanization, with well-intentional design and management by urban technocrats, guided by expertise influenced by the entrenched human-nature antagonism philosophy and ideology of their time. The popular idea of urban sewage systems originated in European cities in the 19th century and the attached “modern” knowledge and understanding of sanitation at that time would be a very concrete and relevant example to show how the establishment of the modern sanitation system played a role in ending the traditional urban farming system, first in European cities, and later in colonial countries and other places in the world. Today, most city people have forgotten that before the modern urban sanitation systems were developed in the latter part of the 19th century in Europe, urban agriculture was the principal treatment and disposal method for urban waste in different parts of the world; many city cultivations used urban sewage water, horse manure, or even “night soil”, that is nutrient-rich human faeces, as fertilizer (Smit et al., 1996; McClintock, 2010). However, with the introduction of the modern sanitation system, as well as the widely accepted modern ideas about the beautiful city and healthful city, traditional city waste treatment systems were gradually replaced by the spearheading idea to “sanitize”

30 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/03/scientists-discover-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-under- guatemalan-jungle. Source: The Guardian website, Archaeology, article of “Scientists Discover Ancient Mayan City Hidden under Guatemalan Jungle”, 2018. Last Retrieved: April 22, 2019. 31 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261. Source: The BBC website, article of “Sprawling Maya Network Discovered under Guatemala Jungle”, 2018. Last Retrieved: April 22, 2019.

64 the cities, a trend that has also minimized the use of urban waste. As part of the result, urban farming, which had relied on the supply of urban waste, also slowly faded away from most of the urban landscape. Since then, the 19th century European city panacea of “everything to the sewer” has been spreading around the world for more than a century. City sanitation systems, combined with technologies, have been applied to clean up the urban environment. Nevertheless, the approach has created problems in both developed and developing countries. The systems are regarded as unsustainable because they either shift the waste to waterbodies outside the city ecosystem, or they have to dispose of increasing volumes of wastes produced by sprawling city magnitudes and exploding city populations, and more and more often, the sewage system fails to play its intended role of cleaning up the city (Smit et al., 1996). However, during the industrial era, even though the idea of modern city sanitation and the tendencies of industrialization and urbanization were leading to extended distances between urban settlements and farming worldwide, because of the uneven development phases, there were still many cities preserving the urban farming practices, especially in developing countries, which usually lacked financial and technological conditions to build modern city sewage system, and where people also maintained traditional farming knowledge and practices. Asian countries had a long tradition of urban agriculture, and early recognition of the benefits of recycling waste for farming practices. In colonial India, when the idea of urban sanitation was introduced for its city systems, Indian people were still insisting on their old tradition of “everything to the soil”, a notion matching with their farming traditions (Geddes, 1918, cited in Smit et al., 1996). Nineteenth-century China, with thousands of large and small towns, excelled at urban agriculture, and the application of “night soil” to farmland was central to both China’s urban waste management and urban agricultural production (UNDP, 1996; Smit et al., 1996; McClintock, 2010). Urban farming in African countries has been practiced during a relatively shorter period of time than in Asian countries, because many current African cities were established in the 19th and early 20th centuries by European colonial rulers who believed in the precepts of modern cleanliness and urban beauty, distinguished from rural dirty. But some early African urban farming examples could be found in Ghana, where the early colonial travelers reported aqua-terra farming systems in its southern coastal area, while in its northern region, human waste was reported to be widely used in some peri-urban zones (Smit et al., 1996; Cofie et al., 2005; McClintock, 2010). After the post WWII independence movements, even though low-income households cultivated in cities on their own initiatives, urban farming in most African countries kept being undervalued by public officials until the leaders started to realize that urban farming and agriculture have the potential to alleviate the growing hunger, and to cope with economic and environmental crises in the ever-expanding metropolitan areas of Africa (Smit et al., 1996). Further, with the development of urbanization and economic growth, a gap develops between the poor and the rich in most African countries, just as urban agriculture also split into farming practices for the rich and farming practices for the poor (Smit et al., 1996). In developed countries, the fate of urban farming has changed several times since the separation between urban and farming in the 18th and 19th centuries. In a very general sense, the history of urban farming in developed countries can be roughly divided into three phases: Industrial Revolution to WWI/WWII, post-WWII to 1970s/1980s, and 1980 onward till the present. Since the Industrial Revolution, even though mass vanishing was the trend of urban farming, some newly recognized values of farming

65 started to be practiced in European cities. One of these values of urban farming was to fight against hunger and city poverty, which appeared as the consequences of urbanization and immigration after the Industrial Revolution (Drescher, 2001). In the UK, the practice of a “small garden” or “guinea garden” started as early as the later 18th century for factory workers, and more allotment gardens were offered to the working class in the 19th century (Gaskell, 1980; Willes, 2015). In France, in response to living and nutritional conditions of the working poor, mini-farms or gardens were pioneered, provided to the city residents in the later part of the 19th century (Smit et al, 1996; Nilsen, 2014). In Germany, in addition to the “gardens for the poor”, another newly recognized function of gardening was created in the middle of the 19th century, for city children to have safer, better and more meaningful places to spend their time (Smit et al., 1996; Drescher, 2001). However, although these new farming values were in practice, the overall decline of urban farming in developed countries did not stop, except for the two world wars. During the two world wars, about one-half of the nutrition of cities on both sides of the conflict was produced in urban or peri-urban areas (Crouch and Ward, 1988; Smit et al., 1996). The decline in urban farming which had begun with the Industrial Revolution, accelerated after a short time of thriving during WWII. In the following 30 to 40 post- war years, urban farming still existed in developed countries but in a shrivelling situation until in the 1970s and 1980s, when a resurgence of urban farming gradually began in many industrial cities in developed countries (Smit et al., 1996). In Italy, small-scale urban farmers organized themselves into associations to advocate for a “green” movement and “slow food” movement, which promotes a “grow it, cook it, eat it slowly” approach. In France and Germany, the urban agriculture movement has been growing for decades and is now just achieving its ascendancy (Smit et al., 1996; Drescher, 2001; Nilsen, 2014). In the UK, the original country of many worldwide movements concerning animal rights, nature, food and sustainability, another well- known world-wide movement in regard to urban gardening, named “Transitional Town”, has been formed as an integration of all the other concerns. The UK is now estimated to have 250,000 allotments, with a waiting list of 10,000 people who desire to access their own small plot of land (Leapman, 2015). In the United States, as well as in many other countries, urban farming is now understood slowly by some people as a holistic livelihood and lifestyle that keeps them connected to the generative power of food cultivation; city people start growing their own vegetables and raising chickens in their backyards, on rooftops, or in community gardens, and urban agriculture has gradually come to be regarded as either a part- or a full-time occupation (WinklerPrins, 2017c). At this time, urban farming is flourishing in very different circumstances than any former experiences in human history. The whole writing of this dissertation, both the theoretical elaborations and the empirical research discussions is an attempt to expound my explanation of the thriving of the urban farming movement in our recent era. 3.2.2 Theorizing Urban Farming Urban farming has become a hotspot of academic studies and is a subject rich in theorizing, because its multiple features can place different logics and epistemologies in parallel to check for their congruencies and divergences. So far, urban farming has attracted scholars from the disciplines of sociology, environmental sociology, geography, urban geography, urban social geography, ecology, urban politic ecology, critical urban studies, environmental studies, and sustainability studies, among others, to dissect the details of urban farming facts, structures and functions through varied disciplinary, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary lenses. Meanwhile different

66 theoretical models and frameworks have been applied to analyze urban farming; in this writing, frameworks such as social-ecological system theory and resilience theory, actor-network theory and assemblage theory, critical urban studies and urban assemblage framework, urban sustainability, and sustainable livelihoods framework will be selected for brief introductions. In addition, the core theoretical framework of this writing – metabolic rift – will be specially stressed, and the existing literature which applied has metabolic rift theory to analyze urban farming practice and their functions to repair the metabolic rift problems will be reviewed. 1) Social-ecological System Theory (SES) and Resilience Theory SES is said to be the dominant paradigm in urban ecological research, mainly using the ecosystem service concept to describe and explain the complex interactions between humans and their environment, as well as to assess the quality of ecosystems and how these systems provide services to humans. SES is prone to be applied to analyze the residential landscape which has more intensive human-environment interactions, and food gardens obviously belong to such human-environment interacted landscape. Drawing on SES, urban farming scholars conceptualize the home gardens and farming plots as agroecosystems and apply the ecosystem services concept to evaluate how these farming gardens provide ecosystem services (Aguilarstoen et al., 2009; Calvet Mir et al., 2012b; Cook et al., 2012). Complemented with the concept of resilience, SES has been integrated in a more interdisciplinary social-ecological resilience framework. Urban farming’s functions and impacts of building adaptive and transformative capacities of urban systems, thus promoting urban systems’ social and ecological resilience, are the special research interest for urban farming scholars under this framework (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Social-ecological resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks, and therefore identity, that is, the capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity” (Folke et al., 2010). Urban farming is regarded as having the potential to enhance the resilience of cities to crises because it can “integrate natural, human, social, financial, and physical capital in cities”, and by “encompass diversity, self-organization, and adaptive learning and management leading to positive feedback loops” (Tidball and Krasny, 2007). A special research interest of this framework is to examine the relationship between culture, farming and resilience. Farming has been considered to play a large cultural role when social-ecological memory is reproduced through farming, and to have a larger impact on urban ecosystem services and system resilience, which specifically include the enhancement of ecological processes, the conservation of biodiversity and agrobiodiversity, the increasing of food security, the reproduction of cultural identity, the resistance to marginalization, and the development of farming-centered social networks based on the exchange of crop germplasm, food, knowledge and other resources. These functions empower individuals, households and communities and buffer them from ecological, social and economic disturbance (Buchmann, 2009; Aguilar-Støen et al., 2009; Calvet-Mir et al., 2012a; Taylor and Lovell, 2014). 2) Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Assemblage Theory Taylor and Lovell’s (2014) Actor-Network Theory has potential relevance to the study of urban farming. ANT accepts all “things” – including physical objects, non-human organisms, ideas, discourses, virtually anything – as “full-blown actors”. Although these non-human actors may lack intention when compared to human actors, they are still

67 involved in the course of action as some of the participants (Latour, 2005). According to ANT, urban farming, as a process of action, involves not only the human participants, but also all the non-human participants; as a produced process, urban farming is the effect of the conjoint action of a swarm of things and activities. ANT has not been applied to urban farming study, but only to the study of ornamental residential gardening (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). In addition to ANT, assemblage theory has also been considered by Taylor and Lovell (2014) as having the potential to be applied to urban farming studies, because with a similar understanding as that of ANT, assemblage theory is also composed of heterogeneous human and non-human elements. Like ANT, assemblage theory seeks to blur the dichotomous divisions between human and non-human, social and material, structure and agency, and emphasizes the conjoint action and the non-reducible effect made by the elements of an assemblage (De Landa, 2006; Anderson and McFarlane, 2011; Taylor and Lovell, 2014). When assemblage theory is applied to urban farming studies, in Taylor and Lovell’s argument, human farmers are not the only actor in the farming process: “humans cannot act alone, self-interest demands attention and sensitivity to the role and preservation of members of the assemblage that have no voice” (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Comparing SES, ANT and assemblage theory within urban farming studies, Taylor and Lovell argued that SES emphasizes more the agency of human farmers in the farming actions, while from the perspective of ANT and assemblage theory, the human farmer does not act alone, but works in conjoint action with other non-human farming elements. Citing Bennett’s (2010) notion, Taylor and Lovell contended that the political implication of assemblage theory and ANT is to expand the “public” to include nonhuman, living and non-living entities in addition to humans (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). 3) Critical Urban Studies (CUS) and Urban Assemblage Framework (UAF) In the field of critical urban studies, the urbanization process of city-regions has been considered as expanding in a global scope, meaning that the mega-cities are inflating themselves, increasing their reliance on a “super exurban”, reaching out far more deeply into hinterlands and rampaging over the whole planet scale, a so immense process that scholars title as “planetary urbanization” (Heynen et al., 2006b; Swyngedouw, 2015; WinklerPrins, 2017c). Critical urban studies pay special attention to the phenomenon of urbanization of nature in a capitalist context, the metabolized process through which all manner of non-human stuff is socially mobilized, discursively scripted, economically enrolled, and physically transformed to produce socio-ecological assemblages that support the city growing process (Heynen et al., 2006b) . Urban assemblage framework is thus introduced in critical urban studies, and similar to ANT and assemblage theory, the urban assemblage approach also seeks to unify the parts in a holistic view of the entire urban system (Heynen et al., 2006b; WinklerPrins, 2017c). In the study of urban farming, the approach focuses on the role urban farming plays in the assemblages of urban life and its multiple flows of food, people, knowledge, material, etc. (Brenner et al., 2011; McFarlane, 2011a,b; Shillington, 2013). In WinklerPrins’ understanding, the urban assemblage framework “helps shift the discourse about urban farming from a developmentalist and problem based narrative to a solutions-focused one” and “emphasizes the creative powers of marginalized people in cities …and focuses on their ability to make the (chaotic) city work” (WinklerPrins, 2017c).

68 4) Urban Sustainability Like critical urban studies which take urban-regions as the sink center of natural resource extraction and depletion, urban sustainability takes cities as the main cause of the global environmental degradation (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996; Odum, 1997; WI, 2013; Vojnovic, 2014). The difference is that urban sustainability is a more advocacy- and-action-oriented concept which has been making great efforts to set up sustainability indicators for guiding sustainability initiatives in cities (Vojnovic, 2014). Urban sustainability is derived from the concept and discourse of sustainability and can be broadly interpreted as the “economic, social and physical organization of cities and their populations in ways that accommodate the needs of current and future generations while preserving the quality of the natural environment and its ecological functions over time” (Vojnovic, 2014). In addition, urban sustainability is specially understood in the context of the rapid expansion of urban metabolism, which gives insight into the causal connection among living styles, consumption patterns, resource extraction and environmental degradation within a macro social-ecological metabolic process (Vojnovic, 2014). Urban farming is regarded as a rich field of interdisciplinary inquiry for developing ideas and ideals for urban sustainability, because of its contribution towards all the three aspects of urban sustainability: environmental, social, and economic. Urban farming contributes to environmental benefits like greening the city, increasing urban biodiversity, facilitating drainage of water, alleviating the urban heat island effect, reducing ecological footprints, limiting the distance for produce to be transported, closing the ecological loop by community-supported peri-urban agriculture and others, including social benefits like reconnecting people and their food sources, bringing healthy food to “urban food deserts” in which there are only a few fresh produce offerings, contributing to trust and justice, enhancing relationships, increasing community cohesion, beautifying the community, improving cross-cultural and cross- generational linkages, serving as a bridge to access social services including nutritional education, youth development, and job training; and economic benefits like buffering the household income, creating jobs, rebuilding the economically declining community and developing the economic potential of cultivating abandoned spaces (Tornaghi, 2014; WinklerPrins, 2017c; Palmer, 2018). 5) Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) The sustainable livelihoods framework in the past was mainly used in the developing countries as a tool in rural development planning and rural poverty eradication (Carney, 1998; Krantz, 2001; Rakodi, 2002; Gallaher et al., 2015). Livelihood in this concept is defined as the “capabilities, assets and activities required for a means of living”; a livelihood is sustainable when it “can cope with and recover from stress and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base” (Chambers and Conway, 1992; Scoones, 1998; Krantz, 2001). Instead of understanding poverty from a single narrow aspect such as low income, SLF suggests considering other vital aspects of poverty like vulnerability and social exclusion, and meanwhile paying attention to poor people’s ability to make a living in an economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable manner (Krantz, 2001). SLF starts with considering households from the aspects of capabilities and assets, instead of problems and limits, and it elaborates on the various ‘capitals’ the poor have – physical, natural, human, financial and social, etc. (WinklerPrins, 2017c).

69 The idea to apply SLF in urban agriculture studies is proposed by WinklerPrins (2017c), based on her understanding of urban agriculture as having a critical role in coping with urban poverty issues in both developing and developed countries. Through SLF’s perspective, the role of urban agriculture is not only to provide food or to increase income of the city poor, but also to offer them ecological benefits, social networks, individual health and personal empowerment, etc. There are well documented research findings in developing countries: urban agriculture is reported to diversify diets (Cabalda et al., 2001), increase food security of families and communities (Kumar and Nair 2004; Buchmann 2009), strengthen household and community resilience (Aguilar- Støen et al., 2009; Buchmann 2009), as well as support urban livelihoods and provide complementary or alternative sources of income for households (Me´ndez et al., 2001; Kumar and Nair 2004; Drescher et al., 2006). Winklerprins (2017c) argued that given the strong connection between urban agriculture and the urban poor as mentioned in many studies in developing countries, SLF has the potential to be applied as a framework to analyze urban agriculture and its functions to help alleviate urban poverty also in the developed countries also. 6) Metabolic Rift Theory One of the earliest efforts that combines urban farming with metabolic rift theory within a multiple-layer analysis occurred in McClintock’s article Why Farm the City? (2010), the very first article referring to urban farming’s functions to help mend the three dimensions of ecological, social and individual rift problems. In McClintock’s understanding, urban farming has the ability to close up the nutrient cycle and repair other ecological rifts; it also helps to reclaim public space and strengthen the sense of community, increase the new immigrants’ confidence and reduce their cultural shock, and mitigate other social rifts by de-commodifying land, labor and food; also, urban farming can help to heal the individual rifts by reconnecting consumers with their food, laborers with the fruits of their work, and people with the natural environment. Being enlightened by McClintock or by the metabolic rift theory itself, urban farming scholars have been gradually using the rift theory to analyze the function of urban farming for healing the related rift problems. Some urban farming researchers directly apply the three dimensions of metabolic rift theory as a holistic analytical framework; some others take metabolic rift as a general concept, and apply it in a relatively narrow sense and from a single aspect. In addition, when applying the concept of metabolic rift to analyze the problems that urban farming tries to deal with, some scholars dig and delve into the root of these problems in light of metabolic rift theory’s critiques of capitalist-driven industrial production, commodification of food, privatization of land and city space, rural-urban antagonism, and human-nature alienation, while some other scholars prefer to understand these problems within a capitalist boundary, which means that instead of examining urban farming and its functions from a critical point of view towards fundamental capitalist mechanisms, urban farming’s functions are understood in a relatively shallow sense within the capitalist system, as the expedient tool and solution for the related urban living complications. McLaughlin and Clow (2008) applied metabolic rift theory to examine the extent to which organic farming addresses the metabolic rift problems. They understood the environmental impacts of industrial farming and its food system, and their cultural and structural roots embedded within a capitalist system. They also understood that the capitalist human and nature interaction (e.g. in the agricultural production process) is constructed under a non-ecological culture of a declining awareness of nature and a capitalist understanding narrowly obsessed with economic expansion to accumulate

70 profit with total disregard for agricultural ecosystems. Moreover, McLaughlin and Clow were quite aware of the roles that science and social organization played to help the capitalist system to control the industrial agricultural process, and its exploitation of both nature and laborers. In their case studies, McLaughlin and Clow’s article was concerned with the antagonism between town and country, and discussed the possibility of applying urban sewage to the farmland to close up the broken nutrient cycle between cities and rural areas. Sbicca (2014) applied the metabolic rift theory to analyze food inequality and food- related health problems within an industrial, commodified and corporate-controlled social context under the capitalist system of neoliberalization. Metabolic rift, in this article, referred to the socio-ecological dialectics of rupture and repair between humans and their food on both the social and individual levels, and food waste was referred to as a specific case of the alienation between people and food. Sbicca argued that intuitive and experiential knowledge of social metabolism should be at the heart of urban food access, and urban farming can remind city people that food is first the outcome of seeds, soil, sun and water with human engagement. The article did not take urban farming as the research topic, but instead looked at alternative urban food distribution activities. These food distribution activities were organized with the purposes of creating less commodified and less alienated people-food relationships. Urban farmers are important participants of these food distribution activities and urban farming is also part of the alternative urban food access for city poor and working class people. Watson (2016) did apply the metabolic rift concept to analyze urban farming, but his application of metabolic rift was mainly used to justify his advocacy of urban vertical farming, a relatively narrow type of urban farming option. Watson argued that according to the concept of metabolic rift, vast industrialized farming and far distant food chains provide massive and cheap foods at enormous ecological and social costs, such as the soil fertility loss and organic open-loop problem, as well as the problem of the growing disconnection between food producers and consumers. He asserted that urban farming in certain vertical forms has the capacity to mend the metabolic rift that affects people and their food system by closing up the nutrient loop and by shortening the distance between people and their food. Bowness and Wittman (2017) also applied the metabolic rift theory to justify urban farming, but their emphasis has been to underline urban farming’s food production function in healing the rift between food and people, labor and land, city and country, society and nature, within the context of the food sovereignty movement. Specifically, they studied urban agriculture’s role to close the metabolic rift by increasing food security, empowering consumers in food system decision-making, reclaiming urban lands, closing nutrient cycle loops and reconnecting urban residents to nature. Bowness and Wittman cited Schneider and McMichael’s (2010) concept of epistemic rift to emphasize the accelerating separation between the “(rural) experience and knowledge of the practice of agro-ecology” and the “(city) conditions of social life under capitalism”, and they also referred to McClintock’s three dimensions of metabolic rifts and urban farming’s ability to close them. Bowness and Wittman’s application of metabolic rift was tracking down the path of urban political ecology, which emphasizes the ecological and social justice aspects of urban food production. Bowness and Wittman’s research was focusing on the food production and food sovereignty aspects of urban farming, but they emphasized that food should not be the end goal of urban farming, and cited Tornaghi (2014)’s call for the comprehensive study of urban farming in capitalism, in urban metabolic processes, and in new socio-environmental conditions.

71 In the report of Urban Agriculture Europe (Lohrberg et al., 2016), Tornaghi, Sage and Dehaene studied the integrated metabolic perspective of urban farming through the concepts of “industrial ecology” and “political ecology”. From an industrial ecology perspective, urban farming is analyzed for its potential beneficial impact on the flows of water and carbon, and in general, for providing ecosystem services and closing loops of resources needed for food production; from a political ecology perspective, urban farming is studied for its social, political, cultural and economic factors and how these factors influence the aforementioned flows. All the factors that hinder the running of these flows and prevent the flourishing of urban farming, in Tornaghi et al’s understanding, will also break up the metabolic processes between humans and the natural environment, that is, creating the formation of metabolic rift (Tornaghi et al., 2016). Tornaghi et al. understood urban farming’s function of mending metabolic rift through shaping an urban continuum between humans and the surrounding urban environment: on the one hand, urban farmers and gardeners work through their labor contributing to the soil, water, waste management for urban surroundings and creating ecological environmental amenities; on the other hand, a pleasant ecological environment contributes reciprocally a range of physiological and psychological benefits on the individual level, as well as many collective benefits on the community level (Tornaghi et al., 2016). In sum, Tornaghi, Sage and Dehaene provided a precise reflection of the intersection between urban farming and urban metabolism and identified models of urbanism that not only accommodate urban farming, but recognise it as a core element needed to deliver a resourceful, emancipatory, healthy, and both socially and ecologically just city (Tornaghi et al., 2016; Dehaene et al., 2016). Although also taking the concept of metabolic rift to analyze urban farming and its functions for city environment, Tornaghi, Sage and Dehaene created an analytical framework which differs from McClintock’s three dimensions approach WinklerPrins, in the latest edition of Global Urban Agriculture (2017c), was among the first to strictly apply the three dimensional analysis of metabolic rift theory to an urban farming study. Using the language of metabolic rift, WinklerPrins understood urban farming as providing productive green that helps heal the metabolic rift, challenging deeply entrenched thinking about the alienation of human and nature. In the ecological dimension, she understood that farming helps the closing of the nutrient cycle in the city, using materials already in place and engaging in waste (nutrient) recycling in the process of cultivation and thus reconstituting urban soil. In the social dimension, she argued that urban farming heals the social disconnect by providing people with their direct needs of food, creating social capital, reconnecting dispossessed and marginalized people to each other, empowering them in urban places, and supporting community at various scales. In the individual dimension, WinklerPrins understood urban farming as a means that reconnects people to nature to improve their individual health, and simultaneously connects people to work to make them feel a productive part of society. In addition, Corcoran et al. (2017), have also lightly mentioned the three dimensions of metabolic rift theory and their application to analyses of urban farming in the Ireland case study. *** There are many other urban farming scholars, who, even though they did not apply metabolic rift as the theoretical framework to analyze urban farming, have contributed empirical case studies, especially the function-associated urban farming studies, which possess convergences with metabolic rift theory in discussing of urban farming’s role to provide ecological, social, cultural and individual benefits for city living. These

72 function-associated urban farming studies rarely cover all the dimensions of rift issues, but in each of these studies, at least one dimension of the rift-related urban farming functions would be studied and discussed to a certain extent. The main task of the next section will be to tentatively integrate these scattered function studies of urban farming under the theoretical framework of metabolic rift, from all the four dimensions of rift problems as have been conceptualized earlier in Chapter 2. 3.3 Urban Farming Discussion Under Metabolic Rift Framework Before moving directly to the main task of this section, to integrate the scattered function-associated studies of urban farming under the metabolic rift framework, I would like first to very briefly clarify three myths haunting urban farming. These myths have long misrepresented the significance of urban farming and its broader values, and hindered a holistic understanding of both the actual roles and the potential capabilities of urban farming in face of the worldwide challenges of more accelerating and escalating socio-ecological metabolic process on a more urbanized world, including both the developed and developing countries. Myth 1 - Urban farming is about food production, provision and consumption. Urban farming studies have disproportionally paid their attention to the domain of food production issues (Mougeot, 1994; Mougeot, 1999; Koc et al., 1999). There are studies that have spent their energy to argue whether urban farming can produce enough to feed the city population. Smit et al. (1996) estimated that urban farming (urban agriculture industry) has the huge potential to feed people in cities. Pearson et al. (2010), Ackerman et al. (2014) and Thebo et al. (2014) declaimed that their research to date demonstrates that the amount of total food produced via urban agriculture is not enough to feed the cities of the world. They estimate that total urban agricultural production can provide no more than 15-20% of the city’s request, and the rest of the city food request will continuously link to rural production or via high-tech indoor and vertical solutions. Other researchers detour away from the arguments on urban farming’s food productivity, and point out that the worldwide movement towards making unproductive city spaces productive is motivated by more-than-food-productivity concerned values (WinklerPrins, 2017c). Urban farming’s instrumental value to feed the city population is only one of its many food related values. There are other values that urban farming reflects on, still food-concerned values, but which go beyond the concern with food productivity and pay more attention to food safety, food security, food justice and even food sovereignty issues (Koc et al., 1999; Bowness and Wittman, 2017). Moreover, scholars start taking urban farming as an alternative approach to rebuild people’s connection with food under a new life philosophy which reflects people’s new life expectations, such as people’s desire to control the sources and rights to their food through urban farming (connection with food) (WinklerPrins, 2017c), or people’s needs for urban farming as part of the alternative food networks (Jarosz, 2008) which “capture a wide array of new linkages between agricultural production and food consumption that differ from conventional processes and routes” (Galt et al., 2014). Furthermore, there are studies on urban farming which have jumped out of the narrow understanding of farming as only food production related capacities, and extended the understanding of urban cultivation to much broader visions. Compared with the large number of mainstream food-concerned urban farming studies and publications, these broader ways of thinking of urban farming have just begun to catch academic scholars’ interest in recent years, and new research directions and interests are forming and waiting for further exploration (Redwood, 2009; Taylor and Lovell, 2014; WinklerPrins,

73 2017c). As with the above referred theoretical applications, scholars have started attempts to study the multiple values and functions of urban farming by combining its prime attribute of food production with other values like ecological functioning, biological and social resilience management, socio-ecological assemblages reconnecting, community building and many others (Tidball and Krasny, 2007; Taylor and Lovell, 2014; Tornaghi, 2014; Vojnovic, 2014; WinklerPrins, 2017c; Palmer, 2018). The application of metabolic rift theory, however, can inclusively cover the other theoretical analyses of urban farming’s multiple values in a capitalist-driven context, and will explicitly accentuate the crucial point that “urban farming is more than food production”. Food production is only one of the many important aspects of urban farming, and there are much more important and critical roles for urban farming to play. However, what must be emphasized here is that, even within the metabolic rift framework, food and food production is still the essential element for urban farming. Without practicing food production, urban farming, urban gardening, or urban agriculture, whatever you call it, will immediately lose its value to be studied as an independent and phenomenal subject. All the other urban farming functions and values need to be fulfilled through the integrated process of growing and tending and working with crop plants. Myth 2 - Urban farming is a temporary response to war, crisis or transitional times Urban farming is often regarded as a long tradition of productive activity which acts as a temporary expedient response to crisis. With the increasing study of urban farming in recent decades, more and more war time documents have been released from Europe and North America countries to demonstrate the important but brief role that urban farming, known as “victory gardens”, once played during WWII (Bassett, 1981; von Hassell, 2002; Lawson, 2005). When the war crisis subsided, however, these victory gardens soon lost its productive focus, and the whole idea of garden farming was thus erased from urban garden space, which becomes a place of creating pure aesthetic views and casual living experience (Bassett, 1981; Smit et al., 1996; Drescher, 2001; Moore, 2006; WinklerPrins, 2017c). During the post-war time in the last seventy years, when the world was undergoing in its relatively peaceful period of industrialization and economic development, the idea of cultivation in the city was mostly called upon at moments of response to the occurrence of economic recessions. The case of Cuba is the most prominent example of turning to urban farming for dealing with food and economic crises. After the collapse of the socialist Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, Cuba rapidly lost more than 80% of its foreign trade and almost 100% of its energy supply, generating acute economic crisis and intense national food scarcity. Urban farming, more precisely, urban agriculture (in Smit et al’s definition) was chosen as a pragmatic national strategy to react to the food and overall national crises (Cruz and Medina, 2003). Another notable and more recent example of urban farming’s response to crisis happened during the 2008 world economic crisis and post-crisis time. To respond to the food price crisis derived from the economic recession, cities from Asia to Europe, from Philippines to Ireland, turned to urban farming for food security (De Zeeuw et al., 2011; Matejowsky, 2013; Nehls et al., 2015; Corcoran et al., 2017; Calvet-Mir and March, 2019) Interestingly, however, this time, from the explosion of the 2008 crisis to recent years, the urban farming phenomenon responding to that crisis is not disappearing with the economic recovery. Instead, the international urban farming initiatives started since 2008 have developed into a decentralized local-global movement, which is still in its ascendancy. In the expansion of these urban farming movements, non-food-security and non-crisis related farming activities have been widely practiced by city cultivators.

74 Purposes and concerns of biodiversity preservation, ecological restoration, social inclusion, community building, local food advocacy, food safety, cultural heritage protection, personal development, children’s education and very many others have been added during the recent decade of post-crisis urban farming movements and are attracting more and more city people’s attention (Ferris et al., 2001; Baker, 2004; Iles, 2005; Kingsley and Townsend, 2006; Louv, 2008; Blair, 2009; Barthel et al., 2010; Williams and Brown, 2011; Borysiak et al., 2016; Lohrberg, 2016; Gray et al., 2017; Pearsall et al., 2017). The growth in attention to urban farming reflects the re- understanding and re-evaluation of urban farming from more-than-crisis aspects: First, plenty of evidence and records are demonstrating that urban farming “does occur in places that are not in crisis, and the cultivation is a desired practice by many who live in places classified as ‘urban’” (WinklerPrins, 2017c). Throughout human history, as has been introduced earlier, people have always cultivated in the cities (Mougeot, 1994; Smit et al., 1996). In other words, farming activities have always accompanied human settlements. The reason that rural areas have been historically farming areas is not because of their special rural attributes suitable for cultivation, but because of their proximity to human settlements – the villages – at that time. This means, when cities today become the common form of human settlement, urban farming could be considered as a normal part of urban living, as that of rural living, without necessarily a precipitating crisis. Second, the deeply entrenched division of what one does in the “city” versus what one does in the “countryside” is changing, and the stereotype impression of crisis-linked urban farming is also becoming out of date. In contemporary centuries, urban farming was previously conceptualized as a necessary process on the way to more “modern” ways of urban living. That would means that farming is only a rural memory activity, having only fleeting transitional value in the process of urbanization, should not be practiced as permanent activities in the “modern” urban space, and in the long run should be eliminated (WinklerPrins, 2017c). Such understanding has rendered the actual existing farming practice an informal and marginalized activity in urban people’s impression, caused urban farming to be invisible during the long history of “modern” urban design and technocratic city planning, and excluded urban farming from the imagination of what a modern city should look like (Smit et al., 1996; Covert and Morales, 2014; WinklerPrins, 2017c). Third, there is also a change in understanding, values and priorities of people’s urban life. Along with the centuries’ development of industrialization, modernization and urbanization, urban people have been reflecting on the pros and cons of urban living, and finding deeper recognition or maybe more subconscious perception of the daily-life based chronic challenges of city life conditions. If we consider all the earlier discussed key points merged together – three shifts of the industrial production, four upgraded versions of social metabolism, three major tendencies of the world’s socio-ecological metabolism – there is an explicit clue emerging: the accumulative process of the escalating social metabolism intensities, the deteriorating metabolic rift problems, and the scaling-up of human and nature alienations, have been aggregated from the previous latent, quiet and invisible conditions to be more visible or more perceivable by people living in the cities. Interpreted through metabolic rift theory, urban farming is people’s intuitive choice of reaction to the rift problems, which they otherwise have to bear passively. Through the perspective of metabolic rift, it is easier to explain that even though there is no urgent war or food shortage crisis, people still need urban farming

75 practices to deal with the chronic, lasting and accumulating multiple-dimensions of metabolic rift problems. Myth 3 - People in developed countries gain multiple values through urban farming; in developing countries, urban farming is simply about food production. The latest round of interest in urban farming has been continuously growing in the developed countries over the last ten years; the discourse has expanded from concentrating on the recreational purpose of urban farming which has started since the post-war times, to covering its different roles in response to global economic downturns, shifting environmental and social values, and increasing food-related public health concerns, promoting urban sustainability and resilience (Hou et al., 2009). The general impression of urban farming in developed countries, where food is generally sufficiently supplied, is that the food production function is only secondarily concern for people. HOWEVER, in the city of Detroit, and in other rustbelt cities of the USA, urban farming “has become a survival strategy for the disenfranchised and marginalized left behind in that city’s tumultuous deindustrialization and is, in many ways, becoming similar to the self-help survival strategies witnessed in many cities” of developing countries (White, 2011; Colasanti et al., 2012; Safransky, 2014; Opitz et al., 2016). For developing countries, on the contrary, even though they have often been described as regions with food shortages, or have been characterized by their poor economies, urban farming research often focuses on its role as a family survival or self-help strategy of complementing family income. HOWEVER, what should not be neglected is that as economic development and wealth are increasing in the developing countries, middle- income women in these countries, as a case in Senegal shows, are farming in the cities “for reasons that have less to do with their immediate need for food and is more in line with gardening as a recreational and time-filling activity”, partially reminiscent of urban farming’s role in the developed countries (Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010; White, 2015). The struggling deindustrialized and impoverished population in developed countries with their option of urban farming for survival reasons, and the rise of the middle class in developing countries and their choice of urban farming for recreation purposes – these two contrasting cases from Detroit and Senegal indicate that urban farming can satisfy people’s multiple needs in both developed and developing countries. Countries that are labelled as developed or developing are not homogeneously composed of their population and their economic conditions; instead, there are structurally impoverished people in the rich country that need to re-establish their life confidence through engaging in farming tasks, and newly wealthy people in the poor country who have also the time and condition to fulfil their inherent aesthetic demands of enjoying natural beauty by doing home gardening activities. Moreover, according to the metabolic rift theory, as well as the human-nature intrinsic connection theories, as human beings all people have the need to re-connect with nature, food, and with the fruits of their labor, because these are intrinsic human needs, regardless of their nationality, social status, or financial condition. To facilitate these essential human needs, urban farming has been universally applied, for farming activity can “activate an awareness of the inherent value of nature and empathy for non-human nature” (Crompton and Kasser, 2009). That means, even though right now it is the people in developed countries who require more urban farming to deal with their metabolic rift related issues, as the urbanization and industrialization process accelerates, developing country people’s conscious separation from food, agriculture, land and nature is gradually becoming severe. Within one or two generations, city dwellers in the

76 developing countries will experience the same natural alienations as those in the developed countries. They might soon need farming to solve the immaterial rift problems emerging in their urbanization and industrialization processes. *** Following is a more detailed literature review on urban farming function-associated studies, aiming to collect the scattered jigsaws puzzle pieces of the specific farming benefits recorded in different urban farming literature and case studies. These studies were not conducted under the theory of metabolic rift, but converge from different theoretical streams. However, regardless of different applied theories, the authentic functions of urban farming recorded in these studies could be interpreted under the framework of metabolic rift, which means in details of the ecological, epistemological, cultural, social and individual dimensions of rifts. Through the lens of metabolic rift, the following analysis will approach urban farming in a solution-focused discussion, meaning that urban farming will be examined to see to what extent it has been applied to respond to and repair the rift problems. 3.3.1 Repair Ecological Rift32 Even though urban farming has been viewed as one of the earliest deliberate nature- based solution implementations to fulfill multiple values (Bell et al., 2016; Cabral et al., 2017a), compared with its social goals and characteristics, the biophysical properties and ecological values of urban farming have received much less attention (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). To balance the disproportional understanding of urban farming’s ecological and social functions, this section will review the literature of urban farming studies from the aspect of ecological values and functions. Regarding of its general ecological functions, urban farming is known for its role in promoting environmental sustainability, aiding ecological restoration by reusing vacant lots, or reducing fuel consumption by decreasing produce travel distances (Taylor and Lovell, 2015; Cabral et al., 2017b). In addition, urban farming and gardening ecological conditions have often been recognized for their aesthetic perspective of greening city landscapes. The function of a greener urban landscape, besides offering ecologically and aesthetically pleasant scenery, can be to provide psychological, emotional, and general health benefits (Beatley, 1997; McClain et al., 2014; WinklerPrins, 2017c). As interpreted through the language of metabolic rift, urban farming and gardening can help to reconnect city residents with their alienated natural environment by bringing “naturalness” into the cities and urban spaces (Hartig and Kahn, 2016). Urban farming’s functions of repairing such human-nature alienation problems will be specifically elaborated in the later sections on the immaterial rift issue. This section’s elaboration will focus on the material rift issue, namely, the ecological rift issue, and discuss how urban farming functions to deal with the ecological aspect of problems. Gray et al. (2017) studied the ecosystem service of urban farming, and assessed specifically the supporting, provisioning and regulating services within an urban garden’s mini-ecosystem. The supporting service consists of habitat provision, biodiversity, and nutrient cycling, which work to further support the provisioning and regulating services. The provisioning service centers on the production-related ecosystem service, which in the urban farming context is mostly about, but definitely not limited to, food provision. The regulating service, defined within a urban farming

32 At a urban garden, there are the issues of water cycling, nutrient cycling, material cycling (mainly organic waste) and ecosystem integrity. When these circulation processes cannot be closed within the household gardening practice, they would indicate some ecological rift problems in the garden.

77 discussion, mainly functions by providing pollination, predator control, water and air purification, and waste decomposition, as well as climate regulation (Gray et al., 2017). As a mini-ecosystem, each urban farming plot has its limits to fulfilling all these ecosystem services, but has its special strengths to serve some of the ecological functions while it may be weaker in satisfying other functions. Meanwhile, it should also be noted here that the services of supporting, provisioning and regulating, and their functions, do not take place separately with categorical divisions of their functioning mechanisms, but instead work in an interweaving connection in a complex ecological network. A ground-based urban cultivation garden can provide macro and micro habitats for city inhabiting animals and insects, because of its diversely organized land cover with herbs, crops and berry bushes, fruit trees, ornamental trees, lawn and even hedges, and its multiple forms and layers of structuring of garden space with ponds, rainwater deposits, stumps, beehives, insect hotels, and bird houses, etc. (Cabral et al., 2017b). A well- functioning urban garden is willing to provide space for local spontaneous species33, and has a certain degree of species richness and certain variety of species distribution pattern, thus showing its service of promoting urban biodiversity. Another important supporting service urban farming can contribute is friable soil texture, a good indication which implies vigorous microbial activity as the proxy and also the precondition for nutrient cycling. Higher microbial activity in urban farming practice will be achieved due to the increased soil porosity from tillage and the increased soil organic matter from the addition of compost (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). Cabral et al’s (2017b) research finding shows that the urban farming plots that are less compliant with regulated gardening codes and have less intensive cultivation exhibit a higher soil microbial activity and a higher species richness. Empirical cases show that urban farming adds plant textures to the landscape and increases the diversity of plants, particularly of the native spontaneous plants. Native spontaneous plants can support more wildlife species and can thus serve as a good bio-indictor of ecological function. In urban gardens, plant species diversity – crop plants, non-crop plants, edible plants, ornamental plants, native spontaneous plants – and their composition have implications for the diversity of other non-plant life forms, because plant diversity can turn the cultivation areas into refuges for micro and macro level non-plant species, and thus provide the habitat conditions to foster their biodiversity (Maron and Marler, 2007; Borysiak et al., 2016; Cabral et al, 2017b; Pearsall et al., 2017; WinklerPrins, 2017c). For example, community gardens are reported to be sites of native bee diversity, and provide ecosystem services related to arthropod populations (Matteson et al., 2008; Pawelek, 2009; Andersson et al., 2007). In addition to providing biodiversity, the rich composition of non-crop plants also works to support two other ecosystem services: non-crop plants, such as flowers and other blossoming plants, support significant levels of production-related ecosystem services for food plants, by attracting bees and other pollinating insects to the garden so the crops could be pollinated, and by providing predator control to prevent the crops being damaged from its predator insects’ attack (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Other notable ecosystem services offered by urban farming activities are connected with its great potential for water regulation and nutrient cycling. Water’s natural attributes run on a macro scale of cycling: precipitating-flowing-evaporating. Human activities would affect the cycling of water through climate change, deforestation, desertification,

33 Spontaneous species here mean the non-edible herbs and native or indigenous species; this group of species is similar to the group of species known as “weeds” for the general public.

78 dam construction and urbanization. In the context of urbanization and urban farming, city cultivation land can contribute to water cycling and regulating function on the micro scale by providing openings in the urban soil surface to support water purification, water infiltration, groundwater recharge, stormwater storage and flood mitigation. To serve these water regulation functions, the soil surface must be permeable for water infiltration potential, and should also be spongy for water storage potential. In city areas, where most of the ground has been sealed with cement or paved with asphalt, and where we are losing the competence of water infiltration and storage, cultivated soils with good porosity and permeability become a very rare city ecological resource consisting of multiple ecological values. More permeable and spongy soil surfaces are composed with more loose and curly soil textures, and enhance the potential of infiltration and storage due to the increased porosity of tilled garden soils amended with organic matter (Wortman and Lovell, 2013). In an urban farming system, organic matter is mostly produced by self-made composting, the typical and widely applied approach to decompose organic wastes and to transform them into organic matter, providing not only important habitat and food for soil insects, worms and bacteria, but also very nutritious fertilizer for crop growth (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Research findings in Taylor and Lovell’s urban farming case study in Chicago indicate that the percentage of soil organic matter is relatively high across all garden sites (Drescher, 1994; Taylor and Lovell, 2015). The main nutrients needed for plant growth - phosphorous, potassium, nitrogen - and their cycle, from soil to crop, from crop to food, from food to waste, and then return back to soil, can partially be closed within a urban garden system which combines all the steps of the entire nutrient cycle from seed planting, crop growing, food consuming, to waste composting. The ecological meaning of composting in urban farming practices, discussed above, is to bring about the closure of nutrient loops to target the nutrient cycling problem in which the nutrients can hardly be kept in the context of a global and regional scale of material flow. Nutrients have been lost either in the form of organic waste that is buried in dumps, or in the form of sewage waste which has been flushed away into rivers and oceans, instead of returning back to soil and rejoining nutrient cycling. This sounds very familiar with the original metabolic rift theory, doesn’t it? In Marx’s original analysis, the most direct reason for the formation of the metabolic rift problem is that “because of the distance and antagonism between rural and city”, “the soil nutrient in the form of food that flows from rural to city cannot go back to the soil”. This indicates that in the words of metabolic rift theory, the composting in urban farming practice helps to close the nutrient related metabolic rift by taking nutrients coming from soil back to soil. As matter of fact, many other above mentioned urban farming ecological functions can also be understood in such a symbolic sense, as to “repair the broken-up rift of certain ecological cycling and flowing”. The success of urban farming’s ecosystem service functions depends on many factors. The first notable factor is relevant to the type of urban farming; different types of urban farming fulfill the ecosystem services differently. For example, urban farming in the forms of container cultivation either in the balcony or on the roof may have less ability to regulate ecological functions due to their ungrounded cultivation pattern, while ground cultivation like the allotment gardens and backyard gardens have more chance to serve multiple ecosystem functions. In fact, most of the urban farming research findings that this dissertation cites or uses as references are based on the grounded type of urban farming practices. For instance, the water related regulating functions are especially hard for urban farming to fulfill in the form of container cultivation; the findings of the

79 water regulating functions of urban farming have been collected from studies based on the grounded garden’s soil conditions. The second critical factor is relevant to farming practitioners’ awareness of ecosystem promotion and their contribution to enrich plant diversity (by purchasing, exchanging, and gifting plant species). Without the engagement of urban farmers’ ecological knowledge, value and wisdom, even the grounded gardens can be very boring and cannot fulfill their ecological functions. In addition, ecosystem functions will be achieved given the actual practice. Even with ecological awareness, the design of garden structure, the daily-life-based management practices, the application of farming techniques, and the implementation of institutional rules of urban farming and garden, will all influence the actual performance of urban farming in the contribution to urban ecosystem services. Take soil management as an example: like the diversity of garden flora collected from gardeners’ multiple sources, garden soils are often assembled from diverse sources; some of the soil is bought from gardening shops, some is scavenged from nearby alleyways or demolished building lots, and some other soils would be mixtures of the native garden soil augmented with self- made compost, manure purchased in bulk or in large bag packages, and other scavenged soil or organic matter from locations like old horse stables, forest preserves, and construction sites (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). Thus, the soil conditions can be very discrepant, so the actual function of the ecosystem service is dependent on the in situ practices of gardeners. Gardeners constitute communities of practice, with positive impacts on ecosystem stewardship, ecosystem services, and social-ecological resilience. Finally, to sum up, urban farming’s functions of healing the rifts will depend on the actual forms, as well as the actual meticulous implementations of urban farming. 3.3.2 Repair Epistemological and Cultural Rifts In the above section, when referring to urban farming related ecosystem service values and its specific function of supporting biodiversity, agro-biodiversity should have been included as a special and significant type of biodiversity in urban farming systems. However, this topic was postponed to be discussed together in this section with the theme of cultural and epistemological rift related issues, because a very interesting phenomenon is being recorded in urban farming studies: when talking about the value of agro-biodiversity, there is often an accompanying discussion of the abundant cultural influences behind the agro-biodiversity of urban farming practice. In the urbanization and globalization context, the influx of domestic migrants and international immigrants with different ethnic identities carries with it the incomers’ ability to cultivate nutrient soil, their culturally and geographically specific farming knowledge, and the traditional seed varieties from the heterogeneous places of their origins. Once there is the chance for these immigrants to plant their homeland seeds and to harvest their culturally influenced crops through urban farming, they are actually reproducing their cultural identities as well as the urban agro-biodiversity. Agro-biodiversity, or diversity of edible plants, is a very important component of agroecosystems, because a diversity of food crops minimizes the impact of crop failure in agricultural systems (Thrupp, 2000). Agro-biodiversity is influenced by many factors, but seed selection is the most critical. The seed sources for urban farming usually include traditional seed saving, social networks of seed exchange, or commercial seeds provided by industrial seed agencies and/or domestic and international agribusiness corporations. Instead of jumping directly to the theme of traditional and cultural effected urban farming seed choices and their contribution to urban agro-biodiversity, I would like first to mention the characteristics of commercial seeds and their role in urban agro-biodiversity. Fairly speaking, commercial seeds have advantages for urban

80 farming practitioners who often lack the resources of time, land and farming knowledge to produce their own seeds (Taylor and Lovell, 2014) and would thus lower the threshold for normal city residents to join farming. However, although possessing such convenience and advantages, the commercially bred seeds have negative social and ecological consequences because they limit people’s choices and leading to reduction of agro-biodiversity, less use of traditionally selected and locally adapted varieties, loss of social-ecological knowledge and even erosion of social networks (Calvet-Mir et al., 2012a; Barthel et al., 2010). Non-commercial seed collection methods conducted by urban farming practitioners usually include the ways of seed harvesting and saving, gift- seed sharing, old-seed travelling (from rural to city) and seed exchange in social networks. Different varieties and species are thereby assembled at urban farming gardens and plots, which become sites of cultural and biological adaptation to experience new varieties and species, as well as production technologies. Galluzzi et al. characterize home gardens – one type of urban farming space – as the “hotspots” of agro-biodiversity, serving as the refuge for traditional crop plant species and varieties that are exchanged among home gardeners within their social networks (Nazarea, 1998, 2005; Aguilar-Støen et al., 2009; Galluzzi et al., 2010). Especially if the urban farming practitioners are from immigrant backgrounds, there is empirical research showings that immigrants’ farming practices make a disproportionate contribution to the agro- biodiversity of urban areas (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Taylor and Lovell (2014) conducted a study of ethnic and immigrant home gardens in Chicago, US, and studied three ethnic household groups: African-American, Chinese- origin and Mexican-origin. Together with some references to findings of another study of Vietnamese home gardeners, Taylor and Lovell’s research demonstrated that, with each group’s culturally specific ways of seed selection and crop growing, these ethnic groups make a great contribution to agro-biodiversity. The average crop richness in Chinese-origin gardens was 14.4 crops and the overall varieties were more than 20 species; the Mexican gardeners also grew many unique crop and herb varieties, and among them, at least 10 varieties of chilies were identified (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Airriess and Clawson’s study of Vietnamese market gardeners in New Orleans identified 43 crop plant species, most of which were uncommon in the western diet (Airriess and Clawson, 1994). In regard to seed selecting and breeding approaches, the Chicago case shows that Chinese-origin gardeners were less reliant on external inputs of seeds and plants than other ethnic groups. They liked to grow the crops directly from seeds, obviating the need for purchased plants, and they saved seeds from the traditional crops which are common in China, like bitter melon, long bean and winter melon. Taylor and Lovell commented that Chinese-origin gardeners’ practice of saving the seeds of these open-pollinated varieties of traditional crop plants may facilitate the preservation of the agro-biodiversity of these species which originated back in home country; while Mexican gardeners, even though purchasing their seeds from commercial sources, used many seeds procured from neighbors, friends or even relatives in Mexico, and they also grew the herb plants which are integral in Mexican cooking in their gardens. Agro-biodiversity and cultural diversity conservation are mutually reinforcing each other (Nazarea, 1998). Not only can agro-biodiversity be supported by using culturally influenced seeds, planting homeland crops, or applying traditional agricultural knowledge carried with immigrant urban farming practitioners; in turn, for these immigrants, the planting of varieties of culture-specific crops represents “a continuation of cultural practices and traditional agro-ecological knowledge associated with their

81 place of origin” (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). By focusing on details of their traditional agricultural practices like seed saving, selecting and breeding, immigrants may resonate with their old memories of homeland life, which bring them the sense of familiarity, safety, and home-feeling that could otherwise be lost in a new culture and new living environment. The materiality of the gardening and farming works, like the use and arrangement of particular plants, structures, and ornaments, could evoke immigrant farming practitioners’ memories of their place of origin (Head et al., 2004; Airriess and Clawson, 1994; Corlett et al., 2003; Domene and Sauri, 2007; Mazumdar, 2012; Taylor and Lovell, 2014). For example, in Taylor and Lovell’s research case in Chicago, the gardens of Chinese-origin have the greatest on-lot garden density, and grow the largest assemblage of unique crop plants with origins in China, especially with diverse seasonal leafy and vining crops. The Chinese immigrants’ gardens exhibit “a unique layered structure consisting of a ground layer of leafy crops overtopped by vigorous vining crops – typically winter melon and bitter melon –supported by trellises constructed from found lumber and branches” (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). The high dense and layered structure with leafy and vining crops is a typical type of crop arrangement and structure which can be easily found in the small-farmers’ family plots in China. Most immigrant urban farming practitioners often have their traditional ways of preparing and consuming food, and also have their culturally influenced preferences for enjoying the unique taste of their food. Such ethnic food preferences construct special ways and channels for immigrants to procure their food and ingredients, which are termed “ethnic foodways” (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). Urban farming supports such culturally important ethnic foodways, and makes the culturally acceptable food accessible through culture-specific assemblages of plant species and varieties. With the facilitation of urban farming, immigrant people are able to rebuild these home-familiar foodways in a new place or new country, with the effect of homeland cultural reproduction (Galluzzi et al., 2010; Nazarea, 2005; Airriess and Clawson, 1994). For example, in Taylor and Lovell’s research in Chicago, many African-Americans grew unique suite of crop plants which supported the rural southern foodways, the “country cooking”, as the African-Americans named it, and they said they preserved the food they grew as a continuation of their parents’ practice of putting up food for the winter in the rural south (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). There are immigrant urban farming practitioners going further and using more comprehensive farming related activities and practices, not only general horticultural activities (from seed saving, selecting and breeding to plant arranging, structuring, and ornamenting) or ethnic foodway practices, but also traditional spiritual and healing practices, as well as neighborly reciprocal activities, “through which the culture of the household’s place of origin is reproduced” (Airriess and Clawson, 1994; Mazumdar, 2012). For instance, for African-American gardeners, as indicated in Taylor and Lovell’s Chicago case study, sharing food from the garden may represent a continuation of southern traditions of hospitality and community care (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). Through the materiality of farming practices and the daily-life based rhythms, immigrants build a symbolic continuation of a former way of life and a sensual connection to their place of origin (Head et al., 2004; Domene and Sauri, 2007). Through these farming related effects, immigrants, especially new immigrants, may receive some sense of support from their own culture, and then may feel less panic about losing their own cultural identity in the process of exploring their new identity. In this way, urban farming plays an important role in facilitating the assimilation of

82 immigrants, or at least easing the bitter process of transition to a new country or place (Airriess and Clawson, 1994; Corlett et al., 2003; McCubbin and McCubbin, 2005). The theme of this section is “Repair Epistemological and Cultural Rifts” through urban farming. So far, are these paragraphs elaborated above really relevant and close to the theme? The answer is YES. For epistemological rift and cultural rift, there is some overlap between these two concepts. When farmer migrants bring their traditionally and culturally influenced knowledge with them to cities but cannot practice that knowledge, there is not only the epistemological rift, but also the cultural rift taking place. Culture is a concept consisting of knowledge and the practice of knowledge. When the immigrants can no longer practice their traditional knowledge, it indicates they experience also part of cultural loss; vice versa, when these immigrants can no longer practice their own culture, it implies they are deprived of the chance to use the knowledge embedded in their cultural practice. Therefore, when analyzing the function of urban farming to repair either epistemological rift or cultural rift, the discussion can hardly concentrate on only one concept while excluded the other. In metabolic rift’s language, immigrants thus own the tools of urban farming to repair the epistemological rift – by practicing the know-how learned from the places of their origins, and also to repair the cultural rift – through experiencing the farming related culture which they have been familiar with in their earlier life experience, bringing them cultural support, regaining their identity, building their confidence and safety, and letting them feel a bit at home. For some non-immigrant urban farming practitioners, they may also maintain traditional, folk, heritage and heirloom varieties, either because they have affection for seed collection and take it as a hobby; or because they have a conscious concern for agro- biodiversity conservation and would like to take action to practice traditional or ethnic farming methods with traditional seed varieties; or because they practice traditional farming knowledge as a way of “re-creating a distinctive sense of time or place or as elements in the reproduction of cultural identity” (Galluzzi et al, 2010; Nazarea, 2005). For these three types of non-immigrant urban farming practitioners, practicing traditional farming knowledge, no matter whether for reasons of hobby, of ecological awareness, or of recalling cultural identity of an old time, they all show a certain degree of awareness and appreciation, to value these old, traditional farming seeds and practices which inherit important and valuable cultural messages from the past. Interpreted from the cultural rift perspective, these urban farming practices are non- immigrant urban farming practitioners’ individual reactions to the second type of cultural rift that occurs within one society, in which the earlier agrarian culture and traditions shared among older generations have been gradually eliminated as old time living that has been viewed as out of date in the rapid process of industrialization, urbanization and modernization, and can no longer be inherited by younger generations. With the disappearance of traditional agriculture and its family based and community scattered food system, and the fading of more simple, natural, self-sufficiently guided living, customs, and value systems, there is the growth of industrialized agricultural production, which leads to a more concentrated and commercialized food supply system, and more consumption oriented and nature-detached lifestyles which rely on machines, gadgets and devices. Young persons are not encouraged to pursue agriculture or farming, let alone to take an agriculture related career as a honourable profession, because the farming related value, knowledge, culture, and traditions are neither respected by the whole society, nor by individuals. In order to restore more nature friendly values in society, to re-establish an environmentally sustainable culture and lifestyle as the older generations were exposed to when growing up, these values and culture, and the related

83 knowledge should be taught again to younger generations, and the related culture, customs, lifestyles, both material and immaterial elements, should be reintroduced to the society. To achieve these goals, urban farming and the activities around it are an optimal opportunity for people today to experience these traditionally valuable cultures, customs, and lifestyle, by letting these living elements become an integral, enriching aspect of people’s daily rhythms. In metabolic rift’s words, that is to apply urban farming as the approach to repair the cultural aspect of the rift. 3.3.3 Repair Social Rift As referred to in the earlier chapter of theoretical elaborations of immaterial metabolic rifts, there is some overlap among epistemological rift, cultural rift, and social rift, as well as individual level of rift. Especially for social rift, discussion of social related rift issues can easily sneak across the boundary of the social domain and over to epistemological, cultural and individual rift related issues. Therefore, in this section, even though I will try to apply the social rift theory to analyze how urban farming functions as the approach to facilitate coping with social rift problems, the articulation may also include how urban farming plays the role of dealing with some of the epistemological, cultural and also individual rifts. However, in general, the argument below will be organized by responding to the earlier structured three aspects of social rift: the capitalization of labor, the privatization of commons, and the commercialization of food systems. There is relatively more existing literature relevant to urban farming’s functions to facilitate community restoration and food system reformation, meaning the relevance of social rift issues to the healing of commons’ privatization and food’s commercialization, while there is less direct literature about how urban farming would help to deal with labor’s capitalization in the process of urbanization and immigration. For these sporadic writings, which have tackled the labor related social rift issues in the context of urban farming, their elaboration is entangled with farming’s functions to cope with the epistemological, cultural and individual aspect of rift issues. Response to the Capitalization of Labor According to metabolic rift theory, one type of social rift takes place in the situation of labor commodification. This type of social rift affects both the farmer migrants as newcomers to city living and the longer-time-settled city dwellers (whose parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were rural migrants). For newly arrived rural migrants, if they are not skilled at producing the industrial products which capitalists can sell for profits, then they have no market to sell their own labor and thus become valueless and suffer from the feeling of uselessness, because the agricultural skills and knowledge which they brought with them and which once supported their rural lives have suddenly become worthless in the city context. In this case, urban farming assists the newly arrived rural migrants during their transitional process of adaptation to urban living, by allowing these new arrivals to gain the opportunity to use their own labor and to produce their own food in the way they are familiar with. In metabolic rift’s words, urban farming is helping to heal the labor related rift issues occurring to the farmer migrants, making them to feel useful and making their lives more meaningful in the city situation; in another researcher’s words, urban farming “gives voice to marginalized people and empowers them to take control of their lives” (WinklerPrins, 2017a). For longer-time-settled urbanites, even though they are more skilled in urban survival than their rural migrant ancestors, they cannot escape the fate of being treated as labor commodities, because under market logic, no matter how skilled the workers might be, they still need to sell their labor to do mechanized humdrum tasks for making profit for

84 capitalists or to maximize their labor’s exchange value to increase their income, which they spend for more consumption and material needs; and their lives are thus trapped in all kinds of commercial relations without extrication. Their city life runs in the cycle of treadmill living, because they have been separated from farming, farmland and nature for so long, that they are prone to suffer from the urban-life-caused problems and tendencies discussed in Chapter 2 and 3. In response to the tedious treadmill city life and the consequent health issues, increasing numbers of so-called lifestyle or hobby farmers have been recorded by urban farming researchers (Primdahl and Kristensen, 2011). These lifestyle or hobby farmers are the urbanites who still generate their main income from their non-farming careers, but would like to take farming as a leisure activity to strengthen both their mental and physical health (Opitz et al., 2016). Response to the Privatization of Commons The second type of social rift is related to the privatization of commons. Based on the observation of land commodification in the countryside, McClintock (2010) illustrated how the systematic theft of communal land property assists the “freeing” of the agricultural population and separates them from farming land and food. Even though the land privatization related social rift takes place in the rural areas and can hardly be repaired given the irreversible urbanization context, McClintock (2010) and Linn (1999), among many others, asserted that urban farming is in favor of creating new commons from cities’ interstitial spaces. Community gardens provide those without their own yard the opportunity to access farming land in the city commons. Many community gardens, in the form of either rooftop or personal allotment gardens, recreate commons where people do not have to own a piece of land property to till a small plot of soil, and they do not cultivate the land alone but in a group. Group working, in general, not only beautifies communities, strengthens bonds, and creates a sense of community among participants, but also offers the opportunities to build trust among the participants. The empirical cases of urban farming practice in the form of community gardens also indicate that community garden practitioners are applying the regime of commons to build dense and extensive social networks characterized by strong and weak ties, social capital, and a sense of community that enrolls diverse individuals and groups (Baker, 2004). In a communal garden, the flow of plant germplasm from more experienced gardeners to less experienced gardeners is believed to enhance internal social networks by reinforcing the dissemination and reproduction of horticultural knowledge in the garden (Ellen and Platten, 2011). In addition, the various practical needs of the gardening work in the community garden would create additional social connections of reciprocity in the form of exchange of labor, seeds and plants, information and knowledge etc., either among the gardeners or between gardeners and their social networks outside the garden (Glover, 2004). For instance, some gardens exchange the germplasm of crop plants through local, national and even transnational social networks (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). A phenomenon that needs to be specially pointed out in community garden activities is the popular practice of bartering among gardeners. Even though food would be sold by the gardeners in the normal business form, the practice of moral economy, in the form of bartering, sharing or gifting, is more popular among community farming practitioners (Taylor and Lovell, 2014). This phenomenon can be explained with commons theory that, as a communal land-use pattern, the community garden has the institutional guarantee of promoting solidarity and social trust. The commons regime encourages community members to have frequent face-to-face communication, which increases the chance of emotional interaction and understanding, as well the potential for trust and

85 reciprocity (Dietz et al., 2003). In the community gardeners’ case, the trust and reciprocity are embedded in their preferences for bartering, sharing and gifting. Mutually, by exchanging all sorts of farming and gardening related goods and services, community gardeners have more person to person connection and communication, which further strengthen social networks in the gardeners’ community. Similar understandings of the community garden and its function to build social networks could be found in urban farming related literature. According to this literature, communal garden work encourages the development of new social bonds and networks by increased personal contact between different people and groups, fostering shared values and behavioral norms that fosters social cohesion (Glover, 2004; Kingsley and Townsend, 2006; Firth et al., 2011). In communities with multiple cultural groups, community gardens contribute to social- ecological memory reproduction, cross-cultural understanding, and community self- reliance and resilience through the introduction of unique, culture-specific assemblages of food plants by different ethnic groups (Kingsley and Townsend, 2006; Taylor and Lovell, 2014). At the harvest season, such communities are further strengthened by sharing diverse garden produce from different culturally influenced farming approaches and by hosting social and cultural events in the garden (Glover, 2004; Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, 2004; Vitiello and Nairn, 2009), often with various foods prepared or cooked in different cultural ways. In more unified ethnic neighborhoods, community gardens contribute to community development through the reproduction of the shared culture in a shared garden space, with the practices of specific culture and knowledge which have been reinforced and made real in the material tasks of gardening work (Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, 2004). Regarding the aforementioned epistemological rift occurring from a series of situations that have forced farmer migrants, who hold the knowledge of agricultural production and local ecosystems, off their homeland, who carry “agro-ecological wisdom” to the city but have no place to perform their wisdom, and who split with their rural land and finally with nature itself, community gardens offer a role to respond to such situation by providing farming space in cities, where the shared social-ecological memories of ecological practices, knowledge and experience can be reproduced and developed by participating in farming and gardening activities, by reifying the social-ecological memories through gardening materiality, and also by incorporating external sources of other social-ecological memories (Barthel et al., 2010). The traditional agro-ecological knowledge practices are malleable. Even though the knowledge and practices have been shaped in the condition of the ethnic gardeners’ homeland, they are further shaped by practical knowledge gained through gardening in new city settings. As in the community garden cases of Chicago, gardeners learn new gardening and farming practices from the media, from their gardening friends, from neighbors, from garden center staff, and others (Taylor and Lovell, 2015). Response to the Commercialization of Food According to metabolic rift theory, commercialization of the food system is the most discernible and understandable type of social rift, because food is a daily-life based object, extensively involved in people’s daily living. The commercialized agro-food industry for a long time has been controlling the entire food supply chain from production, processing, and distribution to consumption, and producing food only for its exchange value while excluding its ecological and social-cultural values. In order to obtain extra exchange values, the commercial agro-food system not only controls the food supply chain, but also extends the supply chain by purchasing and deploying food over long distances on a global scale, and by adding excessive sectors such as corporate

86 headquarters, large scales suppliers, processors, distributors, marketers, advertisers, wholesalers and retailers between the consumers and the farmers (Mullinix et al., 2008). In such an extended commercialized food chain, extra exchange values are created, but the distance between people and their food is also enlarged. As a result of that distance, people do not know what the commercial food production is exactly doing, and gradually, also do not really care about the fact that the commercial agriculture relies on pesticides, chemicals and other farming practices which deplete the natural environment and yield less flavourful food options (De Zeeuw et al., 2000). Meanwhile, the commercial agro-food system has replaced the traditional agro-food system, but people are unaware of the differences between the commercial and traditional food production systems. In the commercially controlled food system, individuals no longer grow or make their own food, have no control over the source of their food, and have no right to determine how the food system should be structured. They change their preference from home-made or nearby food to convenient and cheap industrial food, which is inexpensive because it externalizes all the environmental, cultural, social, and human health costs. All these indicate that people are disconnected from the rich and colourful social relations of tradition food systems, in which a person who cooked the food had closer relations to the person who grew the food, and the consumer was also more familiar with the food path from field to plate. In the shorter chain of food production, distribution, preparation and consumption, specific social- economic relationships were established among farmers, producers and consumers with particular agro-food culture, traditions and customs. The food related metabolic rift issues have been widely discussed among urban farming researchers, even though most of them do not elaborate upon the issue with the concept of rift, and do not explicitly describe urban farming as the tool to repair social rift. Urban farming researchers know very well that the food system has been thoroughly interfered with and controlled by the commercial power, and they are quite aware of the disconnection between people and their food. They also understand the functions of urban farming for rebuilding the connection between people and food. Even though most scholars do not yet use the concept of metabolic rift to justify the food value of urban farming, many of them have widely applied concepts like “foodshed”, “food justice”, “food security”, “food safety”, “food sovereignty”, “food right”, and “local food movement”, etc. to expound the food-related value in urban farming. “Foodshed” draws from the term of “watershed”, outlining the flow of water draining within a certain location. In a similar sense, foodshed is a social-geographic space outlining the flow of food feeding a particular population. Foodshed advances a justice food system that works for low-income people and promotes a stable, local agricultural economy (Koc et al., 1999). The commercial agro-food system, in which the exchange value of food is mostly captured by extended agribusiness sectors other than farmers (Mullinix et al., 2008), is what foodshed has been criticizing and would like to reform (Koc et al., 1999). Being studied under the concept of foodshed, urban farming is regarded to have a role to play in the foodshed to support low-income people with an alternative local and reliable food system (Koc et al., 1999). The concept of food security is always a very important research theme of urban agriculture studies. An official definition of food security, declared at the 1996 World Food Summit, is that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). In urban farming studies, food security emphasizes urban agriculture’s role of ensuring food provision for

87 the city poor (Smit et al., 1996; Korth et al., 2014), but a newly reformed definition has added the “culturally acceptable” aspect of food value into the connotation of food security. Urban farming, especially urban agriculture, is believed to be able to provide access to higher food quantity and more food quality in nutrition and diversity (Korth et al., 2014). Food safety is conventionally an important concern of consumer protection, with implications of cultural attitudes and social norms and trust; it is a concept that is often associated with food supply chain regulation which has a series of standards to protect consumer health (Henson and Caswell, 1999; Opitz, 2016). Compared with the concept of food security, the concept of food safety is much less considered in urban agricultural research, and therefore, there are not many specific studies about urban farming’s role of contributing to food safety, except that when discussing people’s access to knowledge about where their foods come from, urban farming has some self- evident role to play. In more recent trends, the concern of food safety has been included in the concepts of food sovereignty and food right. Food sovereignty as a discourse turned its attention to the urban context only in recent years. Originally, food sovereignty was a form of social movement resistant to neoliberal globalization, a rural development concept emphasizing small-scale agroecological production and equitable development of local food systems, and opposition to corporate-led industrial production, which is marked by intensive agrochemical use, and “green” and gene revolution technologies with emphasis on productivity and efficiency. With the dominant world tendency towards urban living, food sovereignty starts exploring the role urban actors play in sustainable and just food systems, regarding the issues of food security, food access, food quality, distant food miles, local economies, people’s right to food, consumers’ right to safe food, consumer empowerment in food systems, etc. (Bowness and Wittman, 2017). Urban agriculture is believed to be an important form of social practice claiming food sovereignty, and urban agriculture as a movement has many claims that overlap with the food sovereignty movement in seeking a replacement for corporate-led industrial production, the establishment of an alternative food system, and the pursuit of overall agroecological sustainability (Baker, 2004; Bowness and Wittman, 2017). Food right is a relatively narrow term but independent food discourse, whose major concerns such as people’s self-determination over food-systems and people’s control over the source of their food (Baker, 2004), could be manifested in the food sovereignty claims. The local food movement is one worldwide endorsed movement advocating the shortening of the food supply chain in the attempt to promote sustainable food systems development, and has its philosophical notion that people have value, the production of life’s necessities has value, and people have an inherent interest in producing food locally (Koc et al., 1999). Urban farming has been regarded as a natural part of the local food movement because of its inherent advantage of location, which automatically shortens the food chain. In urban farming practice, consumers have closer connection with the food growers and food producers, as well as food sources. In fact, the shortening of the food chain through urban farming offers more benefits than the advantage of location and distance. For instance, urban farming responds to the problem of the over-commercially specialized agro-food system by keeping the food chain shorter so that the exchange value of food growing would go more directly to the low- income city farmers. Moreover, in urban farming practice, consumers even turn themselves into the role of producers, a really alternative change of the life philosophy with food, provoking the exploration of self-reliance and other alternative food systems.

88 All these above mentioned food concepts indicate the need for alternative food networks to change the commercially influenced lifestyle related to food and to internalize all the environmental, cultural, social, and human health costs. Meanwhile, there is the need for an alternative life philosophy of food with awareness of all the costs of the industrial agro-food system. In order to anticipate and mitigate these costs and to establish new food-wise lifestyles, the whole society needs to develop sustainable and local food systems. Urban farming is considered to be a part of this new food system, because urban farming has been demonstrated to be a constructive response and creative strategy to de-commodify the food system and to de-alienate people’s distant relation with food, replacing it with more responsible, meaningful and mindful relations to food. Take urban farming’s role in confronting the pervasive food disrespect, for example: the problem is induced by the overly commodified food system, which distances people, especially children in recent generations, from their food, and thus obscures the sense of respect toward food. Young generations have neither knowledge nor experience about food or food growth processes, and therefore cannot build a cognitive understanding and emotional connection with food. Urban farming offers children the opportunities to reconnect with food. Louv told the story in his book about the children who got involved with the gardens and harvesting the fruits and how they developed a respect for food. As the farming project organizer described, “Not once in 20 years have I seen the kids who live here throw a tomato or fruit at anyone else” (Louv, 2008). 3.3.4 Repair Individual Rift The urban farming researchers seldom apply metabolic rift theory to elaborate urban farming’s benefits on the individual level, but their understandings do cover a large part of urban farming’s functions to support individual level issues. Most of the existing urban farming related literature understands urban cultivation’s function to promote individuals’ physical, mental and social health, and especially, gives a large proportion of their study attention to see how the urban farming, in both individual and collective cultivation forms, benefits the marginalized individuals. However, the researchers from other domains, such as children and nature studies and ecologic therapy studies, have their own research findings and evidence to demonstrate that urban farming is able to help with various individual difficulties in the broader population. I would like to further contribute to the existing understanding of urban farming’s functions by offering a unique metabolic rift theory perspective to analyze how urban farming practice has the potential to cope with the individual level problems. The following articulation starts with a literature review of the general understanding of urban farming to support individual issues, and then it goes specifically to respond to two of the individual level rift issues: “the alienation from the fruits of one’s labor” and “the alienation from nature”. Individual benefits of urban farming have been widely recognized and reported in urban farming research; the research findings have concentrated on the offerings of nutritious self-grown food, the chance of medium level casual exercise, and the opportunity of being close to naturally embraced surroundings for physical, mental, and emotional health, and for each individual’s overall wellbeing (Wakefield et al, 2007; Kortright and Wakefield, 2011; WinklerPrins, 2017c). Urban farming not only provides direct nutritious vegetables and fruit, but also offers nutrition education by means of learning food production and growing one’s own food, and as a result, food growing encourages fruit and vegetable consumption, and a healthier lifestyle (Wakefield et al., 2007; Abraham et al., 2010). Urban farming has been widely recognized as a good exercise for elder people for its casual and medium level workload, but if taking the increasing

89 sedentary lifestyles into account, and thinking about the large population affected by these sedentary lifestyles, urban farming has a great potential to benefit the health of a large number of individuals across a wide range of age spectrums by encouraging moderate exercise (Beckie and Bogdan, 2010; Dehaene et al., 2016). Urban garden places provide a relaxing environment for people to immerse themselves in, and offer respite from urban life stresses, to recharge from daily hassles (WinklerPrins, 2017c). All the literature suggests that growing your own food offers a chance to improve every individual’s lifestyle by becoming more physically active and mentally and emotionally relaxed (Grebitus et al., 2017). About how the individuals benefit from urban farming, the existing urban farming literature focus mostly on the benefits for marginalized individuals, such as new migrants, the elderly, the economically and culturally dislocated people and those left destitute due to structural economic change (WinklerPrins, 2017c). In an example of new female immigrants in the North American cities, by putting their former agrarian skills and knowledge to work, immigrant women found a way to structure their time and to buffer their culture shock, and also earned a sense of accomplishment by growing and producing food for their children and other family members. Otherwise, a feeling of uselessness would strike the confidence of the migrants and bring them a sense of boredom and dependence on others (McClintock, 2010). Studies show that socially organized urban farming activities are good for the marginalized individuals’ health, both physically and mentally, by offering them healthier food, getting them moving and keeping them active, providing them something meaningful to do, giving them a sense of purpose and a sense of being valued, and allowing them to feel that they are a productive part of society (Airress and Clawson, 1994; Egger, 2007; WinklerPrins, 2017b). This empowerment occurs at the individual level in the space of gardens and in the process of gardening and farming. Urban farming researchers believe that when interacting with and nurturing plants, and witnessing the cycle of life growth, each individual’s personal growth and transformation can be catalysed, and their resistance to social, economic and cultural marginalization could also be promoted (Pudup, 2008; Taylor and Lovell, 2014). Especially for these immigrants and ethnic individuals who are undergoing their personal crisis and trauma in new life surroundings, urban gardening and farming activities, through cultural reproduction, preserve their old values, traditional practices, and ethnic identity as cultural resources to nurture their resilience to cope with their personal difficulties (McCubbin and McCubbin, 2005; Pearsall et al., 2017; Taylor and Lovell, 2015). With regard to urban farming’s multiple functions to de-alienate both the alienation from the fruits of labor and the alienation from nature, and hence to relieve the individual level rifts, four points are worthy of emphasis. First, regarding the rift of alienation from the fruits of labor, caused by the capitalist specialization and the division between manual and mental labor, urban farming allows broad connectivity in learning and individual growth because farming activities remove the isolation derived from scientific education which separates manual and mental labor. “Connecting with the environment through gardening allows students to see the broad implication and meaning of their studies, leading to a better understanding of different scientific subjects” (Selhub and Logan, 2012). In addition, a “mentally fatigued mind causes a tired body, so if mental work people could do some farming work before they get overworked through their mental work, it will be good to keep their flourishing body condition” (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Particularly, if people practice the farming activities by transforming natural elements into products with their own labor, they

90 would gain the reintegration of intellectual and manual labor; there is scientific proof to support the notion that farming activities can improve cognitive achievements (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Second, concerning the rift of alienation from nature, urban farming can bring people into direct contact with natural elements such as soil, plants, water, sunshine, rain, worms, insects, birds, etc., and also allow people to experience and metabolize the surrounding landscape by tilling, sowing, planting, rooting, weeding, cultivating, watering, cutting, harvesting, and composting. These farming activities help to re- establish a conscious metabolic relationship between the individual and the biophysical environment where she lives (Selhub and Logan, 2012; McClintock, 2010). These physical relationships and connections with nature enable the individual to appreciate nature not only as a life support system, but also as the spiritual source. Human beings have long been fascinated with a tiny seed’s ability to develop, grow and flourish into a source of sustenance. Engaging in farming by tilling the soil, walking around the patch, sitting nearby to admire, looking around for animal life like butterflies, bees and other insects, brings people the genuine awareness about the self-evident and intrinsic interaction with nature. In addition, urban farming can help to improve individuals’ attitudes toward plants, foods and the natural environments in which they live. Our evolutionary and inherent relationships to agriculture, crops and food provide a direct and comprehensible conduit and context to inform and educate people about environment, ecosystems and sustainability (Mullinix et al., 2008, online article). Researchers demonstrate that city garden farmers reported a greater affinity with nature as compared with people who have no gardening experience, and adults who reported having participated in active gardening as children were more likely to consider trees to have mental health and personal value (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Spontaneously, farming and gardening activities feed the participants with environmental knowledge, foster pro-environmental attitudes, lead to more concern for nature and encourage empathy for the planet. Pioneer school garden projects demonstrate that urban farming activities could change how children eat and how they think about the planet. When school children had more frequent educational sessions with local farming, they subsequently had more positive attitudes concerning local growth and showed more affinity toward the regions where farms were located. Consequently, such experience will reshape young generations to think about their new relationships with the natural world and with each other (Mullinix et al., 2008, online article; Selhub and Logan, 2012) Third, in regarding related health issues caused by the rapid urbanization and city living hassles, an indirect sign of the alienation from nature, green space engaged activities like urban farming can help to restore self-awareness, self-esteem, motivation, attention, creativity, communication, cognition, sleep and overall psychological well-being, and to reduce stress, grief processing, depressing thoughts, anxiety, and fear of insecurity (Selhub and Logan, 2012; Home et al., 2012; Abraham et al., 2010). Specifically, farming and gardening have been proved to provide a sense of fascination, which is a key contributor to involuntary attention and cognitive restoration, to offer the sensory benefits of tilling and growing, which is beneficial for physical and cognitive restoration, to create the opportunity for quiet, which brings the feelings of peacefulness and tranquillity, to promote a cognitively restored and refreshed brain, which can maintain the sense of empathy even in overwhelming and multitasking daily hassles, and to generate a sense of purpose and meaning in life, which is one of the important contributions to the clinical value in depressive disorders reduction (Selhub and Logan,

91 2012). A more concrete example to demonstrate the positive relation between farming and mental health concerns the bacteria called Lactobacillus bulgaricus, which had been identified a long time ago for its significant function to prolong longevity and to offer mental benefits; when orally administered this bacterium can improve depressive symptoms like melancholia. Recent scientific research reports that Lactobacillus bulgaricus occurs naturally in soil and it would be fairly simple for gardening and farming participants to contact this bacterium when tilling the soil. Incidental and purposeful contact with soil through farming activities – digging in it, breathing it in, letting it touch skin – provides a portal for beneficial bacteria to gain access to the nasal passages and gastrointestinal tract (Selhub and Logan, 2012). Finally, another profound way to de-alienate nature and human alienation through farming or gardening involves the practice of a brain-functioning state leading to mindfulness. According to the concept of biophilia, the nature connections, such as appreciating the beauty of a blossom, the loveliness of a lilac or the grace of a gazelle, are the ways in which people can, in some small measure, fill their daily lives with evolutionarily inspired epiphanies of pleasure (Buss, 2000), and this is in fact the way to form the state of mindfulness and to lead to mental health and personal well-being. Until now, research has rarely been conducted to study the causal relationship between farming-gardening and the brain condition of mindfulness. However, there have been emerging academic research attempts to creatively design a research direction towards mindfulness and urban farming related study. For instance, in their study of urban Api- Ethnography, Kosut and Moore (2016) coined the term “intraspecies mindfulness” to describe a practice of speculation about nonhuman species that strives to resist anthropomorphic reflection. It is an attempt to respond to the alienation between human and nature, and the anthropocentric point of view of the human nature relation, by building a mindfulness connection with another species and moving outside the strong sense of our human selves, dissolving the boundary of “human” and “other”. In their fieldwork, Kosut and Moore were surrounded by thousands of insects,” buzzing vibrantly in their ears, stinging them, landing quietly on their skin”, and built their attempt to decenter their sense of human selves in the process, “ to become with them (animals) instead of becoming as distinct from them”. Getting with the bees meant new ontological understanding of the connection with bees, including new modes of embodied attention and awareness, being conscious that our human species is created through interconnectivity to bees (Kosut and Moore, 2016). Intraspecies mindfulness can be practiced in the connection with other species in addition to bees. Engaging in the intersection between oneself and other objects and entertaining the possibility of an ontology of these objects, enables humans to decenter ourselves while to reposition the “others” (Bennett, 2009; Morton, 2010; Kosut and Moore, 2016). However, as will be verified in the empirical findings in Chapter 5, the association between urban farming and mindfulness would in fact be understood and studied far beyond intraspecies mindfulness, which is just one small and additional understanding of mindfulness.

*** *** To sum up, cities have been understood, designed and managed for a long time as placed that are antagonistic to natural or rural space, where the existence of farming is normal. Urban farming, however, can reverse such ingrained thinking of city-rural antagonism, by bringing up a rethinking of nature in the city (McClain et al., 2014). When antagonism develops between urban and rural, alienation takes place between city people and nature. Urban farming becomes the liaison through which urban and rural could be understood integrally, and people and nature regain the daily-life based

92 experiences to interplay with each other (Galt et al., 2014). The term Subversive and Interstitial Food Spaces or ‘SIFS’, is a phrase that points to the fact that many activities encompassed by urban farming subvert the usual use of spaces of cities, and are meant to challenge the capital and commercial logic influenced normative use of these city spaces. The accepted norms of what a city should look like and how its people should behave can be changed by urban farming, which often stands in opposition to these so- called norms (McClintock, 2014). In the light of the human-nature notions like Biophilia or Enlivenment, we humans are intrinsically affiliated with nature and the aesthetically natural beauty, because for more than 99% of our Homo sapiens’ history, we have lived in hunter-gatherer bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms (e.g. animals, plants, microorganisms) and entire natural surroundings (e.g. water, forest, mountain, desert). This also tells the reason why people are often attracted to crystal glistening water, climbable trees, budding bushes, blossoming flowers, humming bees, and chirping birds, as well as spectacular sunsets and magnificent mountain ridges. Because this was the day-to-day interaction between our hominid ancestors and nature, our mental amenity and physical appreciation are associated with these high levels of aesthetic beauty (Wilson, 1984; Kellert and Wilson, 1993; Kellert, 2012). According to the concept of Enlivenment, humans are prone to like natural beauty, because it is the essence of life existence – “The beauty of natural living things stems from the fact that they are embodied solutions of individual-existence-in-connection” (Weber, 2013). In the case of visual or aesthetic preferences, there is a consistent tendency across diverse groups and cultures to prefer even mediocre natural scenes over the vast majority of urban or built views lacking nature; even unspectacular natural settings can promote stress recovery more quickly and more completely than urban environments lacking nature (Kellert, 2012). As also WinklerPrins pointed out, “even green spaces as small as sack gardens can help green a place that is otherwise a completely built environment” (WinklerPrins, 2017b). Urban farming surroundings offer the natural or semi-natural environment for farming practitioners to immerse themselves in, and cultivation activities offer intimate opportunities for urban farming practitioners to interact with nature by tending soil and crops. Thus, urban farming has great potential to reconnect farmers and agricultural knowledge, people and their neighbors, labor and its fruit, people and food, human and nature. The healing power of urban farming can be used to address different dimensions of metabolic rift problems. Urban farming may not have the direct power to change the Dominant Western Worldview (DWW) influenced by the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP), but we can hope that once people in cities start farming, the intrinsic emotional link with nature could be awakened through people’s reconnection with soil, seed, plants, etc. We can hope that rational reflection on human and nature relations would take place when people re-start learning how to grow healthy food by their own hands in an era when technology, machines and computers are becoming dominant and are promised to bring human convenience, freedom, and happiness. We can hope that by practising urban farming, people will finally realize that it is not the urbanized human society and the more sophisticated human technology that can fulfil humans’ basic needs for healthy and reliable food, but the respect for ecological principles, environmental influences and natural constraints that can do so. The research questions of this thesis have arisen from and are motivated by the author’s initial intention to understand people’s interests and motivations to do urban farming, as well as the benefits they gain from urban farming. To know how they understand crisis, how they perceive metabolic rift, I designed a methodology to answer my research

93 questions. The next Chapter is about the design of my research methodology, and the introduction of my approaches to find the research targets.

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94 Chapter 4 Approach and Methodology

If it’s not fun, you are not doing it in the right way! — Rob Hopkins, transition movement

4.1 Overall Methodological Philosophy The primary challenge of designing the research methodology for this recent study of metabolic rift and urban farming is double-fold: First, the empirical study of the socio- ecological metabolic process and the metabolic rift is a brand new domain and there is almost no pertinent methodology that has been recorded or can be taken as direct reference; Second, the theoretical study of urban farming under the framework of metabolic rift is only a recent research hotspot, so not many empirical research methods have been developed yet. Given the lack of existing reference on methodologies relevant to my recent research, there was a need to build up my own methodological framework in an experimental manner. Finally, the philosophy of political ecology methodology was selected as the overall methodological philosophy of my research. 4.1.1 Political Ecology Methodology as the Basis As mentioned in Chapter 2, political ecology is characterized by its diverse academic adoptions, both in theoretical framework and methodological approach. Theoretically, political ecology adopts and integrates knowledge and notions from every discipline which is concerned with the social-ecological processes in the broad context of a social- political structure influenced by capitalism. Political ecology methodology draws from a wide range of primary research methods, which apply the in-depth interview, direct observation and other qualitative research methods, complemented by quantitative methods, document analysis, GIS and survey methods, or other methods common in ecological science (Bridge et al, 2015). For example, political ecology regularly borrows methods of evidence gathering and environmental analysis widely used in apolitical fields of resource and environmental management, such as measuring soil fertility, mapping the distribution of environmental contamination, numerically calculating material and waste flows, and using remote sensing to collect land use data. 95

Political ecology research is often place-based, involving both the environmental practices and historically accumulated and politically influenced social relations of production and exchange. These nature-society relations contain vital elements and info-data that cannot be read from a social or spatial distance, but can be more easily ascertained by intensive, open-ended qualitative methods, often in a model of combination. Through these in-depth, qualitative methods, the complexity of people’s views and the diversity of their voices can be collected (Knox and Pinch, 2006). In addition, as a young and growing study field, political ecology never constrains itself to its historical field of origins, but always tries to push its research boundaries outward into new theoretical and methodological frontiers. This indicates, methodologically, that political ecology research uses very flexible methods, can follow interdisciplinary collaboration with ease, and allows itself to be radically experimental. It is even open to opportunities for experimentation with non-academic partners in “co-producing” knowledge (Bridge et al, 2015). The methodology of political ecology is characterized more by pragmatism than by dogmatism; its philosophy is what matters is what works (Bridge et al, 2015). Only by conducting research under such an open methodological philosophy, could more hidden, implicit, and nuanced views, points, and people’s voices be captured as info-data. Based on the understanding of the political ecology approach and its general methodological philosophy, it is easier for me to justify my decision to apply the political ecology methodology as the methodological basis of my current research. Explicitly speaking, the justification can be derived from two aspects: First, political ecology research studies socio-ecological processes and relations, contributing its efforts to advance rigorous empirical assessment of socio-environmental conditions and changes. These research interests of political ecology and its methodological commitments, can inspire researchers in other subjects, with the similar interests studying human-and-nature interaction from a critical attitude, to design their own empirical research methods. McClintock and other metabolic rift theorists have pointed out the general research direction for understanding the human-and-nature interactions in the dimensions of ecology, social and individual, but do not explicate or demonstrate more detailed empirical methods about how to specify these dimensions into applicable research questions, or how to capture the elements of human-and-nature interplay in daily-life based urban farming practices. In general, the implementation of transferring the socio-ecological metabolism vision into empirical research (except research from the industrial ecology aspect, calculating the material stocks and flows) is still lacking, and the appropriate empirical methodology of either social metabolism, metabolic rift theory, or their application to place-based urban farming research, has not yet been established. Therefore, political ecology, with similar interests in studying socio- ecological issues, especially from the social-material, environmental-historical, political-economical aspects, would lend its empirical research methodological experiences to my current research as reference. Second, political ecology methodology can freely adapt the methods and conceptual apparatus of related research traditions. The flexibility and experimental spirit of political ecology methods offers much imaginative space for me to design my research methodology, grounded in the existing principles and philosophy of the political ecology methodology. This means that the methodology of my current research allows it to be experimental, creative, innovative, and inventive, and even to be playful, requiring art, imagination, speculation and wonder, and even utopian thinking (Braun, 2015).

However, there is still a large part of my current research interest that cannot be covered by the political ecology methodology: this refers to the individual dimension of metabolic rift analysis within the context of day-to-day urban farming practices. Therefore, outside of the field of political ecology, there are other research realms, such as environmental psychology and anthropology, that might need to be taken into account. Environmental psychology, mainly environmental behavior analysis, is relevant to study individual choices of urban farming. For example, the value-attitude- behavior analysis can be applied to analyze urban farming practitioners’ behavior and the underlying value systems that influence their choice of urban farming 34 . Anthropology, especially urban anthropology, can be considered to study people’s choice of urban farming and their underlying understanding of the human-and-nature relation35. In addition, I also adapt some interesting and practical research methods such as participatory mapping in my research process. Participatory mapping is a popular method to offer the community members the opportunity to draw manual maps with the information of neighborhood location, natural resource, and social capital of their community. It is a way to encourage the community members to express their personal and subjective opinions and therefore to capture their knowledge and understanding about their community (Perkins, 2007; Bryan, 2015). I obtained inspiration from this method and designed a self-drawing task for my interviewees as a way for them to express themselves and also a way for me to read the visible version of their memories and understanding of nature. 4.1.2 Research Methodology Design for Urban Farming The feature of urban farming, whether examined through the lens of metabolic rift theory or analysed under other theoretical frameworks, is prominent for its multiple layers of socio-ecological signification and for its exuberant conglomerations of the human-and-nature interaction characteristics. Empirical urban farming studies have been conducted from different aspects with different research methods. The followings are the methods I selected as the references to create my own research methods on urban farming to capture the features and values of urban farming as interpreted through the metabolic rift theories: Temporally or historically, urban farming as an individual choice of daily life arrangement, with each individual’s motivations influenced by personal history in earlier life experiences, could be explored through in-depth and open-ended interviews. People’s reflections on their earlier life experience and their building of further meaningful worlds are rooted in routinized day-to-day practice (Dean, 1999; Carr, 2015). This indicates that urban farming, as a daily-life based practice, offers us the chance to explore the individual urban farming practitioner’s meaning and value system regarding their interaction with farming plots, that is, their interaction with nature. Ecologically, urban farming preserves agro-biodiversity and has various ecological and biological features. Therefore, the empirical field researchers of urban farming often

34 However, the current environmental psychology is only a small and peripheral subfield within psychology, and the study of environmental behavior only analyzes the causal variables between mind and behavior in narrowly quantitative methods, without considering the overall historical and social influences in people’s belief system. In addition, it is also not their research interest to analyze the profound and holistic view of the human-and-nature interaction. 35 However, anthropology has its methodological tradition to study the remote rural and indigenous communities in a long term of intimate observation distance, and this is not realistic for my research plan. In addition, for urban anthropology, even though it brings the anthropologists’ interest and attention back to urban living space, but it has not yet developed good enough research experience or methodology that could be learned from. However, anyway, to certain extent, a close and objective observation method from anthropology could still be applied in my field research. 97

apply ethnobotanical methods to document the cultivated plant inventories on the lot, as the approach to summarize the species richness (e.g. the number of species on the lot). In addition, culturally, gardeners’ selection of the seeds or species often indicates the agro-cultural ethnicity and cultural identities they belong to. Ethnobotanical methods also cover the cultural aspects of implication of the urban farmers consideration. Finally, urban farming researchers also employ mixed social science qualitative methods such as interview, semi-structured interview, group interview, and participatory observation, etc., to explore the farming-centered social networks, their organizational processes and their governance patterns. 4.2 Research Targets and Research Places The main targets of my field research were the individual urban farming cultivators who practice farming in urban spaces. Meanwhile, the other urban farming stakeholders, such as urban farming sponsors or promoters, the staff of urban farming projects, the scholars studying urban farming issues, and the policy makers who are relevant to urban farming practices, were also visited, and their opinions were taken into account as a frame of reference to analyze the information provided by the interviewed individual urban farming practitioners. For the two specific field research places, one is the city of Chengdu in China and the other is the city of Freiburg in Germany (Figure 6). These two cities in these two countries were selected for three main reasons.

San Huan Road (Third Ring Road)

Chengdu Freiburg

Figure 6. The satellite views of Chengdu and Freiburg from 80 km above, and the areas within the red circles are separately the general urban scale of Chengdu and Freiburg (Source: Google Earth)

First, the social metabolic process reaches across a wide range of phases (SM 1.0 - 4.0). China and Germany represent different phases of the social metabolic process in each of their own societies, with different historical, cultural, social, economic and political contexts. China, as a developing country, is still in the process of transfer from agricultural society to industrial society, and it is where the society has been divided with large gaps between people, as well as between places. Different people and different places in China are experiencing different phases of the social metabolic process (i.e. from SM 1.0 to SM 4.0) at the same time. Germany, as a developed country, has completed its industrialization and urbanization for a long time; this also means that German society is experiencing the latest phases of the social metabolic process (i.e. SM 3.0 or SM 4.0). Such different and also rather complementary cases could work together to demonstrate a more complete picture of the social metabolic process. 98

Second, Chengdu is a Chinese city famous for its environmental projects and activities, and as one of the first cities in China that started the intentionally organized urban farming projects, has a great variety of urban farming practitioners36. Meanwhile, the Chengdu region in history was prosperous in its agricultural production and still remains much agriculture related cultural heritages. Therefore, it is an ideal place to conduct urban farming research. Freiburg, as a German city, was once awarded the title of the “Green Capital” of the country, and has a long term reputation for its “Green City” performance that has been demonstrated in various environmental and social movements. Adding to these movements, Freiburg has also joined in the worldwide urban farming movement in recent years, and group as well as individual urban farming activities are flourishing. In addition, the German tradition of Schrebergarten is also very popular among the Freiburg residents, just as the same in other German cities. Third, Chengdu is a typical rapidly growing Chinese city; the urban territory of Chengdu has expanded to twice its original size within ten-fifteen years. The individuals, in such short and rapid urbanization process, perceive the metabolic rift issues differently from people in Germany, and their understandings of the urban farming functions to repair the rift problems are also different from those of their Freiburg counterparts. Therefore, it would be very interesting to compare motivations and benefits between the urban farming practitioners in Chengdu and Freiburg. Together, the two complementary cases would demonstrate a more complete picture about urban farming’s meanings and functions to heal the rift problems. Given my research interest, I took both Chengdu and Freiburg as equally important research sites and would have liked to analyze the detailed urban farming dynamics of in both cities. However, because of time constraints, Chengdu (China) and its urban farming cases are analyzed as the main research place and targets, while Freiburg (Germany) and its urban farming cases serve primarily as reference. 4.3 Operationalization of Metabolic Rift Theory in the Empirical Research of Urban Farming A critical step to implement my own methodology is to operationalize the concept of metabolic rift in the field research of urban farming and deductive theory-driven approach was applied to transfer the metabolic rift theories into concrete open-ended interview guideline questions. These specific interview guideline questions were used in the field to collect the pertinent data. In practice, the first step of reifying the metabolic rift theory in urban farming research was to have the five aspects of the metabolic rift theory – ecological, epistemological, social, individual, and hypothetical cultural aspects of metabolic rift – to be embedded in the field research design. In the second step, five categories of topics below were selected and prepared as the outline questions for the field research interviews: 1) on-ground farming practices and farming facts; 2) motivations for farming and the benefits they gain from farming; 3) personal and childhood experience with farming or nature; 4) understanding and observation of agriculture and nature related lifestyles, culture, traditions, customs, knowledge or local knowledge; 5) knowledge and awareness about the interrelated connections among food systems, agriculture production and environmental concerns.

36 This was the situation known by the author, myself, who once worked as a NGO project adviser for Chengdu urban farming projects. 99

Then, the third step was to transfer each of the five categories into specific interview guideline questions (see Appendix). These guideline questions were formulated in clusters under each of the five categories, and the central questions were prepared before starting the interviews in the field. Finally, these prepared questions were implemented with other improvised check-up or follow-up questions in the field. 4.4 Field Research and Data Collection The field research of my empirical study on urban farming was conducted during 2016 - 2017 in both China and Germany; the data were mainly collected through the personal visits and interviews which I conducted one by one at each of the sampled farming or gardening sites. The field research interviews at Chengdu in China were conducted throughout the year of 2016 (April - October) and in the middle of 2017 (July - September), and the interviews at Freiburg were carried out in the first half year of 2017 (January - June). Before going to the field, the preparation tasks like the guideline questions for interview were structured, the pilot interviews were tested, the research target and scale were identified, and then the concrete field research process, including the research target sampling methods and the data collection approach, were also designed in detailed steps (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Field Research Process

4.4.1 Sampling Methods To approach these aforementioned research targets, multiple sampling methods were implemented in the field. As mentioned in the earlier section of methodological philosophy, creative, experimental and playful research methods would be combined together. Therefore, the first type of sampling method was a design based on my personal interest to “play” with Google Earth. In addition, other sampling methods like target sampling, snowball sampling, extreme sampling, and opportunistic sampling were also employed in the field research.

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1) Google Earth Based Sampling The application of Google Earth as one of my sampling methods for the fieldwork at Chengdu, is based on two factors: First, I have my personal interest to use Google Earth to search interest spots from the “eagle view” point; Second, there are some large- or medium-size outdoor urban farming patches or plots which are big enough to be recognized as cultivated land via naked eye scrutiny from a satellite view distance in the Google Earth program. These lands could be vacant lands, roadsides, riversides, floodplains, or the last “leftover” farming land where its land use attribute of agriculture has not changed, although its surrounding lands have been transferred from farming to urban non-farming land use. For these two reasons, the practical application of Google Earth’s aerial image characteristics to construct a sampling frame for a certain type of urban farming was selected as the first sampling method for my research37. The specific steps of Google Earth based sampling are: Step 1: Fastidiously scrutinizing with naked eyes all the recognizable aerial image of farming patches within the circled San Huan Road and manually marking all the pieces of recognizable aerial image of farming patches into polygons (Figure 8) and finally about 60 pieces of land were recognized as farming patches38 (Figure 9); Step 2: Given the workload of fieldwork conducted by one person, finally 20 polygonized farming patches were randomly selected39 from all the 60 polygons for field research (Figure 10); Step 3: Visiting the 20 patches one by one in fieldwork at Chengdu (Photo 1) and complementing this with other sampling methods to find and to interview at least one urban farming practitioner at each of the 20 plots (see opportunistic sampling method).

Figure 8. Scrutinizing with naked eyes the recognizable aerial image of farming patch and polygonizing the naked-eye-recognizable farming patch

37 The results of the field research also demonstrate that, if I hadn’t used this Google Earth based sampling method, I would have missed the chance to encounter certain types of the urban farming practitioners, whom I wouldn’t have had any other way to know and to interview. 38 To precisely differentiate the aerial images of the farming plot from other land uses, especially from other vegetation-covered land uses, requires some knowledge about and experience with the visual landscape attributes of urban farming plots. 39 A certain computer program was used by one student volunteer to conduct the random selection. 101

Figure 9. Marking all the 60 naked-eye-visible farming patches within the San Huan Road

Figure 10. Randomly selected 20 polygons as the sites for field research, the spot in the red circle is one of the first visited research sites at Chengdu

Photo 1. The on-ground view of the visited research site in the above red circle

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The large- or medium-size urban farming land is only one type of my targeted urban farming plots. There are small-size outdoor plots which are too small to be recognized by using Google Earth scrutiny but can be identified visually by the researcher in person in the field. There are also other urban farming location types, such as indoor container farming, balcony pot farming, and small plots of roof farming, which could also not be recognized and counted through Google Earth but would be selected by other sampling methods as introduced in the following. 2) Target Sampling Target sampling is also called purposive sampling. This method was mostly used in Chengdu city, because I had formerly worked on urban farming projects in Chengdu, and I could easily find connections with former colleagues and other well-informed sources (relevant individuals, NGOs, urban farming project members) to recommend to me several appropriate research targets whom I could start with. At Freiburg, the target sampling method was less used, because I did not know any urban farming cultivators in person at the beginning of the fieldwork. 3) Snowball Sampling The snowball sampling method was widely used in my fieldwork both at Chengdu (27%) and Freiburg (29%). This method was normally applied after getting the connection with one urban farming practitioner in person, and then this person would introduce further urban farming practitioners in his or her network. The advantage of snowball sampling was that it could be used to construct networks of urban farmers or gardeners for my interviews and research, but the disadvantage was that certain similar background urban farmers might be interviewed many times, and the diversity of data would be limited to some extent. Therefore, snowball sampling should be better complemented with other sampling approaches. 4) Extreme Sampling Extreme sampling was used during the Chengdu fieldwork to gain the maximum variation of samples and hope the most “extreme” cases of urban farming practices could be reached. This approach was applied to find the diverse forms and elements of urban farming for particular interests or purposes which would not be covered by the normative goals of urban farming researchers and would not be thought of by the conventional urban farming researchers. This consideration of extreme cases would illuminate the ecological, social and individual dynamics of urban farming and could extend the boundary or even go beyond the boundary of people’s understanding and imagination of urban farming. This approach guided me to seek different varieties of “extreme” cases with respect to urban farming practitioners’ age (youngest vs. oldest), income (highest income vs. lowest income), farming technique they applied (from the most conventional chemical farming to the most ecological farming), and motivations for urban farming (from the “simple” reason to the most “complicated” reason). Extreme sampling was applied at the final steps of my field research, when I had gotten most of my data, but with a hunch feeling that there might be something still missing and that some new elements of urban farming should be captured to enrich the dataset. 5) Opportunistic Sampling Opportunistic sampling is a flexible sampling approach allowing the researchers to make convenient decisions during the process of field research data collection. In the field, when some thing or some person appears in an unexpected but relevant occasion,

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the researcher can make opportunistic sampling that takes advantage of events when it is unfolded in the process. In the field research of urban farming, for example, this sampling method can be conducted when the researcher encounters some urban farming practitioner working on their plot and having the interest to take part in the research. Opportunistic sampling method was used in two occasions in my fieldwork: a) as mentioned in the above Google Earth related sampling, after the 20 research sites at Chengdu had been selected by the aerial image approach, each of the farming patches needed to be visited in person; and opportunistic sampling was used at this occasion, because the patches were large pieces of farming land and different urban farming practitioners would work there. Without knowing any of them in advance, the only method for me was to approach the first person I would encounter and to ask his or her interest to have an interview with me40; b) as mentioned before, at the beginning of the fieldwork at Freiburg I did not know any urban farming cultivators in person and there were not yet many targeted interviewees who had been introduced or recommended to me, so I used the opportunistic sampling method to find my research targets. The advantage of the opportunistic sampling approach is that it is quick and easy for finding a sample, but the disadvantage is that it may not provide a representative sample and could be biased. 4.4.2 Data Collection Approaches Four data collection approaches were applied in my field research; the semi-structured interview, self-drawing, participant observation. In the field, most of the interviews were conducted at the interviewees’ farming or gardening places, and this permitted me to observe the urban farming practitioners’ interaction with the farming environment, and also allowed me to take photos from the farming plots. 1) Semi-Structured Interview The semi-structured interviews at both Chengdu and Freiburg were conducted with the previously prepared guideline questions (with in-situ modification), and descriptive data were collected by written notes and audio recording. The first five minutes of the interview were often used for having warm-up chatting and I often would use such time to introduce the background of my study and thus to let the interviewees understand their contribution to my research, as the way to build the interviewees’ trust in me. The semi-structured interview method offered me the chance to have hour(s)-long, in-depth interviews with the subjects, and this method also allowed me to stray from the guiding questions when necessary, so I could then collect some unexpected answers from the interviewees. The unpredicted information inducted from the field would be added to either form new theories or to enrich the pre-formed theoretical framework. 2) Self-Drawing (Participatory Mapping) At both the Chengdu and Freiburg locations, during the semi-structured interview time, when talking about their childhood experience with farming and nature, my interviewees were asked to draw their memories on paper41. The drawing could be

40 Sometimes, I was lucky and the first person I approached would agree to have the interview with me. Some other times, I was in bad luck and would be refused by some of the first urban farmers I approached, and had to try several times until I found the farmer agreeing to be my interviewee. In many of the cases, I could get the person’s permission to start the interview right away; in some cases, I must visit the same patch twice. In the first time, it was for me to find out an urban farmer having interest to participate in my research and I got his or her phone number to make an appointment for my interview in another day, and then the second time, I could start the interview with that person. 41 Eleven people at Chengdu, and nineteen people at Freiburg contributed their drawings. Education reason? Time reason? Busy working reason? Not well prepared reason? 104

either a manual map sketching the interviewee’s neighborhood with natural and farming elements where he or she spent the time as a child, or it could also be a drawing about his or her memory of the time spent in nature. I gave them the freedom to draw either their concrete real life memory with nature or just some abstract impression of their time with nature. The purpose of this self-drawing task was to encourage my interviewees to express more hidden, emotional perception of their own experience, and thus to capture their inner, subjective and nuanced interaction with nature and farming. Drawing would help the informants to express their thoughts and perceptions going deeper in their memories and it also indeed helped me, as the researcher and interpreter, to understand the visible version of their memories about nature. In addition, when my interviewees were drawing, they would often explain the content of their drawing at the same time, and thus, the combination of both oral and drawing information from them helped me even further to know their abstract memories in regard with nature and farming. At the end of the interviews, many people expressed their enjoyment of the “task” of self-drawing. At Freiburg, one urban farming practitioner living at the Vauban district told me that he had been interviewed by many PhD students and researchers with different research topics, but it was the first time for him to be asked to do drawing during the interview. He drew something about his relation with nature and said that the drawing brought him back to some precious happy memories in nature with his father before the war time. Many other interviewees also mentioned that the drawing helped them to recall their early memories with nature. For the interviewees who liked drawing or were good at drawing, they especially found the help from drawing to express abstract themes about their relation with nature or farming. For some others, the relaxing drawing process brought them back to some deep, private even traumatic memories in childhood, but they said that soil and nature were the consolation, and they perceived trust in my interview and felt comfortable to speak the memory out by drawing. In addition, the self-drawing method also helped many of my interviewees to understand better themselves why they would like to start the urban farming practice. People’s feedback like these are very encouraging, because it means that, during the interviews, not only my interviewees offered me their precious time and information, but I also offered them a time journey to go back to their earlier life experience. However, the disadvantage of self-drawing is also obvious that it takes more time42. 3) Participant Observation Participant observation was applied in the field research at both Chengdu and Freiburg, was conducted in two ways. One way was to join my interviewees to do the hands-on farming work on the site of their plot to observe the materiality of the farming or gardening related works (proportions of crop and non-crop plants; soil quality; plot structure, ornament and arrangement; strategies of adaptation to site conditions) and to observe my interviewees’ interaction with the farming or gardening environment. The other way was to participate in some of the meetings or gatherings that were organized by the urban farming practitioners for building their network, exchanging information or bartering seeds. The participation in and observation of these urban farming activities allowed me to access first-hand experiences and documents43 of the urban farmers’

42 The average interview time for my research at both Chengdu and Freiburg was one and half hours, while some were shorter, as 40 minutes, and some were longer as for two or even three hours. 43 In the field, different documents, like garden log, handout, brochure, and leaflet were collected and studied to understand the urban farming dynamics. 105

farming practice and helped me to obtain tacit information and to encounter unexpected situations in regard to urban farming and its practitioners. However, the weakness of participant observation is that it did not allow for repeat visits to farming plots at different seasons, and so the observation of seasonal changes of the plot and other ecological and social dynamics would be missed. 4.4.3 Data Collected Even though the field research encountered uncertainty and uncontrollable situations, the overall designed research structure and methods were demonstrated as feasible and the general prepared research plan was successfully implemented. The target sampling methods and data collection approaches were applied in the field as an effective combination. At Chengdu, about nineteen Google Earth sampled farming plots were identified44, about twelve urban farming related organizations were visited, about 80 people were connected and talked with. Finally, about 53 people were interviewed either as individuals or in a group, 32 credible voice records were collected, and eleven pieces of self-drawing were finished. At Freiburg, about nine urban farming groups were contacted, about five Schrebergartens were visited, 22 individual urban farming cultivators were interviewed and also recorded, and about eighteen pieces of self- drawing were collected. 4.5 Outline of the Collected Data For the data collected at Chengdu (Table 3), among the 32 samples for analysis, twelve were collected from the Google Earth related sampling method, another four of them were the participants of a community urban farming project, and the remaining sixteen of the interviewees were found through the combination of different sampling methods mentioned above. The basic demographic information of the interviewees, like gender, age, career are exhibited below, and farming fact-related information like farming place, farming technique and the form of organization are shown as well; in addition, the information about my interviewees’ childhood living background, either rural, city, or small town, is also recorded in the same table for the purpose of analyzing their “personal and childhood experience with farming and nature”.

44 One patch (polygon 39) couldn’t be found on the ground; two pieces of patches (polygon 50, polygon 21) were demolished during the field research time, so no urban farmers could be interviewed there; at two other pieces of patches (polygon 37, polygon 29) I couldn’t find people working on the plot at the time of my visiting; three other pieces of patches were visited and respectively three urban farmers were interviewed, but one of the audible records (polygon 36) was destroyed by a volunteer during her transcription process, and two other audible records were of bad quality. For these reasons, among the 20 Google Earth based sampled patches, only twelve urban farmers working separately on twelve of the patches had the interview with me, and accordingly, twelve audible records were transcribed, and five of were fully transcribed and seven transcribed in the form of short notes. 106

Name G Age Career Background Farming Place Farming Tech Organization

1 Jianming M 60+ Farmer Rural Og, V RF Individual

2 Qunfang F 51 Farmer Rural Og, V RF Individual

3 Guangyun M 78 Farmer Rural Og, Leftover RF Individual

4 Xingwu M 66 Worker City Og, RiS RF Individual

5 Xiedaye M 65+ Farmer Rural Og, V, RaS RF Individual

6 Tangdaye M 50+ Farmer Rural Og, V RF Individual

7 Chendaye M 63+ Farmer Rural Og, V, RaS RF Individual

8 Lipopo F 60+ Farmer Rural Og, V, RaS RF Individual

9 Chendajie F 50+ Farmer Rural Og, V No-CF Individual

10 Shidajie F 50+ Farmer Rural Og, Leftover CF Individual

11 Longpopo F 64+ Farmer Rural Og, V RF Individual

12 Pengpopo F 70+ Teacher Rural Og, V RF Individual

13 Qiming F 68 Worker City Roof, Public-Ct No-CF In Project

14 Zhangmei F 59 Worker Rural/City Roof, Public-Ct No-CF In Project

15 Guojuan F 58 Worker City Og, W-sill, Private-Ct; Public-Ct No-CF Individual/Project

16 Ruchuang M 69 Technician City Roof, Public-Ct RF In Project

17 Hefang M 79 Farmer Rural Roof, Public-Ct RF In Project

18 Wangwei F 38 White-Collar Rural Balcony, Private-Ct; Farm, Public-Plot No-CF, NF Individual/In Group

19 Helei M 39 NGO Rural Public Farm, PriG No-CF, PerC, NF Individual/In Group

20 Chunmei F 45+ Free Lancer City Roof, Public-Plot No-CF, NF Individual/Network

21 Junhua F 43 Business Owner Rural Roof, Private-Ct PerC Individual/Network

22 Luolin F 45+ Business Owner Rural/City Roof, Private-Ct No-CF Individual/Network

23 Baoma F 40+ Architect Rural Og, Public-Plot No-CF Individual

24 Qiaoxiao F 38 White-Collar Small Town Roof, Private-Plot No-CF Individual

25 Wangli F 30 White-Collar City Roof, Private-Plot No-OF Individual

26 Kongqian F 38 Business Owner Rural/City Og, Private-Garden No-CF Individual

27 Ziya F 35+ Teacher Small Town Roof, Private-Plot No-CF Individual

28 Tianfeng M 45+ NGO Rural/City Balcony, Private-Ct No-CF Individual

29 Fangfang F 40+ Business Owner Small Town Roof, Private-Plot No-CF, PerC In Company Group

30 July F 25+ White-Collar City Roof, Private-Plot No-CF, PerC In Company Group

31 Tangyu F 23 NGO City W-sill, Public-Ct No-CF Individual

32 Guomin F 35+ Teacher Small Town Balcony, Private-Ct; Farm, Private-Plot No-CF, BioA Individual Table 3. Urban farming practitioners interviewed at Chengdu, China

G (Gender): F (Female), M (Male) Type of Land: Leftover (Leftover farming lot), V (Vacant lot), RiS (Riverside lot), RaS (Railside lot), Farming Place45: R (Rooftops), Ct (Container), Og (On-the-ground) Farming Technique: RF (Rural Farming), CF (Chemical Farming), No-CF (No-Chemical Farming), PerC (Permaculture), NF (Natural Farming), BioA (Biodynamic Agriculture)

45 Urban farming locations often include places like 1) on rooftops or in other parts of a building structure - rooftop farming, balcony and terrace farming, vertical urban farming; 2) container farming or other non-grounded farming; 3) on the ground, inclu. backyard, open vacant not suitable or not yet for construction (along road, railway track, power lines, stream), open city space for green or recreation (park, square) inner city interstitial space (space between buildings), flood-prone area, suburb area. Often within walking distance from home, sometimes with biking distance within 20 to 30 minutes. 107

For the data gathered at Freiburg (Table 4), about 22 people were interviewed. Eleven of the interviewees were found through the help of the network of the Transitional Town Movement, five others were found through my private social network, and the remaining six were found opportunistically (even just randomly met on the tram), mixed with some application of the snowball sampling method. The basic demographic information (i.e. gender, age, job) and the farming facts related information (i.e. farming place, technique, organization) of the Freiburg cases, as well as the childhood living background information (e.g. countryside, city, town or small town, esp. suburb or not) are all recorded below.

Name G Age Job Background Farming Place Farming Tech Organization 1 Dieter M 70+ Teacher Countryside Og, Pg PerC In Group (Klimagarten) 2 Patrick M 40+ Freelancer City Og, Pg, PriG, No-CF In Group (Klimagarten) 3 Lisa F 25+ Student Small Town Og, Pg, Public-Ct No-CF In Group (Bambis Beet) 4 Hennes M 25+ Initiator Countryside Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Freibohnengarten) 5 Patrick M 30+ Company Work Countryside Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Freibohnengarten) 6 Lisa F 20+ Student City (suburb) Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Freibohnengarten) 7 Variana F 18+ Student Small Town Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Freibohnengarten) 8 Kat F 40+ Freelancer City Og, Pg; PriG PerC In Group (Waldgarten) 9 Ronan M 20+ Student Small Town Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Waldgarten) 10 Martina F 25+ Public Service Small Town Og, Sb, PriG No-CF, BioA In Group (Wonnhalde) 11 Mickey M 25+ Graduate Countryside Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Obergrün) 12 Hartmut M 70+ Business Owner Countryside Og, Pg, Public-Ct PerC In Group (Wandelgarten) 13 Caroline F 60+ Therapist Countryside Og. Sb No-CF Individual

14 Horst M 65+ Public Service Small Town Og, Sb No-CF, BioA Individual 15 Thomas M 45+ Company Owner Town (suburb) Og, Sb No-CF Individual 16 Susanne F 45+ Technician City Og, Sb No-CF Individual 17 Barbara F 45+ Teacher Town (suburb) Og, Sb No-CF Individual 18 Uli F 60+ Office Work Small Town Og, Sb No-CF Shared 19 Tina F 45+ Researcher City Og, Sb No-CF Individual 20 Christine F 45+ Company Work City (suburb) Og, Sb No-CF, BioA Individual 21 Brian M 25+ Researcher City (Suburb) Balcony, Private-Ct No-CF Individual 22 Laura F 25+ Consultant City (Suburb) Balcony, Private-Ct No-CF Individual Table 4. Urban farming practitioners interviewed at Freiburg, Germany

G (Gender): F (Female), M (Male) Type of Land: PriG (Private-garden lot), Pg (Public-ground lot), Sb (Schrebergarten46 lot), RaS (Railside lot), Farming Place: Ct (Container), Og (On-the-ground) Farming Technique47: No-CF (No-Chemical Farming), PerC (Permaculture), BioA (Biodynamic Agriculture)

46 Schrebergarten is also known as Kleingarten in German. It is a German urban gardening tradition starting in the German city of Leipzig since 1864. The medical doctor Schreber created the original idea of using gardening to get city children away from the streets and bring them on the fresh air. A school director at Leipzig carried out the idea and founded the first gardening association for school children. Later, the parents of the school children took the gardening work over and gradually developed it as a nationwide movement (Drescher, 2001). 47 Urban farming is usually a zero-threshold activity. Whoever wants to join can start right away. But the approaches and techniques applied to farming in city range from the easiest way of “dig a hole and drop the seeds in” to the complicated designing and tending system of a roof farm, a vertical farming facility, an agroforest or a Permaculture garden. Urban farming technique application is also a highly region-, country- and culture-dependent practice. But no matter how many discrepancies there are among the urban farming techniques, one criterion to distinguish the two main different categories of farming approaches is to see whether the urban farming practitioners use organic approaches or not. For organic urban farming practice, the basic principle is to have no use of synthetic pesticides, synthetic fertilizers or any industrial chemical complex. For organic approaches, there are fewer worries about the farming related risks and problems like the over-usage of synthetic fertilizers which accumulate in exceeded levels of nutrients (e.g. N, P, K) in the soil and in groundwater, or the use of synthetic pesticides which leads to contamination in the soil or creates other negative ecological impacts for the environment. 108

Chapter 5 Findings of Chengdu (China) Research

好雨知时节，当春乃发生。随风潜入夜，润物细无声。 — 杜甫,唐代诗人

5.1 AgriCulture in China’s Urbanization Context China has the largest population in the world (1.37 billion in 201048) and is one of the world’s fastest growing economic regions. The rapid urbanization process in the last thirty years has become the driving force to boost China’s skyrocketing economic development, and at the same time, has brought hundreds millions of people from rural areas to urban areas (Zhang et al, 2016). In 2011, there was a turning point for China’s urbanization process, because in that year, China’s urban population surpassed its rural population for the first time in the country’s history. The rural population fell as a proportion of the nation’s total from 80% in 1979 to less than 50% in 2011. It is estimated that about 250-300 million more people in China will likely move to cities (Grimm et al, 2008; Johnson, 2013). As elsewhere in the world, China’s urbanization is far more than just the mobility of the population; behind the dramatic demographic changes, it is accompanied by massive housing growth, fast infrastructure construction, intensive industrial production, enormous energy production, and tremendous extraction and consumption of natural resources. Correspondingly, dramatic changes are also occurring among the Chinese people with respect to their choices of subsistence, career, social relations, lifestyle, and life plans, as well as their relation with nature. When all these changes interact, it inevitably induces serious environmental, social and individual consequences (Li, 2005; Grimm et al., 2008; Wang and Yang, 2013). Regarding the ecological dimension, the rapid Chinese urbanization process is causing a wide range of environmental and ecological problems, such as the loss of farmland, farmland contamination, air pollution, CO2 emissions, river and groundwater water

48 http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20110428_402722232.htm, Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China website. Last Retrieved: February 14, 2019 109 pollution, rampant waste dumping, resource scarcity and energy shortages, etc (Economist, 2013). China’s farmland is drying out, and at least 10% of China’s farmland has been contaminated with heavy metals. The notorious air pollution in China is known worldwide and there are always names of Chinese cities on every version of “the most polluted cities in the world” lists. China surpassed the United States in CO2 emissions from energy consumption in 2008; it is estimated that, between 1990 and 2050, China’s cumulative emissions from the energy sector will have amounted to 500 billion tonnes – roughly the same as those emitted by the whole world from the beginning of the industrial revolution to 1970. Water shortages has occurred in China for centuries, but are now exacerbated by industrial pollution; a third of the water of the Yellow River – the mother river for Chinese agriculture and culture – has become so severely polluted that it is no longer suitable for agricultural use. Meanwhile, about half of the water sources in urban areas in China are reported no longer fit for humans to drink. In addition, with urbanization, waste accumulation in Chinese cities is seriously influencing people’s living quality and health issues. Furthermore, China’s urbanization process means the switch from rural to urban lifestyles, and from Chinese living standards to western living standards. It is estimated that these switches and upgrades have led to at least a tenfold increase in the numbers of cars on its roads, and the doubling of the energy use and carbon emission per person. Although China accounts for 16% of world output, because of the urbanization process China now consumes between 40% and 50% of the world’s coal, copper, steel, nickel, aluminum and zinc, and also imports half the planet’s tropical logs. More stunningly, it has been reported that from the start of 2012 to the end of 2016, China produced nearly three times as much cement as the U.S. produced in the entire 20th century. (Vidal and Adam, 2013; Zuo, 2013; Li, 2013; Nielsen and Ho, 2013; Gough, 2013; Economist, 2013; Financial Times, 2019). At the same time, on the social scale, the pursuit of a higher living standard and more consumption do not necessarily increase the Chinese people’s satisfaction with their lives. The Annual Report on Society Mentality of China (2013) indicates that compared to the year 2011, the average level of life satisfaction among the Chinese residents had fallen in 2012 and social trust had dropped to its lowest point as a “no trust society” (Wang and Yang, 2013). One of the best concrete examples of Chinese society’s deterioration is its people’s omnipresent concern over unsafe food issues. The long list of unsafe food scandals happening in recent years has exhausted and destroyed Chinese people’s trust in the food they take in: melamine-contaminated milk; pork containing high amounts of illegally added thin carnosine; fake salty duck egg yolks with food colorants; illegally recycled cooking oils. The list goes on. Different opinion polls show that worries about unsafe food issues have become one of the three “issues of most concern” among Chinese residents (Zheng, 2011; Qiu, 2013). In the urbanization process, the interpersonal relationships in Chinese society are transferring from a kinship based intimate network toward a stranger based atomic structure, and this leads to the fragmentation of the overall social connections. Meanwhile, China’s development has caused a huge gap between the rich and the poor; by 2012, for example, the Gini coefficient of Chinese household pure property was already as high as 0.73 (Xie and Jin, 2015). Meanwhile, at the individual level, there are studies demonstrating that Chinese people’s mental health status is declining, and their mental disorders are rising (Liao, 2007). Other studies on subjective well-being support the notion that the Chinese people’s individual well-being is not improving at the same rate as income and material

110 property. Taking satisfaction with life as an example, a cross-section national household survey, containing questions on subjective well-being, revealed that Chinese individual’s happiness has not risen with China’s remarkable growth of income per capita. The detailed findings indicated that rural-immigrant workers have the lowest satisfaction with life, below that of permanent city dwellers and of rural villagers, even while all three groups increased their incomes (Knight and Gunatilaka, 2011). In order to justify that these above mentioned problems in the “socialist” Chinese context could be analyzed by the metabolic rift theory developed in the “capitalist” European context more than one and half centuries ago, there is a need to argue that the so-claimed “communist” China has actually been organized and is operating in a capitalist version. In 1949, the establishment of the socialist regime of China once gave the world the impression that this country would embark on a new socialist path. However, the so-called new path was in fact primarily a sheer copy of the Soviet Union’s approach, which institutionally separated the city and the rural, and confined the urban population and the rural population in their own territories, without free mobility. After the first three decades’ experiment, accompanied by other problems, the copy of the Soviet Union’s development pattern led to a complete failure and chaos in China, and also forced the “communist” Chinese government to start its economic policy reformation, which included loosening the constraints on the rural population’s mobility, in the late 1970s. Since this economic reformation, the Chinese Communist Party has in fact steered the alleged socialist China ever closer towards a capitalist development path. The Chinese development model has been widely regarded as an actual capitalist model, because it opens its markets to considerable foreign investment and international capital, takes capital accumulation and profit maximization as the exclusive goal, applies many capitalist industrial production mechanisms, and borrows many of the marketing and commercial principles and approaches of capitalism. In addition, many Chinese people’s living style and life expectations have taken the capitalist living standards as their own benchmark or reference (Dickinson et al., 2004; McKinsey Global Institute, 2009; Economist, 2019). Meanwhile, many of the Chinese ecological, social and individual problems which have been occurring over the most recent decades, are the typical consequences of the capitalist model of development. Even though the Chinese version of capitalism has many similarities to that of other capitalist countries, the Chinese capitalist model has been regarded as a model of state capitalism, whose economy is not a real free-market but actually a mixed-market economy guided by absolute state power (Bremmer, 2010; Economist, 2012; Araujo and Cardenal, 2013). Facilitated by the unlimited state power, the Chinese version of capitalism has been devouring the natural resources with more unscrupulous force than that of private capitalism. As a matter of fact, the Chinese state capitalism could be understood as the combination of capitalism and socialism. On the one hand, the capital-driven, commercial-centered and consumption-oriented Chinese development pattern lacks the democratic political system, independent judicial system, mature social welfare system and also the free media environment which exist in many other capitalist countries to somehow restrain the recklessness and greed of capitalism and to support more or less the people’s welfare at times of ecological, social or individual crises. On the another hand, the state-led industrial development and the centrally planned and enforced economic policies have been directing China rushing ahead like a reckless behemoth at full speed and at all costs, neglecting the destructive and disastrous ecological, social and individual consequences of these actions by the state power.

111 Consider the nationwide headlong pursuit of urbanization as an example: this intentionally planned and implemented process has lasted for about twenty years, leading to the migration of hundreds of and millions of rural farmers and their families, also giving rise to the epidemic of land-grabbing and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of suburban farmers, forcing a huge amount of the farming population to take up residence in high rise buildings and make their the living in city circumstances. To accelerate urbanization and thereby to promote consumption is the exclusive political will and policy designed and calculated by the arbitrary Chinese central government (Johnson, 2013; Jin, 2017). The recent Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, expressed barely the fundamental purpose of this reckless policy. Li was a strong proponent of the propelled urbanization process, and once issued an article in the top official political theory magazine Seeking Truth to illustrate the imperative of urbanization in generating economic benefits. He cited that “…in 2010, the average unit consumption for each person in a rural area was 4,455 RMB while the average number in urban areas was 15,900 RMB per person.” For Li, this indicates that “in the transformation from a rural resident to be a city dweller, about 10,000 RMB more demand of consumption would be stimulated, and this is particularly true among the young consumers between the age of 18-35 (Li, 2012, own translation)”. Further, Li stressed that “if the urbanization rate could be increased by one percent, about 10 million rural people would be transferred into cities, and about 100 billion RMB (about 80 billion EUR) would be spent on consumption, and numerous corresponding investments would be attracted in the Chinese urbanization process (Li, 2012, own translation)”. Nevertheless, what has been totally ignored by this Chinese Prime Minister is that the high consumption demands of the consumption of urban lifestyle also mean the extraction and depletion of natural resources, as well as the pollution and contamination of our environment. Urban political ecologists have fairly pointed that urban lifestyles have been ignored as one of the driving forces behind many environmental issues, and urban consumption has been neglected as the origin of many global environmental problems. In addition, in fact, the overall social milieu has also been contaminated both by of the nation’s relentless pursuit of GDP and by the individual’s restless desire for wealth, fortune and luxury goods. China has become a distortedly capitalized and commodified society where people narrow their life aspirations and future expectations down to mere material and monetary pursuits. Capitalism – in the guise of commodities, advertisements, and better-off lifestyles – is stirring up Chinese people’s desires to buy, to gain, to indulge, and to addict, while, the general realities and tragedies happening in current Chinese society are demonstrating that such a state-capitalist model brings neither the life satisfaction for the whole society, nor the subjective well-being for each individual. All the modern Chinese urbanization processes summarized above, however, have in fact been transferred from a much earlier Chinese historical, social and cultural background, which has been based on the fundamental fact that China has a four-thousand-year history of agricultural practice, over this long period of history, the country’s traditions, culture, institutions and society structures evolved from and were dependent on this essential fact (King and King, 1911). Traditionally, the Chinese society gave very high respect to agriculture which was operated as the national policy called “Respecting agricultural production; Despising commercial activities (重農抑商)”; farmers as a social class were respected right after the class of official intellectuals, after farmers there were the class of craftsmen, and then businessmen as the lowest class (士農工商). Traditional Chinese philosophy has a core notion of “Harmonious Nature and

112 Human Relations (天人合一)”, and can find its root in the agricultural activities which require the knowledge of climatic changes, biophysical features of plants, preservation of soil fertility and irrigation conditions as the guarantee of abundant harvest. The “Twenty-four Solar Terms49 (二十四節氣)” are 24 points in the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar that match 24 astronomical and seasonal phenomena which signify the 24 particular days that are crucial for agrarian farmers. The first point of the twenty-four solar terms is the “Start of Spring (立春)”, which is close to the Spring Festival – the most important annual festival for the Chinese people. Nevertheless, nowadays, even though China has been transformed from a traditional agricultural society to become a modern industrial society, and a great many people from the farming population have been changed to be city residents, the agriculture related traditions and cultural heritage still exist in Chinese people’s choices of custom, cuisine, daily living, and surviving in their individual perception, cognition and identity. To convey an idea of how greatly the Chinese people have been influenced by their agriculture and farming related history and culture, the oversea Chinese people’s inheritance and choice of urban farming practice could be used as a concrete side example. There is existing research showing that in the United States, Chinese immigrants participate in urban home garden farming at obviously higher rates than other groups (Taylor and Lovell, 2012). News media reported that Chinese parents of Yale University students had grown a flourishing vegetable garden in a vacant lot, in which they cultivated the exotic herbs and vegetable like varieties of beans, scallions, tomatoes and cilantro (China Daily, 2015); in Canada, the founders of the urban agriculture movement “City Farmer” recalled in their 25th anniversary article that an elderly Chinese woman, who grew bok choi and water vegetables in an old bathtub in the Chinatown of Vancouver, became one of their “mentors” for enlightening them to take urban farming as a response for facing the energy crisis in the 1970s (City Farmer, 2003). In Cuba, there is also recorded evidence that the local Chinese communities and their experiences of intensive vegetable cultivation became part of the enlightenment for the Cuban people to take urban agriculture as their main strategy to deal with the food issue and the overall national crisis in the 1990s (Cruz and Medina, 2003); even in Germany, in the city of Freiburg, it is said that a Chinese immigrant was growing rice – a symbolic crop with strong cultural code – in his allotment garden50. Of course, in addition to these oversea Chinese people’s cases, more urban farming cases can be easily found among the people living inside China, since they have a more supportive cultural atmosphere and more convenient conditions to practice the farming knowledge and methods inherited from their Chinese farming ancestors. In fact, for most Chinese cities, urban farming is more like a traditional existence than a modern movement, because throughout the ancient Chinese urbanization process, urban farming was always a part of the city phenomenon (Shi, 2012). So, since farming was once a dominant feature for the entire Chinese society, the farming practice in cities in the past was only a normal fact and not anything phenomenal. However, today, with the background of international urban agricultural movements and in the context of the

49 The 24 full points and correct order are: Lichun (start of spring), Yushui (rain water), Jingze (awakening of insects), Chunfen (vernal equinox), Qingming (clear and bring), Guyu (grain rain), Lixia (start of summer), Xiaoman (grain full), Mangzhong (grain in ear), Xiazhi (summer solstice), Xiaoshu (minor heat), Dashu (major heat), Liqiu (start of autumn), Chushu (limit of heat), Bailu (white dew), Qiufen (autumnal equinox), Hanlu (cold dew), Shuangjiang (frost descent), Lidong (start of winter), Xiaoxue (minor snow), Daxue (major snow), Dongzhi (winter solstice), Xiaohan (minor cold), Dahan (major cold). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_term, Source: Wikipedia. Last retrieved: October 11, 2018 50 Personal resource from Axel Drescher, scholar and expert on urban agriculture, Freiburg, Germany 113 rapid Chinese urbanization process, urban farming has been slowly but gradually recognized as an “old” practice with “new” meaning, “new” function, “new” knowledge and methods. The main content in this chapter will be the attempt to exhibit the details about how the Chinese farming culture elements could be preserved in the form of urban farming and how today’s urban farming could be interpreted and understood from new ecological, social, and individual aspects, taking the city of Chengdu as the case study place. 5.2 Research Site – Chengdu Chengdu (Figure 11), the capital city of Sichuan province, is located in the Southwest region of China. According to the 6th national population census, the urban population of Chengdu was 9 million in 201151, and the data have been updated to be 11 million in 201852. Historically, the entire Chengdu plain region was well-known for its prosperity in agricultural production and was known as the “Land of Abundance (天府之國)”; this is largely a result of the remarkable irrigation system – Dujiangyan53, which was constructed more than 2000 years ago but still functions well today. However, as elsewhere in China, the rapid sprawling of Chengdu’s urbanization and suburbanization process has caused the disappearance of the rural landscape on a tremendous scale (Zooming-out Figures 12, 13, 14; Zooming-in Figures 15 and 16).

Figure 11. Chengdu’s Location in China54

51 http://gk.chengdu.gov.cn/govInfoPub/detail.action?id=367795&tn=2, Source: Chengdu municipal government website. Last Retrieved: February 14, 2019 52 http://www.chdstats.gov.cn/htm/detail_95445.html, Source: Chengdu Bureau of Statistics website. Last Retrieved: February 14, 2019 53 Dujiangyan (都江堰), is an ancient irrigation system situated in the west part of the Chengdu Plain, Sichuan. Originally constructed around 256 BC by the ancient State of Qin as an irrigation and flood control project, Dujiangyan is still in use today. The system's infrastructure was constructed on the Min River, the longest tributary of the Yangtze. Originally, the Min River would rush down from the Min Mountains and slow down abruptly after reaching the Chengdu Plain, filling the watercourse with silt, thus making the nearby areas extremely prone to floods. Li Bing, then governor of Sichuan at that time, and his son headed the construction of Dujiangyan, which harnessed the river by using a new method of channeling and dividing the water rather than simply damming the river. The irrigation function and the water management of Dujiangyan is still in use today to irrigate over 5,300 square kilometers (2,000 sq mi) of land in the Chengdu region. 54 https://www.chinahighlights.com/chengdu/map.htm. Last Retrieved: April 30, 2019 114

Figure 12. Google earth map of the landscape of Chengdu 30°39'40.47"N, 104°05'11.86"E Time: 12/1999

Figure 13. Google earth map of the landscape of Chengdu 30°39'40.47"N, 104°05'11.86"E Time: 2009

Figure 14. Google earth map of the landscape of Chengdu 30°39'40.47"N, 104°05'11.86"E Time: 2015

115 The rapid growth of the urban population and the physical size of Chengdu has been accompanied by the city’s rocketing economic growth. For instance, in 2006 the GDP of Chengdu was about 0.27 trillion RMB and by 2017 the number had increased to be 1.39 trillion RMB55. Furthermore, this fast economic growth has been accompanied by high skyscrapers and gigantic shopping centers, which have also been built up in striking speed and in dramatic amounts. Take the world famous furniture retailer IKEA and its Chengdu shopping center for instance, as early as 2010, there were reports that the single market at Chengdu contributed the largest increase of sales among the whole world business of this multinternational giant56. Especially in the southern part of Chengdu, the Huayang district has become the newly established commercial and residential district, containing the new municipal center (Figure 16), concentrating most of the recently built commercial centers and shopping malls, including the New Century Global Center which is claimed to be the world’s largest single building used for mixed commercial and shopping purposes (Economist, 2019). However, in the memory of one of the interviewed urban farming practitioners, this same piece of land, about 15 years ago, was still a suburban rural area of Chengdu, full of farming lands, vegetation, trees and animals, her unforgettable playground in childhood times (Figure 15).

Figure 15. Google earth map of Huayang district, the southern suburb of Chengdu Time: 2001

Figure 16. Google earth map of Huayang district, the new municipal center of Chengdu Time: 2015

55 https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/gross-domestic-product-prefecture-level-city/cn-gdp-sichuan-chengdu, Source: CEIC Data website. Last Retrieved: February 14, 2019. 56 http://www.sxymf.com/web/archives/2010/141395.shtml, Source: Pujing website. Retrieved: February 14, 2019. 116 As a matter of fact, the city of Chengdu, before it sprawled to become the recent mega-city, and before it was designed to function as the massive shopping-center, in many local people’s memories was once a much less urbanized place with much fresher air, and had more mixed rural landscapes and natural elements. Such as in the memory drawing of a local Chengdu lady (70+ y/o), there were still rural rice paddies and corn fields in the very central area of Chengdu in the 1960s (Figure 17), which is today the district of Shui Jing Fang, a very crowded and busy commercial and entertaining center of Chengdu. The first Chengdu urban farming project that was organized by the local community NGO called “Ai You Xi” actually took place inside this district; some of the urban farming practitioners in the project described some similar memories of this part of Chengdu in the 1960s and 1970s, and also mentioned their impressions of the existence of paddy fields and other natural environments.

Figure 17. The scrolling drawing of the street view of Shui Jinfang district in the 1960s, drawn by Ms. Gong Suqing (The pencil drawing has been housed in the Chengdu Municipal Archives) 117 In fact, Chengdu is one of the first few cities in China where urban farming activities were intentionally promoted and organized by NGO projects; otherwise, the rest of the urban farming activities at Chengdu are practiced by the individual city dwellers, who do farming “voluntarily” or “spontaneously” for various personal reasons (e.g. for retired life, for income buffering). In addition, some other small groups of people, under the influence of certain ideologies (e.g. environmental protection, sustainable living, Waldorf education), would organize loosely among themselves to practice the ideology-motivated urban farming. Meanwhile, because of the high Gini coefficient in China, different income classes of people would practice urban farming with very different aims. For example, there would be middle-income urban farming practitioners, who do farming for ecological, aesthetic or other high life quality reasons; there would also be lower-income people, doing farming for livelihood and income buffering reasons. However, these situations are part of the information collected during the author’s former urban farming working experience in Chengdu in 2010 and 2011, and are a bit out of date, so thus could provide only a rough outline of the urban farming practice of Chengdu. Therefore, a comprehensive field research with respect to the dynamics of Chengdu urban farming practice has been conducted in the current PhD study. Followings are all the significant findings and data analyses of the research. 5.3 Dynamics of the Urban Farming Practice at Chengdu The following data analysis of the Chengdu urban farming practice will be conducted in a combination of the (deductive) grounded theory approach and the (inductive) content analysis approach. According to the theoretical framework of metabolic rift, the research findings will be discussed from the four fixed dimensions to demonstrate how the urban farming practitioners at Chengdu use farming practice to deal with the ecological, epistemological/cultural, social and individual aspects of rift problems. Meanwhile, if some new methods, practices or opinions were mentioned by the interviewed individuals, and if some other interesting observations were captured in the field, these unexpected but significant field-data will be specifically pointed out and be analyzed according to their content. 5.3.1 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Awareness of and Response to Ecological Rift The ecological performance of urban farming’s contribution to repair the ecological rift is dependent on the factors of farming methods, farmers’ awareness and willingness, and the daily-life based practice of farming. Usually urban farming practitioners’ awareness and willingness are demonstrated in the farming methods they practice daily. If they have more concern about the ecological problems (even though they don’t need to know the term of ecological rift or to be aware of the concept), they would choose more ecologically friendly farming methods, and vice versa. In the field research at Chengdu, according to the information provided by the interviewees with regard to the various farming methods, their urban farming techniques could be divided briefly into two categories: non-organic farming method (Non-OF) and organic farming method (OF). To define organic or non-organic, I rely on one simple criterion, that is, to see whether or not industrial fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals are applied to the farming practice. Within the category of non-organic farming (Non-OF), there are two types of farming methods: rural farming method (RF) and chemical farming method (CF). Rural farming method is often applied by the urban farming practitioners who had their early life experience of farming in the countryside and learned their farming knowledge from

118 rural farmers. Even though rural farmers at different places and regions of China may practice farming with different methods in detail, in general, most of them use industrially produced inorganic fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals for the purpose of increasing productivity; meanwhile, given the practical condition of each farmyard, manure made from animal feces (sometimes including human excrements) and other organic waste from agricultural production is also used in Chinese rural farming methods. The chemical farming method is similar to the rural farming method, using different kinds of agricultural chemical products, including industrially produced fertilizers or pesticides, but in the chemical farming method, no manure is applied to farming or cultivation.

Using industrially produced inorganic fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural Rural Farming chemicals; Using manure made from animal feces, human excrement and other (RF) organic waste from agricultural production.

Chemical Farming Using all agricultural chemical products, including the industrially produced (CF) compound fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and hormones etc.

Table 5. Non-Organic Farming Methods (Non-OF) Within the category of organic farming (OF), four types of farming methods could be recognized in the field: no-chemical farming, Permaculture, natural farming and biodynamic agriculture. No-chemical farming (No-CF) tries to avoid any conventional industrial fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals to be used for agriculture. This method is applied mostly for the reason of the urban farming practitioners’ own health concerns, but in some cases it is also out of people’s ecological or environmental concerns. Permaculture (PerC) is a concept and practice that originated in Australia, and is a series of agriculture and food based life designs and practices, which take account water source, wind flow, food plants, energy flow, and other elements. Natural farming (NF), as a modern farming practice, was first advocated by the Japanese farmer and philosopher Fukuoka Masanobu; it is a farming method applied with a strong philosophic idea of “respect to the nature and the nature’s principles”. Biodynamic agriculture (BioA) is part of the practice of anthroposophy, a comprehensive system of educational, agricultural, therapeutic thoughts and practices established by Rudolf Steiner, seeking to use natural means to optimize physical, mental and spiritual well-being. The following are some concrete findings with regard to the urban farming practices which will be analyzed from the aspects of ecological concern in 1) nutrient cycling, 2) soil quality, 3) water cycling, and 4) other ecological conditions on the plots.

No-Chemical Farming Avoid any conventional industrial fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals (No-CF)

A concept and practice originated from Australia, a series of agriculture and food Permaculture based life designs and practices, which take account of water source, wind flow, (PerC) food plants, energy flow, and other elements A modern farming practice, first advocated by Fukuoka Masanobu; a farming Natural Farming method applied with a strong philosophic idea of “respect to nature and nature’s (NF) principles” Comprehensive educational, agricultural, and therapeutic thoughts and practices Biodynamic Agriculture established by Rudolf Steiner, seeking to use natural means to optimize physical, (BioA) mental and spiritual well-being

Table 6. Organic Farming Methods (OF)

119 1) Nutrient Cycling In urban farming practices, nutrient cycling can be achieved through the recycling of organic waste, normally in through composting. Four different types of nutrient cycling approaches are used by urban farming practitioners, as shown in the individual cases in Chengdu. The first approach is to use feces, as rural farmers do in the countryside; and the people who apply Rural Farming (RF) like to use the feces mixed with water to irrigate their plots. These people are mostly the interviewees working on the large- or medium-size outdoor farming patches which are recognizable by Google Earth, and became part of my sample. Nearby these vacant or leftover farming lands, urban farmers can often find some simple toilet place (or “cesspit” in their own words) to get the manure for their crops. The second way of nutrient cycling practiced at Chengdu is to immerse the organic wastes, mostly rotten vegetable leaves, in a barrel with water, and then use the fermented mixture as what they call “Ou Fei” to fertilize the plants. In my research, this approach is widely and mostly used by the elder urban farming practitioners, who often have little awareness of ecological issues but unintentionally make nutrient cycling happen easily, by following some traditional farming approaches. The third approach is composting, and this approach is mostly only accepted and practiced by the younger urban farming practitioners. For the elder people, they either never heard about composting, or they would think that making compost is a very complicated and inconvenient approach. For younger urban farming practitioners, they not only accept and practice the idea of composting, they also support the underlying meaning of composting for its ecological benefits. Some of them take the composting as the most meaningful part of their urban farming practice or find it is very convenient for daily life experience to dispose their kitchen waste. “…[The original motivation for me to do urban farming is] to dispose the kitchen organic waste of my family…because we are practicing ‘resources classification’ at home…Once we produce new organic waste I bring them here on the roof…two or three times a week, and all the kitchen organic waste from my family don’t need to be dumped away…” (Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I grow the vegetables for fun, I can’t expect the output from this plot could support my family…I feel mostly thankful to my vegetable plot because it has been working well in the last ten years to absorb all the organic waste produced from my family, and this is the biggest contribution and service of this piece of plot…” (Cited from Ziya, F, 38 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…now at home I have a small composting container, and because I am a kind of careless person and often forgot something I stored in my refrigerator until it went bad, and often felt the pressure [to just throw the food away and have it getting wasted], but now I feel better, ’cause I just need to drop the rotten food into the composting container, it then works excellently…in the summer time, in less than 10 days [the rotten food] transferred into earth material, and then I feel the material could be reused [instead of just being wasted]…” (Cited from Fangfang, F, 40+ y/o, practicing urban farming both individually at home and in group at her roof coffee shop, 2016, own translation) In some other cases, compost is integrated as an essential part of a mini-circling urban farming system; such comprehensively designed urban farming system often appears in institutional urban farming cases. There are two examples. One case is a roof garden outside a roof coffee shop, where the compost pile in the roof garden absorbs all the leftover coffee grounds and other organic waste created from the coffee shop. Meanwhile it offers self-made organic fertilizer to the vegetables and herbs grown in the garden; these fresh vegetables like lettuce and tomatoes are harvested and made as salad 120 or juice by the coffee shop to serve their guests. The other case is an elementary school campus farming plot, where the compost container is designed and exhibited as an integral part of the farming system to educate the pupils about the ecological function of composting in a mini-circling ecological system. Baobao is a boy attending that elementary school and he is the youngest urban farming practitioner interveiwed. He shared his understanding of composting when his mother, another urban farming practitioner, was interviewed: “…The [composting] container stores the weeds, after they get rotten, the rotten liquid extract could be used as fertilizer….which is more ecologically organic than the artificially produced [inorganic fertilizer] and is better for plants’ growth...” (Cited from Baobao, M, 11 y/o, in school farming project of Paotong elementary school, the youngest interviewed urban farming practitioner at Chengdu, 2016, own translation) For some other urban farming practitioners, a couple, almost the only couple who apply biodynamic agriculture, take composting as an essential part of their farming practice, because according to the knowledge of biodynamic agriculture, to create biodynamic compost is a critical step to guarantee the good quality of crop within a BioA standard. “…We also make some compost…[we follow the BioA compost making instruction], not yet 100% biodynamic compost…but its quality is already very good…it consists of humus, this is humus, normally people think to have organic matter is enough for a compost, but no, organic matter is different from humus…humus can store 25 times more water per unit, in a real biodynamic farm, the soil moisture can be very high, like my teacher’s farm in Australia, even the drought lasts for a whole year, his soil can still maintain its moisture, our humus is quite close to the soil quality over there…” (Cited from Guomin, F, 36 y/o, biodynamic agriculture practitioner, 2016, own translation ) Beside these above mentioned and intentionally self-made composting methods, there is the fourth nutrient cycling approach, which is a more passive way for younger urban farming practitioners to practice composting. This approach is often applied in the situation that cultivators have the awareness to recycle their organic waste but the material and spatial conditions (like balcony farming), as well as their knowledge, are not yet good enough to create a composting pile. In these cases, they would choose to simply bury the organic waste into the soil, and let the soil bacteria transfer the organic waste slowly. In addition to these urban farming practice experiences provided by the self-initiated individual cultivators, some practices and opinions from the government-initiated urban farming projects were also collected. In general, most of these government-planned urban farming projects have little consideration of the role of composting and have almost no awareness of the ecological function of compost in urban farming practices. Almost all the organizers of these government-initiated projects encountered in the field research said that their projects have no consideration of compost and do not take the disposal of the organic kitchen waste as one of their projects’ goals. They also do not specially suggest to the households that join their urban farming projects that they should apply the techniques of composting. For the organizers of these government-initiated projects, their overall knowledge and awareness toward compost is similar to those of the elder urban farming practitioners mentioned before. The reasons for the lack of interest about making compost in these government-initiated urban farming project at Chengdu will be discussed in a later chapter, compared with the relevant finding from Freiburg.

121 2) Soil Quality Since the German agricultural chemist Liebig’s identification of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) as the essential plant nutrients in the middle of the 19th Century, the agricultural soil quality standard has been understood narrowly as relevant to the content and proportions of N, P, K. Such understanding of soil quality makes sense if the consideration is only from the aspect of the quantity of crop production and the basic quality of food. However, from the perspective of ecological concern and higher food quality, the quality of soil is not only related to the inorganic nutrient contents like N, P, K and trace minerals, but also depends on the criteria of oxygen proportion, temperature, humidity, water humidity, soil texture, soil microbes, soil insects and other soil ecosystem conditions (Neher, 1999; FAO and ITPS, 2015; Langemeyer et al., 2016; Cabral et al, 2017b; Tresch et al., 2018). These multiple ecological aspects of soil quality have not yet received enough attention from most urban farming researchers and studies, as mentioned in Chapter 4. However, here, in the discussion of urban farming’s function to repair ecological rift issues, and especially connected with the farming practitioners’ awareness of these issues, the ecological aspects of soil quality will be taken into account. In the empirical cases of urban farming practice, soil quality mostly depends on two factors: first, where do the people get their soil, and second, what farming techniques or methods have been used to maintain or improve the quality of soil. The Chengdu urban farming practitioners obtain their soil from different sources. For those urban farmers who work on large- or medium-size outdoor farming patches, soil quality differs according to the types of the plots. The riverside land and “leftover” farming land which was always used for agriculture are often more arable plots with better soil quality. The vacant lands, often either the house bases left by demolished buildings or the places that have been used as dumps for nearby construction-site-soil, always in full of broken bricks, debris, rubble, gravel stones, and other construction or living garbage. Such poor soil quality represents the situation of most of the large- or medium-size outdoor farming plots. Many other urban farming practitioners practice farming on the roof, in their balcony or at the window-sill area with containers, and need relatively small amount of soil; they usually collect the soil from all available sources, including but not limited to places like roadside greenbelts, city parks, nearby construction sites, neighborhood plant areas, or countryside and other natural places. The soil quality from these different sources varies widely. Some younger or wealthier urban farming practitioners buy their soil (farming soil, compost soil, peat or turf soil) from professional gardening or farming soil suppliers, as do the participants in the NGO-supported urban farming project, whose organizers bought the soil from the market and donated it to each participant in the project. The quality of these professional suppliers’ soil is hard to determine, so often people also add to the supplier’s soil with other organic matter. Regarding soil quality and soil quality awareness, a large difference could be observed. Among the people who have large- or middle-size outdoor plots, the same group of people who are all of elder ages and once worked as farmers in the countryside, there is little awareness of ecological issues, not to mention the ecological aspects of soil quality. They may use manure or “Ou Fei” to fertilize the soil, but this is not out of their ecological awareness but a simple repeat of their previous rural farming experience (i.e. RF method). Some of the urban farmers who grow vegetables for selling pay attention only to the nutrient aspect of soil quality and apply large amounts of chemical fertilizers (i.e. CF method) to guarantee good productivity of the produce. However, even without 122 ecological concern, but because of decades of working and accumulative observation in the field, some of them gain very practical hands-on knowledge to tell the differences of soil quality. For instance, there is an elder age urban farmer with decades of farming experience describing the advantage of using manure and the disadvantage of applying chemical fertilizer: “…Nowadays the soil quality gets worse and worse for the use of chemical fertilizer…The soil is for sure better if it can be fertilized with manure…[For example] after watering manure [often mixed with water] in the field, the water in soil will quickly dry out under the burning sunlight, but because the soil watered with manure are “breathable”, so next day, the water in the deeper soil can evaporate out and thus keep the soil moisture and permeable, and the soil will not become caked mass57. Watering with manure, the surface of the field will be covered with a layer of flimsy and thin stuff consisting of the organic material in the manure, and this can resist a little bit of the hot sunlight; Applying with chemical fertilizer, the surface soil of the field will become hardened and become chapped...” (Cited from Tangdaye, M, 50+ y/o, 2016, own translation ) Among the rest of the urban farming practitioners interviewed, regardless of whether they bought their soil from professional suppliers or collected it from different sources for free, there is a great diversity of their practice of improving the quality of their soil. The choice of their practices is based on their understanding of soil quality, which is also related to the overall farming methods (e.g. RF, No-CF, PerC, NF, BioA) they choose. Among these urban farming practitioners, the absolute majority have the awareness to avoid the use of chemical fertilizer, and prefer to use organic materials as fertilizer; most of them make the organic fertilizers by themselves, and a few others prefer to buy different sorts of organic fertilizers from professional suppliers. Among these self-made organic fertilizers, most of them are made by the method of composting, some by the “Ou Fei” technique, some others by using more passive ways, which simply bury all kinds of organic waste (e.g. kitchen waste, chicken or pigeon feces, You Ku58, residue of herb medicine, straw scraps) into the soil. The preference for organic fertilizers over chemical ones indicates that these people have some basic knowledge about the benefit of organically made fertilizer; at least some of them can tell the harmfulness of chemical fertilizers for causing the soil compaction problem, but more ecological aspects of soil quality have not yet been noticed by most of the urban farming practitioners. In general, the Chengdu urban farming practitioners display a wide spectrum of knowledge and awareness of soil quality. There are the urban farming practitioners who barely know anything about soil quality but just follow the methods they learned from their early life experience or copy from other people, just like they use manure (RF) without knowing why they should use manure; there are other people who know the basic soil quality knowledge like P, N, K, but not more than that, so they choose to use chemical fertilizers comprising these basic soil nutrients (CF); there are also other urban farming practitioners who know that soil quality is more than soil nutrients, so they care about the organic texture of soil, the permeability of soil, the earthworm numbers in the

57 A phenomena the Chinese farmers called “板结”, literally meaing the soil gets caked or hardened. According to the interivewee’s experience and observation, if using too much chemical fertilizer, the soil will lose its organic materials, and in the repeating process of watering and evaporation, the texture of soil will become gradually harder and less permeable. 58 You Ku (油枯), is the residue material left after the rapeseeds are pressed for oil. Rapeseed oil is the most commonly used cooking oil in Chinese families and rape is a kind of widely grown oil crop in the Southern China area, include Sichuan province, where Chengdu City is located. To use You Ku is a very often mentioned way among my Chengdu research interviewees to fertilize their soil. 123 soil and therefore prefer to apply compost to the field instead of simply buying chemical fertilizers (OF, No-CF). There are urban farming practitioners who know the importance of humus for soil quality, and therefore practice special composting methods to gain humus soil (BioA); and there are some others who are “lazy” farmers and therefore prefer to practice the methods like Thick Soil Cultivation59 and mulching60, which can maintain the fertility and humidity of the soil but at the same save labor energy (PerC). However, these farming methods do not yet represent all the varieties of urban farming practitioners’ awareness and understanding of soil quality. At the very end of the spectrum, there are a few urban farming practitioners who practice farming with the method and philosophy of natural farming (NF), which understands soil quality in a much broader sense, particularly from the ecological aspects. NF method takes soil microbes, soil insects and other soil ecosystem conditions as a whole for soil quality, and emphasizes that to nurture soil quality, farmers should have intimate observation about nature and learn from nature’s way of creating soil. Following are quotations from NF practitioners, indicating some of the basic ideas of natural farming: “…I did many experiments in the city environment to collect ‘indigenous microorganisms61’, like in this neighborhood, in this yard for example, I collected the local microorganisms [and added them into the soil]. That’s why the soil in my garden —my neighbors were shocked — are so black so bright [and so many earthworms insides]… So I only use the tool of prong hoe fork to dig the soil to avoid to hurt the earthworms [because there are so many of them in the soil which is] so fertile! …[Besides earthworms] there are also soil insects, and in the soil you can see many tunnels created by these soil insects, very obvious, help the soil be ventilate and breathable, and with pleasant soil aroma…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…For a period of time, when the soil is fertile, there are more lives in it…Soil is actually a life community…[Tap water has been bleached, disinfected] it is not like rain water, not the same quality, not the same proportion of minerals, no microorganism, natural minerals are replaced by chemical elements….[Tap water could be harmful for the life community of soil]…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…The soil was once treated with many fertilizers and pesticides, and the whole system of that soil had been destroyed, then what we did first was to stop using those chemical things. When we try to restore its natural fertility, with its basic needs—microbes, minerals and the others. We let the soil get restored according to its local environment. I find that all these microbes, minerals and other basic needs are enough in the local environment, they all rightly exist in the local system:

59 Thick Soil Cultivation (厚土栽培法), is one of the Permaculture techniques. It is a cultivation method that avoids plowing, tilling or turning over the soil in farming practice in order to avoid killing or hurting the soil animals, because these soil animals are believed to be very important for soil quality and overall soil ecosystem. Meanwhile, this method is created for the purpose of saving the farmer’s labor energy. The specific method is to cover the original soil surface with multiple over-layers of green organic materials (e.g. green grass, animal waste, kitchen organic waste ) and dry organic materials (e.g. dry leaves from trees, straw, wood chips, cardboard chips), and finally to mulch at the top of the former covering layers with the last layer of straw or wood chips. 60 Mulching (覆蓋), is another one of the Permaculture techniques. It is a method to cover the soil surface with a layer of straw or wood chips materials for the purpose to keep the soil moisture and temperature at a favorable degree for both the soil inhabitants (e.g. animals, insects and microorganism) and crop plants. 61 Indigenous Microorganism (土著微生物), is a concept used often in Natural Farming. It takes the soil in farming plots as the ecological habitat, and each habitat has its own microorganism communities which developed in the local agro-ecological conditions for centuries and would have their own features or dynamics. The natural farming approach emphasizes such local or indigenous features and dynamics of these microorganisms and believes that these indigenous microorganisms are specially favorable for the crop plants growing locally. Natural farming has designed its hands-on and practical ways to collect these indigenous microorganisms, and people who accept the NF approach need to collect the specific microorganisms from the local environment where their farming plots are located. 124 leaves can be broken down into humus, and this is what the soil needs, while the former chemical fertilizer could not bring soil with humus, and the soil fertility had to be maintained with continuous addition of chemical fertilizer. This is like the situation of our body. In the past, our society had little knowledge about antibiotics, and fed our bodies with so many antibiotics, like feeding the soil with so many pesticides, and our health was weakened as consequence. Now if I want my body to get recovered, first, I must stop taking those antibiotics, and then I see what are the basic needs of my body, and at this moment, I start to learn my body. Another way to restore the soil fertility is ‘Liao Huang (撂荒)’— to leave the land there without doing anything [and slowly the soil’s ecosystem can get recovered by its natural power]…I find this is exactly similar like the theory of ‘Bi Gu62’…” (Ibid) 3) Water Cycling Urban farming has some potential to regulate water cycling such as to infiltrate water, purify water, and recharge groundwater, as well as to store water and to mitigate floods, but these functions could be limited by many concrete factors, related to the size of the farming plot, the location (on the ground or in container), the farmer’s awareness, the method applied, and the specific practice. When compared to container cultivation (either in the balcony or on the roof), on-ground urban farming has obvious “on-ground” conditions to better play the potential role of regulating water cycling. However, this potential role of urban farming to regulate water cycling has been limited in real life practice. First, given the land limit in urban space, the majority of urban farming practitioners in my field research at Chengdu can only practice their farming in containers. Second, no one realizes urban farming’s potential function to regulate the water cycle in the urban environment, including people who cultivate on the ground, like on the large- or medium-size outdoor farming patches. Moreover, it is all the elder people who work there and who would use RF and CF methods, both of which apply chemical fertilizer and pesticide and would even contaminate the groundwater with the recharging of rainwater. Third, the disappearing speed of the on-ground farming plots at Chengdu is stunning. In a short period of time, I encountered two urban farming cases which changed their land use attribution very quickly. In one of the two cases, a communal urban farming plot was demolished and replaced by a park. Even though the park would preserve the open land for rainfalls, the tendency towards ornamental plants in the park would increase the use of pesticide and other chemicals, and meanwhile, would reduce the tillage activities and the organic materials in the soil. In addition, simple ornamental park plants would reduce the biodiversity that the former farming plot could offer (Photo 2). However, even though the empirical research cases at Chengdu would not offer convincing example and evidence to demonstrate urban farming’s function to regulate water cycling, and none of the people I interviewed are aware of the related issues, there is a “mini” water cycling system, or “mini circulation system” as it is called, being designed and practiced by some urban farming practitioners. Mini circulation systems practice the elements of PerC about rainfall collection, but the rainwater is collected not

62 Bi Gu (“辟穀”in traditional Chinese, “辟谷” in simplified Chinese), could be understood as Inedia or Breatharianism in English. It is a sort of Chinese Taoist fasting method, which is often practiced companying with the mental and breathing exercises like Qigong, Taichi, yoga, or meditation to avoid a hungry feeling. 125

Photo 2. The sceneries before and after the demolishment of the collective urban farming plot only for watering and irrigation purposes, but is also integrated as an essential part of aquatic animals and water plants inside. The pond water that gains organic waste from fish would be used to irrigate the vegetables in the farming plot. There are two urban farming groups in Chengdu using such “mini circulation system” designs at their farming plots: one of them is a school urban farming project whose mini system was established for educational purposes in the school’s eco-garden at the backyard of the campus; the other mini system is set up in the aforementioned roof garden, which is a part of the outdoor space belonging to the roof coffee shop. The owner of the coffee shop designed the mini system for basically three reasons: 1) to make good use of rainwater as an important natural resource and to integrate the reuse of rainwater as part of the food production conditions in the garden; 2) to create a pleasant water landscape in the garden for people’s aesthetic needs; 3) to exhibit the mini circulation system and the entire edible gardening system as a public education space for the customers of the coffee shop (Photo 3 below).

Photo 3. The scenery before and after the establishment of the roof edible garden belonging to a roof coffee shop

126 4) Other Ecological Practices In addition to the above mentioned practices of farming methods and techniques which facilitate urban environment based ecosystem services – such as nutrient recycling, soil quality and water recycling – with either positive or passive awareness, urban farming practitioners at Chengdu have also been engaging in other aspects of farming activities, which influence the ecological conditions and ecosystem services within their small scale urban farming plots. However, these urban farming influenced ecological practices are not evenly implemented by the urban farming practitioners, but depend instead on each individual urban farming practitioner’s choice and awareness. In the majority of the cases at Chengdu, people do farming mostly for food related concerns, so the ecological concerns like biodiversity promotion or habitat provision do not exist in most of their awareness. However, some of them still engage in some of the ecological practices merely through cultivation of their crop plants63. Take biodiversity promotion for example: many urban farming practitioners in fact have been joining in biodiversity promotion just by growing many different species of crop plants. Among the Chengdu urban farming practitioners interviewed, the average self-reported crop plant richness is thirteen species64. More than half of the interviewed urban farming practitioners grow about five to ten different types of crop plants, and about one third of the interviewed urban cultivators grow 12 to 27 different species of crop plants. In an extreme case, there is an interviewee claiming that he once planted more than 100 different kinds of crop or herb species. The data of Chengdu research show that the richness (number of varieties) of crops planted has no obvious relevance to age difference, and both the elder people and the younger cultivators might plant their crops with great richness or not. Also, the richness of crop plants has no absolute relation to the individual cultivator’s farming experience in the past. Many younger people who have no farming experience in their earlier life time may still grow many different sorts of crop plants by learning the knowledge and skills of farming from books and online sources. In addition, even though the richness of crop plants may have something to do with the size of available farming plot or space, it is not so absolute. There is some indoor urban farming practitioner who has only very narrow window sill area but can still plant ten to fifteen types of crop plants, while some other vacant-land urban farming practitioners who grow vegetables for income purpose, even though they have relatively large piece of lands available, choose to grow only one through five types of economically valuable vegetables. The Chengdu research shows that the factors which most influence the richness of crop plants most are related to the farming methods people choose and the ecological awareness people hold. The urban farming practitioners who practice the NF (Natural Farming) method have an obvious preference to grow many different crop species, and most of the self-reported crop richness among the NF practitioners is above 20. In addition, NF urban farming practitioners value the old (heritage) seeds most and always

63 Crop plants and non-crop plants in this writing are different in their purposes. Crop plants include edible plants like vegetables, cuisine herbs, medicinal herbs, fruit trees and berry bushes, etc, while non-crop plants mean the inedible plants like all ornamental bushes, flowers and trees. 64 It is a self-reported rough average number, and some of the interviewed urban farming practitioners counted the numbers of richness only for one season but forgot to take account of some crops they grew in other seasons. In addition, because the interviewed urban farming practitioners did not prepare the number information in advance, when they were asked the question about the number of crop species, they could not give precise numbers. But according to my own observation and estimation, the actual average number of the crop plant richness among my interviewees should be more than thirteen. 127 try to grow as much variety of seeds as possible to preserve the old seeds, and to maintain the crop plants’ biodiversity. With respect to non-crop plants, the situation is similar. Among all the researched farming practitioners at Chengdu, few grow non-edible ornamental plants. Except in two or three cases where the people grow many flowers or ornamental plants for esthetical needs, NF practitioners grow a relatively large variety of non-crop plants with clear ecological awareness. The Natural Farming method takes all the natural environment elements into consideration, and takes the whole farming plot, both above and under ground ecosystem, as an entire interdependent web65. During the interview time, NF urban practitioners expressed their attention and concern about the habitat conditions which urban farming could provide for other animals, insects, micro-organisms, as well as spontaneous and indigenous plants. “…That year when I was planning my family plot… and I was thinking what to grow, I think I realize the law of nature in one piece of field, that is: Earthworm has its own lifestyle, tomato grows up into its own form, eggplant grows up in its own shape, and weed also grow up as weed. Together they share the same piece of land and they are interdependent but also mutually restrained to one other... They need healthy soil quality. They need co-live with weed, with each other…Then some of the worms or insects could go to eat the weed they like and don’t need eat all the crops. [In such case] weed is useful and worms or insects are also good for a complete ecosystem…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “… No, I do not take the ‘pest’ away [from the crops]… Biodiversity can explain why the bug or the worm would appear there, and why monoculture would cause the appearance of these ‘pest’ insects. Insects have been existing in the world for long time and it is part of the law of nature. Each type of insect has its own certain type of plants as food…but if you don’t offer the insect’s own plants to eat, it will start to eat other plants…[if] the biodiversity get recovered here [instead of monoculture]…insect won’t have to stick to and eat only one type of plant and won’t devour that plant completely. So after I get to know this principle, I feel no worry about ‘pest’ insect. I allow them to eat my crop plants, because I know they will leave enough for me to enjoy...” (Ibid) “…I do mulching, so my soil is healthy, and the micro-organisms are enough and quite active. The plants and the structure combination in my plot is very diverse, because my cultivation principle is to grow maximum variety of plants in a minimal piece of land space. My farming plot was less than 20 m², but I grew more than 100 plant species, just plant at all the spots possible…”(Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, natural farming practitioner and urban farming promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) “…What I did was to build a plant species community, like the species community existing in the real natural world, and this is what I always insist, because this in fact established a resilient [farming plot] ecosystem for insects. Insects in such mini ecosystem don’t need eat only one type of crop and because of such a diversity ecosystem, the insect species did also become diverse. [Many farming plots are often obsessed by] a single species of ‘pest’, it is the consequence of growing single plant crop. A diversified farming plot does not have so-called ‘pest’ problem. While the crops’ disease problem, is the result of the unbalance of micro-organism contents. It means that when a certain type of soil bacteria is too little, or the overall soil bacteria is too little, the plant would become ill...” (Ibid)

65 Permaculture approach emphasizes learning from the natural system as well. But in the field research, the urban farming practitioners’ practice with Permaculture is not very obvious or complete; therefore, only natural farming methods can be summarized here as the concrete empirical cases that are practiced in the field. 128 “…I don’t need to worry about the ‘pests’. Why? When there is an ecological balance, the predators of these ‘pests’ will be naturally attracted to come over to catch them. It is even more effective than the artificially introduced predators, which might not be able to adopt the new environment…A certain degree of pests existing in an ecosystem is natural and we need learn to tolerant them. If there is no pests, then their predators cannot survive…The importance is a stable ecosystem...” (Cited from Junhua, F, 43 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…The first year when I was growing the Qingcai (leafy vegetables)…there were many green worms that appeared on the leaves…I caught these green worms and brought them up to the roof plot (where the birds also like to come to visit)…My friend told me that I don’t need to worry about the pest problem, but just let the worms eat whatever they want…and finally these worms got gradually disappeared...In this process, I learned to know that if these worms exist here, [it must indicate that the recent soil and ecological condition is suitable for them to live there, meanwhile] it also implies that the soil condition must lack something, some element which can stop these worms to live…”(Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, 2016, own translation ) There are more such nature-centered methods and thoughts being offered by NF practitioners during the interviews, but this paper has limits and thus can not display all of them here. The basic idea of natural farming is to observe nature, learn from nature and imitate how nature has been organizing its system. Their argument is that earth has been existing in exuberance for billions of years without humans’ interference. Nature has its wisdom and power to achieve such exuberance. Therefore, natural farming believes that human’s farming system can learn to grow our food by facilitating with such natural power and wisdom. Natural farming’s understanding about nature, and about the human-and-nature relation, is consistent with some ancient Chinese philosophy. This topic is relevant to the hypothesis about “cultural rift” of my current research and will soon be discussed specifically in next section. 5.3.2 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Response to Epistemological and Cultural Rift As elaborated in earlier chapters, epistemological rift and cultural rift, as well as the later discussed social and individual rifts, are more intangible metabolic rifts and often hide implicitly and deeply in people’s perception. Even if people do feel something deep inside, but the feeling would be too unperceivable and inexpressible to be captured by an outsider. This would be the situation when researchers want to study urban farming practitioners’ direct personal perception and understanding of the immaterial rift issues, and to test whether urban farming is a kind of tool for urban farming practitioners to response to these intangible rift issues. Especially, when these immaterial rift issues overlap and intertwine with one another, it would become even harder for the urban farming practitioners to express their perception on these interrelated issues. In this section, in order to make these intangible and inexpressible epistemological and cultural rift issues more describable and analyzable, the analysis of research findings will be conducted under the two subtitles of epistemological-need and cultural-need. Even though the urban farming practitioners are not able to express directly that they do farming in the urban space for responding to epistemological rift and cultural rift issues, from their own expression about the reasons for their farming choice and from their own introductions about their early life experiences, some of the urban farming practitioners’ epistemological-need and cultural-need could be recognized and identified in their answers to the interview questions.

129 1) Epistemological-Need The findings of Chengdu research show that there is a type of urban farming practitioner who has a special need to practice urban farming because of their earlier life experience and knowledge in farming. The similar features among these people are that they are all elder age people (50-80 y/o), originally from the countryside, having spent most of their lifetime doing farming, but now they have moved to the city either for family or income reasons. The so-called family reason is that some urban farming practitioners’ children, who live in the city, need their parents to come to the city to take care of their own preschool aged children, and also, as a Chinese cultural tradition, once the children find their own living place in the city, they have the responsibility to bring their parents to the city to live together with them. In such cases, the elder parents leave their countryside homes and start their life in the city. Except for the time to take care of the grandchild(ren), many of them have nothing else to do. The so-called income reason is that some rural farmers who cannot earn good income in the countryside come to the city, but often only find some unskilled and informal part-time jobs to do, leaving them plenty of free time with nothing to do. In these cases, farming would become people’s first choice if there is a piece of vacant land nearby. By practicing the farming knowledge they have been using so long and so well, they find some familiar element of their rural life and therefore obtain the satisfaction and meaning of their life in the city. Mingjian (67 y/o) was the first urban farming practitioner interviewed in the Chengdu research. He and his wife were formerly living in the countryside, but after their two sons found their jobs and had their children in Chengdu, they moved to Chengdu to take care of their grandchildren. Mingjian started his urban farming practice in 2012. When he was looking outside and downward from the high floor apartment where he and his family live, he found a piece of empty construction site next to their apartment building. “…As soon as I saw this place becoming a vacant lot, I made my decision to cultivate vegetables here…”, said Mingjian during the interview. Even though his own self-reported benefits to do farming are about a) the “convenience” to get safe food, b) the chance to exercise the body, and c) the good way for time-filling, these are more like his summary after the farming already started, while not what guided Mingjian to make the decision to do urban farming in the first place. The decision is more like an instinctive reaction for an old farmer at the moment of seeing the land of soil and more like an intuitive impulse for him to apply his know-how. Mingjian and the other urban farming practitioners alike have their full confidence in farming practice, and as in his own words “…People like us are born as farmer. We are not intellectual and are not able to do other jobs, but the farming practice is what we can easily be a master of at least 70-80%...”. More comments come from other interviewed urban farmers with similar backgrounds (moving from rural to city either for income or family reasons): “… I like to do farming for occupying my boring time, for fun…Back home in the countryside, the farming work tasks were too laborious to handle. I got even injured and ill from the hard work of farming, and so my husband does not like me to do farming after we now live in the city. But I don’t care, [I have no other things to do] farming skill is what I know and I can get food from my cultivation... I find it is interesting to do a little bit of farming…I feel some sense of achievement from harvesting my food…”(Cited from Qunfang, F, 51 y/o, moving to city for income reason, 2016, own translation. I encountered Qunfang by following the Google Earth sampling of a piece of vacant land she was working on. Qunfang and her husband work as gatekeepers for a walled resident compound next to the vacant land.)

130 “... Sweet potato is very easy to grow. This is just a little piece of land (3x7 m²) and I do it for fun when I have time…This is unlike the farming I did at home in the countryside. That was for sustenance and I must work in much larger piece of land…I do farming now for exercising, and the side benefit is that I grow my own food without using pesticide, so my food is safe to eat …” (Cited from Tangdaye, M, 50+ y/o, moving to city for family reason, 2016, own translation. At the time when I encountered Tangdaye by following the Google Earth sampled farming plot, he was plowing on a slight piece of “leftover” farming land for growing sweet potatoes.) “… I started to grow vegetables on the roof in 2012, when the district asked me to join their community farming project… [Before the project] I have moved to Chengdu for about seventeen or eighteen years, and I always thought of doing farming, because I had nothing else to do. If I could find a place to do farming, it would be good for me to spend my large amount of free time. It is not good to stay in the room all the day. Farming is the best way to exercise the body. I usually get up at 6 a.m. to have a look about my vegetables on the roof. The air is also fresher there…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, moving to city for family reason, 2016, own translation. Hefang is the oldest interviewed urban farming practitioner Chengdu and probably also the most productive one. Since she started growing vegetables in the box containers on the roof, she no longer needs to buy vegetables for the whole family which consists of four people.)

Figure 18. The piece of left over farming land (polygonized area) where Songdaye worked for 60 years

Photo 4.. Songdaye in the leftover farming land at a city center area of Chengdu

131 A special case found at Chengdu is that of an older farmer, Songdaye, who has been doing farming for almost 60 years on the same piece of land (Photo 4). While all the other surrounding farming lands have been completely encroached by the city development, Songdaye’s farming land is still existing there, as a piece of leftover farming land, enclosed in the quite urban center area of Chengdu city (Figure 18). I encountered Songdaye in the field by following the Google Earth sample of farming land, when he was busy rustling among his crops. Songdaye said that his other family members have all been adapting to the city life with the rapid urbanization process of Chengdu since a long time ago, but he still needs to keep farming in the field, even though he can easily get a good life without working anymore. “… I have been doing farming for the whole lifetime since in my 20s. I have never left this piece of land. (People in my family tell me to stop farming, but) if I really stop farming, I will become ill ...” (Cited from Songdaye, M, 78 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) In none of the epistemological-need cases, did any urban farming practitioner expressed specifically that they do farming for the reason that they have need to re-practice their knowledge of farming. Epistemological-need is a more silent and more implicit need than the more easily expressed needs like time-filling, physical exercise or food safety. However, it is a need easy to understand: Since their young ages, people had been spending most of their time, energy and effort to learn, to memorize and to practice the farming knowledge and skills, and when they get old, the need to re-practice farming becomes something like recalling some old memories of familiarity. However, from these interviewees’ answers, we get to know that the local rural farming practices in these old memories of familiarity were already not so purely related to the local ecosystem, but had been influenced by chemical farming knowledge. Many old agricultural traditions that used more ecological farming approaches have been abandoned or changed by chemical farming and industrial agricultural approaches. For example, as Tangdaye described: “…Farmers in the countryside no longer want to use manure, because they want to save their labor power and just prefer to do easy farming. To use manure, farmers need to raise pigs and they also have to use their own physical labor to carry the manure from their house to the far distant field. The entire process is very tiring, and the physical labor costs are too much…So, no matter how expensive the chemical fertilizers could be sold by the state, farmers still prefer to buy…” (Cited from Tangdaye, M, 50+ y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) Agro-ecological knowledge and wisdom are embedded not only in the local traditional farming techniques like the usage of manure, but also in the collection and reproduction of self-bred seeds or in the recognition and usage of indigenous medicine weeds or cuisine herbs. Regarding the use of old (heritage) seed preservation and reproduction, among the interviewees with rural farming backgrounds, only a few now take action to collect some of the seeds harvested from the crop plants they grow. One interviewee expressed his knowledge of seed collection, but mentioned that city environment lacks the conditions for breeding good quality seeds. In addition, his knowledge and understanding of seed collection is no longer the historically and ecologically selected local traditional knowledge, but more like a modern science and industrial agriculture influenced understanding of seed reproduction. Generally, the awareness or action of seed collecting can be regarded as part of the epistemological-need among these urban farming practitioners with earlier rural farming experience.

132 “… Dasuan (garlic), Cong (chive), Luobu (radish), Shanghai Qing, Dabaicai (Chinese cabbage)…the seeds of these vegetables are bred from the crops of my own growth, I don’t need to buy these vegetables…[when I was still in the countryside, I didn’t use the seeds given by the state, because] I didn’t think their seeds were of good quality…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “… no, I don’t collect my own seeds…because we don’t have the condition to collect seeds. Seeds collection requires certain conditions. First, you need a good location in the mountainous area, for instance, the seed collection of corn needs an relatively isolated place in the mountainous place, otherwise the pollen from other corn fields would fly to your corn field, and this would affect the purity of your corn seed. So, we don’t have such condition in the city. In addition, seed selection is the responsibility of the state, they have the best place and condition to do seed collection…” (Cited from Mingjian, M, 67 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) With respect to the knowledge and recognition of indigenous weeds and herbs among the rural background urban practitioners at Chengdu, the situation is similar to that of their practice to collect and reproduce self-bred seeds: people have the local knowledge, but only a few of them take action to apply the knowledge in city circumstances. The answers from each person demonstrate that even though they all possessed a certain amount of knowledge to recognize some local and indigenous weeds or herbs from their early countryside life and farming experiences, the concrete or asphalt covered urban surface conditions can hardly support them to practice their knowledge (only vacant farming plots have more chance to find some spontaneously growing weeds). However, the following quotations indicate that this weed-related local knowledge is still preserved in these people’s memories; once there is the chance, their need to recall or to use this knowledge can be observed. (In the vacant farming land field) “…I will take this weed herb home, (boiled with water) it has some use for relieving stomach problem, also good for healing the cold…I don’t know every weed herb here, but this one I just plucked, is what I know…I can recognize this is Lantern Grass, also for relieving stomach problem…and this is Iron-whip Grass…” (Cited from Qunfang, F, 51 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…[Living in the countryside when I was young] if I got a cold I often searched in the field for some medicine weeds/herbs to self-healing. I could recognize about a dozen kinds of weed or herb plants with medical function, all taught by my father…People at that time in the countryside hardly take ‘real’ medicine, but all went up into the mountainous areas to search for wild herb or weed plants as their medicines…[But living in the city nowadays, my family prefer to take drugstore medicine] and for urgent cases, it is also not easy to find the weed/herb needed…[But sometimes] if we are outing for casual time, when being asked, I can still help people recognize some medical weeds or eatable herbs that they can take home…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) (In the vacant farming land field) “…This weed, its local name is Yanghe Weed, this is Dog-tail Grass, and this is Qinghao…There is an old saying about Qinghao that ‘In March, it is Yinchen; in April, it becomes QingHao; in May, it can only be cut for firewood’66…At this vacant area, I can also find the weed plants like Diding,

66 Qinghao (青蒿), is also named as Sweet Wormwood in English. In the Chinese weather condition, at the early spring time (in March), when it is just burgeoning with bitter taste, people call it as Yinchen and harvest it for medicine purpose; at the middle spring time (in April), when it grows up and slowly loses its medicinal value, people change to call it as Qinghao and enjoy it as food; and at the late spring time (by May), it loses all the edible and 133 Pugongying, Jinqiancao, Maticao, Laijiaobancao67…But here I can’t find Hesouwu, whch is a very common medical weed plant at my rural home areas…” (Cited from Xiedaye, M, 69 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) All the above-mentioned cases demonstrate that urban farming practice is a way to satisfy the epistemological-needs among the rural background urban farming practitioners, who have the instinctive need to re-practice the farming-related knowledge they learned and practiced in their earlier rural life. Or, in the language of metabolic rift theory, urban farming is these people’s tool to repair the “epistemological rift”, which takes place in the shifting from rural life to city life. However, epistemological-need cannot explain two other types of urban farming practitioners’ choice of farming practice: urban practitioners who grew up in the countryside, but soon left the countryside for cities to study or to work, and never learned specific farming knowledge or worked in farming as their long-term professional career, and those urban farming practitioners grew up with urban backgrounds, and had little or no personal farming knowledge or experience before their present urban farming practice. For these two types of urban farming practitioners, their choice of farming practice may demand explanation by cultural-need. 2) Cultural-Need With the disappearance of farming land – as the “protective covering of cultural institutions” – many agriculture related culture, customs, rituals, festivals and traditional lifestyles in Chinese society have been intentionally eliminated, or just spontaneously disappeared during the unprecedented Chinese industrialization, urbanization and modernization process over the extremely short timescale. For example, during the Chengdu field research, all people mentioned that the Spring Festival – the most important festival and custom for Chinese people both in history and in modern times – no longer has the traditional and impressive atmosphere as before in the agricultural society, in which agricultural was the dominant social activity and people were super attentive to weather conditions and seasonal cycles; therefore, every year when the spring started over again, people had the practical reason to celebrate it, as both a symbolic festival and also a pragmatic timing point for the beginning of a new agricultural production circle. However, modern city life has detached people away from such agriculture based festivals and customs, or turned these traditions to be nonliving cultural symbols, or even taken these symbols as the candy paper to disguise the real commercial purposes. For younger generations, born in the modern city circumstances, without an old-time living environment to immerse in, many of them miss the possibility to be nurtured in the traditional cultural atmosphere, and therefore also lose the chance to inherit the old culture and pass it to the coming generations. However, as a society having four thousand years of continuous practice of agriculture, China still preserves many cultural influences of farming. Chinese people’s instinctive and intuitive need of the connection with farming, land and soil, and their inherent need for farming or farming related living choices, traditions, thoughts and philosophy can be observed and captured among the urban farming practitioners in my Chengdu research. In the following, three types of the farming related cultural and life heritage will first be addressed: soil cultivation, seed preservation, and traditional family cooking. medicinal values, and can only be chopped down for firewood use. This is a folk knowledge, known as the folk saying of “三月茵陳四月蒿, 五月砍了當柴燒” in Chinese. 67 Diding, Pugongying, Jinqiancao, Maticao, Laijiaobancao are known as 地丁, 蒲公英, 金錢草, 馬蹄草, 癩腳板草 in folk Chinese. 134 Need of Soil Cultivation with Intuitive Desire There is a very notable situation among the Chengdu urban farming practitioners: many people answered directly or indirectly that their reason to start farming was simply because they could not bear to see the arable land staying barren there, and they thought it was a great waste of soil to leave the arable land uncultivated. “…Soil should be cultivated often…If the land is left there without cultivation, the soil will lose its fertility…[So soil] should always be cultivated, otherwise the vacant land will be wasted for just grasses…” (Cited from Qunfang, F, 51 y/o, rural background urban farming practitioner, 2016, own translation) “…This is [vacant] land belonging to the real estate developer, or more precisely to say, it belongs to the state, because it hasn’t yet been sold. Cultivation is promised so far…Otherwise, to leave the land empty here is a big waste of land…” (Cited from a Chengguan68, 2016, own translation) However, as mentioned before, many of the urban farming plots are in fact only vacant lots, dumped with nearby construction-site-soil, which is full of rubble, debris and other metal or plastic trash, but such poor land condition can hardly quench people’s enthusiasm for farming. Some people even answered me that it could take them one to two months to just work on cleaning the small stones and trash out of the soil before starting real cultivation activities. In some extreme cases, the land condition is so poor that you cannot even tell whether it is “some trash and stones existing among the soil” or “some soil existing in the middle of the trash and stones”. However, surprisingly, these urban farming practitioners can just grow their crops out of such extreme poor soil conditions! In another interview case, I encountered an old man who was working to plant some crop seedlings in some very “strange” soil, which was in fact not soil but some deeper layer rocky rubble that had been drilled out from a construction site. I sheerly doubted that crops could finally grow from such “soil” condition, but after about four weeks when that farming plot was revisited, various green vegetables were growing well under the tending of that old man (Photo 5).

Photo 5. Vacant farming plot, crops grown by Xiedaye, 2016

68 Chengguan (城管), is an informal municipal position, the lowest level of local governmental para-policeman system to operate daily life surveillance and law enforcement in China. 135 Need of Old (Heritage) Seed Preservation In addition to the overall farming practice, the farming related activity of old seed preservation would also be regarded as a practice following the cultural-need of the urban farming practitioners. Among all the interviewed urban farming practitioners at Chengdu, about one third of them answered that they harvest some of the seeds from their own crops, and these people can be further divided into three categories: NF people, epistemological-need people, and the others. First, for the NF people, namely, the people who apply the natural farming approach in their urban farming practice, they have clear awareness to do old seed collection and preservation for the reasons of hobby, agro-ecological concern and cultural identity. These NF people not only breed their own seeds, but also make efforts to collect old seeds from all the possible sources. Some of them visit the rural areas to collect really old and non-hybrid seeds from local farmers, and some others use the online sources to search special old seeds. These NF people also organize some seed bartering events among themselves to exchange old varieties, or they receive some gift-seeds from friends. “…Farming is the tradition being passed from generations to generations…including seed preservation…Now I can recall that during my childhood, my father took seed preservation as naturally what should be done by a farmer…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, living in the countryside at childhood time, father was a rural farmer, 2016-2017, own translation) “…Not sure whether it is real or only a feeling, but the taste of the lettuce grown from self-bred seeds is really different from the one grown from mainstream market seed…Now for me, if I don’t have the old seed for certain crops, I would prefer not to grow that crop…” (Ibid) “…Old seeds are not easy to find today…hard to find them in the mainstream market…I have the seeds either self-harvested from my farm last year, or shared by my friends. They know I like collecting seeds, so when they have good seeds they share with me. They search old seeds at small local markets, and when they find some rare variety, they will bring it to me…Today in China, more and more people develop the awareness to preserve old seeds, (there is now old seeds network for seeds exchange,) it becomes easy for us to collect old seeds. Now if we get a good species, we have the awareness to preserve and reproduce it, so in the next year, we have more seeds to share with others. So far, there are about 200-300 old seed varieties that could be shared in our network, and they are the grain or cereal seeds, corn seeds, vegetable seeds, even flower seeds…” (Ibid) “…I like to collect old seeds…it is my hobby…All these seeds are collected by me gradually. In our network, we all like to preserve the seeds we bred from our own crops and then we share the seeds with each other…These are all the old seeds given by friends as gifts…Last winter, a friend gave me 8 seeds of Wo Sun (Chinese lettuce)…I grew them all into new Wo Sun and bred a lot of new seeds that I shared all out with friends…” (Cited from Junhua, F, 43 y/o, living in the countryside during childhood times, 2016, own translation) “…Yes, this crop plant is preserved without being eaten for collecting old seeds…For all the vegetables with fruits, like Si Gua (luffa), Na Gua (pumpkin ), we eat some and preserve some others for seed collection…” (Ibid) “…Another difficulty of urban farming is to find old seeds. In my urban farming courses, I always encourage the participants to use old seeds. I encourage them to visit their countryside homeplace to search for old seeds, but most rural farmers are now also using only hybrid seeds, or our network tries to provide them with old seeds…We collect seeds from peasants who practice organic farming and so far in our network about 200 to 300 varieties could be shared with the urban farming

136 course participants…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, NF urban farming practitioner and promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) “…Old seeds are resistant to virus and extreme climate, while hybrid seeds are weak to resist illness and radical climate. I have no idea about GM seeds, I never observed the growing of such seeds, but comparing the hybrid seeds with old varieties, old seeds are better…” (Ibid) “... In the past, the tradition was that peasants always grew their own self-preserved varieties, which are the result of artificial [human] selection and breeding process, and the good species got the choice to save their seeds, which can be further reproduced…but after seed breeding becomes a business, no one preserves their own seeds anymore… young people no longer preserve, old people no longer preserve, and the state even encouraged the peasants to use the hybrid seeds, by commenting ‘Don’t use your old seeds anymore, low productivity, perishable; our seeds are resistant and costless’, [and after the peasants got used to use the hybrid seeds] the state started to charge money for the seeds…the typical example is Monsanto’s mode…” (Cited from Luoling, F, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation) Second, for the epistemological-need people, they are the urban farming practitioners from rural farming background, who were mentioned in the above discussion of “epistemological need”; and according to that explanation, they reproduce the old seeds for the reason of epistemological-need. Third, for the others, who said that even though they mainly use the commercial seeds bought from markets, when they have the chance and condition (e.g. relevant knowledge, good seed quality and quantity), they would prefer to breed their own seeds or to use old seeds, although they did not explain why they prefer to do so. However, no matter what are the specific reasons for people in each of these three categories to do seed collecting, breeding or preservation, their choice could be interpreted in general as more or less a sense to value the old seeds which inherit the cultural messages from the past. Even for the people who could not clearly explain why they prefer to use old or self-harvested seeds, and also who have no awareness to protect old seeds, their intrinsic preference towards old seeds just demonstrates that there is a kind of invisible underlying cultural influence at work, and it is the culture that has been developed and inherited in generations after generations of practice of self-seed breeding. “...I didn’t need to buy vegetables from the market for already two years…garlic, xiaocong, radish, small white Chinese cabbage, bok-choy, Chinese cabbage, I grow all these vegetables with the seeds bred by myself…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…Don’t need buy seeds, I bought the pumpkin and ate the fruit but collected the seeds, and these new pumpkins are out of these seeds…” (Cited from Xingwu, M, 66 y/o, chemical engineer background, 2016, own translation) “…At the beginning, I bought seeds from the market, last year when I was visiting my homeplace in the countryside, I got some seeds from my rural relatives, this year I plan to breed my own seeds, but still need to buy some seeds…My son and his family said the four-season-pea, which was grown out of the old seeds by me this year, are more tasty than the one sold in market, the seeds of the four-season-pea are shared by my daughter-in-law’s mother as gift-seed…” (Cited from Qiming, F, 68 y/o, urban farming practitioner in the NGO project, 2016, own translation) “…We use the seeds bred from our own farm, or we buy some seeds just from normal mainstream markets, or we buy some others online…” (Cited from Guomin, F, 36y/o, 2016, own translation )

137 Need of Traditional Family-Dish Cooking and Home-Food Making In addition to the direct farming practice related needs, food related needs are another type of cultural-need rooted in the Chinese agricultural tradition (Shih, 1982). Through food, Chinese people can keep living in traditional lifestyle, which is based on affluent and diversified agricultural production. Food related cultural-need is first embedded in the agro-biodiversity of the Chinese farming. As mentioned before, the self-reported average crop plant richness among the Chengdu urban farming practitioners is thirteen species (probably an underestimated number; and actual crop plant richness would be much higher). Such richness of urban farming agro-biodiversity, fulfilling people’s enjoyment of family dish varieties, is consistent with the Chinese cuisine reputation for diversity. Vice versa, the fame and richness of cuisine culture in China also contributes to maintain the diversity of the crop species. This is especially true for the richness of vegetables. In the Chinese family cooking tradition, there is always a great diversity of vegetable dishes; and to cook three to five different vegetable dishes for one single meal is very common in many families’ kitchens. Living in such cuisine richness, it is quite easy to understand why these Chinese (Chengdu) urban farming practitioners like to grow a large variety of vegetables, because these people are born into a culture of dish richness, and it is very natural and normal for them to grow these vegetables which they have been very familiar with in their everyday meals. In addition, very often many of the Chinese family daily dishes are accompanied by a little bit of clippings of culinary herbs (e.g. Xiaocong, a type of scallion or spring onion or chives), so many people in my interviews mentioned that it is super convenient for their cooking when these culinary herbs are planted reachable on their balcony. In addition to these daily cooking dishes, in Chinese society, there is another home-made food system which once played an important role for household self-sufficiency. This home-made food tradition was once very popular in Chinese families, providing the whole family with a great many self-processed foods, which can be categorized as pickled food, smoked food, dried food and fermented food. However, such home-made food systems have been gradually replaced by the industrialized and commercialized food supply system. In awareness of the disappearing local home-made food tradition, the local community NGO “Ai You Xi” (literally means “love has a role to play”) has organized many home-made food events in their urban farming project for the purpose of encouraging their project participants to re-make these home-made foods and to restore the self-sufficient food tradition. In general, the urban farming project manager and his colleagues at “Ai You Xi” believe that, through practicing urban farming, restoring the home-made food systems, rebuilding the traditional foodways, and recalling the old food memories, their project participants could regain their cultural identity which is embedded in these food related traditions. Additionally, there are some other findings with regard to home-made food that are worthy of mention here. When my interviewees were asked to recall their home-made food memories, many of them recognized that these home-made foods were actually mother-made foods. This is because mothers and other female members in the family were always playing the key role in home food making process. Many of the elderly female interviewees in my research also mentioned that they have the knowledge and experience about how to make these home-processed foods, and when they were young or when they were still living at their rural home, they made many of them. However, this home-made food tradition is disappearing today in the Chinese families. For these elderly female interviewees, they said they do not make these home-made foods anymore, either because it becomes harder for them to find the appropriate ingredients 138 or because they can today easily buy the modern versions of these foods from the market. Many of the young female interviewees in my research said that they do not even have the knowledge or experience to make these home-made foods, although they miss very much these old foods and old tastes once made by their mothers or grandmothers. The followings are some of the female interviewees’ own words: “… I know how to make Douban (spicy soybean sauce), Doufuru (fermented tofu), Shuidoushi (wet fermented soybean), Mijiu (rice wine), Suancai (sour pickle), Xiancai (pickle)…But I no longer make them today…I learned to make them when I was in the countryside as Zhiqing…Today we don’t have the conditions to make these foods…For example, for Doufuru, first the beans need to be immersed in the water till swelling, the you need to use the family milling equipment to grind the swelling beans. After that, you need to boil the beans and filter them, and then you need to make it fermented with enzymes, then you squeeze all the water, then you cut the half-dry tofu and dry them further, and then after they get mouldy, you store them with lotus leaf…there are so many steps to get the final result…But I still make some easy Paocai (wet pickle) at home…” (Cited from Qiming, F, 68 y/o, urban farming practitioner in the NGO project, 2016, own translation) “…In the past at home in the countryside, I would make Doufu (tofu), Liangfen (soybean jelly), or Midoufu (rice tofu). At that time, without self-making, you had nothing to eat…” (Cited from Qunfang, F, 51 y/o, moving to city for income reason, 2016, own translation) “…I know how to make Xiancai (pickle), Suancai (sour pickle), Maodoufu (mould tofu), Mijiu (rice wine)…But I can’t do these foods here…I can do them if I go back home in the countryside…” (Cited from Longpopo, F, 62 y/o, moving to city for income reason, 2016, own translation) “…I would make Paohaijiao (spicy wet chili pickle), and Douban (spicy soybean sauce)…” (Cited from Pengpopo, F, 76 y/o, retired teacher, 2016, own translation) “…I make Douban (spicy soybean sauce), Doufuru (fermented tofu) and Suancai (sour pickle) for the family…If I harvest too much radishes, I would cut the extra radishes into small pieces and dry them up under the sun, and make them into Xiancai (pickle) or Luobugan (dry radish)…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “… In the childhood time, I remember my mother made Mijiu (rice wine), Douhua (soft tofu), Doushi (fermented soybeans), Zaolajiao (fermented chili)…We Guizhou province people like to eat noodles with Zaolajiao, which is a mixture of chili, bean and soft bamboo shoot, staying still a while, the mixture becomes fermented with a nice sour flavor, which is so good to eat with rice!...and the Doushi…there are dry Doushi and wet Doushi, so delicious to fry it with rice…Why the home-made Doushi in my childhood memory was sooooo good, it is because the red soybeans used to make Doushi were the authentic old seeds, which were transferred from generation to generation with selection and sharing…To make Doushi with just soybeans, the taste is so nice…But such delicious taste does no longer exist, I don’t know to make them, and the ingredients which are needed to make these home-food have become rare today… ” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, living in the countryside in childhood time, 2016-2017, own translation) “…[My family is lucky, that] my mother still makes Paocai (wet pickle), Xiancai (pickle), Larou (Chinese bacon), Xiangchang (Chinese sausage), Mijiu (rice wine), and also Doufuru (fermented tofu) at home, Doufuru grows with long mold, very delicious when mixed with spices…and my grandmother still makes Doubanjiang (spicy soybean source) for us…These home-made foods in my family are not yet replaced by industrialized replacements…” (Cited from Qiaoxiao, F, 38 y/o, 2016, own translation) 139 So far, in this cultural-need discussion, the research findings have shown us the direct farming related needs (e.g. intrinsic need of farming, and breeding of traditional), and also the food related needs (e.g. various vegetable dishes, home-made food, self-processed food). In addition, by applying further the inductive method to analyze the messages collected from the Chengdu urban farming practitioners, the remaining discussions below in this section will show how the urban farming practice could fulfill the other more abstract aspects of the cultural-need. These abstract aspects of Chinese culture were developed over the four thousand years of history when agriculture was the fundamental basis for Chinese society and for Chinese culture, and the influence was so profound that it decided Chinese people’s worldview, value system, and even their collective unconsciousness of aesthetics. However, gradually, in contemporary and modern Chinese society, these agriculture-related traditional thoughts, worldview and value system have been replaced by the science-and-technology influenced worldview and have also been covered over by the economic-growth oriented value system. Nevertheless, even though many of the Chinese traditions and culture are disappearing in the rapid social transition, the widely conducted urban farming activities solicited my initial curiosity to know whether these people’s choice of urban farming implies some profound layers of cultural needs. Now, through some of the individuals’ own expressions, we receive the strong impression that some of these urban farming practitioners, even though living in the fast changing urban environment, still value and appreciate many of the farming based traditional Chinese practices, thoughts, wisdom, and even the farming influenced aesthetics; all of these indicate the influence of the four thousand years of agricultural production in Chinese society, and reflect the traditional understanding of the human-nature relationship in Chinese culture. Just as expressed by one of my interviewees, even though both vegetable planting and flower growing are pleasant things to do, somehow farming and vegetable planting is more interesting as a hobby, “maybe there is a kind of influence from the Chinese tradition and culture of farming (by Tianfeng, 2016, own translation)” which may form some sort of underlying cultural sensitivity and aesthetic values. In the following discussion, there are more such specific expressions by my interviewees. This discussion will be organized according to the four categories which emerged out spontaneously in the content coding process: Twenty-four Jieqi, thoughts and philosophies, Chinese traditional medicine, and farming in education. 24 Jieqi & Natural Wisdom in Traditional Farming “Twenty-four Solar Terms”, or 24 Jieqi, was once widely applied in the traditional agricultural society of China as a social institution; and all farming plans and activities had to follow the instruction of 24 Jieqi. The management of the entire society was based on the 24 Jieqi, which was a summary of knowledge and experience about the natural and seasonal changes of the year. However, in the process of transiting from an agricultural to an industrial society, Chinese society as whole has gradually lost the need to practice 24 Jieqi. Even though several special days are officially designated as public holidays according to the 24 Jieqi, many Chinese people have little sense or awareness about these holidays’ connection to the 24 Jieqi. Of the urban farming practitioners in the Chengdu research, most had more or less some impression about the 24 Jieqi as an agricultural tradition, but except for few of them, most do not use the 24 Jieqi to instruct their farming practice. However, almost all the interviewed people mentioned that they, at least, would like to follow the natural seasonal changes to plan their farming activities, as Songdaye said “…I do not follow the 24 Jieqi, but if the weather is warm enough, I

140 would do some farming. All in all, when it is warm weather, I grow the vegetables for warm weather, and when it is cold weather, I grow what is for cold weather…”. For the few people who still practice the 24 Jieqi, some of them have been familiar with the knowledge of Jieqi since their early farming experience in the countryside; some others started to learn the 24 Jieqi only after practicing urban farming; some others yet value the nature- and season-oriented feature of the idea of Jieqi and make efforts to promote the usage of Jieqi among other urban farming practitioners. In addition, there are a few other interviewed urban farming practitioners, who, even though they do not use the 24 Jieqi for their farming activities, would like to take the 24 Jieqi as a reminder of the astronomical and seasonal changes to plan their families’ outdoor activities, or would like to symbolically preserve this farming tradition in their daily lives as a part of the ancient Chinese cultural heritage. There are some of the direct answers from the interviewed urban farming practitioners: “…[I know the 24 Jieqi very well, but I am illiterate, otherwise] I could write down the names of all the 24 Jieqi points for you. [When I was still living in the countryside,] all the farmers there organized their agricultural activities according to the 24 Jieqi…It is the knowledge inherited from former generations, and I learned it by heart when the older farmers were talking about the details…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…I knew very little about 24 Jieqi, only after I start growing vegetables and build the communication with real rural farmers, they sometimes mention in front of me about Jieqi, and would teach me that after which and which Jieqi, I could do this or that for my farming…So I think that real farmers still preserve the knowledge about 24 Jieqi…” (Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, city background, 2016, own translation ) “…At different places, according to the local weather conditions, the details of the 24 Jieqi would be slightly different. We made a timetable about the suggested sowing and harvesting times according to both the local weather conditions of Chengdu and the general knowledge of 24 Jieqi…[We designed the timetable] to help both farmers and consumers know that ‘people should grow and eat according to the local environmental and weather conditions’…For consumers, the timetable would help them know which are the right seasonal produces to select, and encourage them to buy only the seasonal food…For farmers [also for urban farming practitioners], they use the 24 Jieqi timetable as reference for their farming plans…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, NF urban farming practitioner and promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) “…To learn the basic knowledge of 24 Jieqi helps me to know when shall be the right time to buy the new rice of the year, when shall be the right time to buy certain vegetables…I think many families today have forgotten what is the right season to buy what vegetables…In addition, the knowledge of 24 Jieqi helps me plan for my family the ‘mushroom picking time’ in the forest or the ‘fruit picking time’ in the countryside…You need this seasonal knowledge to organize your family’s activities…Traditional Chinese agricultural production was famous for its intimate relation to nature’s seasonal conditions…and our Chinese people’s life planning was once very dependent on the periodical seasonal changes…” (Cited from Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, urban farming practitioner, senior natural conservation professional, nature education promoter, 2016, own translation) “…Today people living in the city are no longer sensitive about the natural and seasonal changes as what is described in the 24 Jieqi…[because most of the people no longer do farming today]…But in my living, when one of the 24 Jieqi days arrives, I often like finding out some ancient Chinese poems which were written by the ancient Chinese poets to describe the seasonal views and sceneries of that Jieqi

141 day and post the poems online to share with my friends, meanwhile I would also like to post some natural view photos with its strong seasonal features of that Jieqi day to match with the poems…I use these efforts to remind me and my friends that, for example, ‘spring is ending, summer is coming, ancient ancestor’s knowledge is also reminding us about the beauty of such seasonal changes…otherwise, these traditional Chinese knowledge could have been only remembered by my grandmother’s generation…” (Cited from Qiaoxiao, F, 38 y/o, 2016, own translation)

Thoughts and Philosophies Rooted in Agriculture Throughout Chinese history, hundreds and thousands of ancient thoughts, wisdoms, and philosophies have been developed and recorded in scripts and books. Among these ancient classics, for example, Tao Te Ching, written by Li Er (also named Lao Zi), in the 6th century BC, is believed to be one of the most classic texts which represents ancient Chinese basic thoughts and philosophies, and expounds the essential Chinese understandings of the human and nature relation. Every educated Chinese is supposed to know more or less these ancient classic thoughts and philosophies by learning the original texts, which emphasize that human beings and nature combine as oneness (天人合一), and human beings can only survive according with the principles and rules of nature. Once, this understanding was almost the unconscious consensus shared among the Chinese people, even for the illiterate Chinese farmers, as they shared the same understanding of human-nature relation by practicing traditional farming. However, in the contemporary Chinese society, these ancient thoughts and philosophies become contradictory with the principles and regulations of industrialization, urbanization and modernization, which emphasize the power of human’s intelligence, knowledge, science and technology in a more and more extremely way, especially as it implies human’s independence from nature. Nevertheless, the Chengdu research findings show that some of the urban farming practitioners still appreciate many of the ancient wisdoms, and would like to preserve these thoughts and philosophies through their urban farming practice. Some people considered farming practice to be consistent with the human-nature oneness thoughts, so their choice to practice farming is also to exercise the ancient wisdom about the human-nature relation; some others expressed that doing farming can help to strengthen their knowledge and understanding of the ancient Chinese philosophies with regard to the human-nature topic; and still others regarded both farming and the related ancient thoughts as the most valuable heritage of Chinese culture, and would like to practice both the farming and the thoughts in their daily lives. “…At the core, I think the influence of agricultural practice is that it helped Chinese people understand humans as part of nature and all human activities should be organized according to the natural rules…For example, we should learn to ‘store the energy when the autumn is coming’ and to ‘preserve the energy in the winter’, no matter from the health perspective or from the living perspective, everything should conform to the rhythm of nature…Unlike the western festivals which are mostly running in the name of the religious elements, the traditional Chinese living patterns, festivals, all these were once running according to the rhythm of the 24 Jieqi...I think the most valuable part of the traditional Chinese culture which we should inherit is to arrange our lives according to the moving and changing of natural rhythm. This is the highest level of wisdom of life philosophy, and this is the core of our Chinese culture. This is also the essential part of the Eastern wisdom, which would help us avoid getting trapped in the Western kind of ‘anthropocentric thinking’…” (Cited from Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, urban farming

142 practitioner, senior natural conservation professional, nature education promoter, 2016, own translation) “… [The relation between the ancient Chinese wisdom and farming?] I can take Tao Te Ching for example. In Tao Te Ching, sage Laozi told us that…‘simplicity’ is a kind of virtue…What is simplicity? My understanding is that when I recycle the organic waste through farming and grow food out of it, this is a cycle of simplicity, because I don’t produce extra waste or new stuff to the world, and I keep them in the naturally simple form…I can also take the Golden Means (moderate of virtuousness and ability) for example. The Golden Means taught us that ‘道不遠人, 可離非道也’. This means that Tao (natural law) is everywhere in our life, no one can live without Tao; Tao looks like very far away from us, but Tao is in our daily living…Tao is also in farming: like nature that shares everything, I also share my vegetables with neighbors, with worms, with birds; like the life-connected networks existing in nature, my farming also connects all kinds of life together in the farming plots; like the life cycles happening in nature, my farming plot also demonstrate the life cycles, for instance, the crop plants which already died in last winter burgeon with sprouts again this spring…” (Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…According to my opinion, all the traditional Chinese culture, thoughts, philosophy and wisdom are rooted in farming. The formation of these thoughts and philosophy was developed in the process for Chinese people to perceive, to reflect and to understand nature through farming activities. Take the ancient Chinese poetries for example, there are so many natural and beautiful conceptions related to farming. Take Taoism and Tao Te Ching for another example, Tao Te Ching talks about ‘Tao’…What is Tao? Tao is nature! Tao is a self-circulating system consisting of natural laws and rules. Only when we learn to know these natural laws and rules, we learn to know how to harmoniously live with nature, with people, and further, to know how to live with our own life…I find that the farming-based civilization, the farming-based daily life, as well as the farming-based poetries, all these are so nourishing for my life…I strongly feel the intuitive needs to keep in touch with farming, with earth, with soil!!!...” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…I think natural farming and Taoism are very similar to each other at the core of their philosophies…Fukuoka Masanobu69 ‘invented’ the natural farming when he was laying on the ground and staring at the sun sinking beneath the horizon. He was in a state of meditation at that moment, and got the enlightenment to realize the fact that the sun has been there for hundred billions of years before human’s appearance, and since nature has been always working in its own way, what a human or a farmer need to do is just to do what nature has been doing…This is exactly also the notion of Taoism!...” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…Our Chinese culture is built on farming land, embedded in farming related lifestyles, accumulated in historical process, and finally developed into tradition…all these lifestyles, history and tradition, together, form the Chinese culture. It is a culture based on farming and extended from farming land. [What is farming?] Farming is about the cooperation with nature to obtain human’s living opportunity, and after hundreds of generations’ continuous practice, farming becomes the heirloom of Chinese culture, which includes the contents such as the appreciation of food, the preservation of old seeds, the gratitude to nature, the belief in final retuning to soil and the final ending at farming land...These ideas or thoughts are all out of the practice of farming, and out of the high consensus of cultural identity among the ancient Chinese people. It is a cultural identity which

69 Fukuoka Masanobu (福岡正信), is well-known as the author of the book named The One-Straw Revolution (1975). He was a Japanese farmer and philosopher who created the farming method and series of farming philosophies commonly known as the natural farming practice. 143 believes that ‘Human is a part of nature’! This traditional Chinese worldview is very different from the Western worldview, which believes that ‘Human is the dominant center of nature’!...” (Ibid) Farming Culture & Chinese Traditional Medicine In my Chengdu research, several urban farming practitioners expressed their understanding that, as one of the essential cultural heritages of the ancient Chinese wisdom, traditional Chinese medicine and its philosophical theory behind the medical practice are believed to be the result of traditional agricultural practice and the human-nature oneness philosophy behind the agricultural practice. Their argument is that the traditional Chinese medicine practice and its theory are developed from traditional Chinese agricultural society, which was influenced by the agriculture-based worldview and philosophy. If the natural rules should be obeyed in farming practice to keep the crops stay healthy, these natural laws should also be followed in medical practice and in health care to keep the human body staying healthy. Specifically, for example, one urban farming practitioner is also the owner of a famous traditional Chinese medicine clinic in Chengdu. She introduced that, at their clinic, their traditional Chinese medicine doctors always suggest their patients try to live according to the natural rules, such as to follow the 24 Jieqi points or, at least, to follow the natural seasonal changes. For example, in the hot summer time, people should avoid using air-conditioners, which often hinder the human body from sweating naturally. But according to the traditional Chinese medicine theory, in the summer time, it should be the right time to allow our bodies to sweat, because sweating is a necessary body function to adjust the metabolic mechanism and to keep the body in health. To explain it in an oversimplified way, just as farming practice requests the farmers to observe the natural surroundings in detail and to obey the natural principles for good farming, the traditional Chinese medical practice also requests the doctors and patients to observe the body system scrupulously and to obey the natural principles for good health care. In the view of people who practice both urban farming and traditional Chinese medicine, there must be some interrelations among the disappearing of traditional farming, the booming of industrial agriculture, the urbanized and commercialized city living pattern, the frequent outbreaks of serious diseases like strange cancers, and the decline of people’s mental health conditions. They believe these problem result from the violation of the natural rules, and also are a consequence of the disorder of the human-nature relationship. They believe that the disrespect for natural laws and the disconnection between human and nature are the fundamental reasons behind personal health crisis, social crisis, and human civilization crisis. “…In fact, the practice of the Chinese traditional medicine is quite relevant to the 24 Jieqi, and our Chinese traditional medicine doctors are the group of people who really need to pay attention to the 24 Jieqi and seriously take the 24 Jieqi into the application of their expertise… [According to the Chinese traditional medicine theory,] at different Jieqi points, human body would have different and nuanced changes to react to the meticulous weather and seasonal conditions [and therefore, people should react to these changes and conditions carefully]. For example, now, according to the knowledge of 24 Jieqi, the weather is turning to be the ‘Dog Days (very hot days)’, which is a weather condition for people, according to the Chinese medicine theory, to ‘get rid of the extra humidity in the body’, and it is a good weather time (summer) to treat the diseases or health problems which often get worse during the winter time. Specifically, at the Jieqi point day of Xiazhi (summer solstice), if people can get some appropriate Chinese traditional medicine treatment to ‘get rid of the extra humidity in the body’, then the impact and the function of 144 that treatment is much better than to do the treatment at any other days of the year; at the Jieqi point day of Dongzhi (winter solstice), it is good for people to eat some high nutrient and restoratives food as a way to take high energy into the body for the purpose to preserve enough energy for the cold winter time...” (Cited from Kongqian, F, 38 y/o, urban farming practitioner and the owner of a traditional Chinese medicine and therapy clinic, 2016, own translation) “…Nowadays, there are so much counter-seasonal vegetables and food provided in the market…and people lose their control of their basic life needs. Why? Because people have lost the knowledge about common sense! For the farmers at my childhood time, they easily knew which season to eat what food even without opening their eyes, and they had common sense to know what crops are most productive at which season. At that time, cancer was a rare term and something so far away from ordinary people. But today, cancers are so common among people. The overall deteriorated environment is one reason for the cancer issues, but I think the overproduction of counter-seasonal food, the entirely disordered food system, as well as the mess-up of human-nature relations are other reasons for the cancer problems. People have lost the common sense that foods should be seasonal and should grow in natural ways…also have forgotten that human’s food consumption should match with both our physiological and mental needs according to the natural rules...As a consequence, [the Qi (air) can not move smoothly in the body and finally] health problems emerge…Today we hear very often that ‘who or who also gets a cancer’…many such cases…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…In the past, I just thought that Chinese traditional medicine cures the diseases by applying herbal medicine…but now I learned to know that Chinese traditional medicine has a holistic understanding about human body, and human body’s connection to nature…Essentially, it is a way to understand the ‘illness’ in a holistic consideration, whose logic is not to ‘heal the disease or control the symptom’, but to find out ‘Why does the disease/symptom grow out from such body conditions?’, ‘What’s wrong with the patient’s overall body situation [to offer the disease/symptom the chance/condition to develop itself]?’, ‘Does the patient have a physical-mental balanced body conditions?’, ‘Does the patient’s body have a balanced living situation with its external environment?’…Traditional Chinese medicine doctors are trained to check the disease/symptom from such a holistic perspective, and also to try to end the disease or to relieve the symptom by restoring the patient’s body into a balanced physical-mental, internal-external conditions…The essence of Chinese traditional medicine is to apply the knowledge of natural principles to understand human body, and such to cure the ill body by re-adjusting the body conditions to be consistent with natural principles…The knowledge of Chinese traditional medicine was developed from China’s traditional society, China’s traditional society was an agricultural society, in which people learned their experience by observing natural principles when working in the farming process. Therefore, I think the Chinese traditional medicine and Chinese traditional farming share the same cultural root back to nature…” (Ibid) Farming Heritage in Education Urban farming’s role in education has been widely recorded in urban farming reports and literature. However, so far, most of the literature and reports refer only to the natural, ecological or food aspects of content in farming education. Given the long history of Chinese agriculture and its traditions and heritage, the needs of transmitting the farming culture to younger generation have been recognized and implemented by the parents and schools who have strong awareness (Photo 6). In my Chengdu research, several urban farming practitioners in the role of parents or teachers (one overlaps with both roles) demonstrated their own understanding about the importance of farming education for introducing traditional farming culture to young generations.

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Photo 6. The 24 Jieqi Calendar exhibited on the wall inside the Paotong elementary school, where the school farming project is conducted. The school farming project is accompanied with a comprehensive farming-based curriculum called the “24 Jieqi Class” which consists of courses like biology, science, Chinese literature, and drawing, etc. For the course on Chinese Literature, many of the ancient poems which have the contents with respect to the 24 Jieqi, would be introduced to the students. On the 24 Jieqi Calendar, as shown in the above photo, each of the 24 Jieqi (i.e. solar term) is accompanied with one relevant ancient Chinese poem. As these teacher and parent interviewees mentioned, farming related traditional knowledge, such as the 24 Jieqi and the related ancient poems, literature, history and customs could be taught to students; cultivation courses would be designed for children to directly experience the agricultural activities; traditional farming related festivals and rituals could be organized as campus activities to let students join and experience in person; agriculture related historical relics or geographical sites could be visited by students. Through these efforts at farming education, the younger generations are expected to learn the importance of agriculture in Chinese history, to know the basic traditional Chinese thoughts and philosophies embedded in farming, to inherit the sense of perception and appreciation about the ancient Chinese aesthetics, and all in all, to remember that the roots of Chinese culture originated from the farming culture. “…Farming culture or tradition is often something in distant for the children living in the city today and they often have no interest about these things, they really don’t have any interest in them. However, at some moment, for example, if there are, by accident, a batch of wild geese just flying across the sky at certain season or certain Jieqi point day, you can tell them some concrete and related knowledge about the 24 Jieqi. In this case, they may build their interest to know these traditional things. The critical point is to let them connect the ‘conception’ and the ‘image’. For example, you ask children the conception and image of autumn, they would connect the conception of autumn with the image of harvesting…[Our Chinese traditional agricultural society] offered us many aesthetical senses [with nature, with season, with countryside, with sadness], such a sense of aesthetics is what you can attempt to combine when you are referring to farming…” (Cited from Father Qin, the father of two daughters, chairman of the parents committee of Paotong elementary school, one of the initiators of the school farming project, 2016, own translation)

146 “…My older daughter once worked as voluntary guide and interpreter in the Museum of Chengdu for one year or so…She knew very well the historic and agricultural value of the famous ancient irrigation system ‘Dujiangyan’ at Chengdu…She knows why the ancient people needed to build such a system, how the irrigation system was established and structured and how it has been functioning [for 2000 years till today], how the irrigation system turned our Chengdu Plain to be an affluent place of agriculture…I also brought my daughters to visit Dujiangyan many times, to let them be there in person, let them feel the connection with the history, historic construction, agriculture, from the past till present, to their own life…Through these ways, my daughters got to know the meaning of farming and then could understand that irrigation system is always the basis and precondition of any agricultural production…” (Ibid) “…[In Chengdu Waldorf school] the students in grade 3 need to take the course of farming, which is about one month living in the countryside, either at the season to plant the rice seedlings or at the season to harvest the ripe rice…the students in our school have the chance to intimately experience the Chinese traditional lifestyle and the handcraft skills at an very early age…[We teach the students this traditional farming knowledge and experience,] because as a person living at one place, he or she needs to know this place from all aspects in a rooted way…For example, here is Chengdu Plain in Sichuan province, so the food I eat at Sichuan is very different from the food in the northern part of China…So as students, they first need to experience traditionally how this food comes from the field…and also to experience the traditional festivals…like at the end of this month, our school will organize the Autumn Harvest Festival…Some other times, we also organize students to celebrate the Duanwu festival (dragon boat festival) or the Dongzhi festival (winter solstice festival)…” (Cited from Guomin, F, 36 y/o, Chengdu Waldorf teacher and also the mother of a 5 year old boy, 2016, own translation) “…Urban farming is a very good form of natural education for children…She does not have to learn the skills of farming…but could observe the changes of nature through farming…She could learn to know when is the time to plant seeds into the soil, when is the time for seeds to shoot up, when is the time to grow up, when is the time to blossom…If she can realize these rhythms of nature, I feel it is enough for a little girl….” (Cited from Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, urban farming practitioner, nature education promoter, the father of a 8 year old daughter, 2016, own translation) Chengdu research findings indicate that urban farming has been applied by some of the urban farming practitioners as the bridge to connect their needs to the farming cultural traditions that have been inherited in the Chinese society for hundreds of generations. From the individual urban farming practitioners’ perspective, farming activities have been shown to be their individual reaction to cope with some of their inner feelings and needs which I define or hypothesize as the cultural rift. The findings also demonstrate that even within the single culture circle, urban farming is still needed to repair the cultural rift caused by modern city living. With the industrialization and urbanization process, the cultural identity that once belonged to the Chinese people has disappeared with the disappearance of the Chinese traditional agricultural society. Urban farming reproduces and reintroduces such cultural identity through the practice of cultivation, preservation of heritage seeds, family-food making, and other ancient customs related to farming. Meanwhile, through farming, people hope that the basic Chinese farming culture, history, literature, and thoughts and philosophies of the human-nature relation, as well as the basic Chinese aesthetics could be transmitted to younger generations, the farming elements could be integrated into a daily life rhythm, and the cultural gap between the older generation and the younger generation could be closed slightly.

147 5.3.3 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Response to Social Rift According to the metabolic rift theory, the social rift consists of three aspects: capitalized labor, privatized commons and commercialized food system; the relevant literature mentioned in Chapter 3 has recorded that urban farming can play a role in repairing these social rift issues. The field research at Chengdu, to some extent, captured the urban farming practitioners’ responses to the three aspects of social rift, but in an uneven way. The research findings demonstrate that urban farming’s role to deal with the capitalized labor issue could be partially shown in a few individual cases; the role of urban farming in response to the issue of privatized commons is not so obvious; while in the face of the commercialized food issue, most of the interviewed urban farming practitioners mentioned it is the primary reason impelling them to grow their own food, especially when they face the ubiquitous unsafe food crisis in their lives. Meanwhile, because the social rift issues belong to the immaterial rift problems which would be too hidden, implicit and nuanced to be perceived or expressed by the urban farming practitioners themselves, or they might even mix the perception of different immaterial rifts together, so the following discussion of the Chengdu urban farming research findings on the social dimension of rift problem will be a combination of the urban farming practitioners’ own expression and my own fieldwork observation. Even though the people’s expression is sometimes obscure and my observation could also be subjective, and though overall the Chengdu cases could have their limits to fully verify the applicability of the social dimension of metabolic rift theory, the following will be my attempt to interpret people’s choice of urban farming through the lens of the social rift theories. 1) To Support both the Uprooted Migrants and the Lifestyle Cultivator According to the relevant literature and analysis mentioned in Chapter 3, urban farming supports the newly arrived rural migrants who have been uprooted from their farming land and offers them the chance to use their own labor in the way they are familiar with, and thus giving these uprooted rural migrants some support during their transitional process of adapting to urban living. At first glance, this role of urban farming overlaps with another of its roles, that of helping to deal with the epistemological rift issue. However, in the Chengdu urban farming cases, urban farming’s function is more than just meeting the epistemological needs of the rural migrants who have relatively less financial pressure. In my field research, there are about five of the urban farming practitioners with rural backgrounds chose to do farming for income purposes, and all of them grow vegetables for selling. These rural migrants are now in their 50s or 60s and have been living in the city for a minimum of three to five years (maximum. 30 years), and this means that they are not newcomers to the city. They initially arrived in Chengdu for different specific personal reasons, but all with the ultimate purpose to have better life or better income in the city; and many of them tried other jobs, like small street business or temporary factory work, before they finally turned to urban farming as a familiar way for them to earn their income. These people arrived at the city without the requisite skills for the urban, which the labor market needs in the city circumstance, and at their ages, it is not easy to learn the new skills; and meanwhile the other unskilled job opportunities are always temporary and unsteady. As a result, urban farming became their expedient choice, or perhaps even their only choice, for staying in the city with a self-sustaining life.

148 However, if taken only as income support, urban farming is a weak approach for these rural migrants because of the harshness, the very low income level, and the insecurity of land tenure in the urban environment. In my research, the income urban farming practitioners mentioned that the work of farming is much harder than other jobs they experienced in the city. Vegetables, as perishable produce, are often sold at early morning times, therefore, if my interviewees want to obtain a good price, they need to get up around 3 a.m. to harvest the freshest vegetables, and must arrive at the market around 5 a.m. to trade with the buyers like restaurants and others. The monthly incomes earned by these interviewed urban farmers could range from 450 RMB (64 Euro) to 2000 RMB (300 Euro). Taking Chengdu’s lowest income (1300-1500 RMB) in 2016 for reference, what these urban farmers could earn from vegetable growing were all low incomes. For the one who could earn about 2000 RMB/m, it is because she applied chemical farming methods and needed to invest a large sum of money in advance for seeds, pesticide, industrial fertilizer, and other production materials like tools and plastic films or wraps. However, although the work is so hard and the income is very low, and although these income urban farmers are willing to accept such very poor conditions, it does not necessarily mean that they can continue their work of urban farming as long as they want, because all these urban farmers were cultivating either vacant lands or leftover farming lands, which were under uncertain land-use tenures and obscure property ownership. This is a fact that all these urban farmers were quite aware of; all expressed some similar plan as to “going back to the rural home” if they could no longer take urban farming as their income source in the city. “…[Growing and selling vegetables] has better income than doing the temporary job for a private boss, but the farming work is much more tiring and painstaking than other jobs we (with her husband) could find at Chengdu…Growing vegetables is exhausting work, sometimes we have to work till 1- 2 a.m. in the evening…in the morning, we usually need to get up around 3 a.m. and need to harvest the vegetables and prepare them in portions, and then we need to carry them to the market for wholesale. For us, who grow and sell vegetables in the city, we all need to get up at such early time for bidding a bit better price, and the buyers also like the fresher vegetables…” (Cited from Shidajie, F, 50+ y/o, income urban farmer, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…We left the rural home in 2000 and worked once at the construction site, but we couldn’t get our payment, then we were introduced to work for farming…We got this piece of land (leftover farming land) for free…[But] this place will soon be used to build buildings… We can do nothing to stop it or have any other plans…We will see what to do next when that day is coming…My husband wants to go back to our rural home, but I don’t want…” (Ibid) “…We often come to work for 1-2 hours every morning and every evening, besides, we come to the field to harvest the vegetables from 4 - 6 a.m., and then we carry them to the market for selling. It is very hard working, but we did farming in the countryside when we were young, so we get used to hardship and we are not afraid of hardship…” (Cited from Chendaye, M, 63 y/o, income urban farmer, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…We (he and his wife) have been living at Chengdu for about 30 years…In the first 10 years or so, we spent half of the time at our rural home doing farming and the other half of the time selling fruits at Chengdu…Later, we stayed at Chengdu for the fruits business and gave up the farming work in the countryside completely… Later, we also stopped the fruit business…[and three years ago] we started the recent farming business… I am a sick person now…but farming work offers me the chance to exercise my body a little bit and this is good for my health...We heard that new building will be built here in the coming years, if so, we 149 will move back to our rural home for rest, but now we can still work for two or three years…” (Ibid) “…I don’t know for how long we can cultivate on this piece of land. It is said that it will be used for a new building in the future…[At that time,] also when my husband can no longer work as a street cleaner…we will go back to our rural home…” (Cited from Longpopo, F, 62 y/o, income urban farmer, rural background, 2016, own translation) In addition to supporting the rural migrants working as income farmers in the city spaces, urban farming is also known for its role in facilitating the longer-time-settled urbanites as so-called hobby farmers or lifestyle farmers (Primdahl and Kristensen, 2011; Opitz et al., 2016). Unlike the income farmers, who might need to take urban farming as the only income source to sustain their basic living in the city, lifestyle farmers choose urban farming as the practical action to reflect and reform their mainstream lifestyle which is based on consumption and over-emphasizes the material needs of city life. As already discussed in Chapter 2, consumption addiction and material hedonism are part of the critical driving force of the treadmill living pattern in a mass-production and mass-consumption society; the lifestyle farmers’ reflection on and reformation of their consumption-dominated hedonistic lifestyle demonstrate their intent and attempt to jump out of the deteriorating circle of treadmill living. In Chengdu research, there are two cases of lifestyle farmers, who were once two of the millions of office workers, trapped in the hustle of working and the illusion of consuming, suffering from both physical and mental stresses. They had intuitively perceived the tediousness and fatigue of working and living, but felt there was always some inexpressible thing pushing them to move forward without knowing how to slow down or stop, until they found farming. Farming practice allows them to slow down from their hustling life, gives them the chance to reconnect with the soil, offers them a special way to reflect on their earlier life, gradually liberates them from the influence of mainstream lifestyle and finally releases them out of the cycle of treadmill living. Through the enlightenment of farming and urban farming, the two lifestyle farmers gain the opportunity to explore alternative living options, which finally guide them to simple living, a lifestyle bringing people back to the “basic life contents” and leading them to the ultimate benefits of physical fitness and psychological amenity. How exactly does farming promote these lifestyle farmers’ reflection and reformation and bring them back to the “basic life contents”? Followings are the separated introductions of each case, accompanied by quotations from each person. Helei, whose quotations have already been cited many times in the earlier discussions, has been living as an urban farming practitioner and working as an urban farming promoter at Chengdu city since 2011. He also spent two years (2013-2015) in the countryside to grow rice using natural farming methods. Through his rural and urban farming practices, Helei started to notice that city life is running in a repeated “working and buying” pattern and to realize that city life pivots upon commerce and consumption, which offers people so many bling-bling options and allures them into the trap of hustling-bustling city life, without enabling them to stay with their true self and find out their real life needs, which have become entangled with all the illusive commodity desires. His comments on the features of city living pattern are in fact congruent with the description of the treadmill living pattern in Chapter 2, in which people are deliberately propelled to consume commercial goods and are intentionally indulged in material hedonism for the underlying and ultimate purpose of stimulating economic growth and capital amplification. 150 The treadmill living pattern and material hedonism have their seductions to offer people sheer variety of experiences and excitement, and allow them to dream and to hope; this seems plausible to help people escape the harsh reality of busy life. However, treadmill city living, as treadmill industrial production, is a system that only works well on the surface. In Helei’s personal experience, the practice of farming and urban farming let him become aware of the illusory mechanism of commercial society, and allowed him to explore the alternative living style, and finally disentangled him from the treadmill living cycle. Specifically, he explained that farming practice helps him to slow down the busy life rhythm, leads him to stay in a simple life and be cautious about consumption and material hedonism, and guides him to find the real and essential needs as an ecologically responsible individual. Meanwhile, Helei admitted that doing farming once challenged him to face his inner fears70, which rose up when he chose to live in opposition to the mainstream’s treadmill living and realized that this could leave him to be marginalized in the society. However, finally Helei was able to overcome his fears through continuous deep natural farming practice, which does only involves the physical practice of the natural farming techniques, or the epistemological practice of the natural farming knowledge and the underlying philosophy, but also engages the natural farming practitioners into a sort of mental and spiritual practice. In Helei’s experience, he said the mental and spiritual practice just took place naturally in the farming process to touch the soil, tend the crop, observe the natural surroundings, or to listen to the earthworm’s murmuring and the breeze’s whispering. Even though he did not speak out the specific term, according to his description, I would like to say Helei’s farming process is similar to a mindful activity or a kind of meditation (Jacob et al, 2008), because he described the process just happened without making any effort; he needed just to immerse himself into that environment physically and mentally, being in that moment, being aware of that place and the task on-hand, and finally integrate himself with the whole surroundings of the farming plot without thinking of it. This description is quite like the mental state of mindfulness, which is defined as “being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present (Brown and Ryan, 2003)” or can be thought of as “moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, as non-judgmentally, and as open heartedly as possible (Kabat-Zinn, 2005)”. The mindfulness topic is also relevant to the later discussion of urban farming’s role to deal with individual dimensions of rift problem. Here, the following quotations convey Heilei’s reflections on lifestyle and social system issues through urban farming practice and promotion, and also his personal efforts to respond to the treadmill living pattern through his farming practice.

70 In a society like China where most people worship money, financial success and material hedonism, and adore only the people who own such purchase-power and materialistic success, the few people like Helei who want to live in opposite ways would feel pressure of being so different from the mainstream, and also feel anxiety and fears of being left behind. Because the mainstream value system has been deeply implicated in the fabric of people’s lives, and people growing up in the system have been profoundly influenced in such value system and learned to pursue material goods, to achieve expected social identity, and to compete for certain social status. Therefore, if they could not have a niche in the mainstream value system which they have been so familiar with, people would feel marginalized with a sense of shame and failure. These are reasons why to giving up the established value system, purpose of living, meaning of life would be so difficult for these pioneers. The first steps to deviate from the old path are particularly painful! However, in Helei’s case, the concrete farming benefits help him to realize the harms of the mainstream value and to understand the intrinsic value behind farming and simple living. At the moment when he lives away from the mainstream anthropocentric community, farming helps Helei to get connected with a wider eco-centric community which includes both human and non-human lives. The connection with nature helps Helei to build more intrinsic perception of the meaning of life, which finally relieves him from the fears of being different and opposite from the mainstream. 151

Slowing Down and Being Simple: The Immediate Life Changes by Farming “…Farming let me slow down, become content with simple things...change me to consume very cautiously and more simply…This is also a more traditional Chinese style of consumption and living…and the traditional Chinese life was about ‘slow life’…There is the old Chinese saying that ‘the person who can be simply content is who owns the lasting happiness (知足長樂)’…I was too fast too anxious in the past, worked too hard and wanted too much…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…Once I start the farming practice, my life immediately became simple. It is a very natural and smooth process of changing, without intentional planning… Because the farming practice can teach us the most basic knowledge that, the land does not work in this way!!! The soil cannot produce the food at your wish whenever you want to eat that food… The radish can only grow to be this size today [and you have to be patient and let it grow slowly], or it will blossom tomorrow [and you can’t stop it]…It is a great mistake if you try to understand the land from the perspective of human desires…The self-centered thinking and lifestyle is opposite to the natural principles…” (Ibid) “…Farming practice reduces immediately my cost of food...Because farming practices keep me staying at home and eating at home [instead of going out to meet friends and eat in restaurants as before]…Because farming teaches me to know what are the vegetables for the present season and what are the counter-seasonal vegetables, so I gradually become preferred to cook the meals at home with seasonal and self-grown vegetables…Meanwhile I prefer to eat more vegetarian food since I start farming...If I manage to change these two life habits (eat at home with own-grown food and eat vegetarian diet), then the overall living cost could be reduced to a great degree…This does not only happen to me or to my family, but also the same in other households according to our survey…” (Ibid) Overcome the Fears of Being Different from the Mainstream: Being Slow and Being Simple “…The recent city life offers us with too many options and contents, which disable us to stay with ourselves, because these over-affluent contents offer us many ways to avoid to face our true self…” (Ibid) “…To select the simple and slow lifestyle through farming is completely opposite to the development trend of our society which is accelerated to be industrialized...I can be quickly marginalized in the social sequence, and all the efforts I tried and all the achievements I made in the past become meaningless…This brings me the fear and the anxiety of being lagged behind…I think everyone who once experienced the modern world civilization could understand such fears and anxiety…Also the fear about the uncertainty of my future as living in great difference from the mainstream… These feelings did rise up…” (Ibid) “…[The two years of farming in the countryside helped me to slow down,] offered me the chance to stay alone in the field, and to work whole day with the paddy field. This situation made me having no place to escape but must learn to stay with myself…to just face my fears, worries and anxieties, to see them rising up right in front of me…BUT, if I learn to face them bravely, these negative feelings can slowly fade away…” (Ibid)

152 Extended Reflection on the Mainstream City Living Pattern “…Through urban farming practice, I start to re-educate myself about the economy and money…[If I don’t grow my own food, then] I spend money to buy them, but where does the money come from in the city context? From working and competing! So in essence, the mainstream city life is about competing Æ working Æ money earning Æ consuming…” (Ibid) “…[Further,] I deeply realized that our current city lifestyle is not sustainable at all, and at the center of such lifestyle there is consumption as the driving force and many aspects of our lives have been bound up with consumption and rely on consumption…So now I become very aware of my consumption decisions every time and also become cautious about any consumption in general…” (Ibid) “…[Furthermore, I realize that] the city system in fact produces neither vegetables nor energies nor any other resources…All the resources in the city come from nature and from the lands outside city…We city residents obtain these resources by hard working, competing, money earning, and then we exchange the resources and goods with our money…Aha, so the rule of the city game is to gain the distribution right of resource through the competition between individuals, groups or corporations…[Meanwhile, the competition does not only happen among human beings, it also happens between human and nature, and] essentially, it is the human society that grabs nature…We extract natural resources by earning money and spending the money on commercial goods…Moreover, we have never returned anything good back to nature, the city has never given anything good back to nature…” (Ibid) “…[Moreover,] we can see how such ravening city living systems control each individual…We are all incorporated in such system without any awareness…Our basic living has been arranged and involved in the system by the commercial powers, for example, 200 types of medicines we consume may indicate 200 different pharmaceutical companies behind them…We experience our life in a kind of ‘second-hand’ situation 71 ...and gain our experiences in fragmentized pieces…Such, we lose the control of our own lives, without even a little sense of security, and money can hardly buy our security…” (Ibid) “…Therefore, I want to explore how to live in a community having the circulation of technique, wisdom, resource but not relying on the circulation of money…” (Ibid) In Helei’s case, his farming practice teaches him to slow down and to be simple, and reminds him to focus on the essential parts of life and to live for more intrinsic values of life. Farming has also helped him to find his true purpose in life, and is guiding him to under take the urban farming promotion work as his interest and his mission. Studies actually show that people with higher intrinsic values (e.g. self-acceptance, affiliations, sense of belonging to the community) are both happier and have higher levels of environmental responsibility than those with materialistic values (e.g. goods, financial success, image popularity). There is also a scientific psychological basis for the hypothesis that our lives can be more satisfying when engaged in the activities which are both purposive and materially undemanding (Kasser and Ryan, 1996; Kasser, 2002; Jacob et al, 2008; Armstrong, 2012). Similar farming experiences can also be found in the case of Wangwei, who is also an urban farming practitioner and urban farming promoter. According to her description,

71 Second-hand living (二手生活), means that people cannot arrange their basic life needs in more direct ways. More direct ways mean to be less dependent on the commercialized supply chains and to live in a more self-made community, in a smaller community or in a more self sufficient community. 153 bad health problems (both mental and physical) caused by the intense-but-meaningless job and life, pushed her to rethink the mainstream life that she had been unconsciously involved in. At this time, she came to know Heilei and joined the urban farming project that was organized by Helei. Gradually, through the farming practice, she found her way back to her own life rhythm, which is different from the competition-commerce-consumption ruled treadmill living pattern. Starting from the reformation of her family’s food supply system, she begins to develop her own analysis about the entire supply system of her life. She even creates the concept of “basic life contents”, which could be used to tell the difference between the “needs” and “wants” in life. As Wangwei points out, many people, like herself in the past, have confused their “basic life contents” and “needs’ with many of the “wants” that are defined by the commercialized mainstream lifestyle. They have lost control of their own life in the treadmill living pattern, and also give up the responsibility for their own health and happiness to rely completely on the outside world of material hedonism, forgetting that there are also inner power and immaterial approaches for each individual person to make use of. Wangwei believes that urban farming can become one of the practices to build individuals’ inner strength and freedom to deal with the harsh realities of daily working and living. Especially, she has been planning and longing for an alternative living pattern known as the lifestyle of “Half-Farmer Half-X”72, which encourages city residents to combine their “whatever (i.e. the “X” factor )” city career with the role of farmer. The following are her original expressions: Meaningless and Hopeless Anxieties and Fears “…My previous life [before doing farming] was just the mainstream city life…I must compete in my career, I must be ambitious and enterprising, I must have achievements, I must have financial power to buy, and I must have this and that…The mainstream city life has its structure and its fixed working and living pattern…Living in mainstream life indicates you must live according to the rules and expectation of that system…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “… The previous working rhythm made both my body and mind exhausted…It was in my 20s at that time, and the most busy working pattern was to fly among different places throughout China, sometimes when I woke up in the morning I didn’t know which city I was visiting…But gradually, I started to ask myself ‘Oh, how did my life become like this?!’, and I realized that it was not the life I felt comfortable to live...because a large part of such life for me was meaningless and hopeless…hopeless…and it brought me anxieties and fears…Later I realized that my life was not in my own control…I was catering for other people’s expectations and I was living as what the system had designed for me… I felt I lived like a beggar…‘Why must I live like this?...’ I doubted…” (Ibid) “…When I recognized that my life became problematic, and I became uncomfortable in such a life…I started to reflect…and started to search what was the life I need and tried to find out the answer…Especially after I had my child, I needed to find another way of living…Then, on my way to search for the answer, I encountered urban farming. It helps me to newly understand food and life…” (Ibid)

72 “Half-Farmer Half-X”, was proposed by Naoki Shiomi in Japan in the mid 1990s. As an alternative lifestyle, “Half-Farmer Half” movement suggests city people do part-time farming (i.e. Half-Farmer) while pursuing other ventures which they are passionate about (i.e. Half-X). 154 “…Farming helps me to find the answer to ‘what is the life I want to have’…and most precisely to say, farming is the critical medium and approach for me to understand the real life facts, a very important approach…In the farming process I learned to realize many life realities…Reality means that my former life experience was an illusion…It means that the real life is about to know: Where does food come from? What are the essential relations among man, food and land? What is the connection between me and the environment?...And farming practice offers me the chance to find out the answers to these questions…” (Ibid) “…Now I quite enjoy my current state [with the accompany of farming]…Even though now I still stay in a super busy working rhythm during the working days of the week and must hustle around to tackle lots of different issues in my company, but then I save all the rest of my time in the weekend to do my farming, and in this way, I can slow down, and then I find my own living rhythm…a comfortable rhythm that consists of many interesting life contents, which make me become more and more satisfied with my life…” (Ibid) Realizing “Basic Life Contents” through Farming and Food Consuming “…At the time when I felt life was meaningless for me, I encountered urban farming and started to do farming, which restores my confidence and creativity in the effort to explore my relation with my real life…and in this process I find all the interesting aspects of life, a life full of the ‘basic life contents’…which first include the consumption of food…” (Ibid) “…I make sure that all the food consumed by my family must be safe, reliable and traceable…Because food consumption is an essential part of the ‘basic life contents’…If I can’t control the basic life content like food, then I can’t control anything…To be able to realize this point is the result of my farming practice, which returned me back to the nature and reconnected me with the soil in the field…” (Ibid) “…The harvest from my farming practice (both in the centered urban space and peri-urban space) can basically satisfy the vegetable needs of my whole family (four and half people), no problem…However, when I say ‘no problem’, there must be a prerequisite that we first change the conception of consumption in our mind. That is, we eat only the seasonal vegetables, and eat only whatever the land offers for us at the moment. If we don’t accept such way of food consumption, the produces harvested from my farming land can never satisfy the food requests of my family. Why? Because, for example, conventionally, if we want to eat certain food, we can immediately spend money in the market to get them, but we can’t do the same to the field. You can’t say ‘I want to eat this or that food’ and then the land immediately offers what we want…‘We eat what we want’ or ‘we eat what the land can offer’, these are two different food consumption logics…When I say the food out of my farming can satisfy my family’s need, it means we have changed our old food consumption logic to the new logic…” (Ibid) “…In the past, I grew what I like to eat, but in that case the options were very narrow, because the soil and climatic conditions are impossible to grow whatever I want! Instead, I must consider all the ecological and natural conditions of my land and then plant the seeds accordingly…What can grow out from these natural conditions is what suitable for us to eat…If here can only grow out Hongshuye (sweet potato leaves), then I train my cooking skills to make the Hongshuye into different sorts of dishes…Thus, our lifestyle in relation to food gets changed gradually and finally…” (Ibid)

155 Extended Reflections since Starting the Farming Practice: (1) Simple Life by Distinguishing the “Needs” and the “Wants” “…Since I started farming, my life has become completely different from the past…My life becomes much simpler but more comfortable. This is also what my friends can observe from me and what they would like to have. They wonder that even though I earn not much, but my life is quite nourished and at ease. I know that I can live an easy and comfortable life because of my simple living.” (Ibid) “…At the first time when I saw the air-conditioner in the city, I asked my classmates in college ‘why there are many boxes hanging over the outside of the buildings?’ My classmate told me the boxes were air-conditioners and explained what was the use of them…I was so ashamed that I didn’t even know such all-pervading electronic appliance…What a poor country girl! Shame!!...But now I can understand air-conditioners from another perspective and know it is very energy consuming and not environmentally friendly, and it can not be categorized as the ‘basic life content’ of my life…I am not that fragile…But unfortunately, the air-conditioner has become a standard of basic housing appliance in China, and has become the ‘basic life content’ for most others…” (Ibid) “…This (i.e. air-conditioner) brings up the argument about what’s the ‘needs’ and what’s the ‘wants’? The ‘needs’ should be part of the basic life contents, but the ‘wants’ belong to the category of desires…My needs are intimately related to my life occasions, so if an appliance doesn’t have an intimate connection with my daily life occasions, or if it stays idle without being frequently used, then I would say this appliance is what I want but not what I need…In the former time, I liked to buy clothes and stored a lot of them, but I notice that many of the clothes were not worn or touched by me in the last 4 or 5 years. This indicates that when I was buying these clothes I just wanted them but not really needed them…I also bought some evening dresses but never wore them, I just presumed that I needed them…” (Ibid) “…Many people don’t know their ‘basic life contents’, or they assume something belongs to their basic needs…They think they must have a car, must have a house, must have a villa, must have lots of money, and they think that it is the life they want… I would say ‘basic life contents’ should be able to take care of people’s body and mental balance, when I own something that brings me burden, then this must be something I want but not need…” (Ibid) Extended Reflections on the Farming Practice: (2) De-commercialization “…The mainstream social system is run by commercial rules that unbalance our body and soul! Many conflicts are caused by such systems, and also chaos!...Take food as example…food comes from the nature and should be priceless…and the intrinsic value of food should be to support people staying in the balanced body and mental condition. However, now, this most basic and essential feature of food offered by nature for free has been grabbed and labeled as a commodity sold for a price…Behind the commercialization of food, there hides the desire to make food into a business. Every step involves the desire in commercial food making, which does not respect people’s essential need. Commercial food is not made for the purpose to nourish life, but has been used as the tool to earn people’s money by the commercialist, and food becomes only an object but no longer a basic element to provide energy for a robust body and mental condition. Once standing in the role as a commercialist, people’s view is immediately changed to ignore the most essential and fundamental relationship between humans and food…” (Ibid)

156 Extended Reflections since Starting the Farming Practice: (3) Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence “…In the case of the VR73 urban farming course [in the elementary school mentioned by you], farming is not regarded as a daily life practice but only a course, a theme, a class. Farming is designed as a theme in the digital program and what the pupils can experience is the digital program but not the farming practice…My farming experience requires me to use my eyes, nose, limbs in holistic way, [but the VR farming experience is to use the brain only]…” (Ibid) “…Intelligent robot…its intelligence is just the aggregation and calculation of information, but not based on sensory experience (tacit knowledge)…[In the future many humans and their jobs may be replaced, but] the intelligent robot can not replace one type of human, that is who have high sensory experience and high power of awareness 74 …People who have low sensory experience and low awareness power can be replaced easier…For the era of our children’s generation, there will be only two type of people, and one is the people who have awareness power, and the other is the people who have no awareness power and are more easily be replaced by the intelligent robot and can hardly find job…” (Ibid) Extended Reflections since Starting Farming: (4) Vision of the New City Living Pattern “…I think there are ways to rebuild the connection between people and nature/land. But it’s better if it is a localized practice, which means that you don’t let people escape completely out of the current mainstream city environment, for example, to build up an eco-village far away from city and people who feel tired to live in the city can move to such place…But this is a thinking of escape…for people to avoid to face themselves. Such solutions can hardly last for long, because people who live at such place for a long time can still get tired, and could miss the city life again…” (Ibid) “…Urban farming can bring very interesting new forms of city life, and it can be complementary and even a reversal of the current mainstream forms of city living. The recent city life options are not more than coffee shops, shopping malls, cinemas or things like this, and our private social dating or gathering places are limited in these options. Imagine if there are urban farming places, our social life occasions could become so different! In the past, we only have the options about our social circles like ‘young mothers group’, ‘Majiang (roughly a kind of Chinese card game) friends group’, or ‘colleague friends group’, now we can add the option of ‘farming friends group’. In this case, the social life can become an occasion which is really based on the basic life contents, and people also share their thoughts, opinions and life experiences about the related themes…Thus, the contents that people communicate among themselves will become very different…[In imagine] If we meet at a coffee shop, the chatting topics must be suitable for the spatial

73 The VR topic was launched during the interview with Wangwei, when I mentioned that a school farming project in Paotong elementary school was planning to open a new course of Virtual Reality (VR) to their students. The teacher in charge of the farming project told me very proudly that in the VR course, students can experience farming through the advanced VR technology, by wearing the VR glasses and experiencing the “realities” of farming in a digital way. Maybe the teacher just wanted to “show off” that cool idea and to demonstrate their school’s availability to catch up with the advanced technological development. However, even just as an idea, this VR farming course is a bit ironic and thrilling for me, as a researcher who is studying right on the metabolic rift issues and on farming’s role to heal the rifts. In contrast, VR is a perfect example to demonstrate how high-tech could cause further steps of human-nature alienation. 74 Wangwei wanted to emphasize that farming practice helps people to build up their own intrinsic understanding about what is true self and what is real life, and the intrinsic awareness of self and intrinsic practice of farming produce the “power of awareness” which can hardly be overwhelmed or replaced by AI. For the people who are anxious about AI’s replacement of their jobs, maybe they should train them to obtain the “power of awareness”, through either farming practice or any other similar practices that could help them to achieve the mental state —being strongly aware of its own existence — a kind of mindfulness condition, according to my interpretation. 157 environment of the coffee shop; if I spend my time in the shopping malls, then my consumption plans will be restricted in the commercial atmosphere of malls…But if we have urban farming plots as the place for social life and communication, it would be very funny, because it will allow people communicate many life details, such as ‘What kind of food your family likes to cook’, ‘What type of organic food you like to buy for your family’, ‘Is the tomato planted and growing well’...A great many of topics can be chatted and exchanged about. In addition, [unlike the deliberately designed commercial city spaces,] the natural environment of urban farming places bring people with more natural esthetical sense and ideas together. I think urban farming can introduce many very interesting forms of city living, and when your living becomes interesting, many life problems could be solved in creative ways…and this is the biggest meaning of urban farming…People always like to live in a life state which can be both nourishing and interesting, and dislike to live in the life situations in which you have to tackle hard human-to-human relationship, to please people in higher and more powerful positions, to follow the others without personal opinions, or to be controlled in limited life states…and these are the inherent needs and feelings of human beings…” (Ibid) There is a significant finding that can be noticed in Helei and Wangwei’s cases: they both grew up in rural natural environments, and moved to the city at 16-18 years of age, when they started to live in the city in the same way as the urbanites, who had born and grown up exclusively in the city environment. I emphasize these personal background facts, because I want to introduce a concept here as the preparation for some later discussions in regard to the individual rift topic. The concept of environmentally “Significant Life Experience (SLE)” is created to conceptualizes the importance of a person’s childhood experience with nature to form his or her interest, knowledge, attitude, awareness and action when they encounter natural and environmental issues in their adulthood (Tanner, 1980; Tanner, 1998). SLE can be applied in the current urban farming research to explain the significance of Helei and Wangwei’s childhood experiences with nature when facing some of the city life challenges. Because their childhood times were spent in the rural and natural areas, Helei and Wangwei are intuitively sensitive to perceive the city living problems; it is also very natural for them to consider and accept urban farming and a simple life as the solution to deal with these problems. For them, the nature-involved childhood experience would remind them about the intrinsic strength of life and guide them to search in the right direction when they meet city life challenges, while for the people who were born and grew up in only city environment, they could lack the natural experience and strength to direct them to the proper solutions. “…My childhood life living in the village was quite free and at ease, and there were so many interesting life contents happening there, very different life contents as we have to deal with in the city life circumstances. Living in that free and natural space of life, people’s social interaction were very different comparing with the social circle in city. For example, at that time in our village, neighbors could visit each other’s home without appointment. One pleasant and proud memory was that I could stroll or idle in our village and all the villagers would welcome me to enter their homes for a meal. For instance, if in the first day my mother cooked some beef dishes, and asked me to deliver some of them to a neighbor behind our house, then in another day when that neighbor cooked some nice dish, they would like to think of us to share the food with. It was a real sense of sharing. Also, such sharing happened as labor bartering. For instance, there was a family planning to harvest their rice millet, my family went over to help for a whole day, and when my family needed to harvest rice millet, the other family’s members would come over to help us for a whole day. In this case, you could feel the real sense of human connection with each other. In addition, at that time, all the children of our village were my playmates and we could accompany each other. Children living in city 158 today are in bad luck, because at most of their spare time, they have only their adult parents or grandparents as company and have not enough chances to play among themselves. Only at some nice family gathering occasions, children from different families can have their own chance to play together. While in my childhood time, the whole village and the whole nature were our playgrounds. City life can never offer such living conditions. It was exactly the free life experience and memory of my childhood time that reminded me to start doubting and reflecting my poor city life quality at that time. If I did not have that kind of childhood experience, I would have not been able to think of to “return” to the basic living and simple living states. I really think my recent basic living style is a nourishing style of life. It does not suck my energy, neither tire my mind, nor exhaust my body…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) With respect to how these childhood environmentally “significant rural/natural life experiences” influence the urban farming practitioners’ interest, concern over natural and environmental topics in their later adulthood life experiences, more detailed discussions and quotations will be presented later in this chapter. 2) To Recover the Interpersonal Communication, Reciprocity and Trust Urbanization and globalization cause migrations. Thousands and millions of people are uprooted from their homeland place, family, social circle and can become atomized and fragmented in city life without sufficient or effective supporting systems, living alone each as individual islands and surviving with different addictive living conditions, or living in the anxiety of future uncertainties. This is especially true for the case of China, including Chengdu. Worldwide case studies have reported that urban farming can be organized as a social event and community harbor for people to meet, to communicate, to exchange social-ecological knowledge, to share life in small but supportive ways, and in such ways, the neighborly reciprocity, interpersonal trust, are expected to be established. However, in the Chengdu research cases, especially in the individual practitioners’ cases, this function of urban farming has not yet been impressively verified. Only in “Ai You Xi”’s community urban farming project, which started in 2013, could some limited achievements of community sense and neighborly reciprocity be observed. In my field research in 2016, I interviewed about six of “Ai You Xi”’s project participants; according to these project members’ information, the three years of project did foster some limited sense of community and sense of public space among the project participants, and a certain degree of interpersonal communication and reciprocity can also be achieved. However, in addition, what these people mentioned a lot during the interviews were still complaints and distrust among people. Before the year of 2017, “Ai You Xi”’s community urban farming project was the only project of its kind which could be found in Chengdu. But from 2017 onwards, more community urban farming projects were reportedly organized by other NGOs, and even by the local district governments, and the purposes of these projects claimed to be to rebuild the city communities and to restore the sense of community. In my field research in 2017, I had the chance to talk to some of the people in charge of these new projects, but so far, the actual effects of these community urban farming projects are still unknown. However, in general, the overall Chengdu research findings show the fact that these Chinese urban farming practitioners seldom initially consider the social aspect benefits of urban farming as their motivation or reason to do farming, and they seldom initially mention the needs of neighborly communication, even though in real life cases they do have from time to time chances to communicate with other urban farming practitioners next door or nearby, and even have some occasional chances to interact with each other through seed-bartering or seed-gifting activities. In fact, according to 159 them, these farming related bartering or gifting activities would happen more often among friends and family members. For example, many of my interviewees mentioned that at the good harvest seasons, when there is a great amount of produce than what they need for themselves, they usually would like to share this extra produce with their close relatives, friends, or sometimes colleagues, while neighbors or members living in the same communities are seldom in their consideration. The reasons behind people’s lack of interest in the social aspect related to urban farming are too complicated to be able to explicate here, not even with the metabolic rift or social metabolism theories, nor any capitalism related critical theories. However, in fact, this kind of disinterest in social affairs happening in the domain of urban farming could be extended to understand many other social aspects of China issues. The disinterest in social or public affairs is widespread in the Chinese society. In Chapter 7, when conducting the comparative discussion between the Chengdu and Freiburg urban farming cases, I will try to compare the major difference between the Chinese and the German cases with respect to people’s willingness towards social communication and interaction in the urban farming practices. Then the reasons for Chinese urban farming practitioners’ disinterest in the social aspects of urban farming practices would be tentatively discussed. The remaining content of this section presents a few of my interviewees’ understandings or expectations of urban farming’s role to solve the interpersonal and social dimension of rift issues: “…Urban farming can provide the platform and chance for community communication, especially at the mega-city areas [like Chengdu] where the ‘city disease’ problems are so obvious. It is a good platform for interpersonal communication. Like on the roof of our former apartment building,…because of urban farming practice, we and our neighbors got the chance to communicate about our farming experiences…We shared the seeds with each other, communicated the cultivation experiences with each other, and exchanged food with each other…It was a very special communication…Flowers planting alone would not be able to cause these many topics to talk about…What if I do farming alone on my balcony? Then I would have lost the chance to talk with my neighbors…Urban farming could function as the new bond to connect people with people and to initiate the communication between these people…” (Cited from Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…In my observation, many of the people whom I have encountered in my projects to promote urban farming [and who often experience tough, intense, and competitive interpersonal relations in their life of working and living] like to ask the questions such as ‘What can urban farming practice help me for my life?’ and ‘How could urban farming practices improve my interpersonal relationships?’ However…after I gain more experience, I realize that to purely focus on the single purpose of solving the human-human problems won’t work out. Instead, people should first realize where do humans come from, what is our human-nature relation, and if each of us is a part of the nature, then the human-human relation should be understood as a part of the relationship existing in nature, and this means that our human-human relation is inherently a symbiosis relationship…[and urban farming practice can help people to practice and to understand such naturally featured interpersonal relationship]…” Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, urban farming practitioner and promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) “…One day, we gave our neighbor a pumpkin, and the next day, the neighbor gave us a bottle of Doushi (fermented soybeans); one day, we gave our temporary helper some vegetables for free and she found it was very useful, and in the next day she shared in return with us her excellent skills and experience to make Mijiu (rice wine) and Lajiaojiang (spicy chili sauce). The second example is the exchange and

160 flow of skill and technique, and the first example is the flow of resource. When we form a community in which the participants know each other well, everyone would like to share his or her own stories, and this is the flow of wisdom, and in fact, our personal energies are also flowing in the circle…And these examples show the real economic relationship…” (Ibid) “…The real economic relationship, in the end, needs to return to the human-human relationship. It takes each person as the basis and essence, and the human-human relations can be developed in the communication and interaction of personal experiences and perceptions, or in the exchange of knowledge, technique, resource and information among people. However, today, the human-human connections have been limited, quantified and standardized in only the form of economic and monetary relation. As the consequence, today, when we talk about economy, we simplified it as only ‘money’! However, money is not the essence of the economy, but only its symbol. Money is only a piece of paper. However, our mind has been confined in such understanding for long time, because in our empirical city life experiences, we can not live without money…[However, through urban farming projects, we may be able to start the experiment to build our economic relationship through other alternative forms]…” (Ibid) 3) To Grow Safe and Reliable Food According to metabolic rift theory, the commercialized food system is the most discernible and understandable type of social rift, because food is consumed daily, and so has a direct causal connection to people’s health. The empirical finding of the Chengdu research, is accordance with this theoretical analysis, shows that the food related social rift is the most direct and primary reason for the urban farming practitioners to make the decision to start their urban farming practice. However, unlike the point mentioned in the literature review, that the urban farming is incorporated in different types of food concepts or movements to counter the problems of the industrialized agricultural methods and the whole commercialized food supply chain, the Chengdu research shows instead that most of the urban farming practitioners take the self-grown food as the solution to achieve the food safety purpose particularly. This is because, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there are nationwide concerns and worries about unsafe food issues in the Chinese market. The frequent and lasting unsafe food scandals have severely damaged people’s trust toward the food provided or produced in China. During the interviews at Chengdu, most urban farming practitioners expressed their top concerns or deep worries about the food related problems from media or from many large amount of online info resources. Along the entire food supply chain, most of their worries are concentrated in the sections of agricultural production and food processing, because in these two sections of the food supply chain, many harmful chemicals and unnamable hormones are either applied in the crop fields or added directly to the processed food. In addition, some of the interviewed people even mentioned their personal experience of witnessing first-hand occasions where these chemicals get applied to food by the agricultural producers, namely, the farmers, farming workers, or food factory workers. There was the repeatedly mentioned situation that many farmers use pesticides and other problematical chemicals to increase the productivity of their crops or vegetables, which they plan to sell in the market, but keep those other crops and vegetables they plant for self-consumption away from these chemicals. This is an unavoidable situation when the consumers are distanced and alienated from their food and the producers are driven only by profit oriented purpose. These situations can be regarded as both the reason and the consequence of the distrust relationship of the

161 consumers and producers. In the Chinese context, as referred to in the earlier discussion under “recover the interpersonal communication, reciprocity and trust”, there are some profound social and political reasons that cause the widespread problems of distrust, not only between the consumer and the producer, or between one individual and another, but it is in fact a systematical dysfunction of the commercial responsibility and the governmental regulation and supervision. The profit-oriented capitalist mechanism is running with its unrestricted version in the Chinese society, where lacks accountable and enforceable power to supervise and restrict the reckless pursuit of commercial interests, leading to the misdeeds of omission and fraud and to the detriment of different sectors and industries in China, including the food industry75. In the above said background, to grow part of the food when there is the opportunity and conditions becomes the reason for many of the Chengdu urban farming practitioners’ expedient choices. That is also the reason that the majority of them choose the No-CF method as their urban farming method to avoid potential health risks caused by the chemical and hormone elements. Even for these urban farming practitioners who use the RF and CF methods, many of them expressed their serious concern about unsafe food issues and the related health issues. However, they still choose to use some limited amount of chemicals (e.g. pesticide) in their farming practice either because they lack the alternative knowledge to grow the crop-plants or they have gotten used to these chemical methods in their life time farming experience. Regarding the productivity of each urban farming practitioner’s effort, about one third of them (twelve people), said that the vegetables they harvested are enough to support the needs of their own family (ca. two to five members) and they do not need to buy in the market. Meanwhile another three interviewees said because of the harvest from their own cultivation, they don’t need to buy their favorite vegetables, like the chilies, the tomatoes or the perishable leafy food from the market; about other one third (ten people), said that the vegetables they grow can hardly satisfy their family needs and they get most of their vegetables from the conventional market or super market; then among the rest of the interviewed urban farming practitioners, the percentage of the self-sufficient vegetables grown by themselves varies from 70%, 50%, 25%, 20% to 10%. For their remaining food needs, which can not be satisfied by the self-grown vegetables, there are about three sources available. First, there are the conventional markets and supermarkets, where most of the vegetables are from greenhouse production and are believed to have been treated with unreliable chemicals or hormones for different purposes like to increase the growing speed of or to enlarge the size of the crop plants. In reaction to these cases, people have developed many of their personal wisdoms to reduce the potential health risks, such as to buy the one “not so pretty looking”, to select the one with “worm bitten holes”, to buy only the “seasonal”, and so on. Second, people with a rural background told me that they prefer to buy the cooking oil, new rice, Larou (bacon) and many others, from hometowns, from their relatives, or from people or sources they are familiar with. They often go back to their hometowns one to three times a year, and every time would carry with them many agricultural products and rural foods for their city life. Third, for the middle or high income people, they often search for the small peasants’ products which are produced in organic ways, or they order the food from large organic farms where they can only buy the food with a

75 Take the notorious 2008 Chinese milk scandal for example. The scandal involved milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components being adulterated with melamine. It is estimated there were about 300, 000 victims in China, including 6 babies who died from kidney stones. This scandal, along with many other scandals in the food industry, has severely weakened Chinese parents’ and the public’s trust in the food supply system in China. 162 membership. These organic vegetables and foods could be three times more expensive than the food from other sources, but people like them because of their reliability, as well as their more natural and more childhood-memory taste. One of my interviewees, Wangwei, introduced a self-initiated project called “foodie’s map”. She and her friends launched the idea to collect the information of the reliable food producers and sources, “…we would personally visit all these small peasant food producers and sources which are reliable according to our own standards of ‘safety’, and then add these confirmed sellers to our information base…”. If all these options fail to satisfy people’s needs to have safe and reliable food, they often expressed with their frustration that “then, we can do nothing, but just bear the situation”. There is a great sense of helpless among these urban farming practitioners when talking about the social reality that neither the government nor the business sectors takes their role or responsibility to create a safe and reliable food system for the people seriously. Urban Farming as a Way to Seek Food Safety “…Why are there so many people that get cancers and strange diseases today in our society? I think it must have something to do with the widely application of pesticides…” (Cited from Mingjian, M, 67 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I don’t need to buy vegetables if I grow my own…I feel very safe to eat my own vegetables, because they are free from pesticide! All the vegetable offered by the market and by the professional vegetable farmers are sprayed with pesticides which can cause so many diseases… ” (Cited from Chendajie, F, 52 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Doing farming is a way to exercise my body, it can help me to pass the time, it can offer me some food to eat, and this is the mostly important reason to do farming. Self-grown food is safe to eat, otherwise the vegetables contaminated with pesticides that can cause serious health problems…But in the market today, we can hardly find vegetables without using pesticide…” (Cited from Xingwu, M, 66 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I grow my own food, without pesticides, purely natural, safe to eat…My body also gets exercised…The TV news said there is a type of mini cucumber, being injected with some unnamed chemical stuff and quite dangerous…The food provided in the market today are no longer reliable…” (Cited from Tangdaye, M, 50+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Mainly for the reason to get reliable vegetable to eat…Intentionally for the purpose to have safe food, but objectively, my body also get exercised, and my money gets saved…” (Cited from Pengpopo, F, 76 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Mainly because the my home-grown food is more reliable for eating, also I get very used to do labor work, so I would like to grow my own food…” (Cited from Qiming, F, 68 y/o, in NGO urban farming project, 2016, own translation) “…It offers a bit limited choice, but quite convenient and safe to eat the self-grown vegetables…not only safe, but also better taste…” (Cited from Ruchang, M, 69 y/o, in NGO urban farming project, 2016, own translation) “…It is more convenient and more reliable to eat my own-grown vegetables…Oil is brought from our hometown…” (Cited from Chendaye, M, 63 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Rice, cooking oil…we bring them from our rural hometown every year when we go back home…because these foods are more reliable, as long as we have the chance, we always bring the main foods from the rural home…Otherwise, we just

163 live with the unsafe food facts…can’t do anything…” (Cited from Shidajie, F, 50+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Vegetables are planted by ourselves, quite reliable to consume…” (Cited from Father Qin, M, 2016, own translation) “…Look at our Sigua (a type of Chinese melon), growing so big and so fast…100% safe, no injection of any contraceptive medicine [hormones] or any other strange things…We feel very very safe to eat our own food…” (Cited from Luoling, F, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I grow my own vegetables, first, for the sake of food safety reason…Because I like to eat tomatoes, and especially want to enjoy the childhood memory taste of tomatoes…But the tomatoes which I can get from the market have been sprayed with pesticide, so I can’t directly enjoy with its peel…” (Cited from Qiaoxiao, F, 38 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I am very worried about the unsafe food issues…so much has been reported in the media…but not much I can do to avoid the risk…I was even thinking of raising my own pigs, chickens, ducks, and fishes so I could have achieved the self-sufficient life, but our roof place has limited conditions…didn’t work out…So I just try to plant what I could grow here, while having to leave the rest to uncertainty…” (Cited from Wangli, F, 30 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I almost do not eat leafy vegetables outside, because I know the leafs are often stuck with some residual pesticide, which can hardly be washed away easily…I can’t trust the food they offer…Even they claim it is certified organic food, I can’t trust it, because I have friends running farms, and they told me some cheating cases and scandals about the organic food certification policy and its poor implementation…” (Cited from Tangyu, F, 23 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Because the vegetable and salads offered by us are grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, so our customers are very happy to consume them…Because normally the food ingredients they buy are unknown about the source…For our food, the customers know the place where they are growing and they can see the growing process of the vegetables…so safe to eat…” (Cited from July, F, 22 y/o, 2016, own translation) Concrete Examples of Unsafe Food Issues “…I saw by myself that the professional vegetable farmers used pesticides to grow his vegetables…I saw the already withered vegetables became very fresh again after being sprayed without unknown chemical stuff…” (Cited from Chendajie, F, 52 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Yes, nowadays many hormones are used in the agricultural production…If you buy water melon, you can find many melons have red inside flesh, but the seeds are white! This is quite likely the sign of using certain hormone!...” (Cited from Xingwu, M, 66 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Many of the greenhouse vegetables look pretty, having the same size and same shape, but they are harmful for our health…[Another food scandal is about the cooking oil,] people collect the leftover food from restaurants and recycle the oil in these leftover food and make them into ‘new’ cooking oil for selling… ” (Cited from Shidajie, F, 50+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…I think the food price is directly proportional to its quality…too cheap priced food should be doubted, because as common sense, cheap price indicates low cost, but low cost food can hardly guarantee its quality, unless a lot of chemical fertilizers are used to catalyze the growth or some hormone or swelling agent is used to enlarge the crop fruit in a short time…Too cheap priced food is very unreliable…” (Cited from Kongqian, F, 38 y/o, 2016, own translation) 164 Specific Reflection: from Food Safety Concerns to Personal Farming Practice “…The biggest motivation for me to grow my own vegetables is because I could not find safe and reliable food to eat…[At that time] there were so many reports on TV or in media talking about the unsafe food related scandals and public events…It was also the time when I just gave birth to my son…and I needed to eat reliable food to produce safe milk for my baby…But at that time I only knew two options – supermarket and conventional market – to get my food. However, the food offered by these two ways are running in the commercialized supply chain, which means many sectors and processes in such supply chain would be unreliable and its sources could be untraceable…[In addition, such food supply chain often cooperate with] greenhouse agricultural production…which always produces the same vegetables throughout the year with different seasons. The tomato, for example, never became rotten for months! This is quite horrible if to think about it carefully, because in my childhood memory, there was no tomato that could stay fresh for months without becoming rotten!... Then I became very concerned about the food safety and quality, and it motivated me to search for more reliable food…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…At that time, I only knew that the food’s safety could basically be ensured if no pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers were used to grow vegetables…I started to order the vegetables grown by the small peasants who applied organic farming methods…Then I spent a year to replace all the former food and food ingredients with more reliable and traceable food and ingredients…Gradually I found a remarkable change that people in my family became less sick and visited less hospitals…Then I realized it was because my family’s eating and living habits got improved through farming practice, and our eating quality got increased by taking more reliable food…” (Ibid) “…Slowly and slowly, after two years…I started paying attention to the consumption structure of my family, and one day, after making a list of all the consumptions, I was astonished about the fact that my family consumed about 3000 different types food including vegetables, fruits, staples, grains and the food related ingredients in one year!...How could we consume so many?!... ” (Ibid) “…In addition, now, I start to be concerned about the entire food system, concerned about whether the food system takes a person’s real needs seriously in the first place. Food for me is a gift offered by the nature to take care of our body and soul, and we should really understand food as the great blessing from nature…Unfortunately, we, the people, are not well nurtured by the current food supply chain…because the recent mainstream food system is driven by the profit-oriented business motivation, and the purpose of such food supply system is to lure the consumers to pay their money…” (Ibid) “…Now, my understanding about food is that we exchange energy with nature through food consumption…Food is the reified energy offered by the nature, so eating food is the process that the natural energy nurtures our life…[The essence of farming practice is] our way to take care the earth, to nurture the plants…to return the energy back to nature…However, today in our society, food consuming has been simplified and misunderstood as a commercial exchange of selling and buying…” (Ibid) “…The fundamental reason of the food waste problem is because these people no longer understand the real relationship with food…They forget food is coming from nature, lost the perception and knowledge about nature and the soil…not to mention their ignorance of taking care of the earth and plants…For these people, to consume good food only indicates their financial power to consume…and food in their eyes is merely an object of commodity. In there commercialized food system,

165 there is no reciprocity between people and food, between human and nature…and there is only request but no return from human to nature...” (Ibid) 5.3.4 Urban Farming Practitioners’ Response to Individual Rift As part of the immaterial rift, the individual dimension of rift issues overlaps with other immaterial rifts. When the individuals involve themselves in urban farming in response to the epistemological, cultural and social dimensions of rift issues, they are in fact dealing with various individual aspects of needs as discussed throughout this chapter. The following analysis will focus on urban farming’s function to repair the individual aspect of rift issues, which I divide into three categories: (1) the de-alienation from the fruits of one’s labor, (2) the de-alienation from nature, and (3) the de-alienation from self. The first two categories are deducted in accordance with the theoretical elaboration of individual rift, while the third category about “the de-alienation from self’ is formed by a more inductive approach, which conceptualizes the phenomenon according to the data collected from the field. In the Chengdu research, many urban farming practitioners expressed the function of farming to keep or recover their own physical and mental health; some expressed farming’s role to regain the subjective well-being and to re-find the “true” self or “real” self that had gotten lost in the hassles of city life, in the mechanized way of living and working, or in the treadmill living pattern. 1) De-alienation with Fruits of Labor In Chapter 2, according to the metabolic rift theory, the division of labor in industrial production leads to more separation between manual and mental work, as well as between social and natural science, and consequently the workers have less understanding about the meaning of their labor contribution to the entire work when more science becomes engaged in production. In addition, there is social metabolism theoretical explanation about why the modern city life and jobs have the tendency to separate manual work from mental work; there are also empirical records about how urban farming practices can work to reintegrate the social and natural sciences and to reconnect manual and mental labor, thus helping the individual to regain a more direct sense of meaning about their labor contribution. However, the urban farming practitioners at Chengdu did not mention much about this aspect of function of urban farming practices, and only very few of them perceived and expressed explicitly such body-brain integration through farming. Only two kinds of relevant benefits have been expressed in the interviews: first, “a sense of achievement” which the urban farming practitioners can have when their labor contribution in farming brings them the fruits and produce during harvest; second is “a sense of body-brain balance” that some people experience when doing farming with both manual and mental energy. Specifically, what could be captured in the urban farming practitioners’ interviews are the expressions like these below: “…I feel very happy to do farming, because I can breathe fresh air here, can have a harvest of food from my labor…” (Cited from Pengpopo, F, 76 y/o, retired teacher, 2016, own translation) “…I feel it is good for both my body and mental health by doing a little bit of labor work in farming…and I gain some vegetables and fruits to eat from my own labor contribution, why not? And to recycle the organic waste and reduce the production of trash also makes me feel good…” (Cited from Luoling, F, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation)

166 “…I can observe the seedlings’ growing little by little by contributing my labor work, and this brings me a great sense of achievement…” (Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Now I feel much healthier and more relaxed than before…In the past, I used too much of my brain in my work…the brain was in dominance…and brain’s thinking, reasoning and calculating was the dominant state of my laboring pattern…Now, sometimes I don’t need to use my brain when I am doing farming in the field, some other times, even if I still use my brain, [it is no longer dominated by brain work] but a balance of using both the brain and body…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) 2) De-alienation with Nature Living in a growing mega-city like Chengdu, whose space and surface is dominated with skyscrapers and concrete grounds, people and their living contents have been influenced by consumer culture and material hedonism; people’s lives have been almost detached from nature, both in physical space and in consciousness or cognitive sense. In this case, the urban farming practice plays a role of reconnecting the urban farming practitioners with nature in multiple dimensions. For example, the Chengdu research findings demonstrate that farming activities strengthen people’s connections with a more ecologically sound environment, and also provide the actual natural benefits such as fresh air, green views, and the aesthetic enjoyment of natural beauties. Many elder interviewees mentioned that they could spent hours staying with their fresh crop plants, just feeling comfortable and pleased to look at these lovely leaves, flowers or fruits. My interviewees could express their positive feeling in the natural environment of farming with only limited words like “comfortable”, “pleasant”, or “happy”, and they have no awareness about the concepts of “alienation from nature”, but their action and expression of urban farming practice have implied the unperceived (subconscious) fact of the alienation from nature. Their positive affection towards these natural factors in urban farming has also indicated their intuitive affinity with nature. “…My family worries that I might work too much in the field, but I feel very happy to do farming, because I can breathe fresh air here…can see the lovely bright red tomatoes, and can see the densely growing Jiangdou ( a type of long bean) …” (Cited from Pengpopo, F, 76 y/o, retired teacher, 2016, own translation) “…There are not many chances to see these emerald plants in the city space, only in the countryside, there are many pleasant green views which make people feel well and refreshed…Now we have these green vegetables and crops planted in the backyard of our apartment neighborhood, this makes me feel great…” (Cited from Guojuan, F, 58 y/o, retired factory worker, 2016, own translation) “…Like in the rainy weather…I have nowhere to go…then I will go up to my tiny balcony, do some weeding, do some cleaning, store the leaves…Every time, I could stay there for about two hours…I just like to deal with the soil, seeds or plant stuff…” (Ibid) “…Sometimes, I go up to the roof to have a look about the vegetables I grow, wow, the little sprouts burgeoning out from the earth, this is such a pleasant moment, good feeling moment…” (Cited from Luoling, F, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Doing farming and growing vegetables is my long term wish and hobby, because I always think farming is a very pleasant thing to do…Growing flowers is also pleasant, but somehow growing vegetables is more pleasant for me. Both are about growing the plants, but the feelings are different, maybe there is a kind of influence from the Chinese tradition and culture of farming…” (Cited from

167 Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, urban farming practitioner, senior natural conservation professional, nature education promoter, 2016, own translation) I even asked Tianfeng, as a professional natural conservation person who often visits many natural and forest places like national parks and who also likes to climb tall snow-covered mountains, that since he has many chances to visit the real natural areas and has very intimate connections with nature, why does he still have the interest to do farming and to create a mini natural atmosphere at home in the city? He answered that the natural atmosphere of the large mountain is different from the mini-natural surroundings of an urban farming plot or pot. Farming is another way of connecting with nature, a very different way to connect with nature than the mountain climbing process. Meanwhile, as a father and also a nature education promoter, Tianfeng emphasized the important role of urban farming to offer the city children the daily-life based convenient opportunity of nature education. It is not important whether the children understand the meaning of urban farming or not, instead, the point is to let them get used to farming and natural elements in their city life, and let them build the intimacy feeling and memory with the city ecological environment offered by farming, form the aesthetic sense of natural beauty, and inherit the rich and deep Chinese cultural traditions related to farming and agriculture. “…It is fun for her (the five year old daughter) to play with soil…For children, it is just playful…When I am doing my farming, she would take her little shovel to join me, sometimes digging the soil, mashing a big chunk, or sometimes just playing with the compost I just made, or just companying with me when I am doing farming…I think this could offer my daughter a memory of connecting with farming and nature after she grows up, just like at my recent age, I often recall the nature-connected experiences that happened in my childhood…” (Cited from Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, urban farming practitioner, experienced mountain climbing lover, senior natural conservation professional, nature education promoter, 2016, own translation) “…There is the aesthetic value of Chinese traditional farming helping to answer the questions like What is pretty? What is beauty?…There is some big difference between the Eastern and Western aestheticism…The Western type of beauty is a large piece of lawn, and such understanding of beauty has gradually become the standardized sense of beauty to design our city’s vegetation covering today…Such standard should be changed and the traditional aesthetics should be re-educated in our current society…Because traditionally, we have the Eastern sense of beauty which is about ‘采菊東籬下, 悠然見南山76’. Our Chinese sense of beauty is directly based on farming culture. I think the traditional Chinese sense of aestheticism is largely related our long history of farming culture…” (Ibid) “…Farming practice is helpful for individual’s spiritual growth. Why do I say so? Because I notice that many people start building their interest in farming practice only after they get to be 30-40 years old. Why? Because for many Chinese people, this is the right age to re-understand ourselves, to re-connect with our inner self…It is the age for us to form our inner spirit and beauty…In this case, farming is a good practice and approach for us to achieve the spiritual building of our inner self. There are many different ways and approaches of practice, but for me and for many people, farming is the right way, the appropriate way. When I was doing my farming activities, I could perceive a connection with nature and I could perceive a

76 采菊東籬下,悠然見南, is part of the verse in a poem titled Enjoying Wine, written by a very famous Chinese poet named Tao Yuanming living between the 4th - 5th Centuries. The literal translation of these two verses is “In short distance, I can pick the Chrysanthemums flower close to the eastern fence; In far distance, I can leisurely enjoy the view of the Southern mountain”. This poem is very famous among Chinese people, for its peaceful inner feeling described by the poet. 168 relationship with myself…I think this is a very important function of farming. I think this is also the highest achievement and purpose for any forms of natural education. I believe farming has a big role to play to help people build the connection with nature and with their inner self…” (Ibid) “…Mountain climbing is another way to connect with nature, very different from the way of farming…In front of the big mountain, I felt to be encompassed in some gigantic atmosphere, I felt the humbleness and smallness of humans, as only a piece of dust in the nature, and a sense of admiration would rise up in my heart…The feeling is very magnificent…I love it, the grand mountain, but at the same moment, I also feel being oppressed by its grandness…While when I face a small sprout of plant, it means I am also facing its growth. [For example,] when I see the peanut seedlings I planted growing bigger, shooting with yellow flowers, I am observing the growth of life, a life under my gentle tending…a very special, charming and indescribable intrinsic feeling…” (Ibid) In fact, however, urban farming does not simply offer city people the chance and environment to stay connected with the natural elements like crop plants, leaves, flowers or fruits, but also provides them the vibrant natural environment or atmosphere which has better ecological quality, more biodiversity. The large-size outdoor farming patches, often vacant lands or leftover farming lands, often have large areas of unsealed-soil condition on the ground and also have the condition to form sorts of seasonal or perpetual water pond environments; all these conditions offer the urban wild flora and fauna very precious ecological habitats in the city environment, which otherwise, would be dominantly covered with concrete or asphalt. In addition, for these medium-size roof farming plots and the small- or mini-size container farming spaces, even though their ecological conditions might be not as natural and original as the on-ground farming plot conditions, their agro-biodiversity still offers small habitats for various forms of life in city spaces, where ecological conditions are always rare. Even a tiny container farming space could become a mini-oasis for the flying fauna, like birds, bees, butterflies or any other pollinating or non-pollinating insects. Imagine that these creatures are flying above the urban domain which is mostly a “concrete desert”, and that they can hardly find a suitable ecological place or a comfortable twig to alight on, and then suddenly, there is a green farming plot appearing like a tiny piece of “oasis” below on the ground or on the roof, and then a flying creature swoops downward either for taking a rest or settling down as a new habitat. In my field research, people mentioned many names of the animals they could see at their urban farming plots; for many of these animals — e.g. snake, gecko, frog, toad, hare, mole, turtledove, sparrow, bee, butterfly, and dragonfly, etc., people believe they have disappeared from the city center spaces and have been dispersed far away from city spaces. Most city residents, if they do not do urban farming, can hardly be aware or imagine that many of these animals survive in the very crowded and hustling urban environment, inhabiting so close to city people’s neighborhoods. “…[Since we started this roof farming,] more birds are coming to visit…I like to see the birds here, and the ‘chirp-chirp, chirp-chirp’ sounds sung by the birds are so pleasant and lovely to listen…” (Cited from Qiming, F, 68 y/o, roof urban farming practitioner in the NGO project, 2016, own translation) “…Here we have many insects…This insect is a fartnocker…this insect looks like a centipede but may not be…and we have the slugs eating the leaves…” (Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, a roof urban farming practitioner, 2016, own translation) “…I have found about more than seven or eight types of ladybug species in the roof garden outside our coffee shop…There are also many bees…and in different 169 weather conditions, coming with different bee species…Here are also butterflies, and they would come when it is a big sunny day…There are also birds coming to visit, and they come very frequently…I have seen four types of birds in our roof garden, and sparrows are the most…These birds do not target that much on the seeds or seedlings we planted, but like to eat many of the pests stuck on the plants… ” (Cited from July, F, 22 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…There are also the bugs like centipedes and crickets in our roof garden…There are many crickets…and sometimes we find a warm place and make piles of dry grass for them to live in…and in the evening time we can enjoy to listen to the ‘qi-qi-qi-qi’ sounds from the crickets, a very funny and interesting experience [which is rare at the most busy and noisy commercial center area of Chengdu hustling ]…We can also find many earthworms in the soil…very long and very fat…and I have found at least two types of earthworms here, one is in red color and the other is in black color…There are also some ants, but not so many…” (Ibid) In the earlier discussion about urban farming’s role to respond to the treadmill living pattern, some of the urban farming practitioners’ practices and reflections have pointed out the function of farming to help the individuals to learn the laws of nature in the process of tending the crops and plants, to realize the fact that humans are part of nature and can only survive in respect of natural laws, and also to experience the personal benefits of living in a natural, simple and sustainable life. In addition to helping the people build a cognitive understanding of the human-nature relation, farming practice also helps individuals to enrich their perception about nature and natural phenomena, to form the respectful attitude towards nature and natural laws, and to establish a sense of responsibility to natural conservation and environmental protection. (These functions of urban farming, however, could not be verified in most of the old urban farming practitioners’ cases; only young people show more or less their interest in, concern about or awareness of these aspects of urban farming practice. It does not mean the elderly people cannot respond to these aspects of urban farming, but just because most of these elderly people in my interviews had tough and miserable lives in their younger years, their attention and interest had been suppressed by more urgent life pressures.) What is especially impressive is that, through farming practice, many people have changed their attitude towards the “rainy” weather and their perception about the “dirtiness” of soil. For many city people, rainy days or raining is often regarded as something inconvenient, because raining would indicate that they cannot have outdoor activities or have to change their planned events, or would get their clothes and body wet, or get their shoes and pants dirty. Often, people’s first reaction to the sudden rain would be “Gee, it’s raining again, annoying”, while they would not first think of the rain as a natural phenomenon and its critical role in the agricultural production system. Urban farming, however, changes people’s attitudes about rain from dislike to longing. Similarly, before trying farming practices, the city people’s normal impression of soil is dirty and they often have deep prejudice about and discrimination against soil, farming and even farmers. However, their own experience of farming teaches them about the importance of soil and farming, and therefore changes their former perception about soil and dirtiness. In these cases, urban farming is a quite effective way to direct city people to reflect and resist the nature-alienated city life attitude, and to offer them some opportunity to build a more fundamental understanding and consciousness about nature. This is especially true for those urban farming practitioners who only have a city background without any childhood rural or farming experience, and therefore have more alienation from nature.

170 “…Because I did not have the farming experience in my childhood, so I was not aware of the rain that much, and don’t have such awareness in general…Now, [after I joined the roof farming project and do farming by myself,] I do expect more rain, because I can have less watering work to do…” (Cited from Qiming, F, 68 y/o, city background, urban farming practitioner in the NGO project, 2016, own translation) “…(My daughter, 20+ y/o) she does not care about the dirtiness of the soil, she does not have such prejudice…Because she has me as her mother who can create such a close-to-nature atmosphere for her…My daughter has been educated by me to like nature, like farming…She is not scared about any bugs or insects...” (Cited from Luoling, F, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…There are very obvious changes about people’s attitudes towards the rainy weather, very obvious…For the individuals who grow their own vegetables, they always expect the rain for their crops, and don’t regard rainy days as BAD weather…Otherwise, for the people who spend their daily life in the city, they would think of raining as very inconvenient and uncomfortable situation, which forces them to take umbrellas, or makes their shoes dirty…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, natural farming practitioner and urban farming promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) “…The soil can not produce the food at your wish whenever you want to eat that food…The radish can only grow to be this size today [and you have to be patient and let it grow slowly], or it will blossom tomorrow [and you can’t stop it]…It is a great mistake if you try to understand the land from the perspective of human desire…The self-centered thinking and lifestyle is opposite to the natural principles…” (Ibid) “…We need to know from a plant’s perspective, what are the elements needed for its growth, and then we just ensure these elements – like enough time, enough sunlight, all kinds of microelements – are provided to the plant, but not just feed it with chemical fertilizers… ” (Cited from Tangyu, F, 23 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…Many city people today suffer from the problem of nature deprivation, so there is a need to create chances to reconnect with nature…At the beginning, such efforts of connecting with nature may be regarded as something strange and unpleasant for the people who have little experience with nature. They would be scared about ‘strange’ bugs, would feel annoyed to touch the ‘dirty’ soil. However, it is necessary for the people, if they start farming, to learn about these bugs, such as why they appear in the farming plot or what relation do they have with humans. All the city families owe themselves such a lesson of nature education [through farming or other activities] to reconnect with nature…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, NF urban farming practitioner and promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) In addition to all these above mentioned conclusions about how urban farming plays a role in solving the problem of alienation from nature, there are some interesting findings were provided by the urban farming practitioners about their childhood experiences of living in the countryside or in more natural environments. As emphasized in the theory of the significant life experience, these close-to-nature experiences are believed to foster people’s memories of and cognitions about the connection with nature; and these urban farming practitioners regard their childhood experiences with nature as one of the key reasons for them to find and accept urban farming as their reaction and solution to cope with their city life uneasiness and challenges. Meanwhile, vice versa, according to the concept of biophilia, the practice of farming, the engagement in farming activities and the immersion in the farming related ecological atmosphere fulfill many of these urban farming practitioners’ instinctive calls for reconnecting with nature. Even though they may not have the knowledge or the precise concept of nature-alienation, but their

171 intuitive choice of farming has demonstrated that their earlier life experience with nature has formed the inerasable memories and cognition about nature. It is also these urban farming practitioners, who have abundant childhood experience of nature, who are more aware of the city people’s nature-deficit disorder symptoms, have more critical attitudes towards the over-commercialized city lifestyle and the fragmented city living contents, and also have more interest in finding a balance between their city life and their intuitive need of nature, such as to practice farming, or to practice simple living as a deliberate detachment from the mainstream lifestyle and its consumerist culture. With regard to these urban farming practitioners’ childhood memories about nature, a research method of sketch mental mapping was applied during the interview as a way to visualize the abstract memory. The interviewees were asked to draw their childhood memories about their living neighborhood, or anything that came to mind with regard to the nature related memory or perception. These sketches are the cognitive maps drawn by the urban farming participants to provide information about their perceived significant life experience with nature, the perceived nature scale of their childhood experience, or their perceived overall memory of the natural nature world. In addition to the hand-drawn maps, detailed messages about their childhood nature experiences could be captured and extracted from the participants' oral narration while drawing. Obviously, as shown below in their drawings and maps, as well as in the quotations of their descriptions, these people’s childhood memories of nature are full of joyful, playful, cheering and naughty experiences, such as playing in the stream, fishing or fish catching, crab catching, tree climbing, bird egg grabbing, butterfly or dragonfly catching, mushroom collecting, plum picking, or herb collecting, so on and so forth. Meanwhile, people also described how these childhood natural communities have been destroyed, how the rivers have gotten polluted or shrunk, how the forests become bald, how the wild lives have disappeared, and even how the local village communities have collapsed in the last two or three decades. Overall, however, the information in these maps and narrations does illustrate that the childhood life experience in the countryside or in the mountainous areas is connected with the choice of urban farming in face of the city life in adulthood (Figure 19 – 23).

Figure 19. Drawing of the Big Mountainous Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1970-80s) by Tianfeng

172

Figure 20. Drawing of the Mountainous and River Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Wangwei

Figure 21. Drawing of the Rural Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Helei

Figure 22. Drawing of the Rural Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Guomin 173

Figure 23. Drawing of the Rural Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1970-80s) by Baoma

Figure 24. Drawing of the Township Living Neighborhood in Childhood Memory (1970s) by Luoling

Figure 25. Drawing of the Suburb Living Neighborhood of Chengdu in Childhood Memory (1990s) by July 174

Figure 26. Drawing of the Living Neighborhood at Chengdu in Childhood Memory (1960-70s) by Chunmei

Figure 27. Drawing of the Living Neighborhood at Chengdu in Childhood Memory (1990s) by Tangyu 175 For the urban farming practitioners from city backgrounds, whose childhood living places were mostly the city or town areas, their memories in both mental mapping and narration have many fewer ecological landscapes and natural elements (Figure 24 – 27). With the development of urbanization over the past 20 to 40 years, today these remaining free natural elements are becoming even more scarce in urban spaces. This is a great loss for the children growing up in the city, because according to Louv (2008) and Kellert’s (2012) study on the importance of children’s connection with natural urban environments, the unorganized environments like the semi-natural outskirts could offer the children the chance to have unplanned free playing. The term “free” has double meanings here. First, it means that city children can play at such places without any money cost, unlike the current mainstream commercial pattern which provides a lot of artificial wonderland areas such as the Disneyland-style playground, offering great many seductive options for children to participate, as long as their parents can afford these intentionally designed expensive fantasies. Second, it means that city children can play freely in these natural or semi-natural places and can explore the spatial or ecological details in a sense of fascination, wonder and awe which is derived from the intimate adventure of nature’s diversity and complexity (Louv, 2008; Kellert, 2012); such freestyle experience of play and exercise is lacked in the regulated and planned playgrounds such as the indoor or outdoors sports stadium. The following quotations are some of the urban farming practitioners’ recalls of their childhood memories with nature when they were drawing the scratch mapping, very intriguing experiences, similar to listening to adventurous stories. Meanwhile, many of these narrators, when asked to recall the details of their childhood natural experience, always felt very happy to share their joyful memories with me; especially when the valve of their memories were completely opened up by the right questions, they would become very excited with their sparkling eyes to introduce all the playful and joyful details. “…(Figure 19) When I was a child, I did not feel anything special, but after I grew up and went back to visit my childhood living place in the remote mountainous area, I realized that it has very clear sky to see the galaxy in the evening, extremely beautiful…and then I realized that my hobby to observe stars was established unconsciously at that time, and also, my overall interest about nature, about environmental issues was formed gradually in such remote mountainous environment…Such environment also formed my aesthetic sense of natural beauty, and defined what’s beauty for me or what would attract my attention…For example, for other children, maybe it was Gongfu novels or the digital games that attracted their attention or interest, but for me, it was and it is the nature and the natural things that attract most of my attentions…” (Cited from Tianfeng, M, 45+ y/o, urban farming practitioner, senior natural conservation professional, nature education promoter, 2016, own translation) “…(Figure 20) I grew up in Guizhou province, which is featured about its big mountainous terrain…The place my home is located was a rural valley area, a river running through the valley, and my family was living on one side of the mountain slope beside the river. There were families living on the other mountainside across the river, and if we shouted loudly we could talk to each other, but if we wanted to visit them, we must first go down from our mountain and ferry across the river and then climb up to their mountain…The mountains on both sides are huge…and the river flowing in between is wide but not deep…I remember at my childhood time, the river water quality was VERY good, and the households living nearby would directly take river water for drinking! Directly! And the water was so clean so transparent that the colors of the sand floor and stones beneath the water could be seen clearly. The fishes could also be seen clearly in the river. There was one type of fish called ‘stone tiger’ that liked to hide themselves in the apertures beneath the big rocks under the water. The boys who were good at diving and catching skill 176 would plunge headlong into the water and get the fish in only one minute! Very good skill! I was poor at diving, so I could only search for the crabs living beneath the stones in shallow river areas. Then we grilled them with fire beside the river, just wonderful flavor! Best taste! In addition, at the shallow area of the river, some naturally formed water ponds would be used by us as natural swimming pools, and we often enjoyed swimming, diving and surfing there. Recalling that moment from now, I am marveled at the magic of that river, because it offered us so many things and fun. At that time, we could play with sand, with stones, with water, with fish, and would play with natural stuff in so many creative ways. We didn’t have rubber or plastic toys, but we could create so many different natural ways to enjoy ourselves! There were just so many beautiful memories and experiences…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…(Figure 20) Our village was built at the mountainside area along the river…Villagers’ houses were surrounded with trees, plants and farming lands…The forest was behind the village and on a bit upper part of the mountain…The plants and trees were very abundant in the forest and we children were often dispatched by our parents to collect firewood there…I remember we selected only the wood from Qinggang tree as firewood, because Qinggang wood is durable in the fire…After we collected enough firewood, we, several children together, often left some time in the forest just for fun. We would steal something from the neighbor’s field to BBQ, or climbed up the tree to catch bird eggs…many many ways to play…In my memories, there were many many animal species living inside the forest, like wildpigs, pheasants, snakes, boas, hedgehogs, squirrels, birds and so on...The men in our village would go hunting these wild animals. Our father knew a relative who was good at hunting, and because of him, I tasted many wild animals in my childhood time, even monkey meat…But now I recognized it was brutal to eat them as meat!...It was a great pity that I didn’t learn so much about herbs in my childhood environment, but my grandmother knew many of them and would boil some of unnamed herbs as my medicine if I got a cold or cough…My childhood health problems were cured with these herbs…Recalling my childhood time now, it was really natural living, natural therapy…” (Ibid) “…(Figure 20) Today, however, that beautiful river at my rural home has been destroyed, and the crystal clean water in the river has also been polluted. The water quality has become poor because of the new towns development along the river. All the dirty drainage from these towns are drained into the river. The whole river has been polluted now. At our old house, behind the house yard, there was once a natural spring providing my family with drinkable water. It was not only drinkable water, but was real mineral water, and its taste was once so clear, so crisp, so incredibly good, like heaven juice!…Even during some drought years, our spring never got dried…It is still there today, but no longer even drinkable, because at the upper source area of the spring water, there are many farming lands applied with too many chemical fertilizer and pesticide…The water source has been contaminated…” (Ibid) “…(Figure 21) Here was a small stream, here was a water pond, these were farming areas, all farming areas here and there…and here was the vegetable garden area for our villagers, here was farming areas again. On the slope of the hill, here were mostly the forest areas for our villagers...but also a little bit farmland...and a few villagers were living up there…The whole area was once my paradise…this little stream was on our way to school…It usually took us about 10 minutes to arrive at the stream from home, but I often prefer to spend about one hour there, either lying there for a nap, or playing with the wild grasses there, or finding a tree nearby to climb up…Just so many fun things to play around on…My favorite game was to take a bamboo knitted basket to catch the fishes that swam downward from the upper stream…I still remember the first time when I caught some small fish, and my mother cooked them into a very delicious soup for me...The amusement from such experience was so profound, as tasty as the fish soup…” (Cited from 177 Helei, M, 37 y/o, natural farming practitioner and urban farming promoter, 2016-2017, own translation) “…(Figure 22) I remember when I was young, I liked very much to play in the nature at the rural home place of my grandparents…I remember I spent all the summer and winter vacations in the countryside with the rural kids there…and we had tremendous ways to amuse ourselves in nature…For instance, when we were playing in the field, there was a mulberry tree nearby, then we would climb up on the tree to pick the sour-sweet mulberries…Or together with other children, we went to ‘steal’ the corn in the field and brought them into the bamboo woods to have our barbecue…besides the stolen corns, we also grilled sweet potatoes and chestnuts…Sometimes, we would run to the river side to catch fishes and crabs, and the boys liked also to catch loaches and frogs…Some other days, we would go adventurous hikes guided by some older age boys, such as to go enjoy some natural spring water springing out from underground…These abundant nature experiences were the reason of my affinity with nature and rural environment…because it was so amusing to stay with nature…Maybe it was also what formed my environmental awareness…and also my interest about Waldorf education, because teaching at Waldorf, we also need to lead a group of kids to ‘play’ around…” (Cited from Guomin, F, 36 y/o, biodynamic agriculture practitioner, Chengdu Waldorf teacher, 2016, own translation) “…(Figure 23) There were too many places we could play around at my rural home place…and for different seasons there were different ways to enjoy ourselves. In the spring, it was spring outing time…and we all took our food to go up the hill to have our picnic, an occasion we set up a temporary outdoors cooking system for fun; In the summer, we took our clothes to the nearby river to get them washed…It was a very wide river, maybe about 30 meters wide…We stood in the river, and the water flowed through our legs, causing some comfortable itchy feeling…We took the laundry time to enjoy ourselves in the water for hours…After finishing the laundry task, sometime we might do some swimming in the river…or we climbed up to the bank area to ‘steal’ the corns…There were also many frogs in the summer evening, and their songs could be heard on the way back home; In the autumn, we would like to take some break from the farming tasks in the field…and at such interim time, we had our fun to search and dig a kind of root plant which was very sweet…At the similar place nearby, there were also many mild mushrooms, and we always picked some of them to take home to cook with egg soup…such good taste!...In addition, in some small streams, when it was the irrigation time, there were fishes coming from the upper source, and we liked to use improvising tools such as tree branches to catch the fish…Just for fun!...” (Cited from Baoma, F, 40+ y/o, the mother of Baobao, both joined the school farming project in Paotong elementary school, 2016, own translation) “…(Figure 24) In regards of the memory about nature in my childhood, my first memory is about a kind of plant called Wasong growing through the tiles on the roof of our single-storey house. Wasong is also one type of the succulent plants, also a kind of medicine plant, and it grew very well with just a little bit of soil…There was another kind of plant also growing on the roof, we called it Laobusi, which was also easy to survive in the poor condition environment…In addition, my mother also put a pot of Taiyanghua (a type of colorful flower) on the roof, and this flower also had a strong life, just with little water, it could blossom to be a very bright flower…” (Cited from Luoling, F, 45+ y/o, 2016, own translation) “…The urban farming practice reminds me of something I haven’t thought about for a long time, and it is something about my childhood living environment…which has left so profound impressions in my memory that I still clearly remember every corner of that place…I grew up at the foot of the mountainous area of Dujiangyan (very famous about its natural environment one hour distance from Chengdu city), so such a living environment caused my affinity

178 with nature…The place we lived was surrounded by farmlands and we sometimes went to the field to ‘steal’ the crops…My parents also grew some vegetables in the vegetable garden at their working place…I remember they often used the fermented urine to fertilizer the vegetables…and also remember they once harvested a huge Donggua (a kind of Chinese melon), about 10 kilograms, extremely huge!...I really miss the time spent in my childhood…[Unfortunately, as a boy growing up in the city,] my son has no interest in these natural and mountainous things…His hobbies are watching TV and playing computer games, just like all the children living in city today…” (Cited from Kongqian, F, 38 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…(Figure 25) I am a local Chengdu person…grew up inside the city, but when I was little, I often went to visit my grandparents who were living at the southern suburb area of Chengdu, Huayang district77. It was a quite hilly area…and full of farming lands…and at the foot of the hill there were small streams or rivers…My grandparents lived in very old rural house, and I remember I often went to the farming land with my grandfather when he needed to work in the field…Outside the back door of the house, I remember there was a big piece of vegetable garden, and the vegetables like Jiangdou (a type of long bean), Sijidou (another type of bean), eggplants, Wosun (a type of Chinese lettuce) and Xiaocong (a type of scallion or chives) were grown there…In addition, I remember there were many high arboreal trees growing around the house, such as camphor tree, plum tree, Chinese banana tree, and many conifer trees as well…There was also a piece of bamboo woods nearby…I saw also eagle, wild pheasant there, and I even saw people capturing snakes for selling…I also captured something for eating, there was a kind of small bamboo insect rich in protein; there were also many shrimps in the pond could be caught by fishing; there were also eels in the paddy field and our uncle taught us how to catch them…However, these views, these animals, these landscapes are no longer existing there…This entire hilly suburb area has been flatted by the bulldozers and transferred into completely a urban residential district...Just feel today our life is no longer that close to be with nature…” (Cited from July, F, 22 y/o, 2016, own translation) (also see Figure 15 and 16) “…(Figure 26) I grew up at the eastern suburb area of Chengdu, it is equivalent to today’s area between the First and Second Round Roads…I remember there was still farming land on the road to school, and could still see frogs…many birds, dragonflies, bees…There were also many trees, robinia trees, cypress trees…and I sometimes climbed trees for fun…My most impressive memory was that before the summer vacations, our teacher always warned us not to go swimming in the Sha river nearby…(This indicates that the river was still very clear for people to swim inside,) but today, even if you just ask me to put my feet in it, I won’t do that, because the water quality of that river has become so bad…In the past, the seasonal weather conditions were more evident in each season than today…Nowadays, the winter weather would come right after the summer weather, and the spring and autumn weathers are no longer that obvious…” (Cited from Chunmei, F, 45 y/o, 2016, own translation) “…(Figure 27) I grew up at the city center area of Chengdu, at the street of Chunxilu (a core center area of Chengdu)…, I never saw any farming land in my neighborhood…The most impressive memory of my childhood time happened in my elementary school years…I remember there was a very big gingko tree living in the school yard…There was also an elm tree, whose survival rate and germination rate were very high, and no matter where did its seeds drop, there were always

77 Huayang (华阳) district, has been changed in the last fifteen years from a rural suburb area of Chengdu to be a commercial and residential district, also the new municipal center of the city of Chengdu, having most of the newly built commercial centers, shopping malls and all the most fancy architectural buildings constructed for commercial and shopping purposes. Just fifteen years ago, it was planted with plenty of tree of many varieties in July’s childhood memory, but today there have been planted with only skyscrapers. 179 many seedlings sprouting out. I collected many seeds under the elm tree to breed my own elm seedlings and was very fascinated about the strength of the tiny tree seeds which could grow up to be such big trees…There was also a mulberry tree next to our school…I remember one year, our teacher of the Nature Class gave each of us some of the silkworm’s eggs, and asked us to find some mulberry tree leaves for breeding the eggs to be baby silkworms…but there was almost no longer mulberry tree could be found in any of the city space, but we luckily found one in a construction site next to our school and we took some risk to pick some of its leaves back for our baby silkworms78…I had a special hobby and skill that was to build bird nest with twigs and branches, and therefore I studied all the trees with bird nests and could build the nest as good as bird : )…Now my professional craft skills are out of my childhood experience to play with nature, just as to make bird nest…” (Cited from Tangyu, F, 23 y/o, natural artist, sustainable living project manager, 2016, own translation) “…Your research is so interesting, having drawing tasks involved…I remember in my childhood, often I liked to climb up on the wall of the compound building yard and also walking or staying on the wall for fun… Outside the wall, there were many trees…Further beyond the trees there were farming lands mixed with small lakes or water ponds, meanwhile the egret birds were flying and foraging in between…Further beyond the farming lands and lakes, there were some small hills, some wood areas, and children such as me and my friend liked to play in the woods…We could have BBQ there, or just lied down or rolled on the ground, or we would like to grab randomly some small natural materials on-hand to build something up with improvisational ideas, or we captured the insects like ants and mantis to let them fight with each other…More further, beyond the hills and woods, there was the Jialing river…and I always tried to grab some fish from the water but never succeeded…There were also many many cobblestones at the beach side of the river, and beneath the cobbles there would hide some small crabs…Sometimes, we could find the nests of the water birds nearby the river beach area, and we would “steal” some of the birds’ eggs away…” (Cited from Fangfang, F, 40+ y/o, 2016, own translation) 3) De-alienation from Self For the individuals living in modern city circumstances like Chengdu, in addition to the individual level of rift problems of “alienation from labor fruit” and “alienation from nature”, they would also suffer from the problem of “alienation from self”, which means that a city individual would have his or her body health problems, mental health problems, and even the overall self-development problems after living too long in a crowded hustling city environment in which each individual has to face so many life hassles from his or her working and living surroundings. In this context, urban farming practice has been studied in existing literature, and has been reported to have the function of helping people to deal with many of these self and individual aspects of issues. The empirical research findings at Chengdu, as soon being discussed as below, also demonstrate that urban farming could indeed build or enhance people’s physical and mental health, and their overall self-development. The following research finding discussion comprises mainly two parts: First, using the urban farming practitioners’ personal experience and their quotations to illustrate how urban farming could benefit their physical and mental health; Second, applying the brain-functioning knowledge of

78 Silkworm breeding (“養蠶” in tradition Chinese, and “养蚕” in simplified Chinese), was historically a widely engaged income-buffering activity for many households in the Southern part of China. The leaves from mulberry trees are the only food for silkworms, and so mulberry trees once were widely planted or growing in the Southern rural areas of China. The school task of silkworm baby breeding is an extracurricular course designed in many Chinese elementary schools for the purpose of teaching pupils the natural habits of silkworms, and also introducing them to a traditional Chinese agro-forestry activity as a cultural course. 180 mindfulness and a series of “self” related psychological concepts and theories to analyze the interrelations among urban farming practice, mental health, personal practice (i.e. training oneself for the purpose of achieving positive mentality, fitness and overall subjective well-being), self-growth (i.e. holistic personal development in mental, emotional, and spiritual terms), and the breaking away from the temptation of material hedonism towards the pursuit of a more simple and sustainable life. Among the urban farming practitioners at Chengdu, to have physical body exercise is the second most important self-reported motivation for them to practice farming, ranking after the purpose for getting safe and reliable vegetables. This is especially true among the elder farming practitioners, from fifty to eighty years old. Meanwhile, according to many of their expressions, the physical body exercise is often accompanied with the benefit of positive mood and mental freshness. During the field research, some self-reported information which was collected from two or three urban farming practitioners on some informal occasions (i.e. not at the semi-structured interviews) demonstrates that doing urban farming even helped these people recover from their depressions. “…I have no other hobbies except farming…I don’t like playing Majiang (a popular Chinese social game), don’t like doing sports…Growing my own vegetables is my way to do exercise…” (Cited from Tangdaye, M, 50+ y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…I have the problem of high blood pressure…Doing a little bit of farming is my way to exercise my body…and it is better than just lying in bed to watch boring TV programs…Farming work brings us both the benefits of exercising the body and increasing the income…” (Cited from Chendaye, M, 63 y/o, income urban farmer, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…Both my mental and physical conditions are better if I slightly do some laboring work of farming as exercise…” (Cited from the sister of Luoling, F, 65 y/o, retired physician, 2016, own translation) “…I do farming only for fun, for exercising my body…” (Cited from Xingwu, M, 66 y/o, chemical engineer background, 2016, own translation) “…Doing farming is more and more interesting for me and I also feel more and more energetic through doing farming, haha! I come to the farming plot during the early morning time, and it is a good time to do farming, which is also a good way to do exercise…Other old people take dancing or cycling as their ways of exercising, but I could come to take care of my vegetables...” (Cited from Mingjian, M, 67 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…Farming is a casual way to pass the time and exercise my body…Usually I would go up to the roof to seven to eight times a day, and four times in the morning time…I often spend time there to catch the worms, to do grass weeding, soil digging and crop planting, and always feel that the time flies very fast and I feel like I never have enough time to finish these tasks…My feeling is very good when looking at these shiny greens…Doing farming keeps both the physical and mental conditions very well…” (Cited from Qiming, F, 68 y/o, city background, urban farming practitioner in the NGO project, 2016, own translation) “…Just doing farming for exercise!...If I can harvest something from the work, it is nice, but if there is little or no harvest, it is still acceptable for me…because at least my body gets exercised…” (Cited from Xiedaye, M, 69 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…I do farming for fun. My grandson has grown up, no longer needs my caring, and I have no other hobbies to enjoy, so I choose to do farming…Meanwhile, my 181 body feels better and healthier when I am doing some minor exercise like farming…” (Cited from Pengpopo, F, 76 y/o, retired teacher, 2016, own translation) “…I will soon go to carry some water to irrigate my vegetables…I have gotten used to do farming, and it is become part of my life habit, if always sitting at the Teahouse (a place for old people to entertain) to play cards, my body would feel uncomfortable…” (Cited from Songdaye, M, 78 y/o, rural background, 2016, own translation) “…Farming is a better way of exercise for me than other ways. I go up to the roof to take care of my vegetables every morning around 6 p.m., a good time with fresher air…” (Cited from Hefang, F, 79 y/o, moving to city for family reason, 2016, own translation) A very commonly mentioned personal experience among both the elder and younger urban farming practitioners is that they can stay in their farming plots for hours without feeling tired or bored, and the time spent for the farming related casual tasks (e.g. tilling, sowing, weeding, watering, or neatening and clearing up the farming plot) can pass very quickly, easily and unconsciously without much effort or doing it in a hurry, and someone even said she likes to sing songs to her crop plants when she is working. Meanwhile many of them mentioned that doing farming is an occasion to allow them to be absent minded or to have a free wandering mind, and it is a whole process without the need of conscious attention or intentional concentration, and therefore also no feeling of stress. All this indicates that urban farming practice would offer the practitioners an occasion to slow down, to be in calm state, to stay with oneself, to keep the mind in a state of being in “present”— a moment to moment experience which elevates all the senses of small details into significance (Wilson, 1984; Brown and Ryan, 2003; Brown et al., 2007); In addition, the immersing of oneself in the present farming place and the intimate daily connectedness with the natural environment elicits the “individuals”’ experiential sense of oneness with the natural world, without differentiating, comparing or judging the human part of “me” and the natural part of “surroundings” (Mayer and Frantz, 2004, Kabat-Zinn, 2005). Such a brain-functioning state of being in the present and such cognitive-perceptional senses of human-nature oneness lead to the mental condition of a kind of eco-mindfulness, which is a positive association of nature connectedness and mindfulness (Brown and Ryan, 2003; Jacob et al, 2008; Howell et al, 2011). “…[Farming offers me the chance to observe and perceive the nuanced changes of seed growth.] I can immediate perceive the growth of the seed and its changes since the first day of planting, and in the second day, in the third day…If my observation is more careful, then I could notice more frequent changes of that seed…Just like staring at a piece of cloud in the sky…if I stare at it with my full awareness, I could notice all the details of its incessant changes. It is moving continuously, and never fixed. But if you just give it a random look, it might look like fixed. This is also the case for observing a piece of soil, like in that small farming garden I just showed you, I often liked to sit there in the dark and quiet evening time, I could hear the ‘zip-zip-zip-zip-zip’ sounds from underground, caused by the moving of earthworms…Yes! Earthworms and other insects, I could hear their movements…In my perception, I noticed the busy moving inside the soil. I saw the fluctuation of its surface. My expression is nothing exaggeratory, not at all! If you just calm down, you can also perceive it. In Buddhism practice, there is a concept called ‘All in Impermanence’, which is not a theory but a fact that the Impermanence is just happening at everywhere, at anytime, and it just depends on whether you perceive it or not. In my opinion, once a person build the real connection with the soil, he or she will be able to perceive the movements in the 182 soil. This is also the case when they build the real connection with earth, with a plant…Once we open the awareness, we can perceive such nuances and changes everywhere. This is also my understanding about the state of ‘awakening’. Once you establish the real connection with the natural environment in such nuanced ways, you start to perceive the changes, the Impermanence, once you are able to perceive the Impermanence, you become awakened, enlightened…When I was staying in the farming environment, these perceptions occurred naturally straightforward…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) This above quotation is vivid empirical evidence from Helei to verify the association between the practice of urban farming and the achieving of eco-mindfulness. If exploring one step further, the association between the mindful nature connectedness (i.e. eco-minduflness) and the self-regulated functioning will also be discovered, and can again be verified by the empirical individual urban farming cases at Chengdu. Eco-mindfulness, or the mindful nature connectedness, is believed to foster the meeting of individual’s important and intrinsic needs like autonomy, competence, self-acceptance, self-esteem, self-admiration and relatedness, which are central to form self-determination and to enhance self-regulation, as the two self-function to regulate or manage the individual to be the person he or she likes to be and wants to be (Brown and Ryan, 2003; Deci and Ryan, 2000; Howell et al, 2011). Especially, for some of the younger age urban farming practitioners, although they intentionally applied urban farming as the method of personal practice to boost their own emotional enjoyment, mental vitality and the overall subjective well-being, according to their self-reported individual benefits of affiliating with nature, they have actually regulated themselves to gain the unexpected achievements of autonomy, self agency (Brown and Ryan, 2003; Nisbet et al., 2011) and comprehensive self-growth. However, if they could have learned earlier the knowledge of the interrelations between nature connectedness, mindfulness and self-regulation, then maybe they would not need to be surprised to know that the apparently simple and regular farming activities like touching soil, tending plants and neatening the farming plot, etc., can actually provide them with plenty of opportunities to immerse in and interact with the natural or semi-natural environment. Such intimate nature connectedness is in fact the precondition and even the guarantee for personal development (Kasser and Ryan, 1996; Mayer and Frantz, 2004) and self-growth, which include finding the “true self” and the purpose and meaning of “real life” (Jackson, 2009; Howell et al., 2011; Armstrong, 2012) “…For me, as an individual, the first and biggest achievement caused by farming practice is that now I understand myself much better. Second, my way of thinking and perceiving the world has been changed. Third, my lifestyle has been changed. Farming teaches me in-depth life experience [through slow and soft process], and it inspires me with many life and living wisdom, and these inspiration and wisdom bring me real life and living changes. Why through farming? Because farming is the best way to make a connection with the soil or earth. Through farming, I have the chance to perceive the way the whole life system works, and the way the natural system works…In the past, I often heard people said ‘身土不二79’, but I did not quite understand why ‘body and land are not two’?…But now, when I am pregnant with my second child, I can understand why “body and land are not two”, because body and land are actually ‘one’, the same! Especially as a woman, I can now perceive it personally and the pregnant women have the most right to claim

79 身土不二, is a term and concept from Buddhism, can be translated literately as “body and land are not two”. It means that body and land ( i.e. soil, earth) cannot separate from each other. In Buddhism’s interpretation, “body (身)” represents as the result of behavior, “land (土)” represents as the environment the “body” stays with. Body and land together could be understood as Karma. However, in the quotation, Wangwei interpreted it as a bit different from its original religious meaning in Buddhism, but also a smart and wise understanding, I would say. 183 ‘身土不二’! Why? See, the healthy soil can nurture many lives out of it, right? Starting from the lives inside the soil, like earthworm, sorts of bugs and insects; then a bit above, soil nurtures the lives of plants, from seeds to flowers and fruits; and then soil provides food for human lives, right? This is also what happening in a woman’s body, we also need a healthy inner womb system to nurture the development of a baby’s life. Isn’t it? Amazing, right?... Womb’s nurturing of life and soil’s nurturing of life are the same! Exactly the same! Both are mother bodies. Human mother and mother Earth! This new enlightenment only happened in my second time of pregnancy, after I started doing farming. The natural mother functions in the same way as human mother functions. So if I learned how to tend the soil condition, I also learned how to take care of my body condition. In the other way around, if I know how to restore a polluted soil system, then I should also use the same way, the same philosophy, to rehabilitate my body if it is ill…” (Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) After tentatively reasoning and verifying the series of associative relationships among “urban farming practice Æ mindful nature connectedness Æ self-regulation Æ true self, real life”, in the following paragraphs I will go further and deeper. With the help of self-discrepancy theory and self-completion theory, I will attempt to smooth the interrelations of “self Æ social influence (comparison, expectation, competition) Æ discrepant self Æ incomplete self Æ material goods Æ impulsive shopping Å consumer culture or consumerism or mass consumption Å innovation, novelty, marketing Å mass production, economic growth, capitalist accumulation”, and also take it as a way to recall many of the key concepts that have been earlier referred to. Finally, as a whole, I will try to close up the theoretical and empirical chains of evidences, which have been elaborated in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and Chapter 5, and to justify both theoretically and empirically that urban farming has many roles to play in response to the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift problems, especially in the individual rift dimensions. My attempt starts from the psychological definition of the term “self”, which could be narrowly understood with two layers of notions: the actual self, who the people subjectively perceive themselves to be; and the ideal self, who the people would like to regulate themselves to be (Armstrong, 2012). The ideal self is an awareness developing when people locate themselves in a satisfactory social position in comparison with other people, or constructed from the expectations created by others (Armstrong, 2012). Once there is the difference between social positions and the comparison of these positions, there emerges the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self (Higgins, 1987; Higgins et al., 1990; Higgins et al., 1992), a perception that could be alternatively labeled as the feeling of self-incompletion (Wicklund and Goolwitzer, 1982). As socialized human-beings, the perception of self-incompletion normally exists to a certain degree, because as socially differentiated individuals, the ideal self would be easily generated through the comparisons with others or the expectations from others (Zinkhan and Hong, 1991; Kilbourne, 1999; Armstrong, 2012), with a deeper mechanism driven by anxiety and fears about seeking to become favorably situated in society (Jackson, 2009). Individuals often draw on internal and external resources to reduce the discomfort of self-discrepancy, and all the material, emotional and spiritual approaches have been used to achieve self-completion. However, because the material approach is more visible, tangible and convenient than the others, it has been selected more often by people as the solution to lowering their discomfort of discrepancy (Armstrong, 2012). With the increasing material development in human communities, material goods and gifts gradually carry richer symbolic meanings and are more widely applied by people as the language to communicate with each other for avoiding shame, expressing affection, achieving status, identity, social affiliation, and even defining the

184 dreams of the good life. Especially in the industrial society of mass production, material goods become much easily available and more vital for people to express their concerns of self-identity, family, friendship, community cohesion (Belk, 1988; Armstrong and Jackson, 2008; Jackson, 2009; Armstrong, 2012) However, unfortunately, when the human society arrives at its current stage, as in the early discussion of Social Metabolism 3.0, the material approach has been deliberately selected and systematically applied as the dominant strategy to try to maintain the survival of capitalism when faced with market saturation and growth stagnation, and to try to propel an endless development of the capitalist economy. In consequence, our human society finally becomes a consumer society, in which material hedonism, emulation of novelty, and status competition are deliberately encouraged and indulged. In the consumer society, each individual is labeled with the identity of consumer, and the individuals’ self-discrepancy and self-incompletion are intentionally amplified and exaggerated by the tricks of industrial innovation and product novelty with the help of advertisements, because the advertisements keep telling people that if they acquire the promoted products, they will become more complete and desirable (Kilbourne, 1999; Jackson, 2009; Armstrong, 2012). Specifically, industry applies innovative technologies to produce novel goods or fashions, which are launched at premium prices and accessible at first only to a small group of rich people, who are attracted to buy the inherently expensive novelty for showing their social distinction, and then, after distinction takes place, other people’s anxiety of not-belonging or the fear of lagging behind triggers the need of emulation, social comparison and status competition. Finally, all these self-definition related discomforts (i.e. anxiety and fear) and desires (i.e. emulation, comparison, competition) help to expand the mass demand for the novel goods, and cause the mass production of the once luxury good accessible to the majority (Jackson, 2009). As the result, the society is designed to be full of consumerism-oriented thinking behavior, ideology; material goods are used to provide the individuals with the illusive sense that the incomplete self can be completed with a material-defined self, and material goods almost become the only resource at the disposal of individuals to lower their psychological discomfort of discrepancy, or in other words, to “compensate for perceived inadequacies in their concepts of self” (Dittmar, 1992). The symbolic meanings of material goods have been so deeply implicated in the psychological, social and even religious functions, and the meanings of shopping not only work as retail therapy, but also have been appropriated to explore deep existential questions about who we are and what the purposes of our lives are. Material goods have even been substituted for religious consolation and developed into their own form of religion as “fetishism” (Jackson, 2009). This is especially true in a secular society like China, where people have been restrained in their choice of beliefs, and money worship and fetishism have been encouraged to extreme degree by its system of national capitalism and mercantilism. When institutions are built around the aim to pursue consumerism in the outside world, then the individuals are at the mercy of material desire in their inner world. When there is nothing else to believe and hope externally and only “discrepancy”, “incompletion” and “inadequacy” could be perceived internally, material possessions become one of the few choices for the individuals to grasp some ephemeral senses of completion, confidence, trust (in money), enough (in material), control and mastery. However, the reliance on material goods only works well on the surface, but finally brings people to a spiritual and moral bankruptcy (Jackson, 2009). This is because material goods leave open the desire for more and stimulate people’s appetite for more 185 goods, but fail to provide them a genuine access to self-completion. On the contrary, the material-defined self actually leaves the individuals with the internal condition of “empty self” (Kamptner, 1991; Jackson, 2009). An empty self is the inner state of missing the “true self”, losing the purpose and meaning of “real life”, forgetting the “basic life contents”, and giving up the control and mastery of oneself. An empty self never knows how much is enough, and its inner emptiness leads to the insatiable desire for more material goods which will, however, never be enough to fill up the empty self. As a matter of fact, the concept of empty self offers a more profound psychological perspective to explain the earlier discussed issues like: why there is the impulsive behavior of over-consumption, how the vicious cycle of the treadmill living pattern is fuelled, and how the restless mass production is perfectly complemented by the restless mass consumption. After the above articulation, some critical questions arise up sequentially: If both the inner psychological conditions (e.g. self-discrepancy, incomplete self, empty self) and the outer capitalist institutions (e.g. novelty designing, innovation production, advertisement) cooperate perfectly with each other to trap people into staying in the temptation and belief of material hedonism, can we find a way to break up the self-reinforcing cycle? Are we hopelessly too gullible, too lazy or too weak to resist the power of manipulative illusion of advertisement, to immunize ourselves from the invisible and diffuse influence of celebrity culture, and to break up with the ideology of consumerism which has been deeply implicated in the fabric of our lives? Can’t we have the way to bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living and fill up the empty self with genuine completion? Some of the Chengdu urban farming practitioners would like to say that urban farming practice is exactly their personal response to escape from these internal and external traps with the maintaining of the current capitalism-, commercialism- and consumerism-dominated social paradigm. Because through farming practice they would experience a high level of nature-connected mindfulness. Mindfulness helps the individuals to stay in the present, in human-nature oneness, without judgment, and is also believed to have significant association with subjective well-being including the traits like self-acceptance, self-esteem, positive relations with others, personal growth, purpose in life, intrinsic goals of living, environmental mastery, autonomy (Keyes, 2005; Jackson, 2009; Howell, 2011; Armstrong, 2012). That is, mindfulness can “play a more subtle role in raising awareness around engagement in consumer culture, like exposure to advertisement” and mindfulness can “bring a deep sense of fulfillment, countering feelings of emptiness and the futile attempts to fill that through consumption” (Rosenberg, 2004). In these urban farming practitioners’ own words, urban farming practices facilitate them to find out who they are and what they truly want, and guide them to live a simpler but more meaningful and more sustainable life. The following are some of their direct quotations, including some that were also used in the earlier discussion about urban farming’s role to help individuals to jump out of the cycle of the treadmill living pattern. “…The recent city life offers us with too many options and contents, which disable us to stay with ourselves, because these over-affluent contents offer us many ways to avoid to face our true self…[But] to select the simple and slow lifestyle through farming is completely opposite to the development trend of our society who is accelerated to be industrialized...You can be quickly marginalized in the social sequence, and all the efforts I tried and all the achievements I gained in the past become meaningless…And this brings you the fear and the anxiety of being lagged behind…I think everyone who once experienced in the modern world civilization could understand such fear and anxiety…The scare about the uncertainty of the

186 personal future of being so different from the mainstream, these feelings do rise up… [However, the two years of farming force me] to stay alone in the field...I got no place to escape [anymore] and must learn to stay with myself…and to barely face my fears, worries and anxieties, to see them rising up right in front of me…BUT, if I learn to face them bravely, these negative feelings can slowly fade away…” (Cited from Helei, M, 37 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…Farming helps me to find the answer about ‘what is the life I want to have’…and most precisely to say, farming is the critical medium and approach for me to understand the real life facts, very important approach…In the farming process I learned to realize many life realities…Reality means that my former life experience was illusion…means that the real life is about to know: Where does food come from? What are the essential relations among man, food and land? What is the connection between me and the environment?...And farming practice offers me the chance to find out the answers of these questions…”(Cited from Wangwei, F, 36 y/o, 2016-2017, own translation) “…At the time when I felt life was meaningless for me, I encountered urban farming and started to do farming, which restores my confidence and creativity in the effort to explore my relation with my real life…and in this process I find all the interesting aspects of life, a life full of the ‘basic life contents’…” (Ibid) “…Many people don’t know their ‘basic life contents’, or they assume something belongs to their basic needs…They think they must have car, must have house, must have villa, must have lots of money, and they think that is the life they want… I would say ‘basic life contents’ should be able to take care of people’s body and mental balance, when I own something that brings me burden, then this must be something I want but not need…” (Ibid) I think urban farming can introduce many very interesting forms of city living, and when your living becomes interesting, many life problems could be solved in creative ways…and this is the biggest meaning of urban farming…People always like to live in a life state which can be both nourishing and interesting, and dislike to live in the life situations in which you have to tackle hard human-to-human relationship, to please more higher position and more powerful person, to follow the others without personal opinions, or to be controlled in limited life states…and these are the inherent needs and feelings of human beings…” (Ibid) “…[Overall, my urban farming practice helps me to win better connections with nature, with social, and with myself]. [First,] urban farming could help us to perceive our relationship with nature, let us recognize that every piece of stuff we use and every detail in life have something to do with the environment, and to realize that we have the ‘withering together and flourishing together’ relationship with nature, like the so-called conception of ‘life community’…[Second,] once we have such understanding of the human-nature relation, we have better understanding of our relationship with the society…and then, when we are facing our job option, life option and value option,…we have the ability to make right choice…On the contrary, if we lose the ability to make the right choice of our lifestyle or if we have no awareness to make a responsible choice, this would put our society in danger...in the endless vicious cycle of environmental degradation, and we human will also lose the basis of living, ‘cause we are not aliens, [we can only survive with earth mother]…Only taking the environmentally friendly lifestyle, the life community can have sustainable development…[Third,] for each individual, [farming practice offers the channel for us] to explore our own lives and to trigger our interest and desire to learn the essence of our life about where we come from, where we move forward to, what matters for us…I think urban farming is really suitable for everyone to practice, to explore our life…and to finally find the comfortable living of body-mind balance…” (Ibid)

187 Chapter 6 Findings of Freiburg (Germany) Research

Die Beschäftigung mit Erde und Pflanzen kann der Seele eine ähnliche Entlastung und Ruhe geben wie die Meditation. — Hermann Hesse, Schriftsteller und Dichter

6.1 Research Site – Freiburg City in the German Context Germany’s industrialization and urbanization process got underway in the early 19th century, and accelerated during the period between 1871 and 191080. As early as in the 1890s, the German population working in the agricultural sector had decreased to less than 40%; in 1970, the percentage was about 9%; by 2004 it had dropped to 2.3% (Geißler, 2006). The early beginning of industrialization and urbanization also led German people to experience the life consequences of these great social changes at a relatively early time, and it also led people to take early action in response to these influences. For example, in the beginning in the 19th century, because of industrialization, urbanization and migration, numerous people lived in extraordinarily bad conditions; in response, some German municipalities started to give the city poor a piece of land for vegetable production, as an eradicative measure to eradicate city poverty and reduce the likelihood of riots (Drescher, 2001). As the development of industrialization and urbanization proceeded, another life consequence started to emerge among the city residents, especially among the children, that the city streets became more and more busy with traffic, and children were losing their free and safe playground in the street. In order to create possibilities for city children to get them away from the streets, bring them into the fresh air and give them some useful occupation and recreation, in 1865, doctor Schreber and schoolmaster Hauschild in Leipzig initiated the urban gardening idea, which has turned out to be the beginning of the German allotment movement lasting till today (Drescher, 2001). These urban garden allotment areas were known as Schrebergarten.

80 http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1738. Source: German History in Documents and Images (GHDI), information about “Population Distribution by Size of Locality: German Reich, Prussian Provinces, and Federal States (1871-1910) ”. Last Retrieved: April 24, 2019 188 After WWII, people in Germany, mainly in the West Germany, experienced a period of high speed of industrial and economic development, but in the 1970s and 1980s, they were also undergoing a series of ecological and nuclear crises; in this context, German people’s reaction to these crises turned into a nationwide environmental movement, which included the Schrebergarten participants. They transferred the recreational Schrebergarten into edible plots, taking this effort as their individual solution to cope with the predicted future energy and food crises. From that time on, as one of the early forms of urban farming, the Schrebergarten has been playing multiple roles to support the city residents in dealing with their city life hassles. The long term development of industrialization and urbanization has led people in Germany to have an earlier awakening and understanding toward both the advantages and disadvantages of life in such an commercialized and industrialized capitalist81 living system, and their profound perception and reflection about the problems of this system has also led them to respond and take actions to deal with these problems, which could be summarized as a sort of unsustainable living pattern or lifestyle. In this background, the idea of urban farming is integrated as part of the approaches and options to achieve sustainable living; meanwhile, the Schrebergarten is recognized and accepted by the German city residents as a sustainable practice to “achieve the ecological and societal goals like local climate mitigation, water regulation and provision of biodiversity as well as recreation, health and social cohesion in cities” (Bell et al., 2016; Breuste and Artmann, 2014; Genter et al., 2015; Haase et al., 2014a). In these contexts, the city of Freiburg, my research site in Germany (Figure 28), became well-known for its progressive environmental performances, and built its ecological reputation of “Green City”. However, Freiburg did not achieve its environmental reputation automatically; instead, it was the outcome of a wide range of deliberative cooperation among the governmental, corporate, civil, and research sectors, especially with the enthusiastic participation and active engagement of its local citizens with high environmental awareness (Frey, 2013).

Figure 28. Freiburg’s Location in the state of Baden-Württemberg and in Germany82

81 The post-war economic paradigm in Germany was “social market economy (Soziale Marktwirtschaft)”, but this paradigm was gradually turned into the capitalist neoliberal paradigm later on in the 1980s and 1990s. 82 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.html Last Retrieved: April 30, 2019 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_FR_%28town%29.svg/ 437px-Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_FR_%28town%29.svg.png Last Retrieved: April 30, 2019 189 Freiburg is located in the Southwestern corner of Baden-Württemberg, at the foothills of the Black Forest, with about 227, 59083 inhabitants. The Freiburgers’ cohesive concern over environmental issues goes back to the middle of the 1970s, when people joined the anti-nuclear movement to oppose the building of the nuclear power station Whyl; and when people joined the public discussion and reflection to face the Waldsterben (dying forest) problem. Afterwards, for the purpose of advocating efficient energy policy and for the sake of more environmentally friendly living, Freiburgers have been trying all the “efficiency, consistency, or sufficiency”84 approaches to achieve the goals of sustainable society. Because of the democratic system in Germany, people concerned about environmental issues have the freedom to express, to take action, and to associate themselves together according to their specific concerns or interests. Meanwhile, they also have the right to organize their political power, such as the local Green Party, as their political representative to cope with the issues matter for them. As a result, numerous citizens at Freiburg are encouraged and mobilized from its social milieu to take immediate action, to engage in all kinds of environmental activities and to practice what they believe would be good or right for achieving sustainable goals. In such an environmental movements-related context, many people in Freiburg are prone to use food- or farming-oriented approaches and practices as their response to environmental problems or issues of unsustainability. For example, for a certain period of time in the 1970s and 1980s, some groups of young people were advocating a kind of self-sufficient life for going back to the countryside, setting up eco-villages and living together, and took it as the way to solve the problems of limited natural resources and energy; at the similar period of time, for the Schrebergarten85 users in Freiburg, it became more popular for them to change their aesthetic and recreational purpose gardens into edible vegetable gardens. Gradually, the edible garden tendency became even more popular, so that many people living in Freiburg without a garden would try to put their name on the waiting list86 and wait for years87 before they could finally get a patch of allotment garden. In recent years, with the worldwide popularity of the urban farming movement, the community garden88 has become a new form of urban farming; around the years of 2012 and 2013, it was introduced to Freiburg with the concept and action of the Transitional Town Movement89. The concept of community garden opens

83 Source: Statistisches Bundesamt, 2016. According to the criteria of German city size, urban areas of more than 100, 000 inhabitants would be categorized as large cities source: Stadtentwicklung in Deutschland, 2004. 84 “Efficiency” is about increasing resource productivity with the goal of decoupling resource use and growth, no need for significant changes in people’s mentality and everyday life style, but just more application of technologies for efficient production; “consistency” is a more difficult and innovative strategy than efficiency, and it focuses on production methods that are in line with natural processes with the aim of closing loops, applying the cradle-to-cradle concept; “sufficiency” is about the redefinition of what is needed, aiming at an absolute cap of consumption. “Efficiency” and “consistency” are more or less technological strategies that primarily require innovative changes in the production structure, but “sufficiency” is more of a philosophical strategy, which requires that people change the way they live from their inner reflection. 85 As existing in most Germany cities, Freiburg also has many Schrebergarten communities distributing across its urban territory. Some of them are organized by Vereine (association), while some others are freely organized. 86 The average percentage of those on garden waiting lists in Germany are at 10% of the existing gardens. This means, for Freiburg, there are about 400 people on the waiting list; for Berlin there are about 6000 people on the waiting list. Source: Personal info from Axel Drescher, scholar and expert on urban agriculture, Freiburg. 87 In my interviews, one lady said she waited three years before she got the garden; a couple said they had the idea to apply for a Schrebergarten for about 20 years and waited about six to eight years to get the garden; another couple said they were about ten years on the waiting list before they got the garden. 88 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1nHmcUKO0H20C8R7_dsAcb0GLJK8&ll=48.00299189999999%2 C7.844836399999963&z=13 89 Transitional Town Movement started in the UK in 2006; it refers to the grassroots community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency to reduce the potential effects of peak oil, climate destruction and economic instability. 190 up the opportunity for a wider range of city population to join the food-growing movement, and farming is no longer a cliché belonging to only farmers, grandmothers, or Schrebergarten users. Instead, it has become an activity for “everyone”, for whoever has the interest to try to learn farming and to try to grow their own food. In Germany, as in many parts of the world, it is now a shift in society that the middle class and the young people start viewing farming as a very modern and fashionable living pattern, and doing it in more traditional, ecological and natural ways (Primdahl and Kristensen, 2011; Opitz et al., 2016), while the professional farmers keep up industrialized food production in the form of monoculture. Based on this background information about Freiburg, the content of this chapter is going to explore more details about the urban farming cases at Freiburg; the final research findings will display the individual people’s reasons and motivation for, and interest in, practicing urban farming. However, since the cases at Freiburg are studied only as a reference for the purpose of comparison with the Chengdu cases, the data collected from Freiburg research will not be analyzed as carefully or as comprehensively as the Chengdu data. Therefore, only the key messages from the Freiburg urban farming practitioners will be captured and some of the most prominent features of the urban farming practice in the German social-ecological context will be recorded and discussed. The “most prominent features” here means those that are practiced widely among the German urban gardening practitioners but could not be found obviously in China or are only sporadically practiced by a few Chinese urban farming practitioners. 6.2 Urban Gardening Practitioners’ Response to Rift Issues at Freiburg In the Freiburg research, people more often use the term “gardening” or “edible gardening” to describe their urban farming practice, therefore, in the discussion of Freiburg cases, the term “urban gardening” will replace the term “urban farming” to describe, basically, the similar phenomenon that “people grow food and edible plants in city space”. The following data analysis and discussions of findings for the urban gardening cases at Freiburg will also be conducted under the general framework of metabolic rift theory in a deductive way; the four dimension analysis using the “ecological”, “cultural”, “social” and “individual” aspects of urban gardening functions will be processed one by one. However, because the Freiburg urban gardening practitioners have more holistic and integrated reasons and motivations to practice urban gardening, it will be a bit challenging to analyze them in a categorized structure such as the metabolic rift framework could provide; the attempt will still be conducted, including integration of the new information emerging from the field data into the metabolic rift analytical framework, and exhibiting the emerged information as inductively analyzed findings. 6.2.1 Urban Gardening Practice for Ecological Concerns Even though many of the urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg emphasized their multiple motivations and reasons to practice urban gardening, a strong concern for the ecological aspect of issues is a commonly and widely shared value among ALL the people interviewed at the Freiburg research. Such strong ecological concern would be conspicuously noticed in two layers: 1) in their choice and application of ecologically oriented farming methods; 2) in other ecologically conscious concerns of overall garden design and practice.

191 1) Ecological Farming Practices in Urban Gardening According to the information collected in my Freiburg research, three types of urban farming methods or elements – Permaculture, Biodynamic Agriculture, No-Chemical Farming – could be noticed among the urban gardening practitioners (Table X). Permaculture (PerC) and some of its technical elements, such as mulching, raised plot, energy plot, rain water collection and recycling, etc., are mostly practiced by the community garden members or group gardening people. In my research, there are about five different groups of community garden people choosing to apply Permaculture or its technical elements in their garden systems. They chose to apply PerC, not only because PerC uses different ecological techniques to tend the garden and grow food, but also because the philosophy of Permaculture emphasizes emulation of the natural approaches existing in the ecosystem to grow food, to involve people’s creative interaction with nature, and to design edible ecological conditions in the garden. For example, one member of the Gemeinschaftsgarten Obergrün90 mentioned that in 2016, although the summer was so dry and there was no water in the branch stream of Dreisam River for about six to eight weeks, the soil in their garden could keep the moisture because of the PerC method of mulching. Waldgarten Wiehre people, for another example, use tree plants to do PerC and design different layers of trees, bushes and various herb plants, wishing to “work with nature through PerC gardening” and then to “replicate the flourishing natural process” in their Waldgarten (Cited from Kat, F, 40+ y/o, 2017, own translation). For some other community garden members, who advocate a sustainable lifestyle transition from massive energy and resource consumption to smart and ecological use of nature resources and energies, Permaculture provides them the practical chance to implement their wishes for sustainable living. More precisely, Permaculture is a holistic ecological living practice, and food growing is just one of the basic goals to achieve the systematic ecological design for living (Mollison, 1981; Morrow, 1994; Holmgren, 2002; Morehead and Jiang, 2011). The WandelGarten Vauban people apply the “earthworm farm” composting in their garden as the effective way to recycle organic waste; they apply simple techniques like raised-bed, sun-catch-up semi-circle beds introduced by Holzer (Holzer, 2011), and mulching as the smart ways to capture solar energy or to preserve natural energy; and they use simple and traditional tools like scythes to avoid using any electric energy in the gardening process. They also join sustainable living networks, like the Transitional Town Movement, to explore any possible ways for preparing for the predictable or perceived future ecological, economic, energy and food crisis. People in another community garden, the Klimagarten Weingarten, practice the Permaculture principles of smart and ecological resource usage to counter the CO2 emission and climate changes. For Biodynamic Agriculture (BioA), several urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg mentioned that they apply some of the farming elements belonging to the method of BioA, such as applying the horn powder from cow or deer into the soil to increase the biological dynamics of the soil. Freiburg is a region that especially favors such an agricultural method, and the BioA certified foods are very popular in this region. The knowledge system behind the BioA methods is called Anthroposophy; one of the world Anthroposophy study and research centers is located at Basel near Freiburg. Anthroposophy is understood by its researchers and practitioners as a “spiritual science”,

90 https://www.bauernhoftiere-fuer-stadtkinder.de/stadtteilgarten-obergr%C3%BCn/ Source: Obergrün Website. Last Retrieved: March 29, 2019 192 which has an independent and complete system of understanding for humans to perceive and interact with nature, with an emphasis on the spiritual aspect of connection. Biodynamic Agriculture, as the agricultural branch of Anthroposophic practice 91 , acknowledges the consciousness conditions of farming land and soil, emphasizes the spiritual connection and interaction between human and farming practice, and believes in the spiritual healing power existing in herbs and plants. However, given the advanced spiritual philosophy and the sophisticated farming techniques, BioA methods are not yet widely applied among the urban gardening practitioners in my research. In addition to PerC and BioA, urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg are practicing mostly what I call No-Chemical Farming (No-CF), which means that people have no specific preference or knowledge about farming practice, but try with all kinds of no-chemical farming methods to grow their food, as a way in contrast to the industrialized agricultural production which applies all kinds of chemicals and pursues the maximal quantity of food production. No-CF approaches, in this Freiburg context, could be understood as a general organic farming practice combination, which involves each individual urban gardening practitioner’s creativity and improvisation to develop their own farming practices, which include their own understanding about what is good or right to enhance the ecological conditions of their garden. People in Freiburg widely practice composting and organic waste recycling, and many of them mentioned the use of excrement from horses or other livestock and believe these are organic and good for their gardening practice. Also, all my Freiburg interviewees expressed their awareness of growing only seasonal vegetables, of planting a great variety of species, and of practicing the natural techniques of interplanting and rotation among different species. In addition, people in Freiburg have good awareness about the quality, diversity, and source of the seeds they could get. All of the urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg are very cautious about the genetically modified seeds and try to avoid them. Either they buy organic seeds from an organic or eco-shop such as Bio Keller, which many people mentioned, or they have strong awareness to do their own seeds preservation and collection, and ask for the seeds right back from commercial seeds suppliers. Some of them try seed breeding experiments with either old or new varieties in preparation for the coming climate crisis; some use old (heritage) seeds because they think old seeds are more resistant and tasty; some others try old seed varieties for agro-biodiversity reasons and to oppose monoculture. As one interviewee answered “…I support the conservation of old seeds…Because it is good for the diversity of seeds…We don’t want to have just industrial agriculture…(Cited from Hennes, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017)”. 2) Other Ecological Concerns in Urban Gardening Every interviewed urban gardening practitioners in Freiburg expressed that their ecological concern is one of their key motivations to do gardening in the city area. All of their gardening practices are based on their knowledge and awareness of the urban and general ecosystem conditions and the overall environmental issues. Their concerns

91 Anthroposophy, as a spiritual science, was founded by Austrian philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner in the beginning of the 20th century. The thoughts and theories of Anthroposophy are mostly implemented in four fields of practice: 1) in agriculture, it is practiced as the Biodynamic Agriculture, which emphasizes that food growing is a process involving energy exchange with natural and universal elements and spirits; 2) in education, it is practiced as the famous Waldorf Education, which understands a child’s growth as a holistic development that should be nurtured in the balance of physical, mental, and spiritual developments; 3) in medicine practice, Anthroposophic medicine adds the spiritual power in human healing systems, and 4) in the field of Arts, the thoughts, philosophy, and aesthetics of Anthroposophy have been implemented into all sorts of Arts, including a very Anthroposophic style of architecture, and the very Anthroposophic type of dance performance arts known as the Eurythmy. 193 might be expressed or manifested in various ways, but at the core of their information, there is the message about their willingness to explore and experiment to achieve multifold ecological and environmental benefits through their urban gardening practice. Ecological Garden Designing or Planning In general, the urban gardening practitioners in my research at Freiburg all have good sense and awareness about the necessity for a certain degree of ecological practice in their mini urban garden ecosystems. Obviously, the community gardens, which have been newly established in the last three to five years with strong ecological awareness and concepts, they have more concern for the ecological functions of their urban farming practices. These gardeners also have more chance to implement their ecological designs in their garden plots and to provide the city-inhabited wild animals some habitats; the specific small efforts like setting up small water ponds, branch piles, old stumps, bird nests, insect hotels, and beehives in the garden plots are very popular ecological garden designs. For example, many of the interviewed urban gardening practitioners would like to pile up the firewood or branches in their gardens as the shelter for hedgehogs, and sometimes a whole family of hedgehogs would be found at the garden area. Also, many community gardeners have the awareness to cultivate the soil quality in their field plots as the way to provide the earthworms and other soil bugs and insects with suitable underground habitats. Sometimes, the Freiburg municipal government would donate the community gardens some bird houses which could be hung in the gardens. For most private gardeners at the Schrebergarten, they are more often motivated to do their urban gardening practices for casual and private time nature engagement, so their garden designs give more interest to the aesthetic perspective of garden function. However, the emphasis on the aesthetic aspect of garden designing does not mean neglect of the ecological services that the beautiful gardens would contribute. Instead, a beautiful garden with varieties of flowers offers the ecological regulating service of providing pollen for the pollinators like bees. “…My wife and me, we don’t only want potatoes or vegetables, we want also flowers. Only about 20-30% are vegetables and the rest are trees, flowers and grass...” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017 ) “…[I heard] the 20-30 years old young people are arguing that everywhere should be planted with edible plants and they are kind of against the idea about flower planting…But, [in my opinion]food has already gotten wasted too much, so growing their own food is not the prior or urgent...Basically, I think the combining of flowers with feeding yourself may be a well balanced solution…We do not feed ourselves just from food…We feed ourselves also from beautiful stuff like flowers…”(Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) Of course, what should be emphasized is that the difference of the ecological garden designing between the community garden and the Schrebergarten could not be divided that absolutely. There are many shared concerns which the urban gardening practitioners would like to take account of when doing their garden planning, and the widely extended phenomenon of the disappearing of bees and other pollinators is one of the concerns that was frequently referred to among the interviewees, which gradually emerged throughout the interviews.

194 “…I think the combining of flowers with feeding yourself may be a well balance solution…We do not feed ourselves just from food…We feed ourselves also from beautiful stuff like flowers…Also, the flowers are for the bees, we have to consider the bees. We have to also consider the insects…all of them! They feed from all the things in the flowers…the pollen stuff. I actually planted Cornflowers extra for the bees…and the Calendula flowers also for the bees…We have too less bees here…It is my observation and that’s well-known too…Even though they are going to kick me out of this garden in two years…I want to do what I can…We are not allowed to have bees at this property…This is the Kleingarten rule here…The bees have something to do with the climatic change here…Last year, we just had hardly any blossom going out, because there was very strong hail, very big hail storms, with table tennis size of balls of hail. That just destroyed everything, right at the point of time when everything was blossoming. Last year and the year before, too. The year before I did not even have one berry… ” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…‘Urban gardening is’ also important for biodiversity and vice versa…Because there are interdependences: we need mineral and fertilizer…we need ecosystem as well…If we run out of bees, we have problems…so we need flowers in the garden…[Of course, it is also related to birds…]…Bees are more in the countryside and there has less bees in the city…In big city [where its center regions are far away from the countryside and not accessible for bees], it would be a problem for food growing without bees’ pollination…It is not a problem to grow food at Freiburg [because it is relatively a small city, so every corner of Freiburg is accessible for bees]…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…We plant some of the Durchwachsene Silphie92 at our garden to give bees the food…The farmers grow so much maize here – only grown for the use of bio gas and animal food – in the field in the countryside, but the bees can get no food from maize…So in every July and August, when it is the season to grow maize in the countryside, the bees would get no food to eat and have to search their food in the city area…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) “…Because of the chemicals thing and the others…the bees are dying… We need bees…There is a film talking about it, the bee’s issue…I also read about it…” (Cited from Uli, F, 55+ y/o, secretary and mother of two adult sons, shared Schrebergarten Wonnhalde, 2017) In addition to considering the habitat conditions for city wild animal species and to plan the flower planting for bees and other pollinators, many of the interviewed urban garden practitioners also like to increase the plant diversity of their gardens, so trees, shrubs, subshrubs and even climbers would all be considered. Meanwhile, many of the community gardens, such as Waldgarten Wiehre, WandelGarten Vauban, Freibohnengarten, Bambis Beet, Klimagarten Weingarten, and community garden group Wonnhalde93, like to design special planting plans to plant and preserve rare and local plant species as another effort to increase the urban biodiversity conditions.

92 Silphium Perfoliatum is a species originating from North America and introduced to Europe as potential energy plants. Some Schrebergarten people use it as the solution for bee food. Because the young plant of Silphium Perfoliatum is not very competitive with other local herbs and weeds, it is not easy for this type of plant to grow as aggressively as other invasive plant species in the local environment. 93 Schrebergarten Wonnhalde opens up their policy and allows groups come to apply for the Schrebergarten plots which were traditionally open only to family unites. Thus such people as friends can join to cultivate the land as a group. The “community garden group Wonnhalde” is such a group, running their community garden project in a Schrebregarten plot at Wonnhalde, Freiburg; they cultivate together on the same piece of land. 195 Sustainable Living or Self-Sufficiency Choice in German Context and Social Milieu Germany as a country has a fine reputation for its environmental and sustainable policy and performance. People living in such a social milieu can easily get the relevant information both from media and from their own social circles, and then build their environmental awareness and concerns. The German people’s awareness of environmental issues is not only spread widely but was also formed early. As early as in the 1970s and 1980s, the oil crisis and environmental crisis woke up many people to realize the environmental effects on each individual’s life and to force them to respond and take action. Many of German’s environmental awareness and concerns were formed during this period of time and its influence has lasted for generations. Among the interviewed urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg, some of them were direct participants in the early environmental movements, such as the Klimagarten initiator, Dieter, who once was engaged in founding the very first Green Party local groups in the northern part of Germany in the 1970s; some other young people mentioned that their parents joined those early environmental movements and strikes, and that their parents’ environmental awareness and action influenced the younger generations’ concerns and attentions to environmental issues. All my interviewees at Freiburg shared more or less their understanding and concerns over the environmental and sustainable issues with me, either their understanding of the reasons for the environmental and sustainability problems, or their personal reactions and responses to these problems. Their solutions range from the choice of sustainable living (e.g. organic farming, no plastic living, material reduction, reuse and recycling) to even some radical living practice of self-sufficiency. No matter which options they choose, food growing and urban gardening is always an important and irreplaceable component of their sustainable or self-sufficient living practice. In addition, members of the elderly generation, who experienced the extremely tough wartime life struggle for survival, also mention the war and post-war time experience as part of their reason to choose urban gardening practice today. “…We need to be more resilient…In the last few decades, life is convenient with enough work and enough food…But I was a refugee in the WWII…I was born in 1939 and as a boy and child I lived through hungry…My father died in the war (when I was 3 or 4) and my mother had to work for the Polish people…The farming idea began when I was five years old for survival need…As children, we had to find something to eat…so we built our own Beets…For six years after the war, I went through different refugee camps as a boy, till I was 12 or 13 years old…We were all children together, no body helping us…[So I can share, I can feel what those refugees feel today]…Driven by survival need, we even had to do potato collection in the field at the risk that the Russian soldiers would shoot us…The feeling of such experience went through my life…Personally, I know very deep in myself that agriculture is important for surviving…The farming experience always keeps with me…and now I come back to gardening and farming…[With my life experience, I think] it would be possible that wars might happen in the future…[One of our gardening project purposes is to] prepare the possible future crisis…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) “…We think in the future…all the oil, all the coal, all the fossil fuels will be depleted, either no longer exist, or become more expensive…[In that case,] we have to go back to the roots and have to find something with more natural roots…For your culture, about 200 or 300 years ago, there was no possibility to use technology or expensive machines…This is why our aim is to not use any 196 [electricity-based] technology in the garden…[This is also why we apply Permaculture which uses natural technologies, such as] collecting rain water in tanks…We have really decided that we don’t mow the grass with mower, but we scythe them…Even though taking more time, it is a technology doing with fun…For the future climate crisis, we have to be more resilient as a society…Our efforts in the garden are some small contributions…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) “…As a college student in 1972-1978, I studied at Freiburg. At that time when I saw people working in the Kleingarten, I thought they were stupid people…As young people at that time…we didn’t like Bourgeois and we were even against Bourgeois…At that time, the culture of Kleingarten was understood as bit related to the nationalist regime, which was believed in the thinking of Nazi, with the motto of ‘Blut und Boden94’…Most people working in the Kleingarten were from the lower class, as workers, village inhabitants, or poor people… Also, Nazi people were known as liking gardening idea…[somehow related as the idea of ‘Blut and Boden’ or ‘Vaterland’]…Thus, because it was regarded as a combination of both lower class and Nazi idea, so for young people at that time, they didn’t like the Kleingarten idea…However, suddenly, the idea got changed…I think it was directly because of the appearing of Green Party ideas in the 1980s…In addition, I think the attitude toward Kleingarten was also influenced and changed by three youth groups’ ideas in the 1960: ①One youth group had the idea to go to the countryside 95 and live together in communes…②Another youth group were thinking of the idea of changing the society and opposing capitalism…③The third group youth, known as the romantic youth group and I was joining, liked to go to the nature…I think these were the root ideas about why the Kleingarten idea became popular gradually…” (Cited from Schulte-Würth, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…The need of ours is crazy…You can see your country as an example. When I watched TV about 20 or 30 years ago, I liked to see the pictures from Peking, only having bikes, and that alike…I thought it was a wonderful world. But now, look at it…Yes, you can consider capitalism as one reason of these issues…I think the economic is a capitalist system…There are other reasons, but all difficult to solve…I think another reason is about the power of natural science and Technik…[I think because of science and technology] we are now more possible to get many things from Earth, and [because of science and technology] the environment for people today is more artificial, more digital…I think, perhaps, finally a crash would happen…[Because] I think the Technische world is so powerful that the young generations won’t stop its development — the development that would finally destroy the earth, perhaps!…Because there are too many people, too many needs, too much destroying…People often plan ‘I need a car, I need to travel from China to Germany each year’…I think it is very crazy...Sometimes I think the basic needs like food or so on are enough for our humans. But the most people just want more, more, more, more…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…I want to live with nature and don’t want to disturb it too much…I want the coming generations to have a good place to live...I don’t want to make so much waste and I don’t want to change the world too much when I am alive…We should

94 In the 1930th , this terms was once instrumentalized by the German Nazis regime in the “Schreber Movement”, through what was called as Gleichschaltung (elimination of all opposition). Such ideology took the German society about 70 years to overcome. 95 The most recent version of this “back to the land” movement is to combine the Eco-Village Movement, the Permaculture Initiative and the Transitional Town Movement together. The activities practicing the principle of “back to the land” are a response not only to urban alienation, pollution and loss of economic autonomy (neo-ruralism), but also to the proletarianization of the rural workforce and the environmental and public health threats posed by industrial monocultures. Source: Lecture on Climate Crisis and Democratic Prospect, by Frank Fischer, Freiburg, December 4th, 2017) 197 not change the world too much in bad ways but should preserve it for other people...” (Cited from Patrick, M, 40+ y/o, part-time teacher, Klimagarten Weingarten member, 2017) “…My father’s family has several farmers…In my mother’s family, my grandma had a garden and produced a lot of food…My parents also once had a big garden…[But then they moved to the countryside to do farming]…My parents have been practicing self-sufficient living for about 15-20 years…They started to practice it for sustainability reasons, even though at that time they called it as for earth system reasons…But at the core, the motivation of my parents was the same as today to pursue sustainability…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…People today are not connected anymore, while these self-sufficient living ideas and gardening ideas could be used to reconnect people…It is good for me to do this, because other lifestyles are stressful for its professional factors…The essence behind the professionally performance of our society is that the world has been operated in faster and faster speed…But, in fact, if you want to be happy as a human being, you don’t need to run so fast and faster…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) 6.2.2 Urban Gardening Practice for Cultural Needs In general, the farming or agricultural culture related needs are not that obvious among the German urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg. Questions such as “Are there any agriculture or farming related local knowledge or practices existing in your society?” or “Are there any agriculture related traditions, culture, festivals, customs or lifestyles existing in your society or in your daily life?” or “Are there any agriculture (or even nature) related thoughts, ideas, philosophy or literature you would know in your culture or history?” were asked to people at Freiburg, but the absolute majority of them could not think of any agriculture related tradition, and answered that there are few or none existing there in their society or in their daily life. They all expressed that their lives are all in modern living and have nothing to do with the agricultural or traditional lifestyle. Only after hard thinking or recalling, or after being reminded, some of the farming or gardening related customs, festivals, practices or relevant ideas could gradually rise up from the interviewees’ memories. The most frequently recalled agriculture tradition is the Bauernregel (peasant rule), which was about the farming related weather knowledge and was once used by German farmers to plan their agricultural activities. However, my interviewees at Freiburg emphasized that nowadays such folk knowledge is only regarded as a symbolic traditional thing, but not as a scientific guide for their farming or gardening activities. “…I learned this when I was child, that when the frogs climb up and when you find them on the tree…the weather will be good…When you find them going down, the weather would be rainy…My grandmother told me this but I don’t know whether it is proved…As I know, other children also learned something like this…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…It was said that when the weather in May is wet and cold, then it will be a good year for the garden…I got such information sometimes in the radio…or in the calendar…Such information is printed out on calendar for every month…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) Another frequently mentioned farming traditional knowledge or Bauernregel is called “Eisheilige”, which is a climatic phenomenon happening in Germany. Every year in May, there is a kind of cold weather situation in Germany. Farmers in the past were told that after the Eisheilige days, they could start planting plants, because before that time, 198 the weather might still be too cold for plants to grow during the night time. “…Every year in May there is cold climatic situation here in Germany…called Eisheilige. After that time, there is no temperature below zero any more…It still works today! Almost every year, this weather phenomenon would appear on time…So we follow the knowledge of Eisheilige…We don’t plant our salad before the days of the Eisheilige weather, but after those days, when the weather becomes more stable, we would then plant our salad…” (Cited from Susana and Thomas, a couple, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiators, 2017) “…That is farmer’s rule (the Eisheilige knowledge) for planting stuff…I found it is true! Throughout the years, I don’t put the tomato seeds into the ground before the Eisheilige, which is around the 20th of May…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…After those days (Eisheilige), you don’t have snow or ice anymore, or you won’t have temperature falling down anymore…The tomatoes don’t like cold weather, so we don’t plant tomato until the 20th of May. It is like the Russian roulette, ‘you don’t risk yourself for something you don’t need’…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017 ) In addition to Eisheilige, my interviewees at Freiburg also mentioned some Catholic festivals or days which are also the critical seasonal moments for agricultural activities. It seems that in Germany, for example in the Freiburg region, farming knowledge is closely practiced among the religious people and in religious events. In early years, monks and nuns in the church had the knowledge of gardening and knew many things about plants. In the religious areas, the farming activities were either organized by the church or closely integrated as part of the religious festivals or days. “…We know there is a kind of religious day called ‘Johannes der Täufer’ on 24, June…It is said that you have to wait till this day to cut the tree…Because after this day, there is no fluid in the tree, and then you can cut the tree…” (Cited from Thomas, M, 50+ y/o, owner of consultant company, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…[I know in our society] there is the kind of ‘Harvest and Thanks Festival96’ in the summer…People bring batches of herbs and flowers to the church…and make some ceremony with water…and all the children go outside and collect flower…It is a kind of religious festival…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) These are some of the well-known and frequently referenced traditional knowledge or customs, still existing and remembered in German society but not necessarily practiced among the urban gardening practitioners. Instead, what these urban gardeners, mainly the community garden members, really practice are the usage of traditional farming tools and the heritage crop seeds. The original reasons for people to apply these two farming traditions are related to their environmental concerns (e.g. about energy use or self-sufficiency reason) and ecological interests (e.g. about agro-biodiversity or rare species preservation), while the culture related needs were more secondary concerns when the decision was first made. However, in the process when they really start using the old tools and really start planting or harvesting the old seeds, the cultural aspects of value and interest gradually emerges; then these individual gardeners start to feel their personal connection with the culture and history involved in these farming related practices.

96 There was some language and communication problem during this interview. There is a festival called actually “Ernte-Dank-Fest”, which is not in summer but always in October. It is the German people’s “Thanksgiving Day”. 199 “…We use old, traditional tools. For example, we use scythes to cut grass. It is important because it is what the farmers used in the past. Not many people use it today. We use it, because it does not use electricity, does not use oil, but only needs the energy of man. If you do it with your hands properly, you don’t need much energy. It is a simple and traditional technology, when you get used to the technology, it is not so tiring…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) “…Every time I use the farming tools here, I have a picture of the old farmers using them…because the tools didn’t changed that much…specially for us, we do everything by hand…blad…some value there for these hands-on farming practice…the alternative would be some motorized tool which is just not cool…The simple tool is real cool for me, because it is quiet and has ecological advantages! I don’t feel the connect to the past until I start using the tool. When I use it, it feels like the connection with the memory when my grandfather was using it…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…To practice the old tools is COOL…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…It is important to use old seeds…Old seed are good and in diversity…For example, in the supermarket…you can buy only 5 kinds of tomatoes…which actually taste not good and can stay in the refrigerator for 2-3 months without rotting…But in fact, there are actually some hundred kinds of tomato species...Also, old seeds have been developed in thousand years of contribution and have been selected years after years…But now, Monsanto wants to make patents to the seeds…[and this means that] maybe in 20 years we have to pay for our seeds…Because they change the seeds…so that you can plant the broccoli from their seeds but you can’t harvest the seeds for next year use…(Cited from Calinda, F, community garden in Wonnhalde member, 2017) “…On one hand, the seed collection and reproduction by the farmer themselves is a tradition for thousand years…On the other hand. the commercial companies like Monsanto are trying to dominate the seeds producing process…It is good to collect own-seeds, the REAL seeds…Because they have been adjusted to the local environment and weather conditions…But there is a problem that we do not know much about how to collect them and reproduce them…Maybe my parents did it or my grandfather knew it…But we did not learn it…[So the recent gardening practice is a good chance for us to learn these old knowledge]…” (Cited from Martina, F, 25+ y/o, social worker, community garden in Wonnhalde member, 2017) Because the urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg could think of many farming or agriculture related traditions or ideas in Germany society, I enlarged the interview questions with regard to farming culture and tradition, extending the questions to any nature related literature and thoughts. However, my interviewees still felt there are not really many nature related works or thoughts in Germany. They had some brief impression about Goethe97, of whom they know that many of his works are about nature although they lack detailed information, or they have some brief idea of Rudolf Steiner98, who actually inherited many of the nature thoughts from Goethe. Steiner established the thoughts of Anthroposophy, which sees and understands nature from very special, creative and spiritual aspects (Hartmut). In addition, with my reminding, some of the urban gardening practitioners also shared their scattered knowledge with

97 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), was the famous German writer and was well-known for his novels and poetries, as well as his knowledge on botany and other subjects. Anthroposophy founder Steiner asserted that Goethe’s knowledge, such as Geothean botany, was what his Anthroposophy based on. 98 Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (1861-1925), was the founder of Anthroposophy, a spiritual science with roots in German idealist philosophy, theosophy, and Goethean science, etc. 200 respect to the Romantic Era in German history, an era during which many writers and poets were very dedicated to nature, referring to names such as Hölderlin99 and Eichendorff100. The Romantic Era was a time when people readjusted their understanding of the human and nature relationship, and emphasized building connections with nature through intuition, feeling, imagination, and other emotional elements. In fact, the Romantic Era overlapped with the period of industrial development in Germany, which was not a coincidence. Instead, these romantic and emotional attitudes towards nature were people’s intuitive responses and self-healing reactions at that time, when faced with the massive machinery production which was influenced by the pure belief in rationality. Industrial production always emphasizes rationality, which includes the elements of reason, intellect, natural science and reality; such strict demands for rational thinking have also been “inherited” in the more sophisticated industrial production in the modern time, and have even been further intensified and specified in the current info-tech era. With the incessant and intensified development of industrial mechanization (e.g. from working in a factory workshop to working in an office/lab room; from working with a lathe to working with a computer; from working at a fixed job place and time to working at home-time), people may experience more intensively the uneasy perception of rift or alienation; they may then need the romantic and natural works more as their spiritual balm. The German Romantic Era and its “nature writing” could even be understood as part of the history of the development of European nature literature, thoughts and philosophy, which could be traced back to the Dutch philosopher Spinoza101 as the early originator. The German naturalist philosopher Schelling102 was a highlight of the thoughts about nature in a transitional era of German society as it transformed from an initial industrial society to become a modern country. Two other German philosophers, Husserl 103 and Heidegger104, could be regarded as the modern

99 Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), was a German poet and philosopher, a key figure of German Romanticism, known as the “German of Germans” and the “poet of poets”. His famous line “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde (Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this Earth)” , through being cited by Heidegger, became many people’s guidance to an idealistic way of life. His emphasis on a poetical life was actually his suggestion to people living in a rationalized and mechanized industrial society. 100 Joseph Karl Benedikt Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857), was a glorified naturalist poet and a wonderful spring poet, known as one of the major writers and critics of German Romanticism. Eichendorff’s guiding poetic theme was that Man should find happiness in full absorption of the beauties and changing moods of Nature; this is the reason that makes his naturalist poetry still very popular today among the Germans. 101 Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), was a Dutch-Jewish philosopher considered to be one of the great rationalists of the 17th Century Europe. Spinoza’s contribution to naturalist thinking was that he identified God with Nature but not transcending Nature. Spinoza emphasized the knowledge of rationality, but also asserted that intuitive knowledge can provide the greatest satisfaction of mind. He emphasized also the “essence of being” and asserted that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more blessed we are. 102 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), was a German Romantic philosopher known for his philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), which restores nature as a central theme of philosophy and tries to cover nature and the intellectual life in a single system and method. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie focuses on the identical, undifferentiated and absolute relationship between spirit and nature, as illustrated in his notable quotation “Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature.” Spinoza’s thought is believed to have had some influence on Schelling’s works. 103 Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. Husserl pointed out that in the life world (Lebenswelt), life contexts influence people’s subjective experience of ego, while in the phenomenological aspect, the ego is raised up transcendent (which I understand as the essence of self, the true self, the real self). In his work Die Krisis, he described the cultural crisis gripping Europe at his time. 104 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), was a German philosopher, known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism. Technology and poetry were two recurring themes of Heidegger’s later writings, in which he criticized the instrumentalist understanding of technology in the Western tradition which treated Nature only as a “standing reserve” for human purposes. Heidegger contended that with the application of technology, humans’ understanding and connection with Nature has been changed in destructive ways, and then he learned through Hölderlin’s poetries that poetical living is an alternative way of connection with Nature instead of having technological connections only. 201 era highlight in that domain, given that they were two representative contemporary thinkers, who started to reflect on either the negative aspects of European modern civilization or its tense relationship with nature. This notion, however, is more like a hypothesis which came to my mind during my Freiburg research than to be a conclusive contention which has already been proved with concrete research finding. However, it is indeed a very interesting topic that I hope could be covered in future research. “…[If you are interested, you could] search the classic Hochkultur, the literature, and the great poets in Germany…The Romantisch romantic thinking is a part of the knowledge and behavior for Germans to be near to the nature to against the technical influence in the 18th Century. I think the Romantic thinking is influential root…for many people who have such idea. The Romantic and Idealistic ideas are from the nature…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017 ) Throughout the interviews at Freiburg, most interviewees mentioned that they have the memory about either their “grandmother’s garden” or “mother’s garden”. However, at that moment, neither the local urban gardening practitioners nor I myself recognized that “family garden” is actually a kind of farming or food related tradition in German society. We also forgot that Schrebergarten, which first appeared in the 1860s in Germany, could also be recognized as part of the German culture and tradition related to farming or food. “…I just talked with a friend today about the meaning of gardening for my grandparents…never made any vocation to other place, gardening was my grandmother’s way to spend her holiday…she didn’t move...she spent her holiday at home…my grandmother’s lifestyle and holiday style is new for me, because my parents are different, they go to make holidays…but my grandmother never travelled for holiday…this was my impression and thoughts when I was young…but today I think I can understand what she said to me…if you don’t have to go away…you can have this feeling everywhere, for her, this feeling was in her garden…I can understand it because for me it is like the same…that’s the same feeling I have…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…In my childhood memory, my parents always worked in the garden…My mother is 90 years old at the moment, but she still has a garden and still works in the garden in the summer…My parents always do gardening as their life recreation…My father always said, ‘In the spring, I put seeds in the ground, the plants grow, I look at them, I put water on them, then there comes the snail and eats my salad, and finally I must go and buy the salad!’…There are many works to do in the garden, but at the end the food is for snail and the gardener gets nothing, but he still feels fun…” (Cited from Thomas, M, 50+ y/o, owner of consultant company, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…My grandparents had a garden…My mother usually helped her mother in the garden in my impression…” (Cited from Susana, F, +50 y/o, hospital lab technician, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) Overall, there is no impressive self-reported cultural need of gardening or farming among the interviewed urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg, and the agriculture related traditional living style can also hardly be found in their daily life today. As an advanced developed industrial country, German society has been entirely modernized for quite a long time (in comparison with the Chengdu case). As the result, most people’s lives have been cut off from the former traditional lifestyle, and the memory and heritage from the previous agricultural society have faded away from modern German people’s lives, except for a few of the old seeds and traditional food related 202 cultural needs. However, a special and interesting phenomenon could be found in the Freiburg research: either at Schrebergarten or in different community gardens, many foreigners or foreign immigrants like to practice edible urban gardening as a sort of cultural maintenance of and connection with their homeland tradition and memories. For instance, four foreigners, from France, UK, Ireland and Canada, were interviewed in my research. In addition, according to the information collected during the field research, there are many foreign immigrants using the Schrebergarten system to practice the farming knowledge and skills they learned earlier in their own countries. As mentioned in the last chapter, there is a Chinese immigrant who even grows the rice in his Schrebergarten plot. “…In my experience, half of our neighbor gardeners are foreigner around our garden…These foreign gardening neighbors are very knowledgeable about farming, because they once lived in the countryside in their countries and their parents were farmers…We say they have Grüner Daumen (green thumb) in German, means that somebody is a good gardener, and sometimes we would ask them about what shall I do when I have farming related questions…At this Schrebergarten Stühlinger, we have our neighbor gardeners from Italy, Czech, Russia, Turkey, Asia or Africa, but mostly from southern Europe or from Turkey...” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) 6.2.3 Urban Gardening Practice for Social Reasons The foremost impressive finding of the urban gardening practice at Freiburg is about people’s great willingness to work together with other people through farming, and the great self-expressed enjoyment they could experience from group gardening. The second most prominent finding at Freiburg is about people’s wide awareness and deep criticism of the mainstream industrial food supply chain, and their personal action in farming as a self-resistance to oppose or to reform the current dominant but problematic food production system. 1) Interpersonal Connections through Community Gardening Different people throughout the Freiburg interviews expressed their strong needs to work and grow food together with other people. Besides explaining this phenomenon with the German social tradition of Gemeinschschaft (community in English), it appears that people in community gardening find an old and intrinsic way to keep in touch with other people, an interpersonal connection which is not antagonistic, competitive, nor intensive. Instead, through the medium of working in nature and working on gardening, people find a comfortable and pleasant way to stay together. Many urban gardening practitioners’ descriptions demonstrate that urban collective gardening has the ability to integrate people. Casual gardening work leads to relaxation, and allows people to work with plants and talk to people at the same time; as such, it enables the strangers to start talking with each other smoothly, avoiding abruptness or embarrassment. This is especially helpful for people with social anxiety or other emotional or behavioral disorder. In case you don’t want to deal directly with people, the concentration on working with plants and earth would keep people feeling easy among others. This benefit is also applicable to refugees or immigrants who would have language or other cultural, social, or psychological barriers. This is actually the idea that some of my interviewees would like to work on, and as one urban gardening practitioner said “...It would be very interesting to connect my refugee activities with gardening activities. In the next summer, I would like to take refugee friends to the garden...(Cited from Bonan, Waldgarten Wiehre, 2016)”

203 In my research, several community garden members have their own private gardens at home but still take efforts (e.g. long distance transportation) to join the community garden. According to their own explanation, they choose to join the community garden because they like both meeting with people and working in nature, and urban gardening is such a form of social activity that offers them a daily-life-based regular chance to meet people outdoors in the natural environment. Meanwhile, different people get together at the community garden with different but compatible or complementary knowledge, skills and interests; gardening offers them the chance to integrate their different interest and expectations within one space, such as some people are good at tending crops, some like to plant herbs, so others like to do handcrafts, and everyone has his or her own niche at the garden. In the first community garden case of Freibohnengarten, one person wanted to meet people in a garden and wanted to do things together with other people, so he initiated the idea with the help of Transitional Town and Stadt Freiburg; then a second person found the garden by accident, and immediately decided to join in; then other members randomly got to know each other at occasional places and finally all got together under the name of Freibohnengarten. At Freiburg, people easily talk to each other and trust each other, and community garden became a natural idea and a natural form to gather similar-minded people together. I was also easily accepted by the Freibohnengarten as both a member and a researcher; this double role enabled me to conduct the participatory observation at the community gardens. Meanwhile, some of their own thoughts in respect of the collective urban gardening practice were collected as the following: “…I found this group, Freibohnen…I knew from the beginning that it would be easy to attract people to come for community garden…So we took possible actions to start this community garden…We organize workshops…offer social and environmental education…hope to connect people together through gardening process…People are important in this gardening thing…as a group making something together is meaningful for me…This gardening activity is just one part of my life…but a very important part…[I have other social projects]…but gardening is different from my other activities…because here we get connected by growing food…Food is something about life…Plants are something about life…We have connection to each other and to food as connection to life…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…I visited this place by accident…I liked this place immediately…First, I like the social aspect of this garden…I like the group here…People alike get together…Second, I was earlier living at Erlangen where I had a large garden, and I grew tomatoes, herbs and everything there…I missed that…[After I moved to Freiburg] I didn’t have a place to grow stuff…so I join here…like a sort of replacement…Third, I like to build stuff out of wood…I build furniture for myself a lot…and this garden offers me the chance to work on these wood things which I like most…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…I met Patrick…We didn’t know each other at that time…He was talking about this idea…We came across this topic, this community garden idea…I like this idea that people can work together…People together can learn from each other and can know how to do things together…It is important for the society, for people who don’t have gardens to come…for people who don’t live in the countryside to have chances to connect with nature…[For myself] I like to be outdoors…I also like to see things growing, especially in the spring…I look up the natural things and feel so happy about these things…I can watch these natural things in this community garden…Especially we come together…we do together…we cook together and 204 sitting around…Just cooking but no growing (vegetables) is not the same…”(Cited from Variana, F, 23 y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…I always imagined one day living in a community with people and with nature, having quiet and independent life…When I first arrived here, I needed ways to meet new people and make new friends…Freiburg is a special place where you can meet a lot of people…I met Variana randomly in a supermarket, we didn’t know each other...She started talking about this community garden idea. I like this idea. [So I come]…I choose gardening instead of other ways to meet people, because ① I think it’s a good source to meet people and find friends; ②I like nature and I like to be in touch with earth; ③ I am interested in learning some farming skill…growing my own vegetable to eat…It is a good feeling when I am capable to grow my own food as to be independent…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) In the second community garden case, WandelGarten Vauban, their chief organizer introduced that from the very beginning, when the co-housing residents were discussing about how to design the garden, they have decided to not have detached private gardens for each family, but to have a community garden without a fence. Then they planned the garden together, organized activities in the garden together, and created an atmosphere for people to meet and work together in meaningful ways. It has now become a communication area for learning and understanding, and an informal public education area to demonstrate farming practice not only to the gardeners but also to the visitors, and meanwhile to learn from the visitors. “…We also look for the quality of the community…Permaculture originally is Permanent agriculture…The founder of Permaculture, Bill Mullison…and especially his colleague Davis Holmgren…said that Permaculture is not only about agriculture…but also about human communities. This is another very important part [of Permaculture] I am interested in and we try to activate the farming by…building a gardeners community together…There is no fence [of our garden, and] the people from the neighborhood can come over when they want to…We work together, we talk together, we learn from each other…as a learning process about how to make an urban garden, the second is social process…how we build the community, to come together, to know each other…to share…” Delivery sector – This is an elements for Permaculture…social Permaculture…Produce food and share in fair way…to people who need it… There is no great sitting together in the rooms, but moving around in the garden, doing some work together…talking about whatever comes up…talk even personal problems…sometimes people stand together, they don’t work, they talk about the problem, then work again…it is very informal way of exchange, not a goal we have to read and sit together, of course we have a goal, but there are many possibilities…building resilient community in urban areas…(gardening makes the connection with people more naturally happen, instead of make a purpose?) DEFINITELY, it is a very natural way, people are different, but people like to talk…they prefer to do a lot of talking…at work or not working…for people who don’t really want to talk, who wants to hands-on…from the heart, to the mind, to the hands…farming is possible for their different needs…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) Additionally, in some other community garden cases at Freiburg, different individuals and groups make use of the different functions of their community gardens to fulfill different purposes. At the Klimagarten Weingarten, a member uses the community garden for farming knowledge exchange; at the Schrebergarten Stühlinger, the urban gardeners gather under the Lesen Garten project, which is a self-organized community garden project to demonstrate the participants’ opposition to the Stadt Freiburg’s plan to

205 demolish the Stühlinger Schrebergarten area and replace that place with housing; at the Bambis Beet, once the famous public and community garden in front of the Freiburg theater, before it was dismantled and removed, all the garden participants, other local Freiburgers and far distant visitors came to drop by at the Bambis Beet with all sorts of benefits. Here are some of their own words: “…Both are important for me: to grow up plants here and to know people here…I like to get new ideas from other people about how to make the garden, the plants and the seeds…Meanwhile, I feel good to give my knowledge to other people who don’t know how to grow up vegetables, so that they can make use of the knowledge in this garden or at some other places… Also, I am happy to know people here. Last year, there were two refugee, a couple. We made some German courses here for them…We had some books here and drank coffee together…We also brought some cake from home and talk together…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 40+ y/o, part-time teacher, Klimagarten Weingarten member, 2017) “…The city wants to build a lot of houses here and claims it will be cheap but I don’t believe…At this area the price will stay high, very high…Housing is the only investment channel…[People don’t want to leave here]…There is one old man at 85…having his garden here for 30-40 years…He has to quit his garden…It is a BIG life change for him…Many people are crying…We are fighting against this plan and make a concept to open this garden for the whole community here. It is a social project organized in the Garden No. 499, called Lesen Garten (reading garden)…It is a garden with hut and books inside…It is for the public…You can go to the garden to sit and read, or you can bring a book you don’t need anymore, or you can take away a book which you like to read…In addition, we also want to use this garden for plants exchanging…So, we want to start some social and sustainable project here and hope make it as a little chance to keep our garden to stay here…” (Cited from Susana and Thomas, a couple, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiators, 2017) “…Personally, I have learned a lot of things at the Bambis Beet…I could experience the group dynamics…have balanced university life and practical exercise…feel happy to see things growing…Socially, I would also have proud feeling when see the visitors coming to enjoy themselves at the Bambis Beet…Most visitors only have positive feedback…Only at some evening times, when the well-dressed theater audiences came out after the show and saw I was watering the plants with the hose, they would worry that the water would make their dress dirty…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Bambis Beet Theater, 2017) “…Yes, we have green forest, but for example, the garden at the Theater House…it is also so nice to have a look and to see things growing…I like this place very much…People are just sitting there, in between the crop plants…They have people to take care of that place…However, in city mangers’ view, it is not good. I heard them discussed that ‘it is not good, and nobody cares about the plants…it is not clean enough…not serious enough, not formal gardening…we won’t do it like this’…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, visitor of Bambis Beet Theater, 2017) “…Instead of putting flower for pure decoration purpose…to put the edible plants in our garden is good…The edible garden at the theater, it is at the city center…and has more public influence…” (Cited from Varianna, F, 23 y/o, student, visitor of Bambis Beet Theater, 2017) 2) Multiple Connection in the Food Supply Chain Observing their daily life experience of food consumption and learning from the media reports and public of discussions of criticism of the mainstream food system, the urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg hold a very critical attitude about the current heavily 206 industrialized, commercialized and globalized food supply chain in Germany, in Europe and in the world; they expressed their dissatisfaction, worries, and a series of profound reflections about the mainstream industrial food chain. As befits a mature capitalist society, the food system in German society has also been industrialized and commercialized a long time ago. The appearance and popularity of supermarkets could be recognized as a representative event for the establishment of the thoroughly capitalized food supply system in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s (Drescher, 2002). After more than a half century of development, the food industry under capitalism has controlled the food supply system from food production, processing, transportation, distribution, and marketing, to food consumption and disposal, and after decades of personal experience, many people who have been living with the mainstream food supply chain have also recognized the ecological, social and individual costs of the current profit-oriented food system. Among the urban gardening practitioners I interviewed, even though most of their self-grown food can cover only a small amount of their food needs105, their food growing experiences offer them a new aspect, different from the mainstream, to understand the relationship between humans and food. In their opinions, many of the foods provided by the mainstream commercial food chain can hardly be accepted as real food, because the real food, according to their understanding, has many ecological, social, cultural, and life values embedded in it, and is not only a commodity which is produced on the industrial farmland and processed on the conveyer belt in a factory with the purpose of just filling the stomach or pleasing sugar addicted taste needs. In addition to growing their own food, as their response to the problematic mainstream food chain, these people take various actions to try different possibilities of food access, from local bio-shops and farmers’ markets, to food cooperatives, to the radical actions of food scavenging like “dumpster diving106” and “leftover food eating107”. In the following section, these people’s opinions toward the mainstream food supply chain will be presented in the categories of “food growing, processing and production”, “food distribution and externalization of cost”, “food marketing, selling and consuming”, “Food waste or disposal”, and “Entire food system”: Food Growing, Processing and Production “…It is pleasant to learn how to grow the vegetables that we eat all day around…Otherwise, in our normal settings we don’t know how to grow vegetables…We only know how to BUY vegetables and food in supermarket. That’s a shame…” (Cited from Ronan, M, 20+ y/o, French, student, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2015) “…Gardening is an education tool…I think it’s very important to have the urban garden at the center of the city, so people who don’t have garden can see how does food grow out…instead of misunderstanding it that the food is only in plastic package in supermarket…” (Cited from Susana and Thomas, a couple, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiators, 2017)

105 Overall, the self-grown vegetables can support 1% - 80% (about 10% - 20% in most Freiburg cases) of the food that the urban gardening practitioners need to consume in their daily lives, while the self-grown fruits (for jam), tomatoes, and herbs can sometimes provide 100% of their needs. 106 Unlike the conventional trash salvaging related to poor people or the homeless, the term “dumpster diving” here means a new movement embraced by some young people and environmentalists, who are concerned about the excessive food waste phenomenon caused by mass industrial food production, and take direct action to save the untouched edible food (e.g. vegetables, fruits, breads, cans, etc.) products thrown away by food suppliers. 107 It is an action initiated by some young people or young students who take other people’s leftover food to eat. They take this action as their response to the excessive food waste problem. The “leftover food eating” actions made by students could be observed at the Freiburg University Mensa places (dining halls). 207 “…We do farming because we care about the taste of the food we consume…That is important for us...Perhaps there are also health and environmental reasons…Farmers might use too much chemicals, which is not good for water, for the ground, and all these…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “It is so sad that there is so much going on with these advertisement stuff which have been lying all the time…When they say “North Sea Fish”, it could actually come from China, from Japan…or from Fukushima…I don’t know where they come from…also, all the coloring, all the flavoring in food…When I go McDonald, I don’t see anything eatable…I went there once…What they offer is nothing to eat…Nothing is eatable, all are poisonous! Nothing healthy… (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…[For me] many of the foods in supermarkets are not food! Such as Coca Cola! Because they doesn’t feed me…It is just empty [in the sense of nutrition]…What is really important for my health and keeps my body working…is what growing in the soil…but not so processed food...or convenient food…, like the meat ball which you just need to put it into microwave…Such foods do not give me right energy…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) Food Distribution and Externalization of Cost “…I think distribution is the biggest problem…If we see food processing and distributing together, they actually organize them in a way which suppresses the income of the food producers…A lot of producers are at the bottom of the system…These producers are small members of companies…They can then only add value through packaging…They lobby the policy and influence how the food should look like, how the food is marketed, and how we consume the food…This is the biggest problem…” (Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017) “…The transportation of food is so cheap that people don’t think about the conditions where the food is produced…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…Vegetable from local is more expensive than from Italy….It doesn’t make any sense…The products from local should be cheaper than from distance…The transportation of food could waste a lot of energy…” (Cited from Variana, F, 23 y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…Urban gardening is good to have food to be very close to the people, close to the place where people live, instead of long way of transportation…It helps people and food to have this connection again…Urban garden is good to provide us with seasonal food…Urban garden provides also a lot of green for the eyes…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) Food Marketing, Selling and Consuming “…I get the food from Garten-Coop, I have every week food from the Garten-Coop, good vegetables, organic vegetables, that’s important…We are also involved in food-sharing. Food-sharing has two things: first, you can share your food when you have too much. For example, I had some Marmalade and rice when I was in holiday for two weeks, the people could come home and get that food; second, you go to the food shops and they give you what they have too much, like vegetables, milk products and bread so on. With Garten-Coop and food-sharing, we have enough and hardly need to go to supermarket, expect buying butter, milk, yogurt, rice, noodles…For vegetable, we never need supermarket, and vegetable is the main food we eat…” (Cited from Ronan, M, 20+ y/o, French, student, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2015)

208 “…Here, many people have big holidays three times a year, [and they are generous to spend money on these holidays]…While about food consumption, they become stingy and want only very cheap food…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017 ) “…I am in a group of people at Freiburg to open the shop with no packaging…People come shopping with their empty glass or jar…You don’t need to take plastic around your food…and it’s poisonous…It has been proved that the plastic could go into the food in transportation…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…We buy more food from bio market or traditional market…We also order the vegetable boxes such as Bio-FrischeKisten from the region…It is a bit expensive, but it is also convenient…and the bio food need more time to grow…so the price is reasonable…People who do this work are not rich…We value these people’s contribution…The milk price is too low in Germany…The bio farmer is not competitive with supermarket…They (supermarket) have cheaper price, because they don’t respect nature and the people working there…” (Cited from Susana and Thomas, a couple, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiators, 2017) “Consumption is leading the market, but consumption is also led by the market, and I think people are easily influenced by a small number of factors…Price and convenience are the most important two factors…The attractiveness of low price and high convenience are the retailers’ ways to attract the customers…Next to that is a hypocrisy of symbolism associated with food…Super value has been projected onto food price, which is completely socially constructed…If you go to a supermarket in Germany to buy some meat, on the package they have some picture about the countryside…or the brand with the name like ‘farmer’ or ‘countryside’…But the whole image projected on this package does not reflect the reality, which could be a factory or industrial farm…” (Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017) “…I never buy vegetable from supermarket…because I don’t like the big companies who arrange the supermarket…and I don’t know where the food comes from…I don’t know how much chemical they used…I always go to the public market at Stühlinger or Müster market…where I can ask where my food comes from and how they grow up…I like to walk around the market and it is always nicer than supermarket…I like to support local farmers…I like to pay more, but I have then good quality…I have this idea from the beginning…about 30-40 years ago…I don’t like corporations. I like to have small shops around me. It is important. If we don’t buy at the small shops, they will not survive…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) Food Waste or Disposal “…Food waste is EVERYWHERE! Everywhere in the western world! That’s why food-sharing is important. We are food savers! In the shops, there are many waste of food…On the farms, there are also many wastes because the ugly or not so beautiful food can’t be sold…At home, there is also food waste made by the consumers, who don’t take care of their refrigerator…” (Cited from Ronan, M, 20+ y/o, French, student, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2015) “…There is an European law to regulate the unified standard for the shape of food…If the carrot looks ‘ugly’, it can’t be sold and will be thrown in the waste…but years ago people started to sell that (not good looking) carrots…People started to realize it is not nice when most part of the food is thrown away…it is not nice when the price is so low price and the farmers can’t get enough money…it is not nice that we throw most of the food away when some other people have no food to eat…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 40+ y/o, part-time teacher, Klimagarten Weingarten member, 2017)

209 “…Statistically, in Germany, 1/3 of the food has been thrown away…Families buy too much and throw away a lot…Some people I know they throw so much away…I judge from the Bio-Müller to see how people throw their food away…and I see some families throw away a lot of food…My parents never throw food away, and it is impossible for them to do so…But younger people they don’t think…Today, people drive a car to the supermarket to buy food for one or two weeks…At former time, people bought from small local markets…I think this is the better way…but I guess the logistic system does not support this way of living…It is cheaper to buy a big package of food, people eat only part of them and then throw the rest away…” (Cited from Susana and Thomas, a couple, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiators, 2017) “…When I grow my own tomato and herb, I just need to take two tomatoes or five leaves of what I need…But if I buy these in the supermarket, I have to buy six tomatoes or the whole batch of herbs…Every time when I bought the herbs in the supermarket, I never used them all…” (Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017) “…I feel sad about food waste…It is a normal situation…but not acceptable…The monoculture produces too much food, and the consumers buy too much food…” (Cited from Mickey, M, 20+ y/o, student, Gemeinschaftsgarten Obergrün member, 2017) “…For myself, I must say, sometimes I buy too much…I can’t eat them all…Sometimes I have to waste something…but not too much…only one time in a week…and the wastes go to composting…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…There are people searching good waste food from containers…It is a new movement…I would support my children to do that…” (Cited from Uli, F, 55+ y/o, secretary and mother of two adult sons, shared Schrebergarten Wonnhalde, 2017) “…We haven’t yet been questioned about our action (i.e. leftover food eating at university Mensa)…Only some people thought we are weird about doing that. Many students laughed friendly and thought what we are doing is good…There are many students doing that, also some new students joined us to eat the leftover food. Or they are willing to reduce their food waste. All people expressed their willingness to reduce food waste...” (Cited from Ronan, M, 20+ y/o, French, student, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2015) Entire Food System “…In my childhood impression, the food was related to the supermarket. I regarded food as a part of the supermarket industry. I didn’t know how we can grow a tomato. I think it was the case for many many people at that time…Now, industrial agriculture is not the agriculture I want to support…Industrial supermarket is an economic system which exploits the farmers and many people who work for it, from the South, from Africa, from South America, Asia…It is a global system which leads to many many problems…When all the food is transported from Brazil, China, Iran, Spain, Africa, the far distant transportation…a lot of oil are used to transport such things around the world…plastic packages are used for transporting food…It is not ecologically good and energy issue is a big concern here…[Additionally] we don’t know how they produce food in those places, and whether chemicals, pesticide, antibiotic, or geo-tech have been used to grow food…” (Cited from Ronan, M, 20+ y/o, French, student, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2015) “…I find it is very complicated about the value chain of food…Where your food come from? How far away it comes? How much effort goes into it? How much the farmer gets paid? Who get the value of these products? How can bananas from Ecuador cost only 75 cents? The associated greenhouse gas issue during 210 transportation, especially meat…the different ecological footprint…the degradation and the environmental impact…the usage of pesticide [bio-products also using different chemicals, like wine products]…the social impact…all the social-environmental-economic conditions are associated and globalized, and all the food supply chains [in developing countries] have been westernized…[In my working field,] every one is kind of focusing on reducing the emission in actual supply chain, but if think the demand side, like food wasting…[in West] 50% of the food get wasted…this is really a huge issue…” (Cited from Laura, F, 28+ y/o, Canadian, in climate change projects, balcony garden, 2017) “…There is no other consumption as intimate as food consumption, because we do it every day…even two or three times a day… In this sense, I try to be as authentic as possible to my values of food…That means to eat healthy and organic food which does not have to be certified….I also try to choose food sources directly from people who produce them, or I try to grow food by myself…and I try to shorten the chain and to have as closest connection with food as possible…” (Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017) “…If people from the Western Europe can buy much cheaper food from the Eastern Europe [from where the food is prepared and packaged] than they buy locally…This must be a systematic issue…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…I just don’t agree with many things in our society…How do the animals get treated?…How is the food fabricated?...Whether the food is geo-modified or not?…Our society is not transparent enough…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…The mainstream food supply system is a CRAZY situation...” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…In this country, no matter whether you have a TV or not, you have to pay every month…Everybody is watching TV every day and gets influenced by the advertisements of the products like Nutella, pizza and all that kind of stuff…Why they don’t offer some sensible nutrient?...Because there is no money to be earned by doing that, right?…[For selling rubbish food,] they can make a lot of money without having much cost…It’s all about money…Disgusting!... …Imagine people work hard but don’t earn that much money…They arrive at home exhausted…spend their evening in front of the TV…let themselves to be influenced from the TV…The next day, everybody wants to get the cheapest chips and the cheapest Coca Cola…or all the rubbish food they have been told on the TV the night before…That’s what happening…This is one of many vicious circles…But what’s behind is that people are being exploited and the money is being made…All the reality has been hidden basically…Disgusting!...... Imagine a mother with a cleaning job…She cleans the toilets all day and comes home tired…She is totally tired and has no energy to cook for her children, who are just hanging out in front of TV and eating whatever easy and quick plastic food…That’s the way we bring up our next generation…These children are going to vote when they are 18 years old…What are they going to vote?…They don’t even know anything about food!…They don’t learn much about food!…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) 6.2.4 Urban Gardening Practice for Individual Benefits The individual level benefits of urban gardening are also a very prominent finding for the Freiburg cases. The urban gardening practitioners expressed their VERY strong

211 need for urban gardening activities to balance the brain work and the manual work, to connect with nature and to educate children through the connection with nature. Meanwhile, these urban gardening people also shared their childhood experiences with nature in the interviews. In addition, they also expressed a kind, peaceful, relaxing and meditative experience of being connected with themselves through doing urban gardening. The specific cases and findings will be presented below in three categories: 1) the connection of brain and hands; 2) the connection of human and nature; 3) the connection with self. 1) Connection of Brain and Hands Many people in my Freiburg research described a notable benefit of gardening: by doing urban gardening activities, they get the chance to “escape” from their routine of computer-based office work and find a way to express themselves through their hands, and as the result, achieve a pleasant situation of brain-hand balance. According to the metabolic rift, when the metabolic rift takes place, there is an individual level of alienation which involves two layers of problems: One problem is that when the human division of labor develops into more and more sophisticated situations, people no longer understand their contribution to the final “fruits of labor” and no longer perceive the sense of achievement of their labor contribution; the other problem is that with development of industrial labor-division, brain knowledge and tacit knowledge, brain work and manual work become more and more separated from each other. The urban gardening practitioners expressed in their own words how these alienated situations could be amended through gardening work of tending the plants, because to see plants growing and experience harvesting can give them a great sense of meaning and achievement; to manually work with plants and soil offers them the chance to free their over-used brain and to balance their labor work through their dexterous hands in gardening. “…For me, it’s good and practical to work by hands!...My professional work (before retirement) was only to speak with people or look to computer, only mind working…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017 ) “…Gardening is a way to let my hands to express itself...To use not only the brain but also the hands to express itself are human body’s basic needs…Very true, it is something very important…I think that very deep and very back in our human physical experience, we are somebody wants to shape our world with our hands, so we become Homo Sapiens. Shaping our world and ourselves with our hands...is a very creative process, very satisfying progress!…You can try in good ways…You can see what is being done…You can see something is finished…Just like putting the plant in the soil…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) “…Many people today work with the computer of course…There are some computer people came, and told me something like ‘Ah, that’s great! It’s OK to be with my computer, but I really think I want to do something with my hands now!’…This means that they recognize that it is a too unilateral, too one-sided activity about what they are doing at home with computer…They realize this in front of the garden…I gave them a spade (shovel). I gave them a scythe (btw. I was astonished to scything the grass and realize it is a tool which has been almost forgotten in Germany), so they saw how they are able to cut the grass with the scythe, and their eyes began to shine…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017)

212 “…I like doing netting, sewing or some other handcraft hobby like joining the course to make basket…These are the things I really like…I like doing something and make it nicer than before and I build up things for peace…[In such sense,] to work with hands in the garden is like another kind of handcraft hobby…But somehow, comparing with other handcrafts, gardening is more about a hand-expression with nature…” (Cited from Tina, F, 45+ y/o, researcher and mother of two children, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…I like to do gardening with my hands…I can take a tool and work with earth…I like to work with earth…To build connection with earth is the irreplaceable part of gardening…” (Cited from Variana, F, 23 y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…We want to plant our own food, want to spend a lot of time outside of the house. Because Thomas sits and works in front of PC most of the time, while I stay and work always in the lab…So we think it would be nice to have a garden to a bit physical work and [at the same time] to grow some food…Although the food would be eaten by snails or rats, but you still happy to do that…That’s the fun of gardening…to spend some time, to do some labor work…” (Cited from Susana and Thomas, a couple, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiators, 2017) “…Comparing with my other social projects, gardening is specially because it is outdoor…in green…It is more relaxed and more practical…Not need to think so much in head…Not like doing computer work…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…We do watering twice a day, one in the morning and one at night, but that’s not a big deal…It is so nice to be outside after a long day, and to not think about computer works…” (Cited from Laura, F, 28+ y/o, Canadian, in climate change projects, balcony garden, 2017) “…It is a lot of fun…relaxing…Just to be here, to see how it grows, to work with my hands in the ground…I like very much to work with my hands in the soil…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) “…The whole system is not transparent…Such as the modern things like medicine, you can’t see what is inside, can’t know the process how it is developed or fabricated…However, traditionally, if you fabricated something, you always knew what was inside…This is important for a sense of security…It means that ‘I have the control of the thing I do and I create’ and ‘I feel that I can do something and I can fabricate something on my own’…I think it is a basic need for human to feel that ‘yes, I am capable to do it on my own’…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) 2) Connection of Human and Nature Like their sober awareness of the environment and ecology related issues, Freiburg urban gardening practitioners also expressed their great intrinsic need of being connected with nature. Given that Freiburg is a relatively small city close to nature, and people living in Freiburg do not actually have the problem of physical disconnection from nature, therefore these urban gardening practitioners’ needs of connection with nature are more out of their intrinsic need for the connection with nature, as the “enlivenment” and “biophilia” theories could explain. In the following, the theme of the “Connection of Human and Nature” will be illuminated or illustrated in three subthemes of “Connection with Nature”, “Connection with Nature in Childhood Memories” and “Education in the Connection with Nature” with the urban gardening practitioners’ own descriptions.

213 Connection with Nature Urban gardening practitioners compared the different ways of connecting with nature, and described that gardening could offer more bilateral chance of interaction with nature, while the other natural activities like hiking in forest, walking in woods or cycling in nature are more unilateral connection with nature. They expressed how terrible and sad it would be for them in case they are no longer allowed to do urban gardening. “…At one of my gardens…there is a little river and I like it very much…I like to hear the sounds there, I like to see the views there…There are only trees and grassland, but no people there…I would communicate with the animals, trees and so on…I touch them, I talk to them, I have my spiritual connection with them…I like stay there alone, when I am alone, I have my time to spend with the animals, trees, and my garden…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…It is so essential and basic to grow your own food and to work with nature…Hiking in nature is also nice, but it is very different feeling…Gardening does not only mean to get enjoyment from nature, but also means to give something back to nature…” (Cited from Martina, F, 25+ y/o, social worker, community garden in Wonnhalde member, 2017) “…Hiking or bicycling in nature is also nice, we also do that, but it is different from doing gardening. Because in the garden, you have to take care of the things, and that is nice…” (Cited from Susana, F, 50+ y/o, hospital lab technician, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…[Even though both could offer connection with nature, but] I think it’s different between ‘working in the garden’ and ‘walking in the nature’, as it’s different between ‘making a table by hands with wood’ and ‘buying a table’…To be near with nature in garden means to be close to the plants, to the worms, to the smell of the ground…It’s original…And it’s a fine thing to bring the fruits from garden to kitchen and to make them into marmalade or something else. So I think there is a great difference between ‘working with nature’ and ‘just looking to nature’…” (Cited from Horst, M, 60+ y/o, retiree, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017 ) “…I like to have the connection with the soil, the earth…I have this feeling from early time when I was a child…I like the feeling when the soil is in my fingers…or when I sniff the smell of the earth…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 40+ y/o, part-time teacher, Klimagarten Weingarten member, 2017) “…It is good to have the green around me…Especially in the spring, nature is wakening and gives me good feeling…It is nice to see the things changing in the year…When I put the plant down in the earth, it’s like to be the mother of the salad…taking care of them…seeing their changes closely…” (Cited from Tina, F, 45+ y/o, researcher and mother of two children, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…In my family, we all love nature, and nature means everything for us…When my children were little we lived at another more town area of Freiburg…There, they had no natural place to run and also couldn’t go to the street to play…[After we got this garden,] my kids could live and play in the garden…They liked it very much…” (Cited from Uli, F, 55+ y/o, secretary and mother of two adult sons, shared Schrebergarten Wonnhalde, 2017) “…I live in the VERY urban part of Freiburg, no people else around grow anything, I feel my balcony gardening area like a green island in the city concrete…But this is definitely not enough to be connected with nature…” (Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017)

214 “…If I can no longer go gardening here, it would be sad for me…If I can’t continue to do farming, at least there would still be other possibilities to be in nature…To connect with nature is something important for me!...” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…I am a person who needs peace and that’s what I find here [in my garden]…I can relax myself in doing my garden Arbeiten…I don’t know why…I need it…My heart needs it…I don’t like to be sitting or lying still…I always like to move around to see how the plants grow…I can not imagine a life without garden…” (Cited from Uli, F, 55+ y/o, office secretary, shared Schrebergarten Wonnhalde, 2017) “…If I can’t go doing my gardening anymore, it would be something TERRIBLE for me…It will be a BIG thing in my life…I can not imagine the life without gardening…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…If city Freiburg no longer allows urban gardening at all, it would be a very sad day for me…I will protest to show my anger…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…It would be hard to imagine my life without gardening…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) Connection with Nature in Childhood Memories When sharing their childhood memories with nature, many urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg mentioned that the places where they had grown up were either countryside areas or city suburbs located very close to nature. Living in these natural or semi-natural areas, most of my interviewees introduced their free-style experiences of playing in free natural environments, but some also described organized activities like the summer camps or the Scout activities, or other organized or equipped natural sports. A few of the interviewed urban gardening practitioners who grew up in a pure city environment emphasized that even though their childhood experiences were not that natural, because the entire social milieu were enthusiastically discussing about nature, and because of the natural education in school and family, they still felt their connection with nature in their memory and awareness. The following are some of their specific natural memories displayed in drawings (Figure 29 – 37) and in words.

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Figure 29. Drawing of the Childhood Tree and Natural Memory (1950s) by Caroline

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Figure 30. Drawing of the Childhood Tree and Natural Memory (1930-40s) by Hartmut

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Figure 31. Drawing of the Childhood Tree House and Natural Memory (1980-90s) by Patrick

Figure 32. Drawing of the Childhood Time Memory (1990s) by Variana

Figure 33. Drawing of Hamburg Suburb as Natural Playground in Childhood Memory (1990s) by Lisa 218

Figure 34. Drawing of Natural Playground in Childhood Memory (1990s) by Mickey

Figure 35. Drawing of Suburb Natural Playground in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Brian

Figure 36. Drawing of City Natural Playgrounds in Childhood Memory (1980s) by Laura

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Figure 37. Drawing of Suburb Natural Places in Childhood Memory (1960-70s) by Christine

220 “ (Figure 29)…I was about five years old…I tried to get out of the stress and would go up to my tree…It was an apple tree…I usually got up to the first branch and I could just manage it…I always talked to a tree when I was a kid…[Besides] I love to be with the river…My sister and I went to the river for adventure. [At the river,] I would appreciate it, watch it, smell it and experience it…Or I went to the woods, I would appreciate the trees, would walk around and talk with them, ’cause plants do not lie to you, do not bite you and plants are just plants…I am used to not be wanted…There are rifts in my family…in face of poisonous people, impolite people, and insulting people…My way to deal with these rifts is to find my connection either with nature, with river, with woods…One of the first thing I did was always to build the fence…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…My earliest memory with nature was when my father was still alive…He died in the war when I was four or three years old…My father grew up in a forest in eastern Silesia. So he let me go into the forest quite often…I remember the picture when I was a small boy, and he helped me sit on his shoulder and I was looking at the forest, and he explained to me the voices of the birds, and he introduced me in a way all the secrets of the forest…I still remember that was the wonderful first memories…I remember when we lived in Silesia, my great grandfather he was a gardener, and he planted 100 fruit trees…I remember I was looking for fruits at the fruit trees…When they were blossoming like right now season, how beautiful it was…” (Cited from Hartmut, M, 77 y/o, retiree, WandelGarten Vauban chief member, 2017) “(Figure 30)…I remember when my grandfather died, [after I joined his funeral] I buried a earthworm into the soil [as they buried my grandfather]…[I think this] is the psychological explanation why I am attracted to this underground life (the earthworm) when I do my farming today…Now, managing the earthworm farm in the WandelGarten Vauban is my main project of urban gardening…Somehow, I am sharing this (very private memory) with you…This is very special way of connecting myself to nature…Without these billion and billion of years old life…we would not have any soil…So I am so grateful to these earthworms…So now I am giving back the energy I once gained from my survival experiences and from feeling myself…” (Ibid) “…When I was small child, I was so impressed about the tree in the forest, and this one [I am drawing] was the tree which was standing in the garden when I was six years old…The garden was at our old home, where we came back after the war finished…But our house had been taken by the Polish people…They allowed us to live under the roof. So for about one year, we lived under the roof, and I looked through the window, and this tree [I am drawing] was the view…It was very dark in the room under the roof…I looked out through the small window and I saw the trees with apples…It was in the similar way [like what I am drawing]…The big trunk connect me to the soil and land, where I got my strength, my force, my energy…In my life, I think, whenever there is a crisis, or problems, I get some energy from the land…and then the fruits [of my life] can develop…” (Ibid) “(Figure 31)...The place where I grew up was near an, almost, untouched natural area, [in the countryside]. It was between the highway road and our house…It was not our land but the landowner didn’t use it…It was too close to the highway to build any house there...So there were really old trees, a lot of wild plants, like Brennnessel. It was a special place you could not easy enter, kind of getting protected by itself…As children we liked to build tools to dig tunnels inside these plants…Then we would build tree houses and small huts…We were kind of living there…We played the role game that we were living there…I remember we built rain catching and collecting system there…There was a little sink inside…Outside there was a pond full of algae, so it was green…We were living just below a hill, and on the top of the hill there were a lot of farmers’

221 manure in the fields…So the water in our source and in our well was full of Phosphates and Nitro stuff…I lived there till 12 or 13…It was a very big memory in my childhood…In that experience I also started to build stuff out of wood…I also remember on my way to school…at the side of the street, there was sometimes old stuff you could pick up…It was a funny thing to save some stuff from the landfill…I collected many such things…I took them home and repaired them…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “(Figure 32)…I was living in the countryside, and within 100 meters, there was nature…As children we often played in the meadow area…or we had our afternoon in my home garden doing gardening things…or we played like native Americans…and made bow and arrow…or we rode pony…There was a walnut tree planted nearby my home when I was maybe two and my family just moved to this village…I really like this tree…Now it is quite big already…I always said it is my friend tree and it even has a name as Baumkäppchen, like the Rotkäppchen in the fairy tale…Every time when I go home, I would visit it…At the beginning, I thought it was too little to grow up…but within time, it becomes strong enough…This is also the place we played the role game of Native Americans (American Indians), who have a kind of nature religion…I remember I also joined the summer camp called NaturschuleJugend every year…In the summer camp, there were two years organizing activities about the Native Americans; one year we visited the vineyard at the Donau River with the theme of water; one year it was about canyon and hiking in Poland…Around 15 to 18, I joined a girl scout group and we hiked all our part of nature…We met every week…We made fire, singing and playing game outside…Natural activities and experiences were full of my life…” (Cited from Variana, F, 23 y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “(Figure 33)…I grew up in a big city, Hamburg, but our house was next to a piece of moor. It was a suburb area and it was a multi-culture place...What I am drawing is a red wood house, a very very small house…And here in front of the red wood house was the garden area of my parents…and here this was my Beet…To run out nearby, there was just nature…There were a little river, a lot of animals and insects, and a lot of trees…many many trees!…I had a lot of sisters and brothers and we always played in the nature…It was like an island for us…We pretended it was as a piece of adventurous land…We would make trips along the river like a big voyage…We would climb up the trees…We always moved forward at that area, to see, to feel, to discover the region…Sometimes we built things like a little boat at the water…Sometimes we collected the plants and imagined that we were eating them…Sometimes we also did as what I am doing now (cutting and handcrafting a piece of branch for fun without clear purpose or plan)…I don’t know how this area looks like now…I think the river water may be still clear today…I hope so!...” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “(Figure 34)…I did farming in our village garden since I was 14 years old…Doing farming is what I liked…I liked to work outside…I studied (in front of computer) and I needed to be outside…I really liked doing farming, working with plants, seeing what I grew…I liked the sounds of the birds outside…I liked to eat self-grown vegetable, because it was out of my creation…I knew the process, like watering, and I knew the soil, knew how to help the soil…Our village where I grew up is close to the old Rhine…It is about 10 minutes walking distance from home to the river…Our village is between Rhine and some vine yard mountain…There are many real and nice nature…My generation boys liked to be outside in the nature…and this is different from my younger brother, who is ten years younger than me…My brother’s generation spent more time with computer than we did,…while my generation boys built more wood houses or huts…in the forest…Every boy in my village in my generation did it…We liked to spend the 222 time in the nature, at the Rhine, on the mountain, around the vineyards…We liked to experience the nature…We took adventures…In the winter, once, when it was very cold, the temperature was minus 20…we walked about 6 kilos on a nearby frozen stream and tried to find out where did it stretch forward…In our adventure, we found something like dead animals…In the summer we liked to swim in the Rhine river, lie in the sun…or play guitar at the fire in the evening…The village today is still the same. The water is still the same. The Village is still the same. Of course, there are now more houses…” (Cited from Mickey, M, 20+ y/o, student, Gemeinschaftsgarten Obergrün member, 2017) “(Figure 35)…I grew up in a house at the edge of a town near a coast area in Ireland…In our garden, there was a pond, and also my vegetable patch. There were a lot of grass…a lot of trees…a lot of plants my mother grew in the garden…The garden was very very rich with plants…There would be lots and lots of bees, butterflies, dragonflies, and birds, huge amount of birds…all sorts of birds…Outside of our house, at one direction, there were more houses, and at the other direction there were fields, which grew with corns, grains or wheat…and now I am just drawing the landscape: this is the sea, here is the town, this is the road coming out of the town past to the beach…Our house is here, there are more houses, and this the main road having a lot of cars...All these outskirt areas would be where my brothers and I make our adventures…Here is the field, sometimes with animals like cows…These are the hay bales…They were stored on the hill…We would climb up the hay bales or would like to roll them down the hill…and then the farmers would be angry at us…We would explore the landscape, new places, hidden places, or would be in the places where no others could see us…We were always looking for something new…We would find a cave for example, a place where people dumped something like rubbish, like old machine…We would climb up the machine and tried to make it work…We would walk through the forest, would walk down the river…We would build dams in the river stop the water…Also, the beach was very important for us…”Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017) “…Our town today…all these are gone. Here are houses now, here is a golf field now…and all here are houses today. There is a new road. These forest area, wood area have completely gone away…Here is a swim pool now…It really changed a lot…I am not against the change or development per se…but I think the way they put the houses there could have been done in a nicer way…Here is now disconnected from the rest of the town, so now everybody has to drive all the time…I don’t mean to against it…because people need house to live…but it could have been done in a way more environmentally sensitive…” (Ibid) “(Figure 36)…I grew up in a city of million people in Canada, living in the suburb on the east side of the city…There is a golf course nearby…We can meet a lot of deer, squirrels, birds and other animals in our neighborhood…There are tons of birds…You see bald eagle, see hawks…You have tons of migratory birds coming in…You can just sit in your kitchen, 20 types of different birds just coming in, you see so many, it is a very nice experience…very amazing…On the west side of the city, it is only half hour away from the mountain, with a lot of different parks area to go out to explore…Living in Canada, we taking advantage where in the country we live and have more emphasis on nature things…When we were 12, we had class in school about “outdoors living”…We got a lot of activities, like hiking, camping, horse riding, rock climbing…kayaking…cross-country skiing…I think every kid got some extent of exposure to nature…It was very easy in public education to expose to this…It was an integral part of growing up at the Rocky Mountains…It was a nice part of the country to grow up…I always have connection with nature and appreciate nature…Today, the city has grown a lot…I remember when I was little and just moved to our house, there was a big area of soccer fields, and only old farm house, pasture, horse…But now, it’s all house development…The city expands a bit more in the north…The city grew a lot in 223 that sense…” (Cited from Laura, F, 28+ y/o, Canadian, in climate change projects, balcony garden, 2017) “(Figure 37)…I came from a small village/town near Hannover, a very fast growing place…Through the town, there was a man-made straight canal, and on the two sides of the canal, there was a lot of nature…such as a lot of grass where I slept on…Outside the village, there were very big fields growing wheat and potatoes, in monoculture way…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) “…The house of my parents was the last one at the edge of our small town, and the street ended at my parents’ place…There were many trees and high grasses…There was also a little stream where we could play inside…All around were green and nature…But now, everything green there has gone and left with only buildings…Now that house is inside the town…” (Cited from Thomas, M, 50+ y/o, owner of consultant company, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…My parents’ house was very close to the natural area in a small town…about 42 kilometers away from Offenburg…To play with many children together was important for me…and to spend time with the children and my parents in the forest was important for me…We were almost always outside…We were only inside when the weather was not good….” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…I have a strong memory with nature in a piece of forest in Finland when I was five…It was a quite spiritual memory…I remember I was going into the woods…and found one wild strawberry…I was somehow completely mythicized by this little plant…At that moment, the plant message which was sent to me and could be realized by me was that the life in that plant was the same life as in me…There was no separation between me and the plant…Just that kind of feeling of connection, a sense that I didn’t look it as something out there…more like brothers and sisters…and such feeling could be extended to all plants and animals…That encounter was a strong impact on me…That’s what shaped my personal relationship to nature…After I started going to school…every time when I passed by the trees and plants…I always greeted to them…said hallo to them…bowed to them…or scratched them…” (Cited from Kat, F, 52 y/o, freelancer in various fields, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2017) Education and Therapy in the Connection with Nature A frequently mentioned point of urban gardening among the interviewees at Freiburg refers to the educational function of urban gardening, considered over a wide range, from formal education to informal education, from public education, school education, to family education. Especially, the mothers who practice urban gardening expressed how the gardening experience formed their children until today, and they used their sons and daughters as examples to demonstrate that urban gardens are not only good playgrounds for their kids to free themselves, but also natural classrooms for children to learn knowledge about food and to build their lifetime long connection with and need for nature. In a special case found in the Freiburg research, an Ergotherapie therapist established an urban gardening project for the children living in the nearby communities. In my interview with her, she shared her working experience and introduced briefly how to use a garden and gardening as therapeutic methods to support children with nature-deprivation disorder or other cognitive or behavioral disorders. “…Gardening is important for its educational purpose…I do urban gardening to show other people how we grow food to feed ourselves, and to send the information out: let’s do that, let’s farm, let’s be self-sufficient!...” (Cited from Ronan, M, 20+ y/o, French, student, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2015)

224 “…School children should know this old agricultural knowledge and teachers should value more about the food products…These are important knowledge for children…because right now they have poor relation to agriculture…” (Cited from Hennes, M, 25 y/o, social activist, Freibohnengarten founder, 2017) “…A terrible thing I see right now is that the children have been basically isolated from nature…They don’t have that connection anymore…They don’t have opportunity to play with nature…Parents are very worried about the things that could happen to them in nature…Freiburg is an exception to this situation [but the cases at many other places are true]…So I am joining in some nature pedagogy seminars…learning how to teach children about nature…” (Cited from Kat, F, 52 y/o, freelancer in various fields, Waldgarten Wiehre member, 2017) “…When I was a child living in the small town, it was very good for me that there were many children around me, not only my sisters and brother, but many children playing together…We played outside…We play games with each other…We went to the forest…We climb the tree…We collect flowers…or we went to a farm where there were horses that we could ride…We were always outside…[In the past, even in a city settings,] in every street and around every house, when there were not very many cars…children could play outside together…Such life was better for children…It was very good for children’s development…[However,] right now there are not many children can have the chance to play with each other in the street anymore…I am a teacher…I see the development today is not good for our children…and not good for our society…Today children play too many electronic things…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…When I was raising my children, I knew how to let them close to nature…so they played a lot in natural areas…They also loved the garden here and could always find something to do when they were in our garden…My children knew that strawberry is growing not in winter but in May…They knew how to grow potatoes…They knew who is growing what and where in our region…My oldest son is 36 now…He has a balcony growing with many vegetables…He is now working as a teacher with a good imagination, and always has ideas with great creativity…He appreciates his childhood experience in our garden…My second son likes nature too…He likes to hike in the mountain…He is always in nature to relax himself…He needs nature to relax…because his job is to work with computer…” (Cited from Uli, F, 55+ y/o, mother of two adult sons, sharing a Schrebergarten at Wonnhalde for more than 30 years, 2017) “…My children spend much of their time here. They liked to climb up this tree here (the boy could climb 10 meters up) and when they were small kids, they could always find something busy to do at our garden…When my son was young, he always wanted to make a cave here…He liked to make big holes…Another thing he once tried to do was to make a lake in the garden…He likes such things to do…Their father and I, we were once talking about cutting the old tree in the garden…but they were very upset about the idea…They don’t want to have any change in the garden…” (Cited from Tina, F, 45+ y/o, researcher and mother of two teenagers, son and daughter, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…I gave my daughter the opportunities to be a great person (a natural person)…We spent all our holidays in nature…such as tenting in nature…[For life and education,] nature was always more important than a town…so we never visited a town for holidays…My daughter has been obviously very connected to nature…My daughter is now an artist and musician. She wrote songs about gardening, about animals and the little worms for tiny children…All these things are important for her: all the garden things…all the animals…all the little worms…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, also mother of an adult daughter, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017)

225 “…The therapy idea in relation to gardening and children is to let children come outside to the fresh air and learn to be with creatures…Because the trouble is that the kids spend so much time on the sofa with internet, with hand-held devices, with TV, and they don’t really experience three dimensional life at all…The garden is the place to help children get all sorts of three-dimensionality experiences by putting all sorts of things, the fine skills into their bodies…fine motor skills like digging with hands or doing with fingers can be something very powerful when energy is put into it…Children can experience that by themselves…Through such personal, hands-on experience, urban gardening tries to help these children to believe something other than they see in TV…try to free their soul…trying to get them to think for themselves, trying to integrate them into a growing process with themselves and with plants…When the children are here, I hope they could have some free space for their soul, for their own way of being…In this way…a child starts to find his intrinsic motivation instead of doing what somebody else says to do…and also not be dominated by any kind of media or whatever…I think the intrinsic motivation is a very very important thing!...Intrinsic motivation is the clue to grow up well balanced and feeling love and happy within oneself…If one can decide to make his or her own decisions from what’s coming up within, that person will make good decisions mostly… [Case 1]…I once had a group of kids in my garden…I said to them ‘You like pizza, right? But where does this pizza come from?’…I then left to cut the hedge and keep listening when they discussed among themselves…One kid said ‘I think this pizza growing up from the tree, cause otherwise it would have gotten dirty’… Another one said ‘no, it is grown on the ground like the lettuces, cause otherwise the salami is going to be fallen off it’…Another one said ‘this is grown in the bush, cause the worms would have made it into dirty’…None of these kid knew what pizza is or where it comes from…I told this to their mothers, but they just thought it was funny…I really felt sad about these mothers…I thought this is really really disgusting…So I thought we have to do something here…to let the kids learn the garden stuff I took to them…to let them see how things grow out and come to be… [Case 2]…There was a conflict between two 11 year old boys…I gave them some gardening work to do…They went to the stream together and helped each other to get the water…Gardening helps these boys to work as a group, to get rid of all the silly impressions of each other…to respect each other…Also, if offering the aggressive boys a patch to dig in, their aggressiveness could get dissolved when they are tired of digging…That works for them… [Case 3]…There was one kid, his mother was in love with the disinfection bottle, so he was also scared of everything with earth (soil), because his mother told him earth was not clean…The boy has been here for sometime now, at the meantime, he is OK with worms and knows now they are his friends… …So I let children land in this garden area…let them water flowers and plants or just have fun with water…They may just come here sitting and watching, lying down and looking up the stars, or playing with the dogs, whatever…It’s a very important thing to get them out to such a safe garden setting…and be relatively relaxed and free to do what they feel…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Garden for Kids Stühlinger, founder, 2017) 3) Connection with Self There are not that many expressions in regard to “Connection with Self” could be recorded in my Freiburg research, but a few relevant expressions were still captured. “Connection with self” in the Freiburg research context has basically two layers of meaning. First, the urban gardening practitioners build their physical health and fitness through the gardening activities. Second, they feel a relaxed, peaceful, joyful and more solid self and mental condition when they are doing gardening and achieve a kind of 226 mindfulness state, or in their own expression, it is something like meditation, with empty mind, leaving their daily life hassles from job or from office behind, or it is a way to help the individual to stay with oneself, original self, real and intrinsic self. “…Since we are getting old, I think gardening is a very good training to keep fit…My mother is already 90, and every day she works in her garden, working and doing something…I think it’s a very good way to keep healthy…You can go and do jogging or something like that, but you can also work in the garden…I think it is the same training…” (Cited from Thomas, M, 50+ y/o, owner of consultant company, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…If you work five hours in the garden, you feel more healthy, because you breath fresh air, you move around…I value this practice which is physically good, spiritually good, socially good and environmentally good…” (Cited from Mickey, M, 20+ y/o, student, Gemeinschaftsgarten Obergrün member, 2017) “…When I start the garden, I did not know the gardening work is good and healthy, but after I started it, I notice it. And I start to read more about that…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) “…[In my experience,] both the work of gardening and house cleaning don’t need me to think too much, and I just do it. However, when I was at home and had bad mood, to work very very hard to clean the house can help me to get rid of the aggression…But in the garden, it is not the same. If I get anger from working or from daily living, the anger can go away quicker and easier after I start working in the garden…So I mean, doing gardening work helps me to calm down easier and quicker than doing house cleaning work…To work here at the garden is more relaxing, very relaxing. At here, I actually don’t need to think about any thing…I just work…just listen to the birds…Every time when I am here, I always try to stay a bit longer, because every time when I come here, I always find a lot of things to do…and I always can’t stop but just keep doing…” (Cited from Christine, F, 48 y/o, company employee, Schrebergarten, 2017) “…In the early evening, when I came from work, I would like to do something in the garden, then I forgot everything in the office very quickly…” (Cited from Thomas, M, 50+ y/o, owner of consultant company, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…When I am doing gardening, I can forget completely the things like job-planning and that alike…I have the equal feeling when we are in holiday, doing biking, hiking and tenting…” (Cited from Susana, F, 50+ y/o, hospital lab technician, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) “…Doing things in the garden is like a meditation sometimes…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…I have limited time here at the community garden, but every time when I am here, I feel ‘yes this is good for me’…It is good to be with the plants and earth…After I did this thing… I always feel happy that I have earth on my hands, smelling like nature…When I was doing this, I got a empty head…feeling like my thoughts were not in my head…feeling like maybe these things were not important anymore…like a meditation…When there are too much things, I can get my mind empty and just focus on doing gardening…” (Cited from Variana, F, 23 y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…I have hobbies like group singing, or joining rainbow community [for] mother earth…The difference between my gardening experience and other hobbies are: ① It is outside…②I could be in touch with nature more directly; ③I can see the plants growing, and this is good for me, I feel getting connected…The connection with soil/earth, brings me to be in the center and in the middle of myself, helps me to be calm, makes me good feeling; ④When I am singing, I feel my body 227 inside…and I can calm down like doing meditation...Sometimes I have the same feeling when I am here in the garden…Sometime I also feel doing gardening is like doing a meditation activity…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…I can feel better about myself as a person, when I have connection with the gardening work, with the outside atmosphere, with the plants…When I am working in the garden, I can feel more my original sense. Ja, maybe this is what I can express…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 40+ y/o, part-time teacher, Klimagarten Weingarten member, 2017) “…The important part of gardening is the connection with myself…” (Cited from Caroline, F, 60+ y/o, British, Ergotherapie therapist, Schrebergarten Stühlinger, 2017) *** All the above information, categorized and analyzed under the framework of metabolic rift, presents my quick and rough attempt to show Freiburg urban gardening practitioners' multiple reasons and motivations for growing their food in city spaces, and meanwhile to display their wide-range gardening practices and holistic understanding of urban gardening’s role and contribution to build more sustainable, solidary, just, healthy and joyful sustainable living. It is an outline picture to show the Freiburg urban gardening practitioners’ systematic thinking and practicing of urban gardening. Below, this chapter will close with their own integrated understanding of urban gardening, and some of their own brief summaries. “…I could just come to do the wood handcraft things in our garden, but it would not be as much fun, because wood stuff doesn’t grow by itself…To watch something growing is important for me…Growing vegetables, building stuff, cooking at the garden, all these things are based on the growing part…The gardening work is the center of the community garden activities…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 30 y/o, researcher, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…Industrialization leads people to the city, and farmers leave away from farming…Urban farming connects these two lifestyles…Farming in city is important because most of the world populations are in big cities today, so I think it is the time to combine city and farming together, because it lets people grow their own vegetables, lets them slow down, lets them run away from life stress, lets them own a trouble solving strategy…Urban gardening gives city people another life choice, otherwise they always want to get faster and faster…Urban garden reminds us what gives us resources, keeps us to be conscious about our health conditions…” (Cited from Lisa, F, 20+ y/o, student, Freibohnengarten member, 2017) “…It is an ideal place to practice the things to face climate change issues…It is a good place for social integration because here are many people from different nationalities…It is also good for people’s health, because people can get fresh air here, can work here, exercising themselves…” (Cited from Thomas, M, 50+ y/o, owner of consultant company, Lesen Garten Stühlinger initiator, 2017) “…I like to work with nature and to do something for the Earth…I like to do something in groups together and to get more knowledge from the group members, or to just get connection with people, since the group is very nice…I like to grow something for myself and not only depend on supermarket or commercial food system…The concept of working in community garden makes me feel good, because I can really connect with nature, and this is spiritually good for me…” (Cited from Martina, F, 25+ y/o, social worker, community garden in Wonnhalde member, 2017)

228 “…[The community garden offers me the chance] to feel well in the nature, when surrounding myself with people…I like to learn something from them, also to share the knowledge and skill of my professional (as gardener) with them…I have the idea to help each other…I have the idea to live together with people in simple ways, such as without using much money…” (Cited from Patrick, M, 40+ y/o, part-time teacher, Klimagarten Weingarten member, 2017) “…Doing something outside is very good for me…I like to be there, to see the little things I plant…to hear the birds singing, to have the people speaking with me…All of these things are important components of my gardening time…In addition, garden can bring people to a slow life, and I think today the society grows too fast…” (Cited from Barbara, F, 60 y/o, teacher, Schrebergarten Wiehre, 2017) “…I like to grow the herbs. It is nice and satisfying to grow them and to use them for myself…Extremely satisfying…It is the idea of creating something by myself…That’s nothing about save money…It is about the idea to consume outside of the industrial food system…no buying from supermarkets…”Cited from Brian, M, 25+ y/o, Irish, researcher, balcony garden, Stühlinger, 2017)

229 Chapter 7 Comparative Discussion and Conclusion

Think like a mountain ! — Aldo Leopold, pioneering eco-philosopher

This dissertation is grounded in two of my parallel research interests: “human-nature interaction” and “urban farming”. Specifically, it applies the metabolic rift theory to study all the material and immaterial dimensions of human-nature entanglements through individuals’ farming practices in the space of the urban farming plots. Or, in the more precise language of metabolic rift theory, the current research studies how the city individuals understand and respond to the ecological, epistemological, cultural, social and individual aspects of metabolic rift problems, and how their urban farming practices contribute toward mending these rift problems. However, this dissertation does not start directly by introducing the metabolic rift theories; instead, the writing first articulates the socio-ecological metabolic process of the capitalist industrial world in a historical-materialistic background. Concretely, the three shifts of the industrial production (power shift, production shift and space shift), the four upgraded versions of social metabolism (SM 1.0 - 4.0), and the three major tendencies of the world’s socio-ecological metabolism (ecological degradation, treadmill living, and degenerative health issues) are introduced as the relevant background concepts. This background information is introduced as the supplementation of the later elaboration of the metabolic rift theories, in order to better understand the formation of the metabolic rifts. In addition, some detailed facts in these background materials are critically important for us to understand the underlying reasons and meanings behind the individuals’ choices of urban farming, as well as to empathically grasp the multiple challenges which the city individuals have to live with in a more and more industrialized, commercialized, and urbanized planet and in a more and more human-nature-alienated urban life. Because these detailed facts can hardly be covered and elaborated under the metabolic rift theoretical framework itself, they are introduced as the historical background and holistic context of both the formation and possible solution (i.e. urban farming) of metabolic rift problems.

230 Furthermore, in order to describe the social metabolism under capitalism in a more comprehensible way, I integrate the disciplines of environmental sociology, political ecology, urban political ecology, environmental history and historical materialism within a loose concept cluster of Marxist ecology, which shares the Marxist ideology of critical-capitalism analysis (Figure 3). Meanwhile, based on the metabolic rift theoretical framework that has been created in my Master thesis, a modified and improved elaboration of metabolic rift theory is achieved in this dissertation with the addition of the concepts of Biophilia and Enlivenment; moreover, for the first time, the hypothetical concept of “cultural rift” is also tentatively elaborated and integrated under the overall metabolic rift framework. In addition, terms like “treadmill living”, “material rift”, and “immaterial rift” are created in this writing to help to better describe and explicate the situation of social metabolism or metabolic rift. Afterwards, this background information and theoretical framework, these concepts and terms, are applied to discuss the urban farming phenomenon and its functions in the review of literature on urban farming, and are later applied to analyze the empirical urban farming cases at Chengdu and Freiburg. Meanwhile, through analyzing all the data and the entire findings obtained from the Chengdu research, the first research question108, concerning the dynamics of Chengdu urban farming practice, has mostly been answered, and thus only some brief follow-up summary will be provided below. The comparative discussion in the following section will be mainly organized around answers to the second research question109 and the third research question110 of this dissertation. After that, the final conclusion of the current research and writing will be addressed and wrapped up while considering the “remaining messages about urban farming”, “limitations of the research” and “future study directions”. 7.1 Comparative Discussion As shown in the findings of my Chengdu and Freiburg urban farming research, because of the different economic development phases and formats of capitalism, as well as the different historical, cultural, social, and political contexts of the two countries, comparisons between the urban farming cases in China and Germany are quite hard and challenging. Now we can know that both the Chinese and German urban farming practices are conducted in various forms (rooftop farming, container farming, on-ground farming in vacant lots, along railroads or riversides) and both countries’ urban farming practices involve many individual and community urban farming practitioners, most of whom conduct self-sufficient, multiple-purposed, small-sized and no-chemical urban farming practices. However, the differences between the urban farming cases in China and in Germany are also obvious. The Chinese urban farming practice fills a need by

108 Research Question 1: What are the dynamics of the ecological, social and individual processes of urban farming practice in Chengdu (China)? Who are the people practicing, promoting and involved in urban farming? Where and how do they practice urban farming? What are their motivations to do urban farming? What are the benefits they gain from doing farming? How does urban farming help to deal with the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift issues at a farming plot scale? 109 Research Question 2: What are the cultural and traditional reasons for urban farming practice in Chengdu (China)? Does the older generations’ farming practice have some influence on people doing farming today? Does “where do people come from” and “where did they grow up” have some effect on their decision of farming practice? Could urban farming help to fill the cultural aspect of rift (as hypothesis)? 110 Research Question 3: Given the different economic development phases and different historical, cultural, social, and political contexts of the urbanization process, what are the similar and different characteristics of the urban farming practice in China (Chengdu) and in Germany (Freiburg)? How do the urban farming practitioners in China and in Germany understand or experience the multi-functions of urban farming differently? Which rift problems could be best responded to by urban farming practice at Chengdu and at Freiburg, respectively?

231 creating survival, income and economic opportunities for a certain number of low- income urban farming practitioners; it has also the function of providing safe and reliable food in a society where the food safety cannot be guaranteed by the mainstream food supply chains. In addition, it offers people the opportunities of recreation, environmental protection, and cultural heritage preservation. The German urban farming practice plays more of a role in ecological services and education, in community development, in alternative food chain building, and in creation of casual activities and personal development. These general differences between the Chinese and German urban farming cases, summarized from the Chengdu and Freiburg research, are basically consistent with the findings of the RUAF foundation report of the Sino- European Forum on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF, 2013). However, the differences between urban farming practices in China and in Germany also clearly display how the multiple functions of urban farming could support the individual farming practitioners to respond self-protectively to the multiple dimensions of metabolic rift problems at different development stages (SM 1.0 – 4.0) and in different social milieus. Since China and Germany represent different phases of the socio-ecological metabolic process in each of their unique societies, the comparison of these different and even a bit contrary cases in one research project would work together in a complementary way to demonstrate a more complete picture of the meanings and functions of urban farming to heal the metabolic rift problems. Thus, the features of urban farming which could not be demonstrated in the Chinese urban farming cases might be verified in the German cases, and vice versa. China, for example, as a developing country, is still in the process of transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society; Chinese society also has become divided with large gaps between people of different social, economic and educational backgrounds, as well as between places. Different people and different places in China are experiencing different phases of the social metabolic process (i.e. from SM 1.0 to SM 4.0) at the same time. A group of lower income rural immigrants are still experiencing the early stage of industrialization and urbanization (i.e. SM 1.0 - 2.0), newly arriving in cities without suitable working skills, and need urban farming for their basic survival livelihood. Germany, on the contrary, has already passed through this period of development over the past 150 - 200 years. In the present-day German population, there are no such rural migrant laborers who need to rely on urban farming as a way to adapt to city life or to deal with the labor related rift issues. Further, since Germany has experienced a relatively long term of industrialization and commercialization, their people have started to reflect on many of these disadvantages of the system. Such as, for the food supply system, many German people are no longer satisfied with the mainstream industrial standard of food quality and safety, but look for more alternative, ecological and sustainable food systems, including applying urban farming to deal with the food related rift issues. However, in China, people are still fighting for the fulfilment of the basic industrial and commercial standards of food safety. One more example is that Germany is now experiencing the latest phases of social metabolism (i.e. SM 3.0 or SM 4.0), meaning that technology has become such a ubiquitous influence in the society that some people have become very cautious about its almighty power and are experimenting to reduce its application when necessary. This is the reason that many urban farming practitioners at Freiburg try to avoid the use of electronic equipment or complicated technology for their farming practice, instead preferring traditional and simple technology like the scythe. When Germany took about 200 years to accomplish its current industrial achievement (from SM 1.0 to SM 3.0/4.0),

232 China has taken only 40 years to arrive at its recent stage of accomplishment, as well as its social metabolism phase (SM 3.0/4.0). For most Chinese, their attitude toward technology is still worship without reflection, caution or precaution. Notably, more modern technologies have been found in the Chengdu urban farming cases. Besides the idea to apply virtual reality (VR) technology to a school urban farming project, some tiny, fancy, but practical electronic device111, in cooperation with an APP program on smartphone, is being applied by certain Chengdu urban farming practitioner to monitor the soil conditions of fertility, temperature, moisture, and illumination. 7.1.1 Prominent Urban Farming Features in Chinese Context Many Chinese urban farming features are demonstrated in the Chengdu research findings. Features in three of the most prominent categories, “need of AgriCulture”, “concern of food safety” and “practice for personal development” have been identified and will be discussed here as representative of Chinese urban farming facts. Meanwhile, the German situations and contexts for these categories will be mentioned briefly. 1) Need of AgriCulture In the inherent relationship to agriculture and food, human ancestors provide a direct conduit and comprehensible context to inform and educate their offspring about the connections with land and nature. If such ancestral knowledge should be lost, the younger generations will not only lose the chance to connect with their ancestors, but will also lose the chance to learn and pursue vital methods and valuable worldviews that could have been used to confront the challenges of a modern, industrial and commercial life. Agriculture based culture and heritage need to be taught to younger generations and become an integral, enriching and enlightening aspect of their daily lives. Because China has just recently changed from an agricultural to an industrial society, many of the agriculture related culture and traditions are still preserved and maintained in the daily life based practices throughout Chinese society. Urban farming practices enhance the preservation of this culture and these traditions by reproducing the socio-ecological memories attached to farming practice. Specifically, as shown in the Chengdu research findings, people have the impulsive and intuitive desire to sow seeds on the empty but arable (even not arable) land, and have their need to use and preserve old seeds and to make traditional family dishes and foods. In addition, many of the farming-related traditional Chinese thoughts, philosophy, literature, medical practice, and even the sense of aesthetics have been inherited in the Chinese modern life. Even though there are only a few Chengdu urban farming practitioners showing their awareness and willingness to undertake urban farming as a personal practice to cope with the nationwide worship of commercialism, consumerism and material hedonism, their cases have at least demonstrated that farming and urban farming practices could provide Chinese people a cultural sanctuary in face of rampant fetishism. When a society and its social milieu only provide their members with purposeless living and addiction to materialism and consumerism, the situation would force the awoken individuals to search their personal ways to resist the material hedonistic treadmill

111 It is a normal USB sized electronic device, and needs to be half inserted into the soil to monitor the conditions of soil and illumination. The live monitoring data can be easily read in its corresponding APP on the smartphone. I am not criticizing the application of this device or the technology behind it, but just want to exemplify the Chinese urban farming practitioner’s enthusiasm for technology. An additional observation: what could also be noticed at the Chengdu research was that several interviewed urban farming practitioners were considering the possibility of running their personal urban farming hobby into a profitable business. I interpret this as a side-proof of the commercialism-influenced social milieu in recent Chinese society where people are all full of enterprising ambition. This is what I seldom saw among the urban farming practitioners at Freiburg.

233 living. For the awoken Chinese, they can “return” to the traditional knowledge, cultural identity, simple living style, and ancient Chinese thoughts and philosophy of human- nature oneness as their alternative life contents. Meanwhile, some of their direct farming related memories in their childhood could remind them of the intrinsic strength of life and guide them to resist material hedonism and the treadmill living pattern, as well as other modern city life challenges. Meanwhile, urban farming provides the younger generations of Chinese a chance to be exposed to an agriculture based cultural atmosphere. Only in this way, can they value and appreciate the AgriCulture (that is, the agriculture based culture) which they are exposed to when growing up. Only after they experience the agriculture based culture, do they start to appreciate the beauty existing in those ancient Chinese poems, which have many depictions of agricultural activities. Only after they learn to appreciate the aesthetics of agriculture, do they start to know how to appreciate other aesthetics of the Chinese tradition of simple but poetical living. Simple living in the agricultural context means that all life arrangements should be based on the output of agricultural productivity: “how much should be consumed” is dependent on the fact of “how much could be produced”. This Chinese style of simple living is different from the western type of self-sufficient living and also from the monastery version of austerity. In addition to being “simple”, this Chinese style of simple living has an AgriCulture based aesthetics, which does not emphasize the material richness, but concentrates more on the natural and spiritual aspects of life. The Chinese agriculture tradition bestows on the Chinese urban farming practitioners a unique cultural dimension of connection, in addition to the ecological, social and individual dimensions of connections. In addition, for millennia, Chinese people were not only connected with the land and dependent on the land to produce their food, but their senses of material security and cultural identity were also rooted in their connection to a plot of farming land. The very stability of Chinese society relied on these senses of land-connected material security and cultural identity. Since China only started to transform from an agricultural to an industrial society 40 years ago, to some extent, people’s need for AgriCulture is still strong in Chinese society today. In the German society, on the other hand, this is not the case. German people have been living far away from their AgriCulture, since their industrialization started more than two centuries ago; today many people’s parents and grandparents did not work in the agricultural sector and had no early life experiences with farming. The German agricultural traditions and culture have long ago been replaced by industrial tradition and modern cultures, and therefore, people’s need to heal cultural rift is not so keen or so instinctive as their Chinese counterparts. While some German urban gardening practitioners do practice farming for cultural concerns, this is more out of their emerging rational reasoning and reflection on the disadvantages of the modernized and industrialized life. For German people, when they need to resist their own western value dominated materialist and consumer culture, they have less alternative traditional knowledge and cultural identities to which to turn for sanctuary. 2) Concern of Food Safety Empirical findings of Chengdu research show that the food related social rift is the most direct and primary reason for these urban farming practitioners to start their urban farming practice. Their action of urban farming is a personal level reaction toward the nationwide concerns and worries about the unsafe food issues happening in Chinese market. The frequent and persistent food scandals have destroyed people’s trust in the food provided or produced in China, and have become a serious and intractable social problem in Chinese society. The fundamental reasons for the unaccountable food supply

234 issues in China can hardly be analyzed or explained under the metabolic rift framework or any anti-capitalism framework. If a profit-oriented capitalist system can be regulated and supervised in an appropriate way, the food supply chain under this capitalist system can still fulfil the basic industrial and commercial standards of food safety. However, in China, the problem is that the profit-driven commercial interests cannot be stringently supervised by the governing power, and its people are still fighting for the enforcement of the basic industrial and commercial standards of food safety. Most of the Chengdu urban farming practitioners feel completely powerless in face of the unsafe food issue. “Except growing a little bit of my own food, I can really do nothing” is most of the people’s real feeling and opinion. This also indicates that these Chengdu urban farming practitioners’ choice of urban farming is neither out of their deep reflection about the mainstream food supply chain problems nor out of their criticism of the dysfunction of the governmental supervision power. For urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg, food related concerns are not about issues of unsafe foods. Instead, their concerns are around the more advanced food concepts like food security, food justice or food sovereignty, which take the entire food system into their consideration. Their food request is far beyond the basic need of food safety, but more about high level food quality which involves comprehensive concerns about people, animals and ecosystem. Therefore, when compared with Chinese people, German people’s food concern is more based on their deep reflection about the mainstream capitalist food supply chain. 3) Choice of Personal Practice as Self-Supporting Method For individual Chinese, living in the accelerated socio-ecological metabolic process of China, and facing the multiple metabolic rift changes in the Chinese context, urban farming is one of the few options that the awoken individuals could use to keep them staying in a real and intrinsic state with “self” and being aware of their real needs of life. These awoken individuals not only take urban farming as a solution to unsafe food issues, a recreational hobby, or an alternative city living style, but also take it as a personal practice to enhance their mental and spiritual strengths in a multiple-rifts society. Otherwise, they could easily give up themselves to follow the dominant material hedonistic social milieu or to indulge their daily lives in the material hedonistic treadmill living pattern. Even though the awoken individuals are only a minority of the Chengdu urban farming practitioners, their effort to take urban farming as a personal practice is valuable, because they actually show other Chinese people a possibility to live with sober-minded mentality and spirituality in a “crazy” world. For the normal and ordinary Chinese individuals who are living in a country that cannot offer effective supporting systems to its people, this is a particularly meaningful reference, because the individuals can only rely on their personal practice and self-supporting system to deal with the challenges that have been systematically imposed on them. Through urban farming, these individuals could have the chance to practice eco-mindfulness which brings them more mindful inner experience and more intrinsically oriented values, or to practice other benign mental exercises which would be beneficial for self-esteem or recover from depression (Brown and Kasser, 2005; Jacob et al., 2008). For German individuals, although they also take urban gardening as a practice for their personal development, they do not need to rely on this single method; compared to China, German society has developed a more mature support system and can offer individuals more choices of accessibility to all sorts of ecological, social and individual supporting groups. In the field of urban gardening, there are many active, social, and small group initiatives organized to support individual urban gardening practitioners.

235 7.1.2 Notable Features of Urban Gardening Practice in German Context Given its own country and social contexts, urban gardening practitioners in Germany have very different motivations and purposes to practice urban farming than do the Chinese. Three notable features selected from the Freiburg urban gardening practitioners will be discussed below as representative of the prominent German urban gardening facts, accompanied by short descriptions of the comparative Chinese cases. The three features are “concern for ecological sustainability”, “enthusiasm for community gardening”, and “need for brain-hand connection”. 1） Concern for Ecological Sustainability As a developed country, Germany has a long history of industrial development and urbanization processes and has also experienced many negative aspects of its development throughout its industrial history. In this background, German people formed their knowledge and awareness of, and reflections about, the negative impacts of ecological and environmental problems. The public’s high degree of awareness and concern over ecological issues can be conspicuously noticed among the urban gardening practitioners at Freiburg; their various contributions to ecological sustainability can be found in their urban gardening practices. There are many widely applied ecological urban gardening practices which can be found at Freiburg but not at Chengdu. For example, the practice of composting can be found in every urban garden I visited in Freiburg; but in Chengdu, only the younger urban farming practitioners know what is composting and have the interest to do composting. German gardeners have more interest to grow flowers in their edible gardens than their Chinese counterparts, and their edible gardens are often designed and managed in much tidier and more pleasant garden styles, while most of their Chinese counterparts at Chengdu usually have no sense of design and just manage their farming plots for pure productivity purpose. In Freiburg’s gardening plots, in addition to vegetables, more diverse plant species, either edible (fruit trees, berries, herbs) or inedible (tree species), can be found, while in Chengdu’s urban farming plots, vegetables are the absolute dominant species. Meanwhile, in Freiburg people’s gardens, many features such as small water ponds, branch piles, old stumps, birds’ nests, insect hotels, and beehives are specially prepared for the needs of local small wild animals and other creatures, while at most of the Chengdu urban farming plot areas, none of such ecological designs for animals could be found. In general, Freiburg research findings demonstrate that, as a whole, German urban gardening practitioners manifest a great deal of ecological concern in their edible gardening practice. In contrast, Chengdu research findings demonstrate that most of the urban farming practitioners apply little ecological concern to their farming practice, even though some natural farming practitioners and some young urban farming practitioners do care about their overall ecological contribution. In addition, the entire German society provides much more support for both the discussion and practice of ecological sustainability among its people, while in Chinese society, ecological sustainability is always only a side topic and side concern. In Freiburg, there are diverse forms and topics of farming seminars and courses offered to the local urban gardening practitioners to join, and there are special local bio-shops opened for people to buy old (heritage) seeds and bio-products. In Chengdu, by contrast, no such outside supporting system is offered for the local urban farming practitioners; often it is these local urban farming practitioners that organize some gathering opportunities among themselves to share information and experience, or to exchange seeds.

236 2）Enthusiasm for Community Gardening In addition to their impressive concern for ecological sustainability, many of the interviewed urban gardening practitioners of Freiburg showed their great interest in joining community gardening activities. It might be easier to explain the reason for landless city residents to join community gardening, but there are numbers of community garden members who actually own their private gardens, showing their enthusiasm to join the community gardening work with efforts. According to their own explanations, they choose to join the community garden because they like both meeting with people and working in nature, and community gardening is such a form of social activity that offers them a daily-life-based regular chance to meet people outdoors in natural environment. They say they like to see people with different but compatible knowledge and skills gathering together and integrating their different interests and expectations within one space. In addition to the self-reported explanations for their interest in community gardening, two more reasons can be noticed and analyzed through the lens of metabolic rift theory. First, the development of industrialization and urbanization can leave individuals fragmentized and unsupported in their city working and living conditions. Once people find a way that allows them to have the chance to connect with other people freely and pleasantly, these people would show their great enthusiasm to join and maintain such pleasant social cohesion. Second, community gardening is actually a way for people to exercise their right to the city and help the city to heal the metabolic rift problems. This is out of people’s sense of responsibility to their own living place. Once they are offered a chance (e.g. get a piece of communal land at a corner of the city) to practice their responsibility, they would go to execute their rights. At Chengdu, there are also sorts of community urban farming projects organized by NGOs. Participants in these community urban farming projects, however, show more interest in the fact that they can get a piece of farming plot from the project and then start their own farming. This means that their interest is mostly focused on “urban farming” but not “community urban farming”. The more underlying meaning of this phenomenon is that these urban farming practitioners have little interest to join social affairs. They even feel a bit reluctant to be involved in social interaction. The reasons behind this phenomenon are quite complicated, but three points could be briefly and tentatively discussed here. First, China was traditionally an agricultural society and people’s trust was based on family and kinship networks. In the urbanization process, people migrate from rural homeland places to city areas, shifting from small and acquaintance-based kinship networks to complex social networks filled with strangers; trust can hardly be built up in such transitional processes. Second, in a radically commercialized society, Chinese people are encouraged to build all kinds of economic and monetary relationships among themselves, but are discouraged from building free and intimate social or political networks without governmental supervision. Individuals lack a social atmosphere to join social affairs. Third, land property in China belongs to the state; this means that individual Chinese have been discouraged from having their own sense of rights and responsibility to take care of the land they are working on112.

112 For example, when being asked “What do you feel if your farming plot is demolished for other land use?”, all the Chengdu urban farming practitioners working on the vacant lands answered something similar like “I am fine with that; Not a big deal for me; The land belongs to the state, and they can do whatever they want to do; I can find another way to fill my spare time; I won’t feel sad if I can’t do urban farming anymore”. When the government wants to take the vacant land away for other use, there will be no fighting, nor any reaction to express any anger or sadness even if it is a long-term cultivated farming land. In contrast, when the same question was asked to the Freiburg urban

237 Unless they can grow their vegetables on private garden lots or in balcony spaces, their urban farming practices can never be guaranteed in any public locations and spaces (neither on rooftops nor on vacant lots). People feel completely powerless to protect their farming rights in any public city space. For these possible reasons, most Chinese urban farming practitioners would take urban farming less seriously in their lives than do the Freiburg urban farming practitioners. For most of the Chengdu urban farming practitioners, urban farming is regarded more like a tool or method to solve their direct life problems (e.g. unsafe food issues), while for most of the Freiburg urban farming practitioners, urban farming is an inseparable part of life in the city. 3) Need for Brain-Hand Connection According to its industrial development in the social metabolism context, Germany is now experiencing the latest phases of social metabolism (i.e. SM 3.0 or 4.0). This indicates that German people are involved in a highly industrialized and mechanized system, in which labor division and specialization has been practised systematically for a long time. People’s alienation from the fruits of their labor and the separation between mental and manual labor, could be experienced and perceived by many individuals, even though this is a very invisible and slow-growing condition and can only be perceived subconsciously. Many of the Freiburg urban gardening practitioners expressed the situation and feeling that “computer work or computer based office work often leave them with a body desire to go to the nature, or to connect with soil directly with hands”. In contrast, none of the urban farming practitioners at Chengdu expressed such a “desire” as their motivation to practice urban farming. Since Chinese society has just experienced the accelerated social metabolic process of industrialization in only four decades, the Chinese people are enjoying the latest escalated version of social metabolism (i.e. SM 4.0), which offers them the visible and tangible benefits of industrialization, mechanization and technology. In the recent escalated version of mechanization, many Chinese people are experiencing a deep psychological attachment to their digital devices and contents (e.g. smartphone, internet surfing, cyber games). The attachment leads a person to think and feel the digital process as a part of the extended self. The attachment is so strong that the person even feels a sense of bereavement and loss when the device is taken away from them. Few Chinese people have yet started to realize or perceive the negative impact of technology and deep version of mechanization. Therefore, their urban farming motivation is not yet driven by the needs to deal with the problems caused by deep mechanization and deep social metabolism development. 7.2 Conclusion Urban farming study under the lens of metabolic rift is a tough topic, and the ambition to study this topic in the domain of human-nature interaction is even tougher. What is no less tough is the task to coordinate the tone of a controversial anti-capitalism discussion: critical capitalist society analysis does not imply any contention to return to the pre-capitalist society; the capitalist system is a trouble maker of metabolic rift, but it has also the reformative function to adjust mistakes; mainstream discourse celebrates the trends in capitalist labor productivity and consumer welfare as a triumph of western modernity over pre-industrial resource supply crises like recurrent famines, which are regarded as a consequence of traditional societies’ inability to sustain production. farming practitioners, many of them answered that “I would feel very sad; It would be something terrible for me; It will be a big thing in my life; I can’t imagine my life without gardening; I will protest to show my anger”.

238 Meanwhile, the advantages and benefits of capitalism are so obvious that almost every one can share part of them (even though very disproportionately), but the disadvantages and the externalized costs of capitalism, especially the costs which are less tangible, visible and recognizable, have been understood as either acceptable, bearable, or ignorable. There is a contrast between the unprecedented advance in the forces of capitalist industrial production and the enormous ecological, social and individual costs. One underlying aim of this dissertation is to unfold these latent, unperceivable and invisible costs and let them to be exposed explicitly through the lens of metabolic rift. Such an ambivalent discussion about capitalism has also happened in China when the Chinese version of capitalist development is discussed. This Chinese version of capitalism as mentioned earlier, is a combination of the profit-obsessed capitalism and the arbitrary state socialism. The two streams of strengths work together, creating unprecedented rapid development and conspicuous economic achievement. In a very short period of time, as the economy grows dramatically in China, so do its socio- ecological metabolism and its metabolic rift problems. However, the occurrence of metabolic rift and its social metabolism version in China is different from the version in western countries (e.g. Germany). Although metabolic rifts occurred in the development of the west’s transition to modernity and capitalism, they occurred at least over centuries, and the western culture had generations to make some social, cultural and political adjustment, as feeble as they may be. However, China has made its transition within just one generation, and we have inadequate time to cope with the accelerated pace of transition. When the rapid speed of transition is combined with the fragile ecological conditions and tumbledown social situations, China’s metabolic rift problems have already stretched to the breaking point, leaving the whole system extremely vulnerable113. Given such context, another underlying aim of this writing is to discuss that if the accelerating tendency of capitalist development will not be changed and the social and political situation of China will not be ameliorated, what would be the multiple roles of urban farming to support the Chinese individual (taking German cases as reference) to deal with the daily life based occurrence of the metabolic rift problems. In addition to the reflections, summaries and conclusions above, ultimately, this dissertation will be wrapped up with the final discussions, on the topics of “remaining issues of urban farming”, “limitations of the research” and “future study directions”. 7.2.1 Remaining Messages about Urban Farming The first and foremost message is that urban farming is NOT just about farming 114. Instead, it should be part of an integrated way of life. If urban farming were just about farming or just for the purpose of farming and food, this PhD project would have never been initiated or conducted. For the author, urban farming is not only the theme to verify the metabolic rift theory or an approach to heal the metabolic rift problems, but it is also a critical and unique nexus point that could connect so many pertinent social metabolism themes – human (social/individual) and nature, agriculture and industry, country and city, rural farmer and city dweller, production and consumption, production treadmill and living treadmill, physical and mental health, mindfulness, Ecological

113 Private communication with Randy Kritkausky, president of Ecologia.org, USA 114 This message is also a consensus accepted by the professional Permaculture practitioners, the Anthroposophical educators and also some of the interviewed urban farming practitioners at Chengdu and Freiburg. When being asked whether what they are doing is farming, all these people would answer with an absolute “No”! For the Permaculture initiators and promoters, farming is their way to practice natural design; for the Anthroposophical educators, farming is an integral and indivisible part of their education; for a few of the interviewed urban farming practitioners in this research, farming is a way of their city living.

239 Sustainable Behavior (ESB) and Subjective Well-Being (SWB), etc. – under one overarching discussion. However, although urban farming is not just about farming, the activity of cultivation and its result of food is still a core and essential component of urban farming. Without producing food, urban farming will immediately lose its value to be studied as an independent and phenomenal subject. All the other urban farming functions and values can only be fulfilled through the integrated process of growing tending and working with crop plants. The second message is that, in theory, urban farming is uniquely valuable only when it is understood to solve the metabolic rift problems in a holistic and synthesizing manner, rather than in the face of every single dimension of rift issues. Because every single function of urban farming to deal with each ecological, cultural, social, or individual dimension of rift problems is possible to be replaced by other non-farming activities or efforts115, so it means that urban farming is never the only solution to solve every single rift problem. However, the irreplaceable meaning and value of urban farming is that urban farming has almost no threshold and no cost to join in, and its multiple functions can be conveniently applied at the same time by individuals or groups. Meanwhile, the answers to the questions: “Is urban farming only a personal response to an atomized fragmented individualist urban culture and only an internal re- migration to rural culture?” or “Could urban farming reach out to create a new social form in the urban space?” are dependent on whether the urban farming is applied in a single role to solve the individual rift problems, or whether it is understood in a comprehensive way to deal with the multiple layers of rift problems. Nevertheless, in reality, if urban farming is expected to have a substantial impact to repair all the dimensions of rift problems, there must be a precondition that significant numbers of the population are able to practice urban farming. The third message is that, in many urban farming or gardening practitioners’ experiences, farming practice is the most effortless way to reach to the state of meditation or achieve the condition of mindfulness. This is a good message according to the positive inter-relationships 116 among mindfulness, ESB (e.g. de- consumption and simple living), and SWB (e.g. physical and mental fitness). If urban farming is an effortless method to experience mindfulness, and mindfulness is an inner personal condition that helps to undercut the equation between material hedonism and subjective well-being, and helps to alter individual’s over-consumption, then it indicates that urban farming could help people to increase personal quality of life by emphasizing inner life quality over possession quantity, and finally to support people getting off the material hedonistic treadmill living pattern through simple living practices (Jacob et al., 2008). Just persuading people to give up their material hedonism is not easy when they still believe material possession brings them novelty, convenience, satisfaction and happiness, but if through practicing urban farming, they can finally recognize the real source of happiness and learn to accept simple living, then urban farming would contribute to both the planetary well-being (mending ecological rift) and the personal well-being (mending individual rift).

115 Ecological rifts: by organizing conventional parks or decorative gardens (without edible plants). Cultural rifts: by other heritages like traditional food cooking, or by more intangible cultural heritages such as books, poems, music and painting, etc. Social rifts: interpersonal communication, reciprocity or trust could be built by other group or club activities like dancing, sports, parties and so on; safe and reliable food could be supplied by the approach like CSA (community supported agriculture). Individual rifts: by joining in the natural events like natural education activities, hiking, bird watching, flower growing, handcraft making, meditation, yoga practice, and many others. 116 The positive inter-relationships between mindfulness, ESB and SWB suggest that, for specific segments of the general population (e.g. the spiritually inclined), there is no insurmountable conflict between the de-emphasis of a material hedonist lifestyle, and personal life quality and well-being (Jacob et al., 2008).

240 7.2.2 Limitations of the Research First, this PhD project on urban farming is considerably based on my personal interest, and the underlying motivation to write this dissertation has been to satisfy my own curiosity to learn the mechanisms of human-nature interaction, without either enough discussions among academic peers or considering the interests of specific readers for empirical research or policy suggestion purposes. Second, related to the first point, the limitation of personal bias of this dissertation must be acknowledged. As an advocate of organic farming, an opponent of over-consumption and a beneficiary of simple living and deep nature connectedness, I believe in the importance of farming, simple life, and nature connectedness for achieving ecological and sustainable goals. Such personal bias may have had some effect on the design of the research project, creation of the interview questions, analysis of the findings and/or conclusions drawn from the material. Third, because of the application of the metabolic rift as an anti-capitalism theory, this dissertation has a disproportionally critical tone, criticizing capitalism and emphasizing the negative impacts of industrialization, urbanization and globalization, while neglecting the benefits that the capitalist development has provided to people and the fact that many people still need to rely on capitalist development to improve their daily life quality. Similarly, this dissertation discusses only the destructive aspect and not the positive sides of technology. This might leave an impression of “elite rural nostalgia”, “anti-modernity” or “anti-technology117” in my writing. I cannot deny such motivation in my incipient intention. However, meanwhile, I see the accelerating occurrence of capitalism, industrialization, technological issues and metabolic rift problems as the dilemma of human civilization development, which can hardly be avoided and can hardly be discussed. This dissertation has tried to criticize and analyze capitalism from a standpoint of human-nature interaction, which does not take human welfare as the only concern, and tries to cunningly avoid the discussion of the fundamental dilemma itself. Fourth, in the face of metabolic rift problems, urban farming practices are emphasized as the solution in this dissertation; however, they should not be understood as the only option of solution. Meanwhile, the possible negative facts of urban farming (when non- organic farming techniques are applied or the farming plots are not well organized), such as harmful chemical contamination, heavy metal concentration in soils, eyesore- sites or criminal-site problems have not been discussed. Fifth, in regard to the sampling processes, at Chengdu, many young urban farming practitioners were not able to be interviewed because of their busy working schedules, while at Freiburg, more diverse samples of urban farming practitioners were missed because of the language barrier, since research targets were limited to English speakers; in regard to the data collection and analysis, although the Geo data of each individual urban farming plot were collected, the spatial figures of the distribution of interviewed urban farming sites at Chengdu and Freiburg could not be finished because of the limits of time, knowledge and skill.

117 During the middle of my writing process, in addition to applying metabolic rift theory to criticize the modern technologies which have been developed under the driving force of capitalism, I gradually developed a new understanding of technology and capitalism, and set up a new hypothesis waiting for future examination: “There may be a possibility that capitalism, as well as technology, has been dominated, nurtured and made use of by bad and evil intentions (e.g. AI and Big Data). If there is a chance to return capitalism and technology to be in the control of good, kind and ecological intentions (e.g. simple and small scale technologies), maybe they can have more positive contributions to the building of sustainable human-nature relations.”

241 Sixth, through using qualitative research methods, descriptive elaboration has been applied as the main approach to analyze data in this PhD research, and quantitative research methods are lacking as methodological complements. As a result, no causal conclusions could be made and the answers to some of the research questions have had to be more or less impressionistic. 7.2.3 Future Study Directions First, although this PhD research claims to study the human-nature interaction, it has achieved only half of the purpose, because the metabolic rift theory mainly focuses on and describes the disconnection, detachment, alienation and antagonism of the current actual human-nature relations, while lacking specific and thorough descriptions about what a positive or an intrinsic human-nature relationship would be or should be. Even though concepts like Biophilia and Enlivenment, which study the positive and intrinsic human-nature connectedness, have been mentioned in this writing, inside the current theoretical frameworks of metabolic rift theories and Marxist ecology theories, these concepts can unfortunately be applied only as supplementary theories. In the future, more studies on Biophilia and Enlivenment, as well as all the other ideas emphasizing the human-nature connectedness, should be more comprehensively conducted. Second, related to the first point, if the human-nature connectedness should be emphasized, then there is also a great need to systematically rethink, reconsider and reflect on the thoughts and philosophies of the Enlightenment. As the dominant worldview of Capitalism, Enlightenment emphasizes sophisticated dualism and believes exclusively in rationality, while neglecting the equal need of commitment to simple things, to deep moral conviction, to intuitive truth, to spirituality, and to ancestral wisdom. In both the Chinese and German urban farming research findings, it could be noticed that, consciously or unconsciously, some of the urban farming practitioners have actually been guided to exercise their farming or gardening practices under the instruction of these non-Enlightenment thoughts, philosophies and wisdom. Third, urban farming is a rich field of interdisciplinary inquiry for developing the understanding of human-nature interactions, and could be studied further either inside or outside the current theoretical frameworks of metabolic rift theories and Marxist ecology theories. For example, the efficacy of mindfulness to achieve de-consumption behavior has been quickly analyzed in this dissertation, but the possible causal relation between urban farming, mindfulness and ESB yet lacks validation by systematic research; the current evidence rests mainly on self-reported experiences or anecdotal accounts. The relationships among urban farming, mindfulness, and ESB call for further and more scientific studies in the future. For another example, the cultural motivations of urban farming could be further and more deeply explored as an independent theme; the sense of place and sense of memories in relation to the value of urban farming have been undercharacterized and also demand further exploration. Meanwhile, Ethnobotanical surveys could be conducted to inventory all cultivated plants on these culturally and traditionally influenced farming plots. In addition, beyond the attempts at descriptive analysis or rigorous scientific study, urban farming is a fertile site for lifelong experimental and personal participatory forms of research. Lifetime “learning by doing” subjective research on urban farming might be considered by the author in future plans.

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266 Appendix:

Field Research Interview Guideline Questions

1. Urban Farming Facts

1) Cultivation facts: - What do you grow? How do you decide what to grow? - How do you judge the healthy condition of the plants? 2) Input and technique facts: (individual and ecological aspects) - Where did you get the soil? - How do you fertilize the soil? (Manure? Compost? Chemical?) - What kind of seeds do you use? (Commercial or self-harvested seeds) - What and Where are the water source ? (Quality, distance, frequency, health risks) 3) Harvest and post-harvest facts: - How to deal with the produce of the farming? (Selling? Self-consuming? Sharing?) - How much can the self-produced food support you or your family? 4) General questions regarding the whole process: - What kind of difficulties have you encountered during the farming practice? - What are the strains to do farming in the city? - What are the supports you can get for your farming? (e.g. Policy, regulation, NGO) - What concerns you most in the process of your farming?

2. Motivations & Benefits

1) Farming practice motivations: - How long have you farmed at this plot? (Who else join you?) - What caused your interest to start the present farming? - Who you can share your farming related topics or issues with? 2) Why do you do urban farming? What are the benefits? - Why do you invest your time do farming instead of doing other things? - What are the benefits you get from this farming practice? - How do the self-harvested and self-consumed crops benefit you? - What does it mean for you if you can no longer do urban farming? 3) Future plans related to urban farming: - Do you have interest and willingness to continue? Why? (Any future plans of farming?) - Do you encourage your family members or friends to practice urban farming?

267 3. Personal and Childhood Experience with Agriculture and Nature 1) Personal and family background: - Where do you come from? Where did you grow up? (Childhood and teenager time?) - Where did your parents and grandparents come from? What did they do? 2) Farming experiences in earlier life: - Did you ever practice farming before? (When? Where? What kind of farming? What?) - Where did/do you learn your farming/cultivation knowledge and skill? 3) Natural experience in earlier life: - What was your childhood life surrounding? (landscape views, animals and plants) - How did you spend your time in nature? (in the field, in the woods, in the river?) - Other childhood/teenager memories related to food, agriculture, nature? - Other important life experiences or memories (good or bad) with nature?

4. Agriculture related Culture, Traditions, Local knowledge, Lifestyle and Attitude

1) Agriculture related knowledge, custom, festivals, traditions: - Do you know any living custom related to agriculture? (In daily life?) - Do you know any festivals related to agriculture? (Do you celebrate them?) - Do you know any living traditions/traditional lifestyle related to agriculture? 2) Attitude to agriculture: - In your opinion, what farming knowledge and practice should be preserved? - In your opinion, who should own the farming knowledge and do the practice?

5. Relations among Agriculture, Food System and Environment

1) The relation between agriculture and food system: - Where do you get your food in daily life? (Open market or supermarket?) - What do you think about the recent food supply system? - What do you think about the food waste phenomenon? 2) The relation between agriculture and environment: - What’s your understanding about the relation between agriculture and environment? - What do you think about the meaning of farming in urban area and in modern society?

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