Speaker
Description
In an era of planetary crisis, urban planning is increasingly confronted with the challenge of moving beyond extractive development models to foster new ecologies of care and relational urbanism. As cities attempt to integrate environmental concerns into regeneration strategies, urban agriculture is often instrumentalized within top-down greening policies, serving as a compensatory tool rather than an agent of transformative change. This paper critically explores the potentials and contradictions of embedding urban agriculture within public housing regeneration, focusing on the case of Scampia, a district in Naples historically marked by socio-spatial marginalization and speculative urban transformations. Through an analysis of the ongoing "ReStart Scampia" project, an urban transformation initiative that envisions the restructuring of open spaces through a new system of cultivated fields, urban forests, and collectively managed green areas, this research examines how urban agriculture can be conceived not as a compensatory greening strategy, but as a tool for multispecies urban commoning. This approach challenges mainstream narratives of sustainability, questioning whether urban agriculture in public housing contexts can genuinely foster socio-ecological justice, or whether it risks being co-opted within neoliberal redevelopment logics. Drawing on urban political ecology and critical urban studies, this research interrogates the governance structures that shape urban agriculture initiatives in marginal contexts. The study raises crucial questions: to what extent can agricultural practices reconfigure public housing neighborhoods as spaces of care and collective stewardship? How can urban planning accommodate the agency of non-human actors within regenerative processes? What governance structures are needed to sustain non-extractive, post-growth approaches to urban regeneration? While ReStart Scampia presents an ambitious framework for integrating agriculture into public housing redevelopment, the effectiveness of such interventions depends on the capacity to move beyond purely symbolic green policies and toward participatory, commoning-based governance models. By framing urban agriculture as a site of negotiation between institutional planning and grassroots ecologies, this research contributes to contemporary debates on post-growth urbanism, alternative economies, and socio-ecological entanglements. The case of Scampia offers insights into the challenges of designing urban environments that move beyond anthropocentric development, fostering new alliances between land, food production, and everyday life. However, for urban agriculture to serve as a genuine tool for commoning rather than a decorative greening strategy, planners and policymakers must address the tensions between top-down regeneration and bottom-up land stewardship, ensuring that these initiatives remain embedded in long-term, community-driven governance frameworks.
| Keywords | urban agriculture; public housing; multispecies commoning; socio-ecological regeneration; post-growth urbanism; |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
