Urbane Landwirtschaft und Prozesse des räumlichen Empowerment in Kolumbien - Stadtgärten als Orte einer commonalen Transformation für Frauen
Colombia has one of the highest percentages of internal displaced people. During 50 years of internal conflict, almost 5.7 millions people were displaced from their lands and arrived as refugees in the urban peripheries where the knowledge and capacity formed in rural world are not in demand.
In this thesis, I aim to discover the extent to what the organization in urban communitary gardens constitute strategies to integrate the rural immigrants into the city. There, the communitary gardens offer living perspectives and food security in the first place. The urban agriculture projects for women, who are often excluded because of gender, colour or rural origin, can be a way for them to regain self-esteem and empowerment in the city. In many cases, the garden projects form the starting point for further engagement in city-wide networks to claim their rights for access to basic urban infrastructure. In the concepts of empowerment in development and feminist theories, the spatial relevance of empowerment is rarely discussed. In my thesis, I want to investigate the spatial dimension of empowerment. Therefore, I formulate three hypotheses with the aim to explain the processes of spatial appropriation in a material and symbolic way:
- 1. Through the communitary gardens as material places, the actors gain visibility in the public space. Organized in networks to reclaim their right to the city, the people are recognized as political agents and acquire access to official places, like the municipality, where formerly they were excluded.
- 2. In a symbolic dimension, the people gain voice in the media and visibility in the public discourse room. Therefore, they acquire power to represent themselves.
- 3. Especially for women, urban agriculture offers the possibility to combine productive activities and household work. By acting as producers in the public space they overcome socially constructed borders and role models.
To prove whether urban gardening projects constitute spaces of spatial empowerment I apply, in fieldwork, participatory mapping methods in order to discover how perceive people the urban gardens in the context of their quarter: Where are places of exclusion and inclusion, places of threat and community? Furthermore, in workshops with Open Street Map Software I will build up knowledge based on the women as active agents and show them the possibility using open geographic software as a tool to define their own places, like gardens or communitary shops, to gain visibility for their work. These processes also make part of a digital spatial empowerment.
In the synthesis I will look at what extent experiences with urban agriculture give us an example of processes in the frame of socioecological transformation theories. Urban Agriculture is a model for organizing food supply in short distance ways. It is a very intensive form of agriculture, because people are using small spaces to cultivate their own food, sometimes even in vertical ways. People are using local knowledge and local resources and therefore it’s a sustainable way to cultivate food and medicinal plants. It has high potential to link the rurality and urbanity in different areas. In view of the actual food crisis and the growing prices of nutrients, Urban Agriculture will gain more importance in the future. My thesis is that it is crucial to integrate a gender perspective in theories about the socioecological transformation. This means to think of strategies of how women or excluded groups can appropriate themselves of the means of joining transformatory processes from below. These will serve, in the first place, their subsistence, and in the long run, will form part of a process of organizing the economy and food supply in a sustainable way.