Urban Food Street: A Vision of Community Connection

This chapter examines a community garden story forged on suburban street verges, and the way, through photography, it became a space of resistance and community connection. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on willfulness, the use of things, and feminism (Willful subjects. Duke University Press, 2014; Living a feminist life. Duke University Press, 2017; What’s the use?: On the uses of use. Duke University Press, 2019) this chapter considers the way Urban Food Street project ‘re-turns’ (Barad, Parallax: Diffracted Worlds—Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities, 20(3), 168–187, 2014) to a history of dissent and disobedience through the use, and depiction, of gardening tools and verge gardens. Urban Food Street allows us to examine the way visual storytelling exposes things when something in the garden is dug up. When that something is photographed and is the ordinary home space, traditionally a place of mastery and control, those photographs unearth plot points in a digital tale of transformation.