Cultivating Property

Abstract

This article talks about the anonymous contributions to a fuller practice of the right to the city: the right to a qualified—and let’s add, nutritive—urban environment. In this essay, Moreno argues that these gardens are alien to forms of finding sustenance without cultivation and to dominant social forms of agricultural production. There is an uncanny otherness to the strategies, methods, and effects utilized and, equally, an otherness in the conditions of those who perform the labor: retired, unemployed, marginal, or simply outside the normative time of labor. These gardens are, nonetheless, like other horti conclusi, images of paradise, and thus well-deserving of a properly-planted chair for contemplation.