The policing of community gardening in Rome

The aim of the paper is to show the inherent ambivalence of the relationship between policy-making and grassroots urban gardening initiatives. The voluntarism, variety and multiple meanings of community gardening, it is argued, is hardly compatible with the regulatory anxiety and isomorphic pressures that most policy schemes imply. The regulation of community gardening, in this frame, is very often caught in a delicate balance of promotion and control, co-optation and “policing” and risks to exacerbate already existing distinctions between collaborative and confrontational initiatives. We believe that addressing this ambivalence is crucial to a proper understanding of the socio-political meaning of community gardening, and of the problematic relationship between communities’ self-organization, sustainable transitions, and urban governance in an age of austerity and neoliberalism. The topic is addressed with reference to the city of Rome, Italy, in light of a recently approved regulation for community gardening.