Public policy and community gardening in Rome: progress and contradiction

Community gardening has been regarded as a practice through which citizens can challenge dominant power relations and claim back their rights to the city. It has also been considered a form of collaborative government used to reduce state responsibilities in social service provision in a context of neo-liberalization. In any given case, understanding whether public policies are enabling or disabling community gardening initiatives by providing specific regulations, public support or a favourable environment for community organizing, is crucial. This issue has recently garnered much attention worldwide and the aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by focusing on the case of Rome, Italy. Like many other cities in the world, Rome is witnessing an important diffusion of community gardening initiatives. Thus far, the proliferation of community gardening has taken place in an almost completely spontaneous form and risen from the grassroots level in a lack of a legislative and regulatory framework, both at the national and local scale. In July 2015, the municipality of Rome enacted a regulation in this vacuum which is currently in its initial stages. This paper aims at understanding the aims and expected outcomes of this specific regulation, focusing, in particular, on the extent to which such a policy simply promotes the diffusion of community gardening initiatives, or aims at regulating and disciplining their practices.