Urban allotment garden

This chapter aims to address a dearth of sociological literature pertaining to allotment gardens as place, by exploring them as ‘lived places’, where social relations, experiences, meanings, and a sense of place are developed and visualized within gardens. It argues that allotment gardens offer people the opportunity to engage creatively in the production of place and that the social process of place-making occurs through this active engagement. The Pispala allotment garden in Tampere, Finland, is an example of an urban nature area, which is socially experienced as an extremely meaningful place. Urban livability and place-making can be approached through people’s relations to rurality and to nature. The boundaries within communal gardens and allotment gardens where individuals lease out individual plots within a larger shared space can be viewed as permeable and transient. The process of place-making can also be viewed in relation to social interactions and sense of community that develops in allotment gardens.