'Struggling with temporality' A case study of place attachment and displacement of an urban agriculture community in Hungary

Absztrakt

I have been conducting anthropological research, involving participant observation in microcommunities engaged with urban agriculture, especially crop cultivation, from late December, 2015. Beyond the avarage yield of basic vegetables or fruits and herbs, community gardening is about ’colonising’ urban space, or in other words, practising community control over a relatively small piece of urban land, endowing vacant lots with new functions. Thus, urban gardening is a territorial natured initiative, a materialized conglutination of various ideas and acts referring to the dynamics of urban transformation processes and city development. Apart from introducing a bottom-up Hungarian garden community settled in a constantly transforming district of Budapest, I represent how place attachment and displacement influences the decision-making practices of the community, and how place attachment functions under rapidly changing conditions. At the same time I argue that place attachment lets the gardeners express forms of criticism addressed to development and to the underlying logic of ’progress’: the controversial appearance of economic growth and capital injection in the district. I suggest that such affective initiatives function as social seismographs, in which the perceptions of contemporary urban transformations are emergent, highlighting a dialectical relationship between urban dwellers and modernisation processes. Keywords: community gardening, place attachment, displacement, urban transformation, critical urban theory