For the past 4 years I have attended this conference. I became interested in food and farming when I was doing my research and spent time with farmers in Strathspey. In London, with the People’s Land Policy, we have been promoting food growing in the city. The conference covers a wide range of issues including land justice and reform, agroecology, rewilding, and nature-friendly farming, and the problems of government policy. How land should be used is a central issue. Therefore, it attracts a variety of people, not just farmers.
For more information about the conference see: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNSHtMBQRdj842yU7QzI5Olcr8q_yy7Xo
This year at the conference, we presented a workshop called Commoning the City. Commoning is a way of bringing people together in the same space to ensure that land is used for the public benefit. Community land ownership would be an example of commoning.
Speakers included: Dee Woods from Granville Community Kitchen, Sarah Williams from Sustain, Ebany Dohle from Glasgow Community Food Network and Richard Lee from Southwark from Southwark Neighbourhood Planning Network.
Commoning of the City: How community growing and peri-urban farming could lead the way for food, land, and social justice in urban areas.
Our cities are sites of land struggles between those who would appropriate the wealth of the land for their personal gain, such as wealthy individuals, corporations and property developers, and the rest of us who have little access to land and struggle to make ends meet in a context of the rising cost of living. Many are beginning to question the takeover of our cities and are fighting back. One way in which resistance is shown is through the increase in food growing in the city or on the fringe, getting hold of land and providing food directly to people. These projects are often run on the principle of the Commons- that the resources are collectively owned and managed, and that decisions are made by everyone.
This session will look at some of these Commoning projects, how they set up and on what commoning principles, and consider how they can be up-scaled so as to challenge the power of the dominant landowners in the city. There will be discussion about overcoming barriers to commoning related to land access and governance. We will consider how the food growing projects practising commoning can link more closely with housing and environmental campaigners to build a movement that can effectively turn our cities into Commons- for social, ecological and food justice.
Here is a link to the presentation I gave to introduce the session:
Land for What? Land for Whom? 