‘Forced cultivation?’: Faces of acceleration in Polish community gardens
研究波兰社区花园中的时间冲突，揭示加速现象如何通过追赶西方、制度时间错位和加速土壤耕作三种面孔出现，并指出生产主义的人类中心逻辑如何殖民了本应对抗它的过程。
Community gardens are often projected as alternatives to individualism, neoliberalism and social acceleration. We interrogate these imaginaries through the practicalities of gardening, particularly gardeners’ relationships with soil, by focusing on the disjunctive temporalities of community gardens in Poland. Specifically, we explore how these gardens promote ‘forced cultivation’, understood as culturally and politically motivated interferences with ecological temporalities. Through this agricultural metaphor, we explore three faces of acceleration in community gardens: catching up with the West, out-of-sync institutional temporality and sped-up soil cultivation. The findings show that in most gardens, a linear historicity of modernisation is perpetuated; project temporalities often clash with the rhythms of vegetation, and soil is invisibilised and imported from elsewhere in order to deliver some of the promises gardens make. Our analysis of community gardens’ timescape reveals the paradoxical mechanisms whereby productivist anthropocentric logics colonise the very processes that were meant to counteract them.