One Little Piggy Went To Market… And Became a Citizen
Written by Jennifer Blake
On a Sunday morning in Marrickville, a trip down Addison Road would see a usually primarily empty lot transformed into a bustling market. Hippies and yuppies and puppies wander through, clutching string bags and green bags and canvas trolleys. Women marvel over rainbow silverbeet, men salivate over honey-cured bacon and children dance to off-key jazz. Couples and groups of mixed race, gender and orientation giggle at lambs and piglets in the petting zoo and sample organic cheese. On the surface it’s a picture of suburban bliss, but at its heart it’s symptomatic of a trend occurring in big cities all over the (developed) world: the reclamation of space for public use.
This trend is typified by the multiplication of farmer’s markets, community gardens, street kitchen gardens and collaborative urban art projects. It is a trend mostly driven from below, although hastily embraced by forward thinking local governments. And, consciously and unconsciously, it is expressing a conviction that citizenship in a city is concomitant with ownership of or (at least) investment in public space. It’s a backlash against the erosion of local citizenship caused by, among many things, the transnationalisation of food and labour markets, the increasing privatisation of leisure space and the diminished opportunities for interaction caused by the demise of local commerce.
It is a trend that harks back to the ideals expressed in the Green bans; that incorporates ideas about the rights connected with citizenship, individual welfare, and the value of public space for the private individual. The Green bans extended the imagining of social welfare and the rights denoted by citizenship beyond the economic conditions of man, and became concerned with his environmental conditions as well. Citizenship in a city included the right to a certain environment: to parks, to bushland and to low-cost housing. The Green bans acknowledged that the rights of a man or woman are intimately connected to the space in which he or she lives, and a right to that space is caught up in a man’s welfare.
Forty years later, we see citizens campaigning (using their voices and their dollars) to see the city for its use-value, not simply its exchange-value. Thus community groups (and lone graffiti artists) spray signs on vacant lots in Erskineville, demanding re-zoning for community gardening (just down the road from a Green Bans park, coincidentally). Citizens in Chippendale take matters into their own hands, Michael Mobbs beginning a nature-strip food gardening project that has seen three city blocks converted into a vegetable and fruit-growing oasis, with the assistance of Sydney City Council. Other efforts have been less successful, with a fruit and vege stand in Peace Park closed down for the lack of a permit last weekend.
Many of these attempts have been the labour of a few enlightened individuals – Mobbs is a perfect example, whose views about sustainability led him to put it into practice “we need to grow food where we live and work”. Their success is down to the enthusiasm of locals for climate-friendly food, local commerce and community interaction. Not all of these are conscious efforts at active citizenship, but enlightened or not, this is what they represent. They have thrived in the inner city where backyards are rapidly disappearing, sparking a return to community leisure as it has operated early last century. The City of Sydney Council have taken the challenge of active citizenship in public space up with enthusiasm – with many projects involving local food sustainability, and some more original art projects – two examples are I Heart Kings Cross (a communal urban knitting project) and Laneways by George, which has sought new uses for public urban space focussing on community and opportunity.
So next time you duck down to the local markets or marvel at a little bit of street art, remember that these are the things which empower us as citizens and connect us to our communities. And in this day and age, that’s not to be sniffed at.
