His name is José Luis Fernández Casadevante, but he introduces himself as Kois. “It’s a nickname. It is the name of a fish. They are Asian aquarium orange tents, ”he explains. They called his grandfather as a affectionate nickname, then his father, and then to him. “As generations have passed, some relatives have been removed. It seemed little serious, ”he says. But he has been reaffirming more and more around it.
He was born in Madrid (1978), graduated in Sociology, and has been enshrined as an international expert in food sovereignty. Neighborhood activism has had a fundamental role in its life and, for 15 years, participates in the community garden of its neighborhood, Vallecas. In him, he says, he has seen his son grow while the vegetables did. For five years, Kois and her partner, Nerea Morán – an architect -researcher and researcher for the promotion of agrarian uses of the territory from urban planning – submerged themselves in a research process that has culminated in HuertoPías: Ecoubranism, Social Cooperation and Agriculturewho has just published Captain Swing. For them, a simple plot can transform everything.
How did your relationship with the orchards and agriculture begin?
I have been in the Madrid neighborhood movement for twenty -one. As a result of finishing a very long fight in the neighborhood, we feel a kind of existential vacuum, and we think: ‘And now what do we do as an association?’ We had already met the first community garden in Madrid, which set up in the neighborhood of Pilar a few years before, and in 2010 we decided to ride one in our neighborhood. And I am a lot to play the game and try to narrate it at the same time. To reflect on the things in which I participate, and there the practical and research interest emerged a bit. I began to do all the jobs that I have been preparing at this time on the orchards. It was not an ‘inherited’ interest. Neither my parents nor my grandparents had orchards.
In the book he points out that ‘We are the landscape in which we socialize’. How many benefits can urban agriculture for mental health and physical health?
It is one of those activities that can transcend merely playful leisure. In the end, without realizing it, it causes us many benefits, both individual and collective. Right now urban agriculture is being used as complementary therapy from national health systems such as those in the United Kingdom or the United States. You go to the doctor and they can recommend you to go to the garden. Because? Because it combines moderate physical exercise, contact with nature, being outdoors … It is greatly recommended to people who have depression, anxiety, unwanted loneliness … they work very well to reconnect with life in a very broad sense.
They also allow to improve self -esteem, self -control mechanisms, patience, because they are not processes that you can force. You throw a seed and force you to have faith, hope that this will sprout, and you cannot accelerate the process. In addition, it also leads to changes in life styles, in relation, above all, with food.
He also explains how protagonist he can become a community garden in a neighborhood when boosting neighborhood ties and care.
Yes. It is also those places where people can get one in one and leave five in five. I think that is something that does not usually happen in other associative spaces. They are more inclusive places. There is no door. You through the fence see what is happening to the other side and, if you question you, nothing you stop, they invite you to enter. That also allows as a kind of construction of more heterogeneous communities, because it allows intergenerational dynamics. Retired people live with young people or children, and all intermediate age ranges. Or allow to incorporate with much more naturalness the migrant population.
It is a space that has ‘Tobogán’ dynamics, which drag you without realizing
You realize that the Earth is a very prone meeting space for different people to do a common activity. From growing plants and working in the rates, these relationships end up transcending. And all more collective social skills are generated, more management of a common space, to share resources, to collectively plan, and that leads to many people connecting with broader local associative fabrics that are outside the garden. It is a space that has ‘Tobogán’ dynamics, which drag you without you realizing to participate in other things in your neighborhood based on an interest that, in principle, was to eat what you had cultivated.
Working together with your neighbors with a shared objective can generate a kind of ‘collective self -esteem’ in the community, right?
Clearly. That is studied in countries such as the United States. Above all, in the humblest areas. There they are clear that these, apart from working with their own activity, have been the germ of a lot of other neighborhood struggles. When a community is able to launch a project, see that it is able to carry it forward and that it is successful, it is proposed that you can get other things. People realize that they can improve their environment, their living conditions, and then they are encouraged to get involved in other processes that can be much more ambitious. Let’s say that the garden is a space where ordinary changes can then lead to extraordinary changes.
Of all the cases you have investigated and studied, is there any that would highlight, whose story exemplifies how much a garden can transform a community?
The case of ‘Green Bronx Machine’. In the New York Bronx neighborhood, a teacher, Stephen Ritz, worked with a classroom of what would be here the ‘compensatory’ of an institute. Get to take the kids to the neighborhood, start riding community orchards, improving the urban landscape of their surroundings, which the neighborhood recognizes the kids and kids as positive transformation agents of their surroundings, and that the kids, through this Practice, reconnect with an activity that, as they like a lot, invites them not to miss class.
From that practice what Ritz does is transversalize all curricular contents from food cultivation and kitchen. Assemble an experimental classroom in which many foods are grown and cooked, and from there all mandatory matters can be worked. Get those kids and kids, which came from huge school failure rates, get a huge success rate. The project allowed him to win the ‘Nobel Prize in Education’, The Teacher Prize.
Thousands of trucks are entering daily that bring food from thousands of kilometers away and this, more than a strength, we should understand it as fragility, vulnerability
It also reflects on the great food security that these projects can offer. Do you think the food system, as conceived today, can be held a lot of more time?
All the people who investigate the food system from this more ecosocial optics are quite critical. Right now we have one completely dependent on fossil fuels. That is an invisible dependence that we do not perceive. We work from global supplies chains that are enormously shocking in environmental terms, and that, in addition, generate a whole series of asymmetries or dependencies of some territories over others. In terms of global economy, the hoarding of resources in the global north implies putting enormous surfaces of other territories at its service.
In the end we do not perceive from our artificialized environments how this system really works in which thousands of trucks are entering daily that bring food from thousands of kilometers away and this, more than a strength, we should understand it as a fragility, a vulnerability, understanding That science says that in the near future we will live with less resources, less energy, and in environmentally more complicated environments. Adapting to this evidence would imply redesign and relocate food systems. I believe that there urban agriculture is a piece that will help do this process and that will be important.
We live in a world where our attention is ‘kidnapped’ by social networks. In this context, how revolutionary can it take care of a garden?
The garden allows us a personal reflection space. It acts as a space in which we can think who we are, what we like, what is the meaning of our life, and share it with other people. There you disconnect from certain everyday inertia. It also happens in other practices such as hiking. Being in natural environments, our brain evades everyday problems, routines, and the inertia of thought. On the other hand, it also forces us to have moments of full concentration.
In the context in which we are, much of what we can do as individual people is to stop working as much as individuals and get to work more as groups, as communities, and the garden is a conducive place to start
And then the garden is revolutionary if we understand it not as a place to retire from the world but as one from which to intervene over reality. A place where communities gain prominence and activate, and not so much a place where we retire to evade already resign ourselves to a reality that has overcome us. The revolutionary gaze is to understand the garden as an attack and not as a withdrawal, as the poet Hamilton Hayne said.
More or less how long is it necessary in a week to attend an urban garden and where would I recommend starting someone who is considering it?
It depends on the surface of the garden. If it is a terrace garden, with a few hours a week it is more than enough. Another thing is a community garden. There, the work never ends. They are always susceptible to improvements and opportunities for beautification. But in the community orchards different intensities of participation coexist. There are people who are in the engine group of the projects, which are in the day to day, who cares about coordinating it, and people who go more occasionally.
If someone is interested, the first would be to find out what urban gardens he has close, approach to ask, and try. The same does not like the model, or he discovers a place where he will be happy and will meet interesting people. In the context in which we are, much of what we can do as people at the individual level is to stop working as much as individuals and get to work more as groups, as communities, and the garden is a conducive place to start.
#Kois #Sociologist #urban #garden #space #ordinary #extraordinary
