Ticket to paradise or how I learned to stop worrying and
love the transition: How urban farming initiatives are
changing the policy regime in Amsterdam
Research design
Name: John-Luca de Vries
Studentnumber: 10762779
Datum: July 6th, 2018
Word count: 15821
2
Introduction
The stability of urban food systems depends on a properly functioning global market, open trade routes, affordable energy and stable weather conditions, factors which will likely become less secure under the influence of climate change and ecological degradation (Fraser et al., 2005)(Moore, 2015). Urban Agriculture (UA) is an urban food production practice attaining more resilience in urban food systems by making cities less reliant on the import of food and the export of waste, more self-sufficient in food production, and by bringing a range of environmental and health benefits to the urban population (Bell & Cerulli, 2012). However, many structural barriers are still in place that make it difficult for the mainly small-scale community gardening initiatives to grow into a proper alternative food network. A lack of access to land, labor, water, seeds and technical support, or restrictive regulations and public health laws may act as barriers preventing the transformation of small-scale community gardening initiatives into a viable alternative urban food production system (Mourque, 2000)(Bell & Cerulli, 2012)(Roemers, 2014).
In the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular we can see that policy makers have started accommodating urban farmers by offering subsidies and giving the phenomenon more attention (Metaal et al., 2013)(Agenda Groen, 2015). Changing policy is central to reduce barriers that urban farmers run into because preconceptions of city planners and managers make it more difficult to institutionalize and expand farming in the city (Mourque, 2000, p. 120). Researchers into urban farming in Amsterdam are however unclear over the exact nature of the process through which urban farming practitioners and promoters interact with government institutions to influence policy (Roemers, 2014, p. 108). While a common infrastructure that connects UA practitioners, UA promoters and government institutions with each other is not available, making it difficult to put their issues on the government’s agenda (Stolk, 2015, p. 73), the policy climate in Amsterdam still seems to be becoming more conducive to the growth of urban farming. How is it possible that policy towards urban farming is becoming more favorable while the different actors in UA are not making a coordinated effort to change the policy landscape? And how exactly do existing barriers to change play into this process?
3 In this research project my goal is to understand how UA practitioners and UA promoters are overcoming barriers to growth and influencing the policy regime in Amsterdam. My core theoretical framework is derived from the field of transition studies, which aims to research how innovative social projects overcome barriers embedded in systemic practices by understanding how social innovations can transform these practices to enact a sustainability transition (Elzen & Wieczorek, 2005; Elzen, Geels, & Green, 2004; Grin, Rotmans, & Schot, 2010; Loeber, 2007; Loorbach, 2007; Olsthoorn & Wieczorek, 2006). The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) within this field of studies can aid us in understanding how processes interfering between the niche (novel practices) and the regime (consolidated structures) are re-directed by the coordinated agency of actors aiming to initiate structural change (Bos & Grin, 2012). Grassroot projects aimed at enacting structural changes in the urban regime may be connecting with each other and actors in the regime to access knowledge and physical infrastructures, governance arrangements, partnerships, market arrangements and so on, in ways that allow them to annul the restrictive influence of barriers embedded in the regime (Grin, 2017, p. 362).
Understanding this process of structural change requires us to first take a step back from the level of structural arrangements and to observe how UA practitioners and UA promoters are accessing arrangements in practice through their connections with each other and government institutions. Some problems do however become apparent when we want to utilize the MLP to detect practical ways in which agents use resources to attain political change on the policy level. One main line of scholarly criticism leveled at the MLP has been that the usage of the dichotomous concepts niche and regime obscures the interdependencies that exist between actors within a given field of practice (Smith, 2007). This recommendation mirrors the criticism formulated by Actor-Network Theory scholars on the ways in which mainstream social science attributes the source of social action to ‘powerful’ social structures. Utilizing an elaborate conceptual apparatus derived from theory when researching a particular instance of the social world can lead the social scientist to misconstrue the causes behind social action by
attributing causality to social structures, which thereby become an explanandum sui generis (Callon, 1984)(Latour, 2005)(Law, 2009). The social context within which networks of actors operate has then
4 become an explanatory variable without precisely explicating how networks ‘generate’ power through the network itself.
One example of research in the field of transition studies that has attempted to deal with this theoretical flaw comes from Hoffman & Loeber (2016), who made huge steps forward by developing a relational perspective on the way in which niche and regime transform each other through the power struggles that actors engage in over time (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016, p. 2). Their research aims to break down the dichotomy between niche and regime by showing how regime and niche actors form networks together to access resources to influence the formation of a newly developing practice (ibid; pp. 16-17). While succeeding in flattening the construction of political agency by locating it in a network bridging the divide between niche and regime in the empirical reality, the authors did not bring translation processes between both levels into view without resorting to placeholder concepts such as fields and
structures that are utilized as an explanandum sui generis. A methodologically pure ANT study might
allow us to avoid this problem by constructing agency by ‘following the actors’ without making any
a-priori assumptions about the sources of causality. This would however strictly limit us in our capacity to
make any a-posteriori theoretical generalizations utilizing the MLP to indicate the figuration of the social structures in which actor-networks are embedded.
We want to prevent obscuring the exact nature of the power relations between actors in the domain of urban farming by making premature theoretical statements. We make use of Actor-Network Theory to give us initial sensitizing concepts that we may use to render this process traceable from a relational perspective without obscuring these relations. In ANT, power is operationalized as the ability to achieve an outcome through the support of a network (Page, 2010, p. 14). Achieving political
outcomes necessitates access to resources such as knowledge and physical infrastructures. We cannot however attribute an a-priori ontological status as social structures sui generis to these resources without instantly reifying the dichotomy between structure and agency (Latour, 2005, p. 67, p. 85, pp. 168-171). Instead we view resources as performatively constructed interdependent bundles of stabilized
5 operationalization brings the resource concept closer in line with Latour’s use of the actor-network as a conceptual tool to deploy the connections between human and non-human actors that give shape to their combined agency (ibid; p. 136).
In this research project we propose to utilize concepts from ANT and the MLP explicitly as
sensitizing concepts that we use to make inferential statements about the sources of political agency in the
domain of urban agriculture in Amsterdam. We follow Blumer (1954) his original insight that
sociologists must prevent making problematic ‘scientific’ statements about the nature of reality with a concept that is insufficiently grounded in empirical data (Blumer, 1954). Any of the concepts that we will define later in our operationalization should be taken as a temporary indication which we use to give some direction to our methodical inquiries. We thereby hypothesize that there are certain barriers embedded in larger structures that constrain political agency, that actors can utilize resources to overcome these barriers, and that actors can influence policy by aiming their action at barriers utilizing particular resources. My main interest in this research project is in understanding how actors in UA utilize relationships with other human and non-human actors as resources to overcome structural barriers and achieve lasting political influence. How do UA promoters & practitioners utilize resources to influence the decision-making processes of the Amsterdam municipality? Which role do government representatives interacting with UA promoters & practitioners play in this process? And by which factors is the ability of UA promoters & practitioners to achieve their common goals constrained?
Methodology
We start off the research with a qualitative inquiry into our first research question, into the ways in which UA promoters & practitioners make use of resources to influence policy. This inquiry begins with a literature study through the available research on UA in Amsterdam to analyse whether any of the indications in our research assumptions and theory have a relation to phenomena in the domain that we are investigating. Stolk (2015) identifies three main groups of actors implicated in the drafting of UA policy in Amsterdam: urban farming practitioners, urban farming promoters, and government
6 of Urban Agriculture. We will perform semi-structured interviews with these actors, identifying key players during the interviews and by choosing respondents through snowball sampling. We will start our research inquiries from two community gardening initiatives; Voedseltuin IJplein in Amsterdam-Noord, a community gardening initiative, and ‘Pluk! De groenten van West’ in Amsterdam-West, which is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiative. They will be the starting position from which we aim to chart whether and how political agency is already manifesting itself in the domain of Urban Agriculture in Amsterdam.
Structural elements of the regime only become visible within ANT in so far as they are represented by specific regulations, language, needs, or laws that constrain or enable the agency of actors within the domain of urban farming. Data collection will focus on participant observation and interview research in which we try to figure out the exact ways in which resources contribute to the attainment of change in structural elements of the regime. We will try and establish which main factors are the focus of these actions in Amsterdam through work in data collection at different moments, one of which will be a workshop that municipal workers and people in domain urban farming think up concrete deliverables for achieving a bigger role for urban farming in Amsterdam. Seeing as this is a partial ANT study, it is our objective to trace a network consisting of human and non-human actors, and how this contributes to political agency. This means that we will also do online and literary research to see which actors and actants contribute to the construction of the actor-network.
We will use Atlas.ti to code the 22 interviews that I undertook after having transcribed them utilizing the concepts that we have established in the preceding operationalization. After entering into the field, I quickly concluded that the separation between urban farming promoters and practitioners often is impossible to make. The interviews that I undertook for this research project consist of thirteen interviews, two with urban farming practitioners, ten with people working as both practitioners and promoters, and two with government representatives. While I originally planned to get a bigger sample of government representatives, I quickly found out that it was a lot harder to arrange interviews with relevant players. Apart from that I found that urban farming is considered a very young domain in
7 terms of policy, making it hard to find people with enough experience with the matter. Some of the interview data has already been collected in a previous research project that I undertook in Voedseltuin
IJplein at the start of this year. The study is a first attempt by an inexperienced student at an
actor-network theory account in which I attempted to describe how the different actors involved in a community garden may influence the participation of actors from the surrounding neighborhood. The research project was a mixed methods inquiry, creating further difficulties as Latourians are generally vehemently opposed to quantifying data. The data may now be used to further our understanding of how this community garden relates to the broader urban farming network in Amsterdam.
Our research paradigm is fundamentally pragmatic as we want to combine concepts from two theoretical paradigms which are often viewed as at odds with each other. Pragmatism as a research paradigm accepts philosophically that there are singular and multiple realities open to empirical enquiry, orienting itself to solve practical problems in the ‘real world’ (Feilzer, 2010). It aims to interrogate a research question with the research method that is most fitting to the problem at hand, to establish a knowledge which is relative and transitory, never absolute (ibid; pp. 13-14). We take the base pragmatic position that theoretical concepts in ANT and the MLP can be used as sensitizing concepts which may fit better or worse to the empirical context that we are researching. Pragmatism allows us to integrate the theoretical perspectives we have included up to this point not as an absolute truth but as a transitory conceptual system which we may use to describe certain dynamics in the empirical reality.
Operationalization
We already briefly discussed the use of the concept actor-network, which is defined by Latour solely as a methodological tool to draw associations between human and non-human actors. Latour does not grant the actor-network an ontological status, but instead views it as a metaphor that can be used to model the traces left by actors in the process of re-defining their relationships to each other (Latour, 2005). When Michel Callon refers to an actor-network he describes a network which is itself an actor constituted of heterogeneous elements and a network that can re-define and transform what it is made of (Callon,
8 1987). This network can be made up of both actors and actants, actants being a more general term
meaning ‘anything that makes an actor do something’ (Latour, 2005, p. 55). This network can be made up of people, organizations and groups, information- and communication technologies, textual accounts, legislation, buildings, the bricks out of which a building is laid, the food which feeds the people there, and the organisms involved to create the food. What is commonly viewed in sociology as ‘the social’ only becomes visible as a movement between elements of the network producing new associations (Latour, 2005, p. 8).
The way in which ANT characterizes the relationship between different entities in a
heterogenous network problematizes the view of resources as fixed entities which an actor can access in a routine fashion. Avelino & Rotmans (2009) conceptualize power as the ability of actors to mobilize resources to attain political objectives. If we wish to understand how actor-networks in the world of urban agriculture are generating power, then it is necessary to consider how these resources are ‘constructed’ by actors. We propose the somewhat unconventional usage of an operationalization of the resource concept that comes from an ANT study within the field of strategic management. One of the questions that Steen (2010) poses in his article is into the way in which heterogenous bundles of people, technologies, documents, and other entities become the stabilized building blocks that a firm can use to adapt strategically to the changing world that it finds itself in. A central notion within this process of stabilization is caught within the concept of translation. Translation refers to the process by which an entity that has one role or meaning in one situation comes to mean another in association with different entities (Callon, 1995). Latour describes this process as ‘a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into co-existing’ (Latour, 2005, p. 108). A mediator is an element in a network that fundamentally changes the inputs that flow through it, while an intermediary only faithfully
transmits causality (ibid; p. 39). A chain of translations brings together mediators and intermediaries into performing a stable actor-network which becomes calculable and dependable as the foundation for agency.
9 The process of translation is the main phenomenon which we want to study as the process of stabilization is important for our understanding of the interrelations between the relatively unstable
niches and more stable regimes. Hoffman & Loeber (2016) demonstrate that changes in practices are
always a result of interactions between niche and regime actors forming new actor-networks around an unfolding object of knowledge. This object of knowledge is any evolving scientific practice that expands through actor-networks indefinitely, acquiring new properties and changing the ones they have (Knorr-Cetina, 2001). Hoffman & Loeber found out in the case of the greenhouse sector that more powerful institutional players were able to disproportionately influence the expression of the innovative practice into social space (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016, p. 18). One advantage that regime actors have over niche actors in the process of articulating innovation is their ability to tap into structural power, showing that ‘the act in consolidation of change in standing practices notably involves creativity on the part of ‘vested interest’
actors (or ‘regime-players’), rather than—and in addition to—creativity demonstrated by the innovators (‘niche-players’)(ibid; p. 17).
The common element shared by the ANT study of Steen and by Hoffman & Loeber is that both focus on the ways in which practices become consolidated over time, with Steen the conceptualization of resources in his research paper explicating the importance of having stabilized relationships of people, texts, technologies and organisms available to influence the consolidation of emerging practices. Culture can become a resource for example if it has been fabricated in such a way that it routinizes the behaviour of firm employees to the degree that their conduct becomes calculable (Steen, 2010, pp. 328-329).
Setting foot in the garden
Let us now start by introducing the two research cases from which we start our inquiries in the field, Fruittuin van West, located in Amsterdam-West created and managed by the organization CityPlot, aims to support urban food production through communal agricultural plots, and Voedseltuin IJplein, managed by the cooperative Voedseltuin IJplein. Voedseltuin IJplein is a community garden located in the North of Amsterdam that tries to bring together people from the neighborhood to produce organic
10 fruits and vegetables for the local food bank. Starting out my field research I wasn’t exactly sure where I would have to start to map this network of urban farmers in Amsterdam. I googled around on the internet, and found a website containing all community gardening initiatives in Amsterdam. This brought me to send out e-mails to a couple of these initiatives which brought me into contact with Ann Doherty for the first time, who is the main organizer of Pluk! De groenten van west. Fate would have it that there was a meeting that evening in a place called Nieuwland in the East of Amsterdam in which different leaders of community gardens in Amsterdam would gather to hold presentations concerning the work that they were doing in Amsterdam. Ann invited me to come over and this started out my foray into this developing actor-network for the first time in earnest, at this event organized by ASEED as an info-night. ASEED, Action for Solidarity, Environment, Equality and Diversity is an NGO that has been around since the first climate summit in Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. The NGO plays a central role in the development of the Amsterdam urban farming network as will become apparent throughout this account.
This evening I started finding out that there was an active scene in Amsterdam aiming to spread the practice of urban farming through the city of Amsterdam by supporting different community gardening initiatives. At this point in time my research objective was mainly to find out what kind of politics was underlying these changes in the food system which I was reading about in the literature. One of the first people that I ended up talking to was an older woman sitting at a table who introduced herself to me as Annemarie Verschoor. Later in the conversation I found out that this was the same Annemarie that I had send an e-mail to earlier that day asking her whether she would be okay with me doing a research project at the garden that she was leading, Voedseltuin IJplein. This evening I also met Ann Doherty, Eduard Hernandez, and Toby Jones, who I will find out are all playing a part as actors promoting urban farming as a function in the policy of the Amsterdam municipality. What I was finding out was that the people that were working to promote their gardens to the public as a way to find volunteers and funding that are necessary to keep the project running. The municipal support for these gardens is minimal and consists of subsidies that are allocated to the gardeners, and what the meeting at
11 Nieuwland mainly seemed to function as is as a mediator in an expanding network bringing together different parties under a shared identity and objective. I was observing how the NGO ASEED was tied together to the different projects here with Eduard Hernandez promoting the different initiatives as expressions of the concept of ‘food sovereignty’, which appeared to me as a concept tying together the identities of the different actors present at the meeting. Political engagement seemed to be strong as the concept expresses support for movements of farmers around the world to gain access to the means of agricultural production, such as the global Campesino movement (Cadieux & Slocum, 2015).
Making my first steps into an actual community garden looking for the kind of political energy that I had felt at this meeting during the cold and rainy month of February turned out differently than I had expected. What I mainly tried to understand in the interviews that I did with the people from Voedseltuin IJplein is whether there is any politics underlying their work in the gardens. While I found out that their political leanings are all relatively similar, namely towards GroenLinks, a Dutch green party, most of the gardeners seemed to be apprehensive to share my language of transition thinking. While the transition thinker in me was quick to assign their community gardening to the larger process of revolutionary structural change, they expressed that their gardening was mainly just a healthy, fun way to spend recreational time. One of my respondents told me the following in an interview when I referenced the contribution of community gardens to a sustainability transition: I think you’re way ahead
of the curve. It’s a process that goes with small steps… I don’t know where I’m picking it up but in the future food is going to have to be more localized when we’re not going to be able to fly it in from Argentina anymore. But it’s a gradual process. This confirms the findings from Wageningen University into community gardening
projects, stating that politics is not one of the main motivating factors for gardeners to engage in community gardening activities (Van de Klippe, 2015). Any attitude towards the municipality was usually quite positive, with gardeners speaking of subsidies that had been becoming available since the Green Agenda (Agenda Groen) had been introduced in 2015. The gardeners were talking about perceived momentum for urban farming which had made it a lot easier for them to get the money and resources that they needed to keep the garden going now considered with a couple of years earlier.
12 Politicians and civil servants seemed so much more eager to help out than they had in the earlier years since the establishment of the garden.
One thing that I was becoming very aware of during this initial research project was the tendency I had to use quasi-scientific language of sociology to say things about my research subjects which felt hurtful or demeaning once I would put them into a language which they could actually clearly understand. One incredible insight that Actor-Network Theory allows us to bring into the research account is the role that the researchers themselves act out in the process of translation. Social theorizing is often blind towards the degree to which theories performatively impact the research subjects that it is attempting to describe (Latour, 2005, p. 34). When a researcher says someone is a certain way while this isn’t actually the case, this researcher might be tempted to smother feedback from the respondents saying ‘this is not who we are’, under a layer of technical mumbo-jumbo. When finishing up the
interview with Annemarie we spoke briefly about the previous research project I had undertaken in the Voedseltuin. After some questionable research decisions, I had moved from a mainly political research question into one considering the effects of the ‘homogeneity of the actor-network upon the
participation of neighborhood residents in the community garden’. Talking with her a couple of months after the initial research project, I realized that there is a danger inherent in research in that we might risk creating conflict where there initially is none by imposing theoretical frameworks upon a situation when we do not find the story that we set out to begin with.
Returning to a now flourishing garden in the summertime I wanted to do it differently this time. Latour states the importance for ANT scholars to always “follow the actors in their own ways,
beginning our travels by the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups” (Latour, 2005, p. 29). And of course I wanted to make uncle Louis proud this time around. My
inclination was to try and discover political processes by zooming in at the relations that the gardeners had with actors outside of the garden, asking them about the municipality, project developers and relations with other community gardens, instead of trying to impose politics on a stable community, which risks problematizing groups having reached a degree of internal cohesion. Michel Callon describes
13 in a famous research paper how researchers can make themselves into obligatory passage points in an actor-network by creating a problematization that only their expertise can resolve (Callon, 1984). Aware of my own function as a researcher, I therefore decided never to use the language of the Multi-Level Perspective but tried to see whether the dynamics emerged from the field, opting for an unstructured interview style to accommodate the actors’ own perspective.
The gardeners seemed mostly cynical about their prospects of resisting when the municipality would decide to allocate a different function to the location of their garden in the bestemmingsplan. A
bestemmingsplan, or a destination plan, is a legally binding document that precisely explicates the
different functions that can be allocated to an area of land, specifying precisely what types of places or buildings can be allocated to an area (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2018a). Annemarie said that they were aware that it was important to work on ‘explicating the value’ of the garden towards the municipality as a safeguard against future project development. The area is designated in the destination plan as a green destination, but the area is not part of the groene hoofdstructuur, the minimal amount of green that the city of Amsterdam has to designate as such, making its position more vulnerable to political maneuvers (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2018c).
“You can’t do much about it [project development]. Except pay attention and make sure that you utilize every occasion you can to explicate the value of something like this, staying in contact with organizations that are bigger than yourself. Making sure you have a network, and when someone says ‘alright let’s get rid of it’, that you have enough people saying ‘well not so fast’.” - Annemarie, Voedseltuin IJplein.
According to Bruno Latour, every social instance is the product of localizers that structure the situation by transporting some effect from other interactions onto the scene under observation (Latour, 2015, p. 194). This community garden is being performed as a product of a combination of different actors and actants such as certain contacts that supplied the gardeners with equipment and seeds, and a constant enthusiastic base of volunteers working to tend the garden, along with access to knowledge resulting from their embeddedness in a a larger network made up of academics, government representatives such
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Fig. 1 - Voedseltuin IJplein during Winter. (photo, me).
as the gebiedsmakelaar, and other people ‘in the right places’ making sure that the interests of the community are safeguarded against any encroachment from project development in the area. When people caught wind of plans from the municipality to demolish and rebuilt some of the apartment blocks that neighborhood residents in IJplein were living in, a large delegation of people from neighborhood and garden alike went to information meetings at the townhall of Stadsdeel Noord. At one of these meetings I observed how the city planners tried to use scientific language that detailed their expertise the plans that had been laid out, an expression of the appeal to ‘Science’ as an authoritative argument that excludes voices coming from different domains (Latour, 2004). The gardeners responded with an explication of the value of Voedseltuin IJplein as a meeting place for people from different cultural backgrounds, and a place with an important social function as a producer for the food bank. The neighborhood and the food bank therefore act as localizers that support the continued existence of the garden by granting the garden legitimacy, with the garden returning the favor by acting as a localizer towards these other actors by granting them important functions that are necessary for their continued sustenance.
15 Having spent my share of time in the Voedseltuin I departed on to another sliver of paradise called the Fruittuin van West to meet with Ann Doherty who is running Pluk! De groenten van West, a community-supported agriculture project that is based on permaculture principles and aims to deliver organic fruits and vegetables to the members of the project. Ann Doherty is a council member of Aseed, and she coordinates the organization Cityplot that tries to encourage city residents to grow their own herbs, fruits and vegetables, believing that it is possible to grow food on all scales around the city-landscape. Permaculture is a design science and philosophy that underlies the work of Cityplot, which aims to create systems of natural production that are self-sustaining by allowing social functions to emerge from evolutionary processes integrated with ecosystems (Mollison, 1988). The CSA project is a space where Ann and the other gardeners bring together the transformative objectives of both
organizations in a practice informed by this alternative view of organizing food production, predicated on the availability of a community in which knowledge is shared and seeds are exchanged.
One of the ways in which a mediator may function in an actor-network is as a being that brings together people into a collective, acting as a connector that allows a group to manifest itself (Latour, 2005, p. 24). Through my conversations with Ann Doherty and Eduard Hernandez I became aware of a festival called ‘Reclaim the seeds’ which was held at the Fruittuin van West last March, in which several hundred people came together to celebrate diversity of seeds. While Ann tells me in the interview that people in the garden aren’t consciously doing political organizing, she is aware of the effect that festivals like this can have on local politicians. In some way you reach the politicians that way. Either that they attend
these fora, and see things are happening on the local level, and that they should pay attention to them. Or that they feel the pressure, like with de Boterbloem, they were like 'oh actually we can't just do that'. It is during this
conversation that I am introduced to the case of De Boterbloem, when Ann tells me that the festival attendants were being brought together for an organized bike ride to an organic care farm in the area, called De Boterbloem, or Buttercup Farm, whose tenure position has since a couple of years become threatened, as a show of support to their cause. In this way the Reclaim the seeds festival could become a connector which acted as a conduit for connecting the struggle that Buttercup farm was finding itself in.
16 Another important connection that the garden was making was with different universities such as Wageningen University & Research, a famous Dutch university specialized in agriculture &
environment, as she told me that the gardeners themselves liked to keep conversation simple by not getting too deep into theoretical paradigms even when many gardeners had direct connections to these universities. Direct work at the policy level and the utilization of knowledge as a resource are not a pre-occupation for the gardeners and Ann Doherty, as I asked her about the usage of the ecosystem services paradigm as a resource in the political process. She confirmed that she’d seen a rapport on the topic and that this paradigm was quite useful as an argument when dealing with the municipality wanting to build more housing instead of green, as the ecosystem services paradigm shows that green can often deliver higher real economic value than other functions (Braat & De Groot, 2012). She pointed me in the
direction of a professor from Wageningen University called Arnold van der Valk working directly at the policy level in Amsterdam, based in the AMS institute located in Het Tropenmuseum. This professor had serendipitously gotten involved in the case of de Boterbloem through a video that he had decided to shoot detailing the land struggles that de Boterbloem had gotten into which had subsequently been banned by Wageningen University because the content supposedly contained ‘incorrect information’ (NRC, 2018).
The clip is part of a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) by the AMS Institute and details how the Buttercup farm becomes embroiled in a corruption scandal tied to a change in the land use destination after the land surrounding the farm had been sold to project developers for a large profit (WUR, 2018). Van der Valk approaches the matter from a conflict perspective and raises questions regarding the often perceived technical-rational nature of the planning process:
“Urban planning is more than just a technical-rational task in the hands of professionals in spatial planning. Planning processes inherently involve a political dimension. Different stakeholders co-determine what the urban environment will look like in the future… What this case tells us is that decisions on the use of urban space do not simply and immediately follow from rational-technical planning procedures enacted by planning experts. Citizens
17
and other stakeholders engage in a sometimes fierce struggle for their preferred uses of land, for their dreams about the future of a particular part of urban space.” (WUR, 2018).
The importance of being embedded in a larger network as a means of safeguarding the continuity of an urban farming project, along with the awareness that any occasion should be grasped for detailing the value of the project, are a show of both the precarious nature of the urban farming project within the municipality, as well as the potential there is for resisting project development by trying to give voice to different values in society. Dr. van der Valk is himself an occasional gardener at
Voedseltuin IJplein, and he brought together gardeners from this garden to come to the aid of another
threatened garden called Ubuntu, which came up in both the conversation with Ann Doherty and Annemarie. This potential for mobilization embedded in the network is especially relevant as the city of Amsterdam seems to be in the middle of a growth period in which real estate values are skyrocketing and existing green spaces outside of the main green structure are increasingly becoming threatened by project development (Milikowski, 2018).
Fig 2. Arnold van der Valk presenting the Boterbloem case in the video in question (WUR, 2018).
Let us introduce another useful ANT term into the account. A controversy is a moment in which a-priori orientations and understandings of the world become uncertain due to changes in the way in which ideas and people come together (Latour,2005)(Martorell, 2017). Dr. van der Valk’s video turned out to be one representation of the controversy that de Boterbloem was finding itself in, by showing that
18 actors on opposite sides were mobilizing in a struggle for land centered around different values that translate into different visions for land functions. This main controversy was turned into a resource serving the political process as it allowed actors in the domain of urban farming to articulate a common identity and interests towards the public, politicians and different stakeholders. The Dutch newspaper NRC published one news article when the video was removed, a hit piece shaming Wageningen University, and another article once the video had been re-uploaded to the internet, prompting
Wageningen to issue an apology towards van der Valk, legitimizing the controversy that de Boterbloem found was mobilizing itself around (NRC 2018a-b).
Out of the garden and into the frying pan
Following up on these conversations I was becoming more interested about the role of festivals as resources in this mobilization process, so I decided to pay a visit to the Food Autonomy Festival, organized by ASEED in May as a space where people could come together to learn about growing food, land access, and ‘sharing enthusiasm for a collective future’. The festival was organized at Vrijstaat
Bajesdorp, a squatting camp at the Bijlmerbajes which is currently set for eviction by the Amsterdam
municipality. The place looked truly different from anything I had seen before up to this point in my life, with a beautiful combination of buildings partially reclaimed by the trees and plants that were growing all around the terrain and through the creases of the crumbled walls and wooden fences that surrounded the enclave.
Listening to lectures and panel discussions I learned many more things about the case of de
Boterbloem from Alies & Trijntje, the two women who are the main organizers of the protests we
discussed earlier. Their presentation acquainted me with some of the language that was important in protesting the situation of de Boterbloem, mainly talking about ‘big money’, ‘large project developers’, ‘corrupt politicians’ and ‘business parks’ as signifiers of the problems that de Boterbloem was facing. Other speakers originated from a collectivized area of land in France called Lazare that had been occupied in protest of an airstrip that was planned to be brought to the area, in whose discourse I heard
19 many words which made me tremble ever so slightly. ‘Anti-spacist’, ‘communism’, ‘collectivization’, ‘anti-capitalism’, examples of collecting statements, which are utterances that perform the social by creating a justification for certain actions, standardizing the steps that are necessary to undertake the re-assembly of a collective (Latour, 2005 p. 232). The festival space appears to emanate a problem-definition that is clear-cut in its oppressor/oppressed structure and vague in outlining what the enemy precisely looks like, focusing on the effects of capitalism on the environment, the power of corporations over the food chain, and the effects of industrial agriculture on ecosystem degradation.
One thing that became apparent to me during the festival was that the discussions, language and words fell within a particular narrative that was distinguishable to me, a tiny outsider with the gaze of an ANT, as a panorama. A panorama is an ANT concept that refers to totalizing images produced by actor-networks that organize societies along the lines of a sense-making narrative (Latour, 2015, p. 187). These exclude viewpoints which are incommensurable with the inner consistency of the narrative, crowding out local antagonisms for a consistent frame that explains everything within its boundaries. When one of the panel members responded to a point that was mentioned by an attendant to a discussion on food sovereignty on the potential that technology and vertical farming might have in relation to the question of feeding a growing world population, the narrative was quickly ‘corrected’ again by two of the other participants in the panel discussion, after which the point was not taken up again. During this discussion the term ‘eco-modernists’ came up time and again tied to a dystopian image in which ‘everyone would be living in technologically advanced cities and no one would be living on the land anymore’. This frame can be traced back to a highly influential document called the
Eco-modernist manifesto, a strong example of a panorama, which makes a convincing and radical case for
humans to leave the land for settlement in highly technologically advanced, self-sufficient cities (Various authors, 2015).
Discussing this instance with Toby Jones, an urban farming promoter and researcher who was moderating this panel discussion at the time, Toby explicated that he perceived the ‘correction’ as a decision by one of the panel members to choose one narrative over another based on a preference for
20 “more open, accessible forms” of urban agriculture, reasoning that “[the panel member] may have perceived these luxury apartments with one tower producing food as something accessible to that community”, but perhaps not so much to the other people that were participating in the discussion at the time. Jones wrote a research piece in which vertical farming is discussed as a potential extension of the urban agriculture practice in Amsterdam, which details a case wherein students from Wageningen University participate in a ‘Design the Greenhouse’ challenge sponsored by AMS and ABN-AMRO for one of the towers of the Bijlmerbajes (Jones, 2018). In this research piece he describes how refugees and entrepreneurs currently inhabit the towers but that there had been no mention of these vulnerable groups in any of the plans presented for the Greenhouse Challenge.
What was put forward to drown out the utility of vertical farming was the idea that inside these technological facilities it would be impossible to bring the same care to the fruits and vegetables as could be accomplished in a patch of land. Toby remarked that much of the hostility towards the vertical farming idea may have had to do with the tendency for these kinds of techno-environmentalist
narratives to exclude the social component, thereby excluding groups of people with a different vision for the ways in which these projects should be organized. What this discussion amounts to is an interesting question of the effect of framing on local instances, because panorama’s may act as localizers in the sense that they structure a discussion to favour some words, images, examples, metaphors and perspectives while excluding others, where different frames can be carried by actors who may try to shield a discussion from the determining effects of certain localizers embedded in the actor-network.
What I started wondering about was whether these squatted spaces such as Nieuwland and the Food Autonomy Festival at Bajesdorp that had been created as a meeting place for people sharing the auspices of this panorama would ever be an appropriate meeting place for the people to build a network that is able to influence policy, namely a network that is capable of enrolling politicians. When speaking with Eduard Hernandez he described the importance of squatted “social centers that provide spaces to be critic in a political way, in an environmental way and a social way”. While these social centres were clearly bringing together people who had a critical outlook on the political system and realities of
21 environmental degradation, it seemed to me that even when the political process consists of a struggle it is nonetheless extremely important to enrol politicians into an actor-network when resources embedded into the regime are to be accessed. Here at the Food Autonomy Festival I ran into Tanja den Broeder of
Eetbaar Amsterdam, Edible Amsterdam, an NGO that is aiming to connect urban farming and food
initiatives to create a regional urban farming network. She described the main problem in the food network as the outcome of a process of deliberation that aimed at collecting the kinds of support from the municipality that would allow them to sustain urban farming initiatives over a longer period of time. What was central in this process was their attempt at enrolling civil servants and wethouders, aldermen, in the networks themselves as a way of securing the necessary inputs to keep the processes going, such as subsidies, licenses and legislations.
Tanja detailed to me the efforts of the platform, the association of pioneering urban famers in Amsterdam, in setting up a Stadslandbouwloket which would create one central location from which all subsidies and inquiries concerning urban farming would be managed. Efforts from Platform Eetbaar Amsterdam and other actors form 2012 onward, assembled input for the Food Vision (2014) developed under wethouder, alderman Freek Ossel (Wonen en Wijken, Grote stedenbeleid, Armoedebeleid, Openbare Ruimte en Groen, Haven en Westpoort). As the Food Vision was finalised by the city counsil in 2014, de Partij voor de Dieren forwarded an amendement to secure a Stadslandbouwloket and allocate a dedicated budget (€ 80.000,00) for it.
Tanja detailed her political strategies consisting of creating gatherings and programs in Pakhuis
de Zwijger, of which one was called Prototyping the Food Council, and putting in large amounts of
energy enrolling civil servants, politicians, urban farming practitioners, and promoters, only to see these swiped away at the very moment that a new coalition led by D66 took residence in the city council, appointing a new Wethouder Duurzaamheid of D66 named Abdulheb Choho, who wiped away all the work that had been put in at that point towards realizing the Food Vision. This occurrence was confirmed to me in an interview that I had with Tjerk Dalhuizen from Voedsel Anders and several other interviewees, who described how a Food vision was developed by different players in the municipality
22 four years ago, after which the entire plan was wiped off the table because food wasn’t one of the
priorities of the new alderman. The Stadslandbouwloket was kept on the agenda and developed into 'Van Amsterdamse Bodem' one and a half year later, a website for information about food initiatives instead of the original intended 'one stop shopping facility' dealing with licence and authorization for urban farming initiatives. An earlier 'co-creation' effort to create a stadslandbouwloket had failed with partners Cities, De Gezonde Stad, ANMEC, Platform Eetbaar Amsterdam and the municipality. Agreements about roles, responsibilities, transparency of the process etc., with other words 'conscious contracting', did not reach fulfilment.
In the years that followed Eetbaar Amsterdam, who had transformed itself into a foundation, put less time and energy in political oriented initiatives, like the renewed efforts of Arnold van der Valk to develop a network creating a better position for urban farming in the region, under the banner of the
Voedselraad MRA, or Food Council MRA (Metropole Region Amsterdam). By connecting small food
producers, industrial farmers, corporations, governments and NGO’s the Food Council MRA ‘aims to
accelerate transition towards a sustainable society and change the ways we perceive food’ (Food Council RMA,
2018). In an interview that I did with dr. Van der Valk at the AMS (Amsterdam Metropolitan Studies) Institute, van der Valk told me about his career as a professor of planning at Wageningen University. When I mentioned my thesis supervisor dr. John Grin to him he told me that it was the Multi-Level Perspective which first brought him to trade Wageningen for the AMS Institute in Amsterdam, because he experienced WUR at that time as institutionally poorly adapted to the more socially transformative perspective brought in by the MLP. The ‘transition terminology’ had become a common frame of reference for anyone working in Amsterdam trying to transform the food system, according to van der Valk, even serving ‘as a way of recognizing as a part of which club the people I meet with identify themselves,
giving a name to powers which we before couldn’t find the right words for’.
This phenomenon points towards an interesting feedback loop between the ways in which scientific theories relate to the social realities that they are aiming to describe. In Actor-Network Theory the relationship between science, nature and politics is a central controversy that is being
23 resolved by the role that social scientists play within an actor-network as co-producers of the collective, using science to delineate the group boundaries that tie together an actor-network (Latour, 2005, p. 253). When we consider that the Multi-Level Perspective does not only function as a scientific theory, but simultaneously as a tool for bringing together people with a shared vision of a society that can be transformed, transition theory itself becomes a resource in the translation process allowing an actor-network to be deployed.
This complicates my relationship as a researcher to the political process within the domain of urban farming in Amsterdam that I’m aiming to describe. Recognizing the niche-regime in a more socio-technical setting shows a great danger to be unaware of the impacts that a theory such as this has when using it as a researcher in the research situation. There are certain metaphors that we may use to describe aspects of the social reality which render parts of the world visible and other parts of the world invisible. These metaphors can be very powerful, and we must be very careful when we introduce them into a research situation because they have a structuring effect as localizers on the research situation that we are considering. Especially now that we are replacing the traditional research subjects consisting of marginalized groups in society that sociologists may give a voice with experts and scholars from renowned universities around the country becoming our research subjects (Latour, 2005 p. 98). These experts have a tendency to reject the ‘social’ labels we attach to their efforts, while our traditional research groups often weren’t prone to bringing this kind of voice to the table.
I experienced this first hand in a meeting between Arnold and Jan de Kock, an entrepreneur connecting farmers in Brabant directly to consumers in main cities around the country, wherein Arnold described the situation that he found himself where he had to enrol different players into the network of the Food Council MRA, actors in the food production niches, such as urban farmers, farmers in the metropole region, and larger industrial farming complexes, businesses and the government. Arnold detailed the problem as it lay before him using the concepts of the niche and regime, stating that there are certain players on the niche level who were trying to exploit the recognition by large food players in the
24 fruits and vegetables. Jan de Kock took the story about complex interrelations between different actors on different stratums of the social structure and used an alternative metaphor to help Arnold organize the incredibly complicated landscape using the metaphor of the lifeworld and the systemworld. While the metaphor was clearly helping bring some order into a playing field which was becoming increasingly complex, I found that I had an incredibly hard time keeping up with the complexity of the discussion between these professionals, often resorting to looks of wide-eyed bafflement when the participants at the table asked me for my input on the matter. At this point I intuitively took a step back and decided to use the metaphors that they utilized in a faithful manner without imposing my own interpretation upon the situation.
When bringing up the potential for Eetbaar Amsterdam and Food Council MRA to work together on bringing urban farming initiatives in Amsterdam into a central network in a different meeting with Arnold and Toby, dr. van der Valk responded with the idea that “there might indeed still be some social capital underlying the organization”, but that the organization was mostly inactive at this point. While the interests and identities of both actors seemed defined in a similar way it seemed
impossible to reconcile differences and work towards integrating the social capital of both organizations into a network in which these resources could be shared. In a meeting that Tanja brought me towards
Noord Oogst, an urban farming cooperative in the North of Amsterdam, I witnessed how Tanja and
Simcha de Haan aimed to enrol Ron van Echteld, the president of the enterprise, in the network of
Edible Amsterdam. What had happened was however that the leader of this initiative had already
expressed interest in becoming a board member of the Food Council MRA that van der Valk was currently assembling.
One thing that I picked up during the meeting was the importance of the business model in being able to demonstrate the value of urban farming vis-à-vis actors in the regime to prove the sustainability over the long term of these kinds of initiatives. Returning to the idea of explicating value, Ron van Echteld had been able to turn part of his land into a natural water filtration system with the help of professionals from Waternet who had seen the ecosystem services value of his land, which now made him
25 eligible for different kinds of subsidies. Ron explicated the millions of euro’s that had been wasted by the municipality investing in food chain innovations that turned out to be unsustainable from a business standpoint. He stressed a need for a professional understanding of the legal vehicles that the initiatives would embed themselves in to clarify the mutual responsibilities of the municipality and the UA initiatives. He illustrated this with an example of a legal conflict between Noord-Oogst and the municipality, wherein the municipality stated that any subsidies had only been ‘intentioned’ while Ron claimed that they had promised him subsidies which they now weren’t handing him. Through legal proceedings Ron managed to get the subsidies that he needed to keep the project afloat in the time before it was able to sustain itself profitably, a process through which he had become “a real expert in law”.
During this meeting, Tanja explicated that she perceived a democratic deficit in the emerging structure of the Food Policy Council, which could prove a danger to the movement as it tried to integrate different grassroots players and appeal to a larger democratic base. What became apparent in the narrative of Tanja was that she was engaging the municipality in a struggle for more democracy, viewing ‘the power to the people’ as the biggest resource in the process of getting the necessary support from the municipality to continue urban farming initiatives. Would we even begin to underline the complexity that is hidden below the collecting statement ‘power to the people’, we can use an example of a practice of open deliberations that Tanja used to engage in with urban farming practitioners and promoters as they came together to construct a shared identity and common problem definition by bringing ‘two tribes’ together in meetings stressing communication in physical space. One problem that Tanja picked up upon is the fact that buildings and spaces have an influence as actors on the kinds of deliberative settings in which meetings between different actors take place, prompting her and Simcha de Haan to devise of the utility of outside deliberations and the construction of narratives using video material to ‘re-establish power over the image and the conversation’.
What she had learned in the time in which she was trying to set up de Stadslandbouwloket is that she had seen fear from bureaucrats and civil servants who were afraid to give away the power that they
26 had acquired as one of the biggest barriers getting in the way of assembling the network. When we consider one of the conclusions from Hoffman & Loeber (2016) their study of niche-regime dynamics in greenhouse innovation it becomes clear that the control that institutional players have over the way in which a practice is expressed makes it easier for them to articulate control over any unfolding object of
knowledge, the object of knowledge in this instance being the knowledge and expertise from the field of
urban farming finding its way into the channels of bureaucracy and procedures of Gemeente Amsterdam. Tanja’s narrative made me a stronger proponent of the utility of the concept of regime for describing the stabilized procedures and rules that the municipality was representing and adhering to, with the control embedded in the bureaucratic procedures becoming a barrier stifling food system innovation precisely because existing practices granted power to players in the municipality as long as they retained their form. One example of this is the experience that both Tanja had with the rigidity of the licensing processes of the Amsterdam municipality, in that they hardly allow any forms of multifunctional urban farming enterprises that she and her foundation had been trying to set up at the grassroots level.
One element of what she was telling me was that the spreadsheet reality of civil servants looking for measurable impacts of different urban farming initiatives was extremely problematic considering the distance that there was between the world of numbers and actual lived reality. She told me that Arnold, coming from ‘his ivory tower’ at Wageningen University would find it easier to move inside these worlds but that there was a danger in opting for the legal vehicle of a foundation over a cooperative, seeing as a foundation necessarily excluded the larger democratic base of smaller producers from the main decision-making body. The relative weight of these legal considerations had become apparent to me at the meeting that I witnessed between Jan de Kock and Arnold van der Valk, where they discussed which legal vehicle it was necessary to choose for the Food Council MRA. At the end of the meeting Arnold concluded that it was going to be necessary to establish both a cooperative and a foundation that would work towards integrating the niche and regime levels, with his companion Jeffrey Spangenberg being more comfortable as an entrepreneur in leading the cooperative, and Arnold being more
27 foundation. This information put me in an interesting situation when I was witnessing how Tanja and Simcha de Haan were trying to establish a cooperative bringing together the local initiatives in the MRA under the banner of Coopolis Amsterdam. Even now as I’m writing down this account I’m aware that when I will send it off to the people that have given me the information throughout this research project that my account may have its own performative effects upon the actor-network which I have attempted to deploy here.
Bringing urban farming into the regime
With all of this talk of trouble in paradise I became interested in exploring some of the cases in the urban farming domain further where turmoil between project developers, governments and urban farmers had led to situations of threatened or actualized eviction. My aim was to make an inventory of the different resources that these initiatives had used to try and influence the decision-makers at the moments that it mattered the most, namely that an actual threat for the sustained existence of an initiative would manifest itself. One of the people that I established contact with first was Annet van Horn, who had been the main organizer of the garden Ubuntu in the South-East of Amsterdam, an urban farming initiative that had been evicted just one month ago. Speaking with other interviewees I had already learned that the situation was dire and that there hadn’t been any alternative locations that the initiative could move towards offered up by the municipality. My main intuition was that something must have gone terribly wrong in the communication process between Annet and government
representatives, seeing as the situation had deteriorated so far without there having even been an offer for a different location. I was emboldened in this view by some remarks that were made by people that I had spoken to that Annet could have managed the expectations of the municipality as to what should have been done with the land in a better way.
The initiative was bringing together entrepreneurs who were collectively tending and managing a community garden, while providing services such as bike repair and antique sales to the surrounding area. While the garden had only been provided with tenure for a period of two years, the
28 gardeners were hoping that the municipality would extend this lease once they saw the creative
influence that the initiative had on the local surroundings, in terms of place-making and ecological impact. The municipality had however been unable to be convinced of the value that the initiative was providing to the surrounding area. This may be a result of the cultural differences that become apparent in the communication process between the gardeners and civil servants, where she experienced a ‘culture-shock’ when considering the importance that these representatives attribute to ‘the rules and the
exact measurements that this thing or that thing is allowed to have or what things aren’t allowed’. One of the
problems that Annet admitted to with Ubuntu was the fact that it had been difficult to get people to clean up around the little houses in which the different entrepreneurs were located:
“It is important to be a bit more tough in enforcing the rules, more so than I actually did. For example, we really made a mistake by allowing people to leave their houses a little messy. But that is probably the only thing that didn’t go very well. And people weren’t always showing up for meetings. But I think that it’s possible. Because there are many shared interests, and if you explain that it is necessary to uphold these rules, that we can’t be here otherwise, then you have made that clear. So we promised to keep this place safe and clean, and then we can’t build here and we can’t dig too much there, or something like that, and then that’s that. Then it’s a rule. If you can communicate that clearly.” - Annet van Horn, Ubuntu.
One thing I concluded is that the fact that most gardening initiatives thrive on volunteer labor makes it very hard to enforce rules and discipline which is necessary to craft the kinds of professional business models which are necessary to take urban farming out of the sphere of good-willed amateurism, and into the sphere of sustainable business models that aren’t reliant on government subsidies. The process of building up firm resources within strategic management is predicated on the ability of firm managers to routinize the behaviors of firm employees, seeing as ‘the ability to engineer complex networks of people, documents and technologies to act at a distance and execute strategy in the organization is the other essential component of strategizing (Steen, 2010, p. 328). Organizational culture is a resource that can be cultivated to ensure the stability of certain procedures over the longue durée, but only if there is enough incentive within the organization to subdue individual interests to the interest of the firm. A
29 culture of rule-consciousness is an asset in a municipal organization where any deviation from the
Bestemmingsplan can create big problems in the formal legal sense, instilling organizational members
with a sense of duty towards the practice that upholds the institutions of the organization. This organizational culture may have come into conflict with the more free-spirited nature of the Ubuntu initiative, which is representing values invoked when sharing decision making power comes into play.
My aim now was to try and confirm these insights in a follow-up interview that I did with Arnold van der Valk, seeing as he was attempting the establishment of an organization structure within the domain of urban farming by connecting the different initiatives between the scales of the niche and the regime. Arnold however explicated that management isn’t central to strategizing within the domain of urban farming, because ‘when people start flourishing, when they start having fun… you can leave most of the
work to the people themselves’. It became apparent that one of the main resources that was available for him
to set the stage for making the kinds of connections that would render the actor-network more complete consisted of concrete examples that ‘really had the ability to get people moving when introduced at the right
moments’. Arnold had explicated the importance of building critical mass, putting people in the right
positions so that it would be possible to push forward the agenda of the food transition now that openings within the regime were starting to manifest themselves. This mirrors experiences that Annemarie in Voedseltuin IJplein had with managing volunteers, where she expressed that ‘when
volunteering isn’t fun for the volunteers anymore, volunteers are quick to think ‘poof’ I’m just going to stop doing it.’
Latour utilizes the idea of the plug-in as an element in an actor-network that has the ability to subjectify actors so that they become enrolled in the actor-network (Latour, 2005, pp. 204-208). These examples that Arnold uses to enroll actors in the network cannot be divorced from the connections with players in the food system that have been able to provide sustainable models that can then be used in a discussion to sway others to be enrolled in the actor-network. An image can set the tables in a
discussion by downloading a certain view into the minds of the one’s participating in the discussion. In this way any concrete example brought up by a participant ‘downloads’ the right ‘software’ to be able to
30 view the matters within a frame of reference conducive to the desired comprehension of the problem at hand (ibid; p. 207). However, I was aware of the fact that the utilitarian nature that I perceived these examples to have only further strengthens the criticism that ANT is ‘nothing but an extended form of
Machiavellianism’ (ibid; p. 252). The forces that are able to mobilize an actor-network to achieve common
goals must reside in something deeper than the machinations of some individuals in the network pushing the right buttons of those who have been enrolled in the network.
After this interview I visited de Boterbloem where I spoke with Alies personally for the first time about the situation that de Boterbloem found itself in. Biking to the area in the West of Amsterdam for the first time I was surprised by the beautiful agricultural scenery that I was presented with as I drove onto the path leading to the care-farm. A large grey monolith of a business park looming over the scene to the right of the farm made increasingly clear to me that the land which is located close to Schiphol was right on the border of a conflict between two different worlds meeting each other here in the periphery of Amsterdam. We discussed the interactions with the people from SADC, the Schiphol Area Development Company, that is ‘developing and managing a growing and diverse range of work-locations along the Airport Corridor in the Metropole Region Amsterdam ‘ (SADC, 2018). This firm consists of shareholders from the provincie Noord-Holland, gemeente Amsterdam, gemeente Haarlemmermeer and Schiphol, to lay down the infrastructure that business parks can be developed upon in the
Lutkemeerpolder. Alies, along with Trijntje & Erik, the owners of the farm, had been engaged in a struggle with SADC over the rights to the land. Alies and Trijntje had just appeared in court the week before to successfully stave off an eviction warrant that had been set out against the care farmers.
The main question with which I approached the interview was as to what resources the care farmers had been able to utilize to successfully stave off the project developers since the first eviction threats came up in 2009. Appearing in court cases multiple times they showed how important it is to ‘tell the story, and get better and better at doing it in the process’. Alies told me that they had
successfully organized multiple protests, which was something that they were able to accomplish in no more than a week’s time when another eviction notice had come in March this year. This was because
31 people in the network in which she was embedded had started viewing de Boterbloem as a symbol of wider injustices that were being perpetrated to the living environment of Amsterdam in the name of project development:
“I organized the entire manifestation in a week’s time with two friends. Seriously. You’ve got social media, and I know enough people, it’s not like we’re all on our own out here. 14.000 autographs are laying over there signed by people who want us to stay here. You can mobilize them. It’s all about organizing and mobilizing, you just need to start. I called someone asking for a license for the manifestation, I called someone for a sound installation, and I asked farmers from the surrounding area whether they wanted to show up driving their tractors. That’s it. And we started sharing it on social media. 150 people showed up. That’s how something like that works. And again, it’s about something which speaks to people’s imaginations. It’s not that people think ‘oh poor Alies with her garden’, no, this is a symbol of how this damn municipality is functioning. That they’d rather enter into agreements with faulty speculators, throwing away millions of euro’s, just because they want to keep some useless firm on its feet, instead of seeing that this is a very important place for the entire city.” – Alies, de Boterbloem.
