Rooting Hope in the City: Emotional Processes in a Community Gardens’ Placemaking in Mexico City.

• In Event: Urban-Environmental Futures in the Global South

Abstract

Community gardens are shown to be sites of environmental placemaking where emotions and prefigurative actions come together to materialise sustainable urban futures. Through everyday care and shared experiences, participants forge emotional bonds and practical routines that turn spaces into living experiments of alternative relationships with nature and the neighbourhood. Drawing on the sociology of emotions, this ethnographic study in Mexico City argues that hope and other collective emotions drive people to act, sustain commitment over time and produce meaningful impacts for urban biodiversity and well-being. The study shows that shared experiences and collective emotions lead to improvements in urban biodiversity, community cohesion and well-being, contributing to a better understanding of emotions in environmental placemaking in the Global South.

Author

• Carlos Collado, University College Dublin