(Food) justice in the interim? Temporary urban gardening, welfare activation, and plural valuation

Abstract

Across European cities, temporary urban gardening is used to address vacancy, sustainability, and social inclusion. Yet little is known about how justice is enacted when such initiatives are embedded in welfare and labor‐market activation policies. This article examines a publicly funded urban gardening project in Dortmund, Germany, implemented as a labor‐market activation measure on temporarily available land targeting employable welfare recipients. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the study combines the concept of “food justice” with valuation studies to analyze how labor, land, and exchange are valued in everyday practice. Rather than using food justice as a normative benchmark, the article explores how notions of justice are produced and negotiated through institutional frameworks, daily routines, and actors’ evaluative judgments. The findings reveal tensions between empowerment and dependency, care and control, and social recognition and material precarity. While participants experience gardening as meaningful work and a source of social participation and belonging, these valuations remain bounded by welfare regulations, temporary land tenure, and charity‐based forms of food distribution. The article argues that temporary urban gardening projects function as spaces of plural and negotiated valuation, where justice is enacted provisionally through everyday practices, contributing to debates on temporary urban land use, food practices under welfare governance, and the limits of inclusion‐oriented sustainability interventions.