Cultivating together : unearthing the transformative potential of community gardening as prefigurative collective action in Ljubljana

Križnik, Blaž (author), Mittermaier, Laura (author)

Community gardening as a form of collective action has the potential to drive transformative social change. Despite this, few studies offer empirical insights into how community gardening affects transformative social change in practice. This study aims to address this gap by examining the Onkraj gradbišča community garden in Ljubljana. Employing fieldwork with participant observation, exploratory and in-depth interviews, and a review of secondary sources as research methods, the study explores how community gardening enables and sustains transformative social change and how institutional support (or lack there of) impacts community gardening as a transformative community strategy. The findings reveal that Onkraj gradbišča fostered key conditions of transformative social change, including inner transformation, collective leadership, community capacity building, and some scaling strategies. In contrast, scaling upstrategies were ineffective and the absence of institutional support limited the impact of community gardening on enabling governance. These findings suggest that the transformative potential of Onkraj gradbišča to contribute to path-shifting urban sustainability transitions was limited. Nevertheless, as a form of prefigurative collective action, Onkraj gradbišča provided atangible alternative for food production, community capacity building, land use management, and urban planning in the city. The study argues that performing a “vision of a better world” may be the main legacy of Onkraj gradbišča, highlighting the transformative potential of community gardening in Ljubljana.

• Language: English
• Keywords: community gardening, prefigurative collective action, transformative community strategies, transformative social change, urban gardens
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 09.05.2026
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: Str. 1–22
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-182574
• UDC: 316.354:711.4:635
• ISSN on article: 1469-6711
• DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2026.2669757
• COBISS.SI-ID: 278394627
• Publication date in RUL: 18.05.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Local environment
• Shortened title: Local environ.
• Publisher: Carfax International Publishers
• ISSN: 1469-6711
• COBISS.SI-ID: 521647641

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: skupnostno vrtnarjenje, prefigurativno kolektivno delovanje, transformativne skupnostne strategije, transformativne družbene spremembe, urbani vrtovi

Projects

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: European Union - NextGenerationEU
• Project number: MN-0017-581
• Name: Neighbourhood collective action and social innovation for resilient cities in East Asia and Europe