Leading an Urban Agriculture Initiative in Working-Class Neighborhoods: New Actors in Activism and Entrepreneurship, Dunkirk Perspectives
Urban agriculture is correlated with the response to crises and vulnerabilities. It is promoted by many stakeholders as a tool of sustainable urban development. This article analyzes non-profit urban agriculture initiatives led by city residents in Dunkirk, a French industrial shrinking city, where such dynamics seem to be weak, and in Grande-Synthe, a city of the urban area, paying particular attention to them. We especially analyze five initiatives and the people behind them by highlighting their alternative, radical (supposed to improve the underprivileged populations’ livelihoods) and neoliberal (supposed to increase social inequalities) features. We put a particular emphasis on the place of the disadvantaged population, who are in the majority in the area, and on the role of public policies in the emergence and orientation of those urban agriculture initiatives. We underline simultaneous and contradictory affiliations of the initiatives to neoliberal, alternative and radical functions of urban agriculture, and the influence personal and territorial path play on it.