Chapter 3 zooms out to whole neighbourhoods to consider urban foraging—the collection of produce, plants, and fungi in the city. The lively interest in urban foraging demonstrated by the success of workshops, social media accounts, and books for a general audience has been relatively explored in academic literature in the past decade. Researchers have analysed foraging in the context of rethinking urban food systems, the production of edible landscapes, and urban forest justice—the right to have control over wild food, access to natural resources and decision-making processes. The capacity for foraging to develop or enhance relations, connections, and senses of belonging is a significant aspect that emerges in most literature. Building on this research, we ask what relations and connections materialise in a specific settler-colonial and multicultural urban context. The evidence in this chapter was collected through sensory ethnographies, including with a traditional owner of Sydney and Dharawal eora knowledge keeper, walks following a campaigning artefact we made called The Green Square atlas of civic ecologies, neighbourhood and a foraging workshop along a creek. We also analyse how neighbourhood ecologies can be visualised creatively to guide people to discover local edible plants. In this way, we discover a profusion of edible plants thriving even in industrial and high-density areas of the city despite the disturbances of soils and water from urbanisation. Native Australian plants, like dianella, lilly pilly, and fig trees, grow along suburban streets. Bananas, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins send shoots under fences, escaping gardens. Fennel, parsley, mulberry, and tomatoes disperse their seeds with the help of wind and birds to grow along railway tracks, in cracks in the pavement, or in vacant lots. City parks are alive with edible weeds. This chapter shows how foraging as a socio-ecological practice recodes relationships with plants and place, develops ecological literacy, and shapes people’s knowledge and understanding of neighbourhood ecologies.

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Foraging. Neighbourhoods and Socio-Ecological Literacies

  • Ilaria Vanni,
  • Alexandra Crosby

摘要

Chapter 3 zooms out to whole neighbourhoods to consider urban foraging—the collection of produce, plants, and fungi in the city. The lively interest in urban foraging demonstrated by the success of workshops, social media accounts, and books for a general audience has been relatively explored in academic literature in the past decade. Researchers have analysed foraging in the context of rethinking urban food systems, the production of edible landscapes, and urban forest justice—the right to have control over wild food, access to natural resources and decision-making processes. The capacity for foraging to develop or enhance relations, connections, and senses of belonging is a significant aspect that emerges in most literature. Building on this research, we ask what relations and connections materialise in a specific settler-colonial and multicultural urban context. The evidence in this chapter was collected through sensory ethnographies, including with a traditional owner of Sydney and Dharawal eora knowledge keeper, walks following a campaigning artefact we made called The Green Square atlas of civic ecologies, neighbourhood and a foraging workshop along a creek. We also analyse how neighbourhood ecologies can be visualised creatively to guide people to discover local edible plants. In this way, we discover a profusion of edible plants thriving even in industrial and high-density areas of the city despite the disturbances of soils and water from urbanisation. Native Australian plants, like dianella, lilly pilly, and fig trees, grow along suburban streets. Bananas, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins send shoots under fences, escaping gardens. Fennel, parsley, mulberry, and tomatoes disperse their seeds with the help of wind and birds to grow along railway tracks, in cracks in the pavement, or in vacant lots. City parks are alive with edible weeds. This chapter shows how foraging as a socio-ecological practice recodes relationships with plants and place, develops ecological literacy, and shapes people’s knowledge and understanding of neighbourhood ecologies.