Solidary Kitchens and Community Gardens: Commoning Practices of Care in Urban Places

The retreat of the state in austerity contexts and the widening of social gaps during the Covid-19 pandemic have been linked to the emergence of solidarity initiatives. Communal kitchens and collective gardens became key everyday infrastructures that addressed hunger and maintained social ties, where shelter and care mattered most. This article discusses urban food commons in processes of 'home-making' by examining practices of food cultivation and preparation in housing squats, and how these survived after the pandemic. The aim is to understand how marginalized and racialized urban dwellers create a new home through joining collective projects and what role their relationships with plants and food play in building new belongings. Urban occupations and housing projects are classified by nutritional studies as food deserts or food swamps. Drawing on critical food studies, our research attempts to see these environments not only in what they lack, but also as urban foodscapes in which relations of care and belonging between plants, people and place are enacted. Through an exploratory study of self-organized community gardens and solidarity kitchens in the Brazilian metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, our contribution considers commoning practices that go beyond an attempt to decommodify and reclaim spaces for housing and involve other aspects of collective living. After considering the narratives and strategies of urban dwellers, we suggest treating community gardens and kitchens as spaces for (re)organizing social reproduction, reproducing a culture-nature arrangement, and providing care that can unlock transformative potentialities and knit a sense of place.