Town Is the Garden Chapbooks

Critical texts, recipes, and poetry from a creative community food-growing project in Scotland. 

"Town Is the Garden" was a three-year creative community food-growing project run by Deveron Projects, a socially engaged arts organization in the northeast of Scotland. The project set out to explore how a rural agricultural town might rethink its relationship to food and food growing in an era of increasing awareness of climate and ecological emergency. Food becomes a lens through which to investigate the dichotomies that have led to the current environmental catastrophes. Through a collective investigation into the processes of learning and sharing skills related to food growing, the project explored how a community can better pay attention to the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds. This set of six thought-provoking chapbooks captures the diverse creative learning program developed through the project.

Caroline Gatt is an anthropologist, performer, and senior research fellow at the University of Graz Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology in Austria. She is a co-investigator on the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project, funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Joss Allen is a Helsinki-based artworker and gardener exploring how creative practices can shape earthy politics, community economies, and ecological ways of being. He was a coordinator of the three-year community food-growing project Town is the Garden in Scotland.