Michael Jakob: «Urban vegetable gardens are a fad».»

Hélène Lavoyer - Le Regard Libre N° 40

The environmental and food issues being debated around the world today will not go away on their own. More than ever, criticizing the means deployed by populations and governments, while highlighting their concrete and positive aspects, is just as necessary as questioning them. This is what we did, when we met Michael Jakob, Professor of Landscape Architecture at HEPIA (Geneva). In the charming Chez Quartier tea room on rue Voltaire, he answered our questions and took a different, sometimes even opposing look at our previous conceptions of the urban kitchen garden and its representation in Western society. An interview rich in questions.

Le Regard LibreCan you tell us about the history of gardening in Switzerland?

Michael Jakob: Switzerland has a particular history of gardens, because it's a country that doesn't really have an aristocratic tradition. As in other countries, there are no huge show gardens - unlike in Italy, France and England. The great Swiss tradition is to be found in peasant gardens, in the canton of Berne for example. These were more democratic gardens, accessible to everyone. Certainly, in the XIX^th and XX^th century, there are hotel gardens and major urban gardens, which make up a whole interesting panoply, but Switzerland is clearly different from other European countries. 

Is your interest in the garden purely utilitarian?

The garden has rarely been a disinterested, purely aesthetic place. It was a long time before Switzerland had luxury gardens, which functioned as places of representation. This is very different from other traditions. There are a few exceptions, of course.

Where does the garden's relaxing, sometimes almost meditative dimension come from?

In reality, «relaxation» is a very modern and bourgeois concept. In the world of the farmer, in the world of necessity, we use a plot of land in the best possible way to exploit it intelligently. It's a typically aristocratic or, in Switzerland, bourgeois attitude to say: «I have a stressful life, and I use the garden as a place of well-being.» But it's not one in the first place. On the other hand, although I wouldn't call it «relaxation», in Italy, for example, we already find in the XV^th and XVI^th The gardens of this century are places of well-being, festivity, libertinism, promenades and physical and sensual pleasures. 

Is wellbeing a consequence of looking after a garden?

It's clear that any garden provides those who love it and don't have to work too hard on it with a certain form of well-being. I think, however, that this category of «well-being» is relatively modern. Of course, the ancients were already talking about the well-being that comes from owning a garden - Horace, Seneca, Pliny - but here, we're talking about gardens that were, after all, very large Roman estates, and we're talking about happy few, who certainly had slaves and gardeners who prepared the garden. It was obviously good to be out in the garden, listening to music and celebrating with friends. However, we're talking here about aristocratic gardens and a slim elite who used these spaces as a place of freedom and inspiration, and certainly also of happiness.

From the garden to the urban kitchen garden: what's the difference in meaning or representation?

A garden can have many meanings and uses. It can be a garden that is completely aesthetic, and therefore of no use whatsoever, or it can be a garden that is purely utilitarian. By definition, the urban vegetable garden is a type of garden that consists of a farm masquerading as a garden; we don't call it a farm, or a vegetable factory, but a «vegetable garden», because the aim of the vegetable garden is to produce vegetables and fruit while giving it the form of a garden. In fact, the model kitchen garden is already the King's kitchen garden at Versailles. We know that Louis XIV wanted to have a kitchen garden, and his kitchen garden in a way ennobled the kitchen garden itself. Until then, it had been a secondary, inessential feature of gardens. So much for the history of the kitchen garden.

What is the current situation?

Today's urban vegetable garden is a different matter. In other words, it's an extremely recent invention, of the last thirty or forty years, and an epiphenomenon that stems from the desire to return to nature. It seems to me to be linked to this religion of nature that surrounds us and makes us love everything that is «organic», that seems authentic or green in a world where nothing is authentic or natural. We've been losing or transforming nature for almost two thousand years, changing it from top to bottom, diverting rivers and razing mountains. We exploit everything. The further we've gone in modifying nature, the more we've dreamed of a kind of piece of nature that would be truly natural. Faced with the crisis of religions and most values, the ideology of nature appears to be the «last value».

There's a political background to this, too.

Absolutely. After all, it all stems from the ecological movement of the sixties and seventies in the USA, which later became known as the «green movement». I would also say that this phenomenon is not innocent; that it doesn't just fall from the sky, there are reasons for it. In the late capitalist society of these decades, we've gone extremely far in terms of the disproportionate exploitation of nature, and from this stems the desire to return to it. So, symbolically, it's a kind of laboratory for the possible return to nature within the very heart of the city. We continue to live in the city, that's where everything happens, we love the city in spite of everything, but we want to have pockets of nature in this city. It's almost a sacralization of nature, with all the contradictions that entails.

Is vegetable gardening a return to faith?

I wouldn't call it a return to faith, but the replacement of one faith by another. The replacement of traditional religious forms by a new religion  The more «light», the more immediate the contact with that which is admired and venerated. God, on the other hand, is far away, and it's possible to doubt his existence. Nature religion is therefore a kind of sensualist ideology that involves the senses and direct contact with the earth. What religion and the desire for nature have in common is that they are both ideologies; the former is very old and linked to transcendence and metaphysics, and has a value system that explains everything. When this system went into crisis - during the Enlightenment at the latest - it was replaced by this «all-nature» that invites us to recharge our batteries, to find ourselves, to think ourselves.

The function of the urban vegetable garden is not to feed the population.

Take a city: Geneva, population 200,000. You'd need huge fields in and around the city to feed the population. In Switzerland, however, we have a law to protect the landscape and the territory, which means that 80% of Geneva's territory is agricultural, and nothing can be done there other than farming. There are communes where a metre of land costs 3,000 or 4,000 Swiss francs, whereas agricultural land costs 1 or 2 francs. In these cases, we have enough agricultural land, except that not enough people want to farm it. We could create endless vegetable gardens around Geneva, so why do it in cities, where land is expensive? In terms of land use, I find this rather aberrant and illogical.

What about the city as a shared space?

The urban vegetable garden is something that works for five, ten or fifteen people. Precisely because a city is a communal space, it must remain a plural space. If I reduce it to a vegetable garden, I reduce the plurality of usable spaces and create a kind of monoculture. An urban vegetable garden is also almost always anti-economic, anti-ecological and often anti-aesthetic. Perhaps someone will prefer the beauty of emptiness to that of a vegetable garden. Not everyone dreams of being surrounded by salads, so why should we follow this fashion when it's the will of a very small segment of the population? It's also clear that this is a fashion phenomenon with ideological roots. So there's something inauthentic about it, a bit like tattooing. Nobody gets a tattoo for themselves. Even if someone says: «I tattoo for me», it's absolutely false. The phenomenon, the shapes and the language of tattooing are pre-established, everything comes from society.

Isn't this current development and fashion a kind of protest against a society that is becoming increasingly industrial? 

It's a symbolic protest. We can find urban vegetable gardens everywhere: in Barcelona, for example, there's a beautiful square with lettuce, sage, rosemary and so on. Very well, we have rosemary in the city, but even in Catalonia and even in a city like Barcelona, if you go out for half an hour, you'll find agriculture, fields, rosemary or basil. So there's no need for urban vegetable gardens. For me, it's a ersatz and it distracts attention from the real problems and the real questions, which are: «What are we eating?» and «What is the quality of the food?» We eat badly and we eat unhealthily, and that's where the real problem lies. The urban vegetable garden is a kind of cover and pseudo-solution for a very complicated, globalized world, where this kind of localism is a decoy. For me, it's a dead end, a pure window-dressing phenomenon, and I can't see any viable argument for it. 

HEKS has set up urban vegetable gardens as «integration spaces», where a migrant and a local resident work together on a vegetable garden. What do you think of these schemes?

I think any integration process is very welcome. Migrants and refugees are «hidden» in Geneva too. Any integration process is welcome, whether it involves vegetable gardens or anything else, the important thing is that it's done.

Write to the author: helene.lavoyer@leregardlibre.com

This interview was conducted as part of a university study on urban vegetable gardens, in tandem with Lena Rossel.

Photo credit: © Una Montagna di Libri