Infrastructures of care: beyond the Janus-face of urban community gardens in Copenhagen

Urban community gardens are often celebrated as grassroots alternatives to neoliberal urbanism or criticised as municipally managed tools for regulating public space and advancing green gentrification and city branding. Building on a third wave of research on urban community gardening that moves beyond such binaries, this paper conceptualises community gardens as infrastructures of care, relational, socio-material arrangements that organise maintenance, repair, and ecological reproduction while being shaped by municipal governance. Drawing on discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with municipal urban planners in Copenhagen, the paper shows how gardens are framed through ambivalent governance rationalities that both enable and constrain collective capacities for care. They are articulated simultaneously as sites of socio-ecological experimentation and as mechanisms for enhancing natural surveillance, property-led development, and behavioural regulation. Examining community gardens in Copenhagen, this paper shows how they operate as institutionalised infrastructures of care within the hybrid political economy of Nordic welfare urbanism and selective neoliberalisation. Rather than opposing the state, these initiatives are shaped through municipal governance and welfare institutions. The paper therefore shifts attention from grassroots resistance towards the ambivalent institutional governance of care, contributing to debates in urban political ecology and critical urban studies on how care infrastructures emerge within transforming welfare-state arrangements.