The Urban Gardens of Havana - Ola Plonska Younes Saramifar Gebunden

This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not 'thick descriptions ' linked to larger political issues but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Us ing these experiences the authors argue that 'the political' reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.