CeASR Seminar Series: Dr Natalia Gerodetti

“Islands on the Urban”: The Edible Landscapes of Seoul

Dr Natalia Gerodetti

Abstract:

Urban food cultivation takes many forms, from well established community gardens to small pockets of planting woven quietly into the cityscape. While formal sites such as allotments have received considerable attention for their contributions to wellbeing and sustainable urban food systems, far less is known about the informal, often improvised practices of micro–urban agriculture. These small acts of growing—tucked into leftover spaces of high value urban environments—reclaim the city in subtle yet powerful ways, asserting a right to place through the cultivation of edible plants. In Seoul, these dispersed pockets of fruit and vegetable growing form striking “islands on the urban,” giving lush visibility to more than-human relations across the megacity’s neighbourhoods.

This paper explores these dynamics in Yeonnam-dong, a rapidly transforming district in Mapo, drawing on wider research into food cultivation practices in Seoul carried out in 2023 and 2024. By tracing and mapping the edible landscape of this neighbourhood, the paper reveals how everyday growing practices create interconnected networks of green micro spaces that collectively contribute to urban green infrastructure. Situated at the intersection of long-standing food-growing traditions and emerging motivations around sustainability, wellbeing, locality, and aesthetics, these edible plants act as spatial markers of the vital role more than-human interactions play in shaping contemporary urban life.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Natalia Gerodetti is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University, UK. For over a decade, Natalia been interested in urban food cultivation, human-plant relationships, community, belonging and identity as a researcher but also as a gardener and seed saver herself.

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Host or Publisher LBU - Centre for Applied Social Research (CeASR)