Drawing Resilience: City Farms as Civic Ecologies

In comic form, this talk presents architecturally directed research on four city farms—Vauxhall, Mudchute, and Kentish Town City Farm in London, alongside one in Oxford—to argue for their role in promoting well-being through everyday practices of care and repair. Often located on marginal or formerly industrial land, these farms transform overlooked sites into valuable civic assets through voluntary labour, local knowledge, and negotiated self-governance.

While commonly understood as green or agricultural spaces, this research positions city farms as complex civic microcosms. They respond to local needs, foster social resilience, and cultivate ethical relationships between people and place. The thesis argues that these farms function as local civic ecologies, making meaningful social and material contributions to their neighbourhoods while building the resilience needed to influence broader policy contexts.

The research is grounded in early involvement in the design of a new city farm in Oxford, demonstrating how spatial and material practices can shape forms of social participation and sustain long-term community engagement. It shows how well-being emerges through embodied, everyday routines that nurture a shared sense of place.

Methodologically, the project adopts a multi-scalar approach, combining site surveys, narrative interviews, and action research across four thematic levels: site, individual, community, and institutional. It explores how resilient relationships are formed among physical settings, individual agency, community dynamics, and institutional frameworks.

At the individual scale, the research considers personal histories and experiences of empowerment, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. At the community level, it examines human–nonhuman relationships through posthuman perspectives. At the institutional level, it investigates governance structures and decision-making through action research.

Through sustained, multi-scalar engagement with the farms, the study reveals how these intersecting practices contribute to moral purpose, social flourishing, and the institutional conditions necessary to build a more equitable and resilient society.

The exhibition presents digital pages from the comic book illustrating the formation and gradual development of one of the farms, Oxford City Farm, from inception around the kitchen table to the construction of an onsite community kitchen.

Jane McAllister is an academic, illustrator, and architect educated at the Architectural Association and Cooper Union, New York. She is co-BA Architecture Course Leader at AAD, where she leads practice-based teaching through live community projects in the UK and internationally. Her work focuses on participatory design and cross-cultural exchange, including a design atelier on migration, identity, and self-governance. Her practice-based PhD explores city farms as resilient, self-governed urban entities, presented as a graphic novel. Her research and writing—on topics from Belmonte Calabro to city farms—have been published in Environmental Science & Sustainable Development, ORO Editions, and ARQ.

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