Julia Spanier presents at IOER Annual Conference 2021: Space & Transformation

On 24 September Julia Spanier presented her paper ‘Remnants and memories of the past in the rural places of grassroots innovation. The case of Community Supported Agriculture in Germany‘at the IOER Annual Conference 2021: Space & Transformation held at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (Dresden, Germany).

Abstract: This paper speaks to the recent integration of spatial perspectives into research on grassroots innovations for sustainability. One avenue of this research has focused on the role of place, mostly studying urban places as breeding grounds for innovation. Yet, other research fields have found the countryside to generate singular forms of innovation, with a distinctive feature being the countryside’s allure of the past. Often, rural grassroots initiatives are inspired by a romanticized idea of past rural life or are committed to the preservation of traditional (e.g. agroecological) practices understood to be fitter for the future than recent inventions. In fact, the European countryside has witnessed dramatic changes, including de-peasantization, since the onset of capitalist urbanization, begging the question how rural innovations, particularly those opposed to the capitalist paradigm of technology-intensive agriculture, relate to and make use of this past. Therefore, we build on geographical research on memory and other remnants of the past as components of materialist-relational place to explore the role of materializations of the past in the shaping of place-based grassroots innovations. We study two agricultural grassroots initiatives practicing Community Supported Agriculture in Germany. Following Ginn (2017), we investigate (1) the material and symbolic remnants that are assembled – from trees planted to the legacy of land inheritance law – and (2) the collective memories and histories that are written into the places, or forgotten. On the basis of these cases, the paper discusses the ways in which (un)intentional encounters with differently materialized pasts play a role in the making of the places of grassroots innovations, including the making of place-based catalyzers and hindrances to success, and the construction of a place’s ‘rurality’. Our study suggests that remnants of the past – largely unexplored within the field of innovation – deserve further attention, quite likely also beyond the realm of the rural.