The aesthetic dimension of productive green community spaces

Productive green community spaces are currently the subject of extensive academic discussion. Scholars from diverse fields explore this phenomenon from social, economic, political and planning perspectives. Yet, the aesthetic dimension of such sites has remained outside the academic purview, while giving rise to public debate and critique. This paper addresses the lacuna by examining productive green community spaces in Israel to contribute to the contemporary discourse on aesthetics and community gardens. Three theoretical frameworks for aesthetics serve as the basis of our investigation: the intrinsic value of nature, experience beyond the visual towards the ethical and cues of care. Our analysis regards fourteen productive green community spaces, established in 2017 and 2018, that seem messy and unordered at first sight. We identified six constituents to establish the aesthetic merits of the gardens: expressions of social and cultural characteristics, cues of care through organization of space, presence of nonhuman lives, embodied experience, change over time (dynamics) and ethical expressions.