18-carrot gold

Take a stroll through suburban streets, especially in the inner suburbs, and there's a growing chance of finding nature strips where the grass has gone, replaced with carrots. Or potatoes. Or, depending on the season, lots of free-range tomatoes.

Look over the front garden fence, too. More and more households are pulling out the roses and planting pumpkins. The concrete is beginning to crack, creating gaps for a veggie patchwork quilt of micro food production.

"People are moving towards little farms in their gardens. They're raising chickens in the city, even goats," says Dr Tania Lewis, who is fascinated by the way cultural hangovers from the hippy era and a modern anti-materialism are entwining.

"There's clearly a cultural shift and an awareness that land should be used for productive purposes. And veggies in the front garden has a cool factor…"

Lewis, a senior research fellow at RMIT and co-editor of Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2011), sees the rise of the urban veggie patch and associated swap meets for inner-city growers as part of an attempt to create a greater sense of community. "People are looking to turn suburbia into something playful - building community and having fun."

There's no movement in the conventional sense driving this process, rather what Lewis terms "collectivised individualism". Some people engage in guerrilla gardening, cultivating or prettifying public land. Others opt for permablitzing, where a group will descend (by invitation) on a private garden and transform it into productive space.

"People want to bring pleasure and enjoyment back into their lives. People are sick of speeded-up, alienated living," Lewis says.

This rise of lifestyle politics and a greater sense of ethical consumerism morphs seamlessly into other spheres: the rise of garage sales and op shops, the growing popularity of farmers' markets and even the emergence of online communities sharing information on hard rubbish collections.

Lewis says this is more than a passing fad. "The lifestyle movement has been on the up since the 1990s at least, reflecting some of the initiatives of the earlier hippy movement. But now the neo-romantic hippy element is becoming mainstream."

Perhaps the biggest signal that a modified Nimbin is knocking on the doors of North Brighton or the North Shore is Channel 10's decision to run the show, Guerrilla Gardeners.

"It's an interesting marker. The channel has a young audience, but not a radical one," Lewis says. In one episode, the presenters took over a boring Sydney roundabout and landscaped it, complete with row boat and palm tree. The local council sought an injunction - only for local residents to rise up in defence of the show.

It seems that our cities are beginning to welcome their inner urban jungle.

This story was first published in RMIT's Making Cities Work magazine.

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