Urban vegetable gardens: a Portuguese semiosphere for understanding seniors’ memories and crises

This work’s objective is to contextualize the mnemic codes circulated in the Famalicão Urban Garden Vegetable, located in northern Portugal. This place has nearly 200 citizen-gardeners, and we focus on the largest part of this group: a senior community. This semiosphere presents a series of common cultural texts that aid in delimiting its border. In turn, we can also think of it as a heterotopic reference (Foucault), because it welcomes people at a stage of life in crisis, as is the case with the elderly/retired. Memories are part of the cultural texts in this urban vegetable garden, and this elder group is building similar memories due to the common life stage they are experiencing in this semiosphere. But they have also added other common cultural codes linked to their previous memories. Those memories are expressed in each earth plot, where we observe their narratives, the objects and techniques used, and the agricultural practices. This study began in 2023 and is based on field research. The flânerie strategy has been used, as has the ethnography based on the anthropology of food. This study concludes with the application of twenty-four semi-structured interviews.