Ardagh Community Trust: transgressing boundaries, asserting community

Abstract

Administrative boundaries are ubiquitous. A vital technology of power within the modern nation-state’s mode of bureaucratic governance, they carve up and abstract land and water alike into conceptual totalities that, in their simplification, render them legible to centralised administrative bodies. This is a foundational tool of state planning, the impact of which permeates all aspects of socio-economic life. These boundaries are not passive; they do not simply define a geographical area. Rather, they are selective in what they encompass and, as a result, what they include and exclude and what is rendered visible and, hence, valuable. This article describes an example of the real-world impact of this selectivity through discussion of the experiences of a community-led charity (Ardagh Community Trust) and the community group that founded it (Friends of Horfield Common). In their work to demonstrate that an administrative-boundary-spanning public green space (Horfield Common) and leisure facility (the Ardagh) was a vital community resource and hub, this article focuses on the work of Friends of Horfield Common/Ardagh Community Trust to ensure that their local community, one dissected by multiple administrative boundaries, was recognised and acknowledged when, in 2008, Bristol City Council in the UK proposed the sale of multiple publicly owned green spaces through their Parks and Green Space Strategy. Administrative boundaries played a key role in defining and determining which sites in the city were proposed for sale and in structuring the accompanying public consultation process, thereby determining which communities were recognised as communities in relation to this policy and, hence, which communities’ opinions were actively sought and heard. This article concludes by highlighting some of the potential political and economic costs attendant on reifying administrative boundaries rather than lived communities in both planning and consultation processes.