Creating Local "Citizen's Governance Spaces" in Austerity Contexts : Food Recuperation and Urban Gardening in Montréal (Canada) as Ways to Pragmatically Invent Alternatives.

While there is a growing interest in citizen-led initiatives, there is still no consensus on how to situate them, especially in relation to state institutions. On the one hand, citizen-led initiatives are seen as being co-opted by formal institutions in a context of austerity. On the other hand, these initiatives are often presented as "spaces of resistance" to neoliberalism, or as political acts of reclaiming the city. Mapping and tracing urban gardening and dumpster diving from their grassroots emergence to their inclusion in the institutional world through a two-level analysis, we show that individuals and loosely organized collectives involved in such initiatives are embedded in complex relationships with local institutions and third sector organizations that do, in turn, structure their practice and its consequences. The two-level analysis we propose follows this process: it is through interactions and relationships with other "practitioners" and with their social and institutional environment that these urban social practices gradually institutionalize.

What Is Informal Participation?: Introduction to the Special Issue: Quietly Standing Out: Understanding Informal Forms of Political Engagement.

Far from activism in formal groups or in visible and vocal demonstrations stands a type of citizen participation observed through everyday practices and daily activities in the public sphere. Targeted citizen actions in urban spaces, dumpster diving, responsible consumption movements or small acts of everyday resistance are all examples of what we call informal modes of participation. Such initiatives are not new, nor do they pertain to a particular geographic arena. However, it is only recently that social scientists have started to pay attention to such activities: scholars from urban studies, development studies, political sociology, and critical geography have started to address this phenomenon. After discussing the existing literature on this topic, this introduction proceeds to define and operationalize the concept of informal participation, while also providing a common analytical framework for dialogue among the six contributions to this special issue briefly described in the last section below.