Adaptive Civic Commons in Madrid: Lived Experience, Agroecological Learning, and Negotiated Governance in Institutionalized Community Gardens

Urban community gardens are increasingly institutionalized through public land, infrastructure, and administrative recognition, yet the mechanisms through which formalized gardens retain—or lose—civic purpose remain insufficiently understood. This article examines Madrid through a qualitative comparative case study involving 33 participants: 30 participants across 13 community gardens and three contextual actors. A layered, multi-perspectival adaptation of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis combines idiographic interpretation with site-level and cross-case comparisons. An embedded quantitative content analysis of a transparent 12-garden transcript subsample (approximately 85,219 Spanish-language words) normalized six thematic dictionaries per 1000 words and used exploratory Mann–Whitney U tests. No thematic-rate difference reached statistical significance, suggesting that cultivation layout alone does not explain civic capacity. Cross-case analysis identifies five mediating processes: distributed roles, recurrent collective routines, knowledge translation, boundary-spanning partnerships, and accessible routes into participation and voice. Participants experienced gardens as therapeutic and relational counter-spaces, settings of agroecological learning, civic classrooms, modest forms of food autonomy, and negotiated commons. Food-security contributions were supplementary, whereas ecological literacy, practical competence, social connection, and collective agency were substantial. Adaptive Civic Commons is proposed as a framework for publicly anchored, community-led commons whose continuity depends on adaptation in governance, ecological practice, civic pedagogy, and public legitimacy.