What happens when the same people who once marched in protest suddenly find themselves inside Town Hall? Tanya Zerbian, Soledad Cuevas, Ana Moragues-Faus and Daniel López-García tell the tale of how democracy can remove what it once provided.
València’s l’Horta – the fertile plain that surrounds the Spanish city – has long supplied vegetables and fruit to its residents. Yet for decades it was under siege from urban expansion, infrastructure projects, and speculative housing. Out of this resistance grew Per l’Horta, a movement born in the early 2000s determined to protect farmland from concrete and defend a way of life that was both ecological and cultural. What began as opposition gradually evolved into something bigger: an experiment in reshaping how a city feeds itself.
From indignation to imagination
Early protests surrounding the protection of l’Horta – especially the clashes over La Punta, a farmers’ neighbourhood destroyed for port expansion – brought together farmers, squatters, and neighbours. What united them was not only land defence, but the desire to imagine a different city and food futures around l`Horta.
By 2009, these groups had converged in the Platform for Food Sovereignty of the Valencian Country, a broad alliance embracing agroecology, short food supply chains, and new forms of producer–consumer solidarity. Then came the 2011 indignados movement – a wave of mass demonstrations across Spain in response to austerity, corruption, and inequality. It transformed public debate and gave fresh momentum to local experiments in participation and sustainability.
What united them was not only land defence, but the desire to imagine a different city and food futures around l`Horta.
In this period, food became a political lens through which people reimagined everyday life. Community gardens, cooperative markets, and local consumer groups flourished across the city. These initiatives were not symbolic gestures – they were living examples of another way of organising production, consumption, and democracy.
Into city hall
The turning point arrived in 2015. Elections brought a progressive coalition to power after two decades of conservative rule. For the first time, grassroots activists were not just knocking on the door of government – they were invited inside.
The new political space was as fragile as it was hopeful.
The city created a new Department of Agriculture, Orchard and Villages, led by figures with deep ties to the grassroots movement. Activists became advisers, consultants, and policymakers. Together, they drafted the Local Agri-Food Strategy 2025, founded a Municipal Food Council, and supported a regional law to protect l’Horta.
For those involved, the shift was striking. People who had once organised street protests were now coordinating food projects with municipal offices. It was an extraordinary transformation – a rare instance where protest movements directly shaped institutional design. Yet the new political space was as fragile as it was hopeful.
Progress and its limits
There were important advances. Farmers’ markets gained legal recognition. Public procurement pilots brought local organic food into schools. A metropolitan council was established to coordinate farmland protection.
Power did not simply transfer from the streets into government; it circulated through relationships, negotiations, and informal practices. However, other forms of blurred power, opposing food system change, also began to take effect.
Yet the process was uneven. New regulations faced delays and resistance from entrenched interests; particularly traditional food retailers and trade unions defending established supply chains. Inside city hall, the hard edges of bureaucracy were encountered: limited budgets, political inertia, and conflicting agendas. Consultancy work offered stability but also professionalised activism, draining energy from collective mobilisation.
Over time, enthusiasm shifted to frustration. The network of projects that had developed under the new administration signified progress, but it was fragmented and fragile, creating blurred lines of authority — the shifting, overlapping forms of power and influence that arise when movements and institutions intertwine. Power did not simply transfer from the streets into government; it circulated through relationships, negotiations, and informal practices. However, other forms of blurred power, opposing food system change, also began to take effect.
Floods and political backlash
In 2024, devastating floods swept across the region, killing more than 200 people and destroying crops. For many of the people we spoke with, the disaster confirmed what they had long argued: protecting farmland is not nostalgia; it is climate resilience. That same year, elections returned conservative governments to both the city and the region. Within months, participatory structures were quietly dismantled. The Food Council stopped meeting. Development plans once shelved were revived.
The trajectory was not linear. Movements stepped inside and outside institutions, sometimes partners, sometimes critics.
This was not simply a story of progress and decline. Movements advance, institutionalise, retreat, and resurface in new forms. After 2024, many activists returned to grassroots mobilisation, organising fair-price campaigns and alliances with farmers. What had been built inside institutions now found renewed expression outside them.
What Valencia teaches us
This 23-year process reveals both the promise and fragility of bottom-up innovation. Food movements did more than resist: they built alternative markets, influenced legislation, and created new governance structures. Yet power remained blurred. Formal councils could be sidelined, and vested interests quickly reasserted themselves.
The trajectory was not linear. Movements stepped inside and outside institutions, sometimes partners, sometimes critics. They adopted multiple roles – as protesters, consultants, coalition builders, and market organizers – depending on shifting contexts.
The lesson is that sustainability transitions are not tidy or inevitable. They are contested, cyclical, plural, and discontinuous. Progress can be real, but also reversible. Valencia’s orchard is unique, but the dynamics are global. Cities everywhere face the same dilemma: how to secure food in a climate crisis, how to defend farmland from development, how to democratise the food system.
What Valencia shows is that grassroots actors can be powerful transition intermediaries. They can draft policy, mobilise citizens, and create living examples of alternatives. But unless deeper power relations are addressed, victories remain fragile.
The orchard survives, but uneasily.
You can find the full academic article this draws with ChatGPT assistance on here.
