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Where have all the houses (among other things) gone? Some critical reflections on urban agriculture
Abstract
Urbandale Farm (Lansing, MI) has much in common with other urban agricultural projects throughout the US and especially those in the rust-belt cities of the Midwest. It raises food for an economically challenged neighborhood. It offers opportunities for local participation, education and job creation, and it is supported by diverse public and private institutions. By all official accounts, Urbandale Farm is good at what it does. Its acreage, production, income and entrepreneurial activities are all increasing, and it has become a poster child for urban agriculture throughout the city. However, despite its good work (or possibly because of it), Urbandale Farm, and urban agriculture more generally, may unwittingly be helping to rationalize the displacement and continued social and political inequity of urban neighbors rather than reinforcing greater place-making, neighborhood empowerment and sustainability. Using Urbandale Farm as a case in point, this paper critically explores how urban agriculture is being used by some scholars, activists, governmental offices and agencies to transform fragile neighborhoods. It questions some of the movement's underlying assumptions as well as some of its actual benefits and beneficiaries. The paper also offers suggestions—for the purpose of initiating a more nuanced conversation—on how urban agriculture can be reconfigured philosophically and practically to shed its neoliberal tendencies and contribute to a more structurally based social and political transformation.
... The exodus of food production from cities is an incomplete history of urban agriculture in the U.S. The unabridged version of this history includes how urban agriculture has been redeployed intermittently since at least the late-1800s as a form of "crisis" management throughout periods of major national and global crises -including, but not limited to, Pingree's Potato Patches during the 1890s depression, the Liberty Gardens of World War I, and the Victory Gardens of World War II (Basset 1979;Delind 2015;Draper and Freedman 2010;Lawson 2005;McClintock and Cooper 2010;Vitiello and Brinkley 2013). Over the last century, urban agriculture programs have served as stopgap measures to mitigate food shortages caused -y las narrativas sobre agricultura urbana que ha contribuido a catalizar y mantener-nos dice sobre cómo actuar como defensores e investigadores de los sistemas alimentarios. ...
... Las pruebas esbozadas en las secciones anteriores sugieren que las UAIZ no han logrado aumentar el acceso a OPEN CRITICAL PLANNING JOURNAL after being cleared, along with public comments issued by then-Mayor Giuliani, suggested that the city was threatened by community control of land and largely motivated to eliminate vacant lot gardens as spaces of potential political resistance (Schmelzkopf 2002;Staeheli et al. 2002). Today, there is clearly enough land for urban agriculture and housing in many other cities, yet municipalities are still tearing down while refusing to replace and increase the limited existing housing (Delind 2015). The claim that food sovereignty and housing security are competing land struggles seems to support a misleading land scarcity narrative that has been used to maintain concentrated control over resources and power. ...
... Sin embargo, el hecho de que otros terrenos de propiedad municipal estuvieran disponibles para la construcción de viviendas y de que los huertos urbanos permanecieran sin urbanizar incluso después de haber sido desalojados, junto con los comentarios públicos del entonces alcalde Giuliani, sugieren que la ciudad se sentía amenazada por el control comunitario del suelo y estaba muy motivada para eliminar los huertos urbanos como espacios de resistencia política potencial (Schmelzkopf 2002;Staeheli et al. 2002). Hoy en día, es evidente que hay suficiente terreno para la agricultura urbana y la vivienda en muchas otras ciudades, pero los municipios siguen derribando mientras se niegan a reemplazar y aumentar las limitadas viviendas existentes (Delind 2015). La afirmación de que la soberanía alimentaria y la seguridad de la vivienda son luchas por la tierra que compiten entre sí parece apoyar una narrativa engañosa sobre la escasez de tierras que se ha utilizado para mantener el control concentrado sobre los recursos y el poder. ...
... This means that, over the last 20 years, Sustainability has become a core theme, considering the relatively recent formation of the Kyoto Protocol and other green initiatives that have called attention to the pollution emergency and the need for sustainable development [86][87][88][89]. This need does not find appreciation in countries that have so far stressed the urgency of a solid economy without considering the environmental cost [90,91]; however, in countries trying to integrate environmental approaches within economic and social planning [91][92][93][94][95], the sustainable approach is not seen as antithetical to economic and social development. The keyword "Sustainability" is, in this case, the most powerful keyword (with a total link of 25 and 20 co-occurrences) that recalls the other cluster keywords. ...
... This means that, over the last 20 years, Sustainability has become a core theme, considering the relatively recent formation of the Kyoto Protocol and other green initiatives that have called attention to the pollution emergency and the need for sustainable development [86][87][88][89]. This need does not find appreciation in countries that have so far stressed the urgency of a solid economy without considering the environmental cost [90,91]; however, in countries trying to integrate environmental approaches within economic and social planning [91][92][93][94][95], the sustainable approach is not seen as antithetical to economic and social development. Figure 9 regroups the main items that have been characterized for their cluster strength and co-occurrences. ...
... Despite this, innovations in technology are now making possible an effective industrial conversion that saves jobs and worker identities and preserves a sense of community as well as the environment [26,60,[98][99][100][101]. From this point of view, entrepreneurial resilience must be considered as the result of different components. Mutual interaction reinforces the organization, in contrast to the traditional entrepreneurial philosophy in which a firm must maximize earnings to avoid failure [4,5,15,19], act as an individual [21,22,102,103] and avoid cooperation [74,75,80,87,88,93,94,96]. ...
In this review, we study the state of entrepreneurial education as it applies to business resilience. We consider records over the last 20 years about entrepreneurial resilience that consider their social impact and focus on sustainability. The aim of the study was to determine whether an enterprise that stresses social impact and sustainability rather than profits could reinforce entrepreneurial resilience. The importance of this study is that it offers a more complex description of entrepreneurial resilience by connecting social and environmental sensitivity with a profit-oriented logic. We found a mild incremental rise in, first, the years of the 2000s and a jump by 2010. We then used VosViewer to create a cluster map from the record list of WOS, creating three clusters of: “education and sustainability”, “entrepreneurship and social impact” and “innovation”, and these three clusters were related to superior entrepreneurial resilience. This approach should be adopted in real time to be able to adapt to socio-economic crises, adopting a functional approach based on cooperativeness and awareness of complexity.
... Despite a general understanding of how green gentrification can manifest, there is much to be understood concerning the precise geographic and social conditions under which green gentrification impacts emerge (Anguelovski et al., , 2018Rigolon and Nemeth, 2020). In pursuit of a more nuanced understanding of the factors that influence green gentrification, scholars have expanded the socio-spatial contexts within which the phenomenon is researched (Anguelovski, 2016;Bouzarovski et al., 2018;DeLind, 2015;Millington, 2015;Rigolon and Németh, 2018). Urban agriculture has emerged as a common domain for scholars to explore the particularities of green gentrification, as it is well established that urban agriculture initiatives in North America operate across a wide range of scopes, scales, visions, and missions and are guided by a diverse array of urban actors (Braswell, 2018;Eizenberg, 2012;Mares and Peña, 2010). ...
... It is often the case that those seeking to establish an urban farm or garden must look toward areas of the city with affordable, vacant land (Alkon and Cadji, 2020). However, many of these sites have been shaped by a legacy of environmental toxicity or unwanted land uses and, due to discriminatory housing and development policies (e.g., redlining), predominantly house historically marginalized residents (Alkon et al., 2019;DeLind, 2015;McClintock, 2018a). As such, the implementation of urban agriculture, although intended to introduce ecologically restorative land use and encourage community engagement, can interrupt existing socio-spatial relationships to place and introduce unwanted economic attention (McClintock, 2018b). ...
There is substantial evidence detailing the ecological and social benefits provided through urban greening. However, research in the field of urban green equity has revealed that these benefits are not enjoyed equitably by all residents; existing disparities in the distribution, accessibility, and experience of urban greening disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities and residents. Furthermore, green gentrification scholarship has indicated that instances of urban greening intended to rectify inequities, can contribute to or elicit shifts in property values, encouraging speculative commercial and retail investment, disrupting existing socio-spatial relationships, and threatening the housing security of residents. Although there is consensus on this general characterization of green gentrification, many questions remain concerning the relationships between urban residents engaged in small-scale urban greening and the perpetuation of green gentrification outcomes. Contributing to this line of inquiry, we present a case study of an urban farm operating in Vancouver, Canada, facing displacement due to the redevelopment of its current site. Our results from the study illuminate the contradictory position in which urban residents practicing urban greening are sometimes placed—both implicated in and impacted by green gentrification processes. We present a review of our case study to highlight the power dynamics that farm members must navigate in the effort to preserve their access to land and continue their farming practice. Then, we discuss the farm's role as a consultant for the redevelopment process, exploring how its vision, mission, and identity have been co-opted by development agents and used as a branding tool to promote and support the public perception of the redevelopment. Our findings offer insight into novel relationships between urban agriculture, large-scale redevelopment, and green gentrification. What's more, they contribute to existing discourse concerning the limitations of development processes to account for the risks of green gentrification.
... PHS responded to the limits and opportunities of city and philanthropic funding under Mayor Street and his successor Michael Nutter with new rationales for agriculture. Since the 1970s, PHS had presented its community gardening programs as bringing together residents of blighted neighborhoods to "take back" and beautify At the same time, nationally and locally, urban agriculture policy, funders, and advocates increasingly cast urban farming and gardening as helping to solve food insecurity (Delind 2014). PHS came to promote City Harvest largely as a program for community gardens donating produce to food cupboards (Meenar and Hoover 2012;Vitiello and Nairn 2009). ...
Cities in the United States have developed urban agriculture support systems with different priorities. These reflect the often-competing values ascribed and inscribed in cities’ urban farming and gardening landscapes. The institutional structures of U.S. cities’ urban agriculture support systems vary accordingly, with significant impacts and implications for equity and justice. Some treat farming and gardening as a public good, public space, valued for their community-building, environmental, public health, and other social benefits. Others have sought to extract more economic and redevelopment gains from urban agriculture. These represent divergent, often-opposing theories of what urban agriculture can yield, and what it should be.
In his early work on urban agriculture, Jerry Kaufman explored its community and economic development potential, raising questions with which planners continue to grapple. This chapter reflects on the evolution of urban agriculture planning, policy, and practice in two cities he studied intensively, Chicago and Philadelphia. It asks: How have different actors and institutions valued urban agriculture? How have those values manifested in practice? What goals and impacts can U.S. cities reasonably ask of urban farming and gardening? And how might planners and cities develop urban agriculture policies and support systems that promote greater equity and justice?
... Despite the common expectations that urban agriculture is inherently "communal" or "community-oriented" (Ghose & Pettygrove, 2014), scholars have called into question the practice's tendency to be exclusive, if unintentionally, thus creating a quasi-private social space among gardeners due to divisions along social, cultural, and economic capital disparities (Allen, 2008;Aptekar, 2015). Furthermore, urban agriculture could contribute to gentrification and displacement by creating a white social space dominated by white bodies and increasing the values of previously blighted properties (DeLind, 2015;Safransky, 2014), even when intentions were to serve the needs of the long-term community (Becker & McClintock, 2020;Reynolds & Cohen, 2016), unless such tendencies are proactively addressed. The presence of public resistance against urban agriculture that Pothukuchi (2017) finds in Detroit further demonstrates a diversity in public perception about what the practice symbolizes, especially across racial and class lines. ...
The disruption of social and food systems during the COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique set of opportunities and challenges for urban agriculture. Based on 79 in-depth interviews with the managers of community gardens, school gardens, and urban farms in the DC metropolitan area, this study explores the divergent responses of each type of urban agriculture to the social, economic, and personal disruptions that the pandemic wrought using the post-disaster “social recovery” theory. Findings show significant differences in the immediate impacts across types of urban agriculture, with community gardens being the least impacted and urban farms implementing the most variant adaptation strategies. The data also show notable differences within each type of urban agriculture, especially among urban farms. We attribute variant trajectories of their adaptations to pre-disaster conditions, including autonomy over cultivation space, access to resources, and connections with other facets of city life. We conclude by underscoring the importance of recognizing the heterogeneity of urban agriculture in assessing its transformational capacity and potential.
... However, urban agriculture also involves challenges or detriments [18], for instance competition for resources, such as land, soil, and water [19], high investment costs or lack of acceptance [9], lack of space for large-scale urban farms [20], fostering of political and social inequity and displacement of urban neighbors [21], and soil contaminants that pose potential health risks [8,22]. ...
The desire for fresh, local food has increased interest in alternative food production approaches, such as private small-scale agriculture, wherein households grow their own food. Accordingly, it is worth investigating private agricultural production, especially in urban areas, given that an increasing share of the world’s population is living in cities. This study analyzed the growth of produce at people’s homes and in community gardens, focusing on behavioral and socio-demographic factors. Data were collected through an online survey in Detroit, Michigan; 420 citizens were interviewed. The results revealed that trust, attitude, and knowledge affect the growing of produce at home. Involvement and personality are also drivers of community gardening. Regarding socio-demographics, household size affects the growing of produce at home, while gender, age, and income affect community gardening. The findings have valuable implications for stakeholders who wish to foster private small-scale urban agriculture, for example, through city planning and nutrition education.
... Second, the most represented outcomes are the increased (re-)connection to nature (29) and increased ecological resilience (23), showing the potential of urban food to contribute to environmental awareness and sustainable practices. Also well represented is increased self-sufficiency (28), indicating that urban food can provide place-based solutions to increase access to food, and connected flows of resources (20), which can support making urban systems more circular. These processes and outcomes can be considered some of the main contributions of urban food practices. ...
Urban food is a key lever for transformative change towards sustainability. While research reporting on the urban food practices in support of sustainability is increasing, the link towards transformative potential is lacking. This is because research on urban food is often place-based and contextual. This limits the applicability of insights to large-scale sustainability transformations. This paper develops a framework to synthesise insights from urban food research across multiple disciplines and exploresits links to transformations research. We have developed a framework of signposts for transformative change based on processes and outcomes that are considered key for sustainable (urban) food transformations. Secondly, we classify diverse urban food practices to elevate them beyond their local, place-based contexts. We find that urban food practices carry a lot of potential to facilitate sustainability transformations. Based on that analysis, we provide insights on how urban food research can further contribute to harnessing the transformative potential of urban food practices for actionable purposes.
... Urban agriculture is experiencing a resurgence in popularity in many parts of the world. Beyond the social benefits urban agriculture can provide, such as creating opportunities for community building, jobs, and education, as well as increased access to healthy food [1], urban agriculture is also gaining interest due to the possible environmental benefits it can provide to municipalities. Some of those benefits include increased green spaces, reduction of food imports, and nutrient recycling [2][3][4][5]; the latter is the focus of this paper. ...
Urban agriculture, due to its location, can play a key role in recycling urban waste streams, promoting nutrient recycling, and increasing sustainability of food systems. This research investigated the integration of brewery wastewater treatment through anaerobic digestion with substrate-based soilless agriculture. An experiment was conducted to study the performance of three different crops (mustard greens (Brassica juncea), basil (Ocimum basilicum), and lettuce (Lactuca sativa) grown with digested and raw brewery wastewater as fertilizer treatments. Mustard greens and lettuce grown in digested wastewater produced similar yields as the inorganic fertilizer control treatment, while basil had slightly lower yields. In all cases, crops in the digested wastewater treatments produced higher yields than raw wastewater or the no fertilizer control, indicating that nutrients in the brewery wastewater can be recovered for food production and diverted from typical urban waste treatment facilities.
... Urban agricultural activists have equally found themselves framing their projects in economistic terms since the 1990s, swimming in a neoliberal tide against demands for the "highest and best use" of increasingly valuable urban land (DeLind, 2015;Samuel Walker, 2015). While some scholars are beginning to theorize gardens as a urban commons (Eizenberg, 2012;Federici, 2012, pp. ...
In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and ?urban pioneers? alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates? overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.
... As The assumption that UA is a valuable goal in itself often results in an instrumental approach to governance. UA advocates tend to consider the actual development of UA policies and projects to be of greater importance than the precise form, objectives and impacts of such initiatives (Cohen and Reynolds, 2014; DeLind, 2015; McClintock, 2014; Smit, 2016). Policy responses at various levels generally situate UA in the field of food and agriculture, with a strong focus on preservation of farmland and the supply of local food (Cohen, 2012 ). ...
This article explores the role of local particularism in relation to the global interest in urban agriculture (UA). A growing movement is advocating UA, but future prospects are limited by variability, unclear expectations, vague responsibilities and leadership in the UA movement. We wonder whether the poor understanding of UA governance is associated with a public discourse and academic literature that too easily adopt the generic and universally claimed benefits. We argue here that uncritical enthusiasm results in an overly instrumental approach to governance of UA with a main focus on stimulating formal (e.g., policy making) and informal advocacy (e.g., civic engagement in UA). We do not deny the importance of formal and informal advocacy in UA development, but rather claim that the potential of UA needs a more nuanced analysis. Study of the interplay between UA advocacy and a city’s contextual characteristics is a worthy pursuit, as it may provide significant and more profound explanations for the divergence observed in UA developments. Case studies performed in Warsaw (Poland) and Ghent (Belgium) serve to illustrate the importance of context. The results suggest that neither case is likely to benefit from a governance strategy that only stimulates greater advocacy and institutional support. The inclusion of city-specific needs, opportunities and pitfalls of UA in the governance strategy can help to move UA toward its full potential. We suggest a policy-making strategy for UA that expands beyond the realm of food production alone. Ultimately, the aim is to steer away from assessing (and critiquing) UA solely against the backdrop of these generic success factors.
... Urban agricultural activists have equally found themselves framing their projects in economistic terms since the 1990s, swimming in a neoliberal tide against demands for the "highest and best use" of increasingly valuable urban land (DeLind, 2015;Samuel Walker, 2015). While some scholars are beginning to theorize gardens as a urban commons (Eizenberg, 2012;Federici, 2012, pp. ...
The San Francisco Bay Area in California is undergoing a technology-driven wave of growth arguably more thoroughgoing than the first “dot-com” bubble, fueling hypertrophic gentrification and tales of a deeply class-divided, “Blade Runner kind of society”. While Silicon Valley is still the industry's employment center, San Francisco is seeing faster tech firm growth, and is transforming its downtown to become more “livable” and promoting public space as key to innovation. In this context, this paper offers a reading of urban public space not just as a consumption amenity but also as the “shop floor” of a labor process that goes beyond the walls of the firm to mobilize the social itself in the production of privately appropriated value. With innovation now the watchword of gentrification, the stakes of this shift oscillate between the total commodification of urban vitality and the recognition of the social process of value production itself.
United States cities have developed urban agriculture support systems with different priorities and institutional structures, with significant impacts and implications for social equity and justice. Some treat farming and gardening as public goods, public spaces, valued for their community-building, environmental and public health promotion, and other social benefits. Others have sought to extract more economic and redevelopment gains from urban agriculture. These represent divergent, often opposing expectations of what urban agriculture can yield, and what it should be, often present in the same city. This article, a combination of mixed methods research and reflection, traces the evolution of urban agriculture practice, support, and policy in Philadelphia and Chicago since the 1990s. In both cities, community gardens first declined and then grew in number since the late 2000s; both cities became prominent centers of urban farming. The two cities’ policies and support systems started from a similar place in the 1990s, but Chicago increasingly treated urban agriculture a public good, while the place of agriculture in Philadelphia remained more contested and unstable. These histories reflect broader tensions and the diversity of approaches in governing, supporting, and practicing agriculture in cities.
Like many neighborhoods in cities across the United States, Gifford Park—a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska—has been recreating itself through urban agriculture. Past research about urban agriculture reveals that it can operate as a material argument that resists negative characterizations and empowers residents, but this argument is incomplete. This case study extends the idea that places can function as spatial arguments and conceptualizes urban agriculture as a place ballet. Place ballets, which describe the interactions between places and bodies, offer a way of thinking about large-scale, slow-moving rhetorical action as well as demonstrating how economic and racial privilege manifest in the place and bodies—the material foundations of a place ballet. I argue that urban agriculture functions as a place ballet that reveals a complex, material argument about the positive impacts places and bodies can have on communities and community members while simultaneously overlooking the economic and racial privileges inherent in these efforts. Although the concept of a place ballet is a useful way to bring together two aspects of material rhetoric—place and bodies—it carries its own implications of economic and racial privilege.
L'agriculture urbaine est un concept plus empirique que théorique, qui est né et s'est diffusé dans le domaine du développement international à partir des années 1990
Problem, research strategy, and findings: How do traditional forms of urban agriculture and the newer digital urban agriculture converge and diverge from one another in terms of land use and gentrification? I interrogate the subject of digital urban agriculture with data from 82 semistructured interviews and notes taken during public forms and tours of facilities. Respondents were located in Denver (CO; n = 30), New York (NY; n = 26), and San Francisco (CA; n = 26) and held positions ranging from community organizers, investors, local food powerbrokers, and planners to engineers involved in facilitating urban foodways based on vertical farming, automation, and related technologies. I find digital platforms—systems exhibiting characteristics including real-time surveillance, artificial intelligence, and automation—share similarities with traditional urban farming systems. Both platforms have the potential to disrupt dominant political economies and also have links to gentrification and other inequitable land use patterns. Potential divergences include differences in a) social, cultural, economic, human, and built capital barriers and outcomes; b) land use life course; and c) zoning.
Takeaway for practice: Digital urban farming systems inhabit a regulatory gray area; respondents encountered agricultural, industrial, or commercial zoning permits. The “digital” aspects of these systems contributed to this ambiguity and are used by powerbrokers to obtain further zoning permission than is possible with traditional urban agriculture. Compared with more traditional urban farming systems, digital urban agriculture taps into different forms of human capital. Finally, my findings are inconclusive on the issue of land use life course. Some data indicate digital farms will remain in urban cores, whereas other evidence points to the eventual migration of these platforms to the metropolitan periphery.
Academic literature on USA urban agriculture’s (UA) potential for social justice (SJ) primarily centers on larger cities, such as Detroit or NYC. This focus obscures lessons from smaller cities such as Wilmington, Delaware. A diverse array of participants and organizations engage in UA in Wilmington with varying SJ goals and everyday practices within their sites. These goals and practices range from community change, education for underprivileged youth and marginalized communities, and providing economic opportunities. Participants’ perceptions of the impact of their social work also vary. Data gathered over the course of fieldwork conducted in 2017 suggests that considerations of the practice of UA in Wilmington, Delaware offers an alternative trajectory for evaluating its transformative potential. While possibilities for subversion of structural oppressions are observable in Wilmington’s UA, there are also possibilities for UA to augment existing inequalities. This thesis is comprised of two papers, in the form of Chapters 3 and 4, that address everyday experience of social justice through urban agriculture in Wilmington, Delaware. In Chapter Three, I argue that applying a (feminist) geopolitical framework into UA allows for an understanding of the different everyday lives and experiences of urban agriculture participants, which in turn influence how the wider network of UA organizations operates. In Chapter Four, I argue that issues of (in)visibility or (in)accessibility of UA sites impact participants’ perceptions of their social justice potential, which can be influential in the continued practice of UA as a site of social justice. Through my research I argue that an understanding of SJ orientated UA, and SJ more broadly, attuned to participants’ everyday experiences, worldviews, the sites in which they attempt to facilitate justice, and the relationships between these elements creates a more effective platform for scholars and activists to analyze, plan, and ultimately affect SJ.
Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values and rallying point for progressive claims to the right to the city. Recent critiques, however, warn of its contribution to gentrification and displacement. With the use–exchange value binary no longer as useful an analytic as it once was, geographers need to better understand UA's contradictory relations to capital, particularly in the neoliberal sustainable city. To this end, I bring together feminist theorizations of social reproduction, Bourdieu's “species of capital” and critical geographies of race to help demystify UA's entanglement in processes of ecogentrification. In this primarily theoretical contribution, I argue that concrete labor embedded in household-scale UA—a socially reproductive practice—becomes cultural capital that a sustainable city's growth coalition in turn valorizes as symbolic sustainability capital used to extract rent and burnish the city's brand at larger scales. The valorization of UA occurs, by necessity, in a variegated manner; spatial agglomerations of UA and the ecohabitus required for its misrecognition as sustainability capital arise as a function of the interplay between rent gaps and racialized othering. I assert that ecogentrification is not only a contradiction emerging from an urban sustainability fix but is central to how racial capitalism functions through green urbanization. Like its contribution to ecogentrification, I conclude, UA's emancipatory potential is also spatially variegated.
Based on interviews with 44 urban growers in New Orleans, this study examines their experiences of establishing urban agriculture (UA) projects on publicly and privately owned lots, either through purchase or lease. Publicly owned lots are easier to identify, but bureaucratic application processes and unpredictable policy changes made access less predictable and insecure, especially in terms of purchasing. Leasing privately owned lots is often a straightforward procedure, but these lots are difficult to identify without a comprehensive list, and were rarely available for purchase. Ultimately, neither type of vacant space produces significantly more security in land tenure for UA projects. The findings indicate that availability of vacancy does not equal initial or long-term access to the growers, and the current system of making vacant properties available for UA raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of UA projects.
Urban agriculture (UA) has emerged as a promising way to address many important issues, including growing food for local communities, preserving open space, promoting health, and developing local leaders. A worrying expectation, however, has developed for UA to meet these important and ambitious goals while also being financially sustainable without outside funding. We call this expectation the unattainable trifecta of urban agriculture—the myth that urban agriculture can, without long-term funding investments, simultaneously do three things that are each hard enough to do on their own:
1) Provide good food to people with limited financial resources at prices they can afford.
2) Provide job training, work experience, and/or leadership development for people typically excluded from employment.
3) Generate income for producers and create jobs funded by profits from sales.
In this reflective essay, we draw from the academic literature on UA and from the combined 30 years of urban agriculture experience of the first two authors to document and discuss what impacts urban agriculture is having and what challenges UA operations face in achieving these social goals. We conclude with recommendations for funders, policy-makers and activists about the broader changes and supports that are needed to make these goals more attainable within the context of UA.
Subsistence gardens were a significant land use in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area from 1900 to 1940. Their existence, however, was materially erased from the city and discursively erased from its history after that period. This paper investigates the processes of that erasure, particularly in the American Addition neighborhood of Columbus, concentrating on the articulation of an urban normative that made such land uses appear contrary to "modern" urban development. At the same time, the existence of such practices and landscapes in the city was explained away by a crisis narrative of the garden that helped to support the idea that such practices did not produce "normal" urban spaces. The simultaneous material and discursive colonization of subsistence gardens as "relief" measures during the Great Depression left these landscapes and areas dependent on the City of Columbus, under whose control they were transformed into more "appropriate" cityscapes.
A great variety of examples of calamities and disasters all testify to the blurring of boundaries between the human and the artificial, the technological and the natural, the non-human and the cyborg-human; they certainly also suggest that there are all manner of Natures out there. While some of the examples promise ’sustainable’ forms of development, others seem to stray further away from what might be labelled as sustainable. Sustainable processes are sought for around the world and solutions for our precarious environmental condition are feverishly developed.
So, while one sort of sustainability seems to be predicated upon feverishly developing new Natures (like artificial meat, cloned stem cells or manufactured clean water), forcing Nature to act in a way we deem sustainable or socially necessary, the other type is predicated upon limiting or redressing our intervention in Nature, returning it to a presumably more benign condition, so that human and non-human sustainability in the medium- and long-term can be assured. Despite the apparent contradictions of these two ways of ’becoming sustainable’, they share the same basic vision that techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it contains. The examples suggest that we urgently need to interpolate our understandings of Nature, revisit what we mean by Nature, and, what we assume Nature to be.
This first textbook on the topic of gentrification is written for upper-level undergraduates in geography, sociology, and planning. The gentrification of urban areas has accelerated across the globe to become a central engine of urban development, and it is a topic that has attracted a great deal of interest in both academia and the popular press. Gentrification presents major theoretical ideas and concepts with case studies, and summaries of the ideas in the book as well as offering ideas for future research.
This article is about the potential and limits of community control and development (community-building) in the developed world, but most of the references are to the USA. There is a paradox in the contemporary political economy. As the level of the social, political and economic relationships at which communities and cities are embedded has become increasingly globalised – and thereby remote from people in cities and communities – there has been a substantial turn towards the community level as the domain and level at which social, political and economic problems should be solved. The article explores this paradox, beginning with a detailed explanation of contemporary political economy – the increasing economic globalisation existing side by side with political devolution at the community level. This is followed by a discussion of the growth of community-based organisations in the USA, their activities and their histories. From there, the article shifts gears to critique the theories of community that guide most mainstream practices. The article ends with a discussion of alternative forms of community organising and development that lead towards greater community control in the context of capital mobility and economic globalisation.
Food security is a significant problem throughout the United States. This paper examines the extent of food security in the Allen Neighborhood and examines how it relates to both demographic characteristics of the neighborhood and the structure of food retailers in the surrounding area. U.S. Census data indicate that the neighborhood has many of the characteristics that make it at high risk for food insecurity including low-income, many single parent families, high numbers of renters, and a significant minority population. Spatial analysis of food retailers using GIS indicates that while food is readily available through convenience and party stores, the location of grocery stores indicates that the Allen Neighborhood is located within a food desert. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, a survey of neighborhood residents reveals that almost 1 out of 3 households is food insecure.
Presentation hosted by Our Kitchen Table
- L Redmond
Vision: Urban gardening and green economy flourish in Detroit
- C Hill
No justice, no juice: Food as a tool for organizing. Civil Eats
- L Redmond