How do the organizations involved and the local political economy influence what is valued, and what is considered possible, for these spaces? What are the outcomes of preservation efforts in terms of policy, program characteristics, and garden accessibility? In this chapter, I take up what urban agriculture research has suggested about forms of urban growing, urban development processes, and the impact that community gardens can have on the urban landscape, as well as what remains to be understood about these dynamics. To illustrate what is at stake and what forces shape the possibilities for urban agriculture, I then summarize the research on key aspects of the urban context including food system inequalities; the politics of shaping and understanding urban nature; urban development and its contestation; and the role of community-based organizations in making urban life. Next, I discuss the research on how social movements effect structural change, a critical question for urban agriculture advocates looking to win favorable land use policies. I close the chapter by highlighting the major contributions of this dissertation, ebb and flow rolling benches addressing the uncharted nexus of organizational sociology and political ecology and discussing the limited research on the shifting relationship between community-based organizations and social movement organizations, whose blurring is especially pronounced among groups working to preserve urban agriculture sites.
Organized efforts to grow food in cities have a long history in practice, but they have only recently caught the attention of researchers. Following a handful of studies in the 1990s and early 2000s , Lawson’s history provided a comprehensive picture of the long history of community gardening in the US. Urban agriculture can take many forms, including private gardening and animal husbandry in backyards, balconies and rooftops; community gardens; edible landscapes such as food forests and community orchards; gardens at schools and other institutional sites; demonstration gardens; and commercial urban farming operations of various sizes . Community gardens are the most common sites for urban agriculture research in the developed world, perhaps because of their rich social relations, commonality and ease of accessibility. This dissertation touches on many forms of urban agriculture, because policymakers and the public often tie them together; however, the primary focus is on community gardens, because these multifunctional sites offer the most potential benefits and are often at the center of collective action in defense of urban agricultural space. Much of the research on community gardens to date has taken the form of case studies about individual gardens or programs , needs assessments , and measuring or estimating potential contributions to food security, urban redevelopment, political mobilization, or other aspects of social life . While several researchers have noted the vulnerability of gardens to urban development pressure , few studies have focused directly on the land use issue. Studies about the threat of garden removal and resistance to it have almost exclusively taken up the case of New York City’s urban agriculture movement .
This local movement coalesced in response to a major land transfer plan in the 1990s, a conflict that received a great deal of coverage at the time. Though they have received less attention in the literature, similar dynamics have played out in cities across the US, creating an opportunity for comparative research regarding the social movement activities, organizations and outcomes in different cities. Following Allen et al.’s distinction between alternative and oppositional food movements, scholars of urban agriculture have begun to analyze variation in community gardens according to their political orientations and outcomes. Some grassroots projects are described as radical because they take an oppositional stance toward existing social structures, explicitly challenging industrial agriculture and the political-economic system that has virtually abandoned many urban communities . Others are more reformist, seeking to provide urban residents with new opportunities for environmental connection and self-provision, without confronting the structural context in which these needs have arisen . Still others serve to support the existing social system by signaling the type of neighborhood change that benefits elites. Counterintuitively, while gardens often become vulnerable to removal when land values increase, they are also an attractive neighborhood amenity and can themselves contribute to gentrification. Urban real estate tends to increase in value when community gardens are built nearby, especially in areas with initially low land values . Community gardens sometimes receive support from developers and other elites because of their potential impact on the exchange value of urban land . However, increasing real estate value also contributes to displacement of vulnerable populations, and/or the destruction of gardens themselves to make way for development .
Thus, gentrification can serve as a source of elite support for gardens, but it can also threaten low-income residents’ access to a garden and even the garden’s very existence . Scholars who approach gardens as “contested spaces” have noted that community gardens tend to proliferate in declining urban areas, yet they can also have an appreciating effect on neighborhoods which then increases the garden’s vulnerability to development. Even if gardens remain secure as the surrounding neighborhood gentrifies, their internal character may be contested. As a social and recreational activity that produces green spaces and healthy food, community gardening is associated with a range of individual and collective benefits: community empowerment , economic opportunity , safety and security , neighborhood development , environmental health and sustainability , cultural preservation , food security and nutrition , alternative medicine , rehabilitative therapy , and healthy recreation . Community gardens vary widely in their form and function , and the benefits they provide are not consistent across all gardens. Scholars suggest that attaining the full range of touted benefits at once is likely impossible, because community gardens and other urban agriculture initiatives are constrained by limited resources and market-based economic contexts. The wide range of benefits envisioned for community gardens means that participants at a given site do not always agree about how the garden should look or what purpose it should serve . This is especially true in gentrifying areas or other neighborhoods undergoing demographic change, in which residents from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds bring different norms and expectations to the space . Like other alternative and local food initiatives, community gardens fit well with a certain white, middle-class ethos , embodying a set of pastoral or “green” values. When the dominant social group universalizes its own values, the meanings and perspectives held by other groups are obscured, which can lead to a sense of exclusion . Yet food growing practices are important to every culture; people from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds have built urban community gardens and find meaning in these spaces . It is particularly important to interrogate the nature of community gardening programs before assuming that they are beneficial for those most in need, since community gardens can produce not only food, health, and community, but also displacement and exclusion, and since they are built amidst the inequality and uneven contexts of urban life.Inequalities in food access and health are large and growing problems in the United States. Across the country, food insecurity is significantly higher for Black and Latinx Americans than it is for whites . In cities, access to affordable healthy food is constrained in both low-income neighborhoods and in predominantly Black neighborhoods of any income level, a problem that is most pronounced in low-income Black neighborhoods . With insufficient food access, individuals are unable to make healthy decisions about their diets and consumption . Not having access to affordable food is a problem on its own, rolling grow benches and also because food insecurity is associated with diabetes and other chronic diseases among low-income Americans . In low-income communities where nutritious food is less available, obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related health problems are more common . While proximity to an affordable food retailer certainly makes it easier to eat healthily, food insecurity is even more strongly correlated with income and race than with the food environment itself . Whether measured as distance to a grocery store or as income and purchasing power, spatial inequalities in food access are so stark that the correlation between food insecurity and diet-related health problems is observable at the neighborhood level. Food access inequalities are linked to disparities in the built environment and the legacy of urban racial segregation .
Food insecurity in Black and Latinx communities is perpetuated by interpersonal discrimination and structural racism, through inequitable access to education, employment, housing, and credit . Over the last century, processes of institutional racism including segregation and white flight have occurred simultaneously to the restructuring of retail food distribution and the closure of many urban supermarkets—producing an unequal food system with significant negative impacts for communities of color in American cities . Dimensions of structural racism such as redlining, discrimination in lending, zoning, and other real estate industry practices have concentrated Black and Latinx residents in lower-income, racially segregated neighborhoods with fewer opportunities for quality education, employment, and health . With white flight to the suburbs, a new homogenous consumer base and large tracts of available land promoted a shift in food retailer models toward ever-larger supermarkets and an increasing concentration of the grocery industry . As this shift occurred, urban areas—especially inner-city Black and Latinx neighborhoods—saw themselves abandoned by grocery stores. Changes in food distribution and retail, coupled with discriminatory insurance practices and burdensome zoning requirements, made servicing these neighborhoods more expensive while profit margins grew slimmer . Today, low-income Black and Latinx neighborhoods are characterized by a high concentration of liquor stores and fast-food restaurants, along with a dearth of healthy food retailers . As affected communities and researchers have drawn attention to the race- and class based inequalities in food access and health outcomes, calls have grown to ameliorate the disparity by adding more healthy food options in neighborhoods described as “food deserts” . The primary response has been government and nonprofit initiatives to incentivize new grocery stores or increase healthy food options at existing retailers . However, such interventions aren’t always successful, especially when the prices and food offerings are not well aligned with the needs of the neighborhood . Furthermore, activists have pointed out that injustices in the food system go beyond the spatial inequalities of food retail: ownership and control over farmland , food processing and distribution , and food retail business are all concentrated disproportionately in the hands of corporations and white Americans. Building a healthy and equitable food system therefore requires attention to food sovereignty—the right of all people to access healthy, culturally appropriate food and to determine how food is produced and distributed . Community gardeners determine for themselves what to plant and how to grow their crops, making this form of urban agriculture an especially promising vehicle for food sovereignty. More generally, by providing nutritious food for low or no cost, community gardens are seen as one way to improve the food offerings and environmental conditions in disadvantaged neighborhoods.Constant but ever-shifting inequalities in urban environmental conditions are a focal point in the scholarship of urban political ecologists. Urban political ecology begins from the premise that society and nature are co-constituted through the process of urbanization, which alters material flows and transforms space according to discursive, cultural, economic and power relations at the local, regional and global scales . Bridging constructivist and realist approaches, urban political ecologists examine the ways that both ideas and biophysical conditions work to structure “socionature” . In other words, scholars in this area focus on the ways that spaces in the urban environment are produced, discursively and materially, in ways that benefit some groups and disadvantage others according to interconnected social relations.Applying the lens of urban political ecology to the phenomenon of urban agriculture, McClintock argues that urban agriculture is a social response to distinct forms of individual, social and ecological strain imposed by the capitalist system of production. Urban agriculture is celebrated for multiple potential benefits because it is a comprehensible strategy that has arisen in different circumstances as a reaction to and an attempt to ameliorate hunger and social unrest in times of crisis, the alienation from nature that many come to feel living in cities, waste accumulation as populations grow and densify, and the ecological degradation from industrial processes and globalized agriculture.