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, weed trimming tray 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. McClintock’s framework helps explain the multifunctionality of urban agriculture, its wide resonance in an era of widespread individual, social and ecological strain, and its interconnectedness with numerous social, cultural and environmental processes.
However, his invocation of urban political ecology stops short of tracing the ideological and material flows involved in urban agriculture’s implementation in any given locality. Like any other socio-environmental space, community gardens arise from the confluence of certain physical elements that have cohered as a result of social processes, relations, ideas, interests, and practices. In turn, these spaces have symbolic and material impacts on the social systems of which they are part. The soil, water, seeds, and materials used for garden tools and infrastructure are brought together by people holding specific ideas and marshalling resources available to them in order to make urban nature. At the same time, certain physical elements must be absent from the space for it to continue as a garden; the gardeners must labor against ecological forces to limit the growth of life forms they don’t wish to cultivate , and they may come up against political-economic forces seeking to grow capital by re-forming the space with entirely different physical elements. The lens of urban political ecology can help unpack the interconnected social and ecological relations that come to bear on the creation and preservation or loss of urban agricultural sites and other urban socio-environments. While urban political ecology draws attention to uneven outcomes produced by power relations, however, much of the political analysis reaches abstract conclusions about the governance of space under the influence of capital. Traditional urban political economy provides a more concrete framework for understanding the actors involved in urban land use contestation, and political ecology can be further enhanced with attention to the specific organizations through which power flows as social relations, ideas, and practices reshape socio-environmental conditions.While community gardens can provide social, nutritional, aesthetic, and potentially economic benefits to participants and nearby residents, they occur within and are unlikely to resolve large-scale disparities in neighborhood characteristics. Residential racial segregation, and the food-system and environmental inequalities that have arisen alongside it, can be seen in part as a result of the political-economic logic governing urban development. This logic, employed with consistency by powerful actors in most North American cities, tends to drive land-use decisions and policy in a way that leaves urban agriculture sites highly vulnerable. In a dynamic process, power differentials manifest through competition to take the form of built-environment winners and losers across space. Logan and Molotch’s urban growth machine thesis explains this disparity by emphasizing that different localities are constantly competing against one another to attract capital, intensify land use, cannabis grow set up and thereby grow the economy. Because resources are limited, it is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. What is more, the growth machine logic is occurring at multiple scales: between different neighborhoods within cities, between cities and the surrounding suburbs, between different cities, and between regions or larger territories as well. Local growth coalitions—made up of politicians, businessmen, developers, small property owners, and other real estate interests—work together to structure their locality in a way that will attract capital investment and increase the area’s overall “exchange value” and in so doing promote property value appreciation . The most successful growth coalitions win buy-in from higher levels of government, new construction projects, greater commercial activity, more intense residential development, and the benefits of rising property values that accrue to growth coalition members . Less successful growth coalitions may still attract capital, but in forms such as industrial activity, hazardous waste facilities, or other locally unwanted land uses with steeper health and economic downsides . Unsuccessful locales may lose out on investment altogether, and experience shrinkage rather than growth as economic opportunity dries up, properties are abandoned, and residents move away. Even when growth coalitions succeed, the benefits of increasing exchange value are not evenly distributed amongst those in a given locale. Despite ideological assurances that growth is good for everyone, urban development often comes at the expense of residents’ “use value,” with increased traffic, pollution, noise, strain on utilities, and aesthetic decline reducingresidents’ quality of life.
Growth coalition members work to manage the public narrative so that growth is widely seen as desirable, or at least inevitable . However, if community organizations anticipate the harm to their quality of life and mobilize to resist unwanted change, conflict can arise between local residents and the growth coalition and its growth entrepreneurs. Community organizations resisting development are rarely on an even footing with the growth coalition. Within a given locale, community residents opposing development usually organize their resistance in response to a particular threat, while a region’s growth coalitions tend to remain consistently organized due to members’ ongoing coordination and shared interests in growing the value of their properties. Because pro-development groups are usually better resourced and more organized, they tend to prevail . But not always—sometimes communities are able to mount effective opposition to forms of development that they see as undesirable. Which communities can successfully oppose unwanted development represents further inequality in the terrain of land-use contestation. Those with greater access to financial and social capital are far more likely both to attract capital investment for desired forms of development and to mount effective opposition to development proposals they oppose . Thus, already disadvantaged communities are the most likely to either experience capital disinvestment and neighborhood blight, or to undergo steep declines in use value from LULUs as the growth machine drives on. Mirroring patterns in the urban food environment described above, the residential neighborhoods with the most blight, and those closest to LULUs, tend to be low-income Black or Latinx neighborhoods. Considering the challenges these neighborhoods often face— including limited access to affordable, healthy food; vacant and blighted land; slumping property values; poor air quality; and social problems such as crime and low collective efficacy—the potential benefits of community gardens are especially meaningful for residents in such areas. Indeed, many community gardens are started informally by residents seeking to address community needs and add use value to vacant land in low-income neighborhoods. Yet if these residents don’t own the property they garden on, it remains vulnerable to the gears of the growth machine. The dynamics of the urban growth machine have influenced land use in the United States for well over a century; in recent decades, urban governance and political economy more broadly have also been strongly shaped by the prevailing logic of neoliberalism. Since the late 1970s, neoliberal ideology has gained traction among political decision-makers across all levels of government. Standing in contrast to Keynesian economic theories about the role of government in stimulating and regulating the economy, neoliberal ideology posits that the main role of the government is to prop up free markets and otherwise get out of the private sector’s way . This has translated into accelerated privatization of public assets, more regressive tax codes, and the rescission of social services . Culturally, neoliberalism has taken shape in an ideological shift that emphasizes individual responsibility for one’s economic wellbeing and health, a shift that has occurred alongside the structural fraying of the social safety net . The rhetoric extolling free markets and spotlighting the role of individuals in their own fate serves to distract from the ways that individuals are connected in society and “free” capitalist markets accumulate ever-greater wealth for a privileged few while burdening everyone else with the downsides of private profit-making . In the United States, city budgets have become more strained since neoliberal ideas gained political traction. Public spending cuts at the state and federal level have reduced capital flows from higher levels of government into city coffers, and cities have not been able to make up for the shortfalls through general taxation describe the dual processes of “roll-back” and “roll-out” neoliberalization: public systems of social service provision are dismantled, and their former functions are devolved onto private and third-sector organizations, which take on a larger share of the work to feed, house, educate, and otherwise care for citizens in times of need. Through the roll-back and roll-out of neoliberalization, urban governance arrangements are becoming restructured. Nonprofit human-service organizations have had to focus more on local service provision and engage less in advocating for policy that protects the rights of the poor .