Philadelphia Green was developed as a strategy to help the larger organization of PHS maintain its legitimacy as times were changing, interest in horticulture as a status-signal was on the decline, and urban problems were making their way into the consciousness of Philadelphia’s elite. Initiated in this context, the Philadelphia Green program increased PHS’s activity within its home city, opened up new funding opportunities, and made a significant impact on the urban landscape. When it was first founded, Philadelphia Green faced no difficulty in gaining legitimacy because of its affiliation with PHS, but as with PHS overall, maintaining Philadelphia Green’s legitimacy over time required adaptation to a changing organizational environment. Philadelphia Green was originally conceived as a strategy to benefit urban residents by getting them interested in horticulture, yet as with many nonprofit urban agriculture programs, PHS discovered that more grant funding was available to start gardens than to maintain existing ones. To meet the shifting landscape of available funding opportunities, the program evolved into a greening tool for combatting blight and spurring neighborhood redevelopment. For its first ten years, Philadelphia Green mostly offered materials and technical support for urban residents interested in starting gardens.
Then the early 1980s, the program’s longtime director J. Blaine Bonham proposed a project for the city’s bicentennial celebration, cannabis growing system which he dubbed the Greene Country Townes. Invoking William Penn’s original vision for the city , this project targeted a series of neighborhoods for concentrated greening interventions that engaged neighbors on adjacent blocks in various transformations, such as adding window boxes, planting street trees, and installing community gardens and pocket parks on vacant lots. The Greene Country Townes were billed as demonstrations of how much potential greening had to bring beauty and revitalization to urban neighborhoods. Seeing the impact that intensive greening had on the selected Greene Country Townes neighborhoods, the leader of the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections reached out to partner with PHS on using federal Community Development Block Grant funds to green vacant lots across the city. In Philadelphia Green’s “clean-and-green” treatment, lots would be cleared of trash, covered with fresh sod, and then adorned with a small wooden fence to prevent vehicles from driving onto the lot and dumping more trash. As the clean-and-green operation continued throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, PHS worked with researchers at local universities to measure and document its effects. This rationalization furnished convincing evidence that greening vacant lots can improve property values , reduce crime , and even lower rates of depression among local residents . These frequently cited studies have legitimized investments in community gardens and green spaces in Philadelphia and beyond.
However, the studies are based primarily on the clean-and-green treatment rather than the program’s gardens, and they appeal to growth coalition interests as much as the needs of marginalized residents. As one development professional explained, the clean-and-green treatment makes neighborhoods “more investment ready” . Well-maintained lots free of trash offer many benefits, not the least of which is their impact on neighborhood attractiveness; however, a lawn-like vacant lot does not offer the same social or nutritional benefits as a community garden.Over time, an increasing share of the Philadelphia Green annual report was dedicated to large scale landscaping work such as the clean-and-green project, horticultural improvements in highly visible public spaces, and parks revitalization. Garden support continued, but it came to be described more in terms of educational classes offered and trainings to help neighborhoods self-organize to start gardens. Eventually, the Philadelphia Green program ended as its functions were divided into new, more focused programs including Garden Tenders , City Harvest , Public Landscapes , and Philadelphia LandCare . Comparative analysis of documents and interviews provides evidence for how Philadelphia Green’s transformation into an urban development program affected the narrative for urban agriculture’s value in the city. The codes for investment, city beautification, city reputation, revitalization, cleanup, and neighborhood reputation were all more frequent in Philadelphia documents and interviews than in Milwaukee or Seattle.
While narratives were present in all three cities describing urban agriculture as a way to beautify neighborhoods and thereby improve the city’s reputation, this beautification was most closely connected to economic impacts in Philadelphia. In this model, if gardens on vacant lots were replaced with housing or commercial development, the end goal of economic improvement would be achieved and the removal of the garden not as much of a loss. In PHS documents and in interviews with current and former PHS staff, the code for organizing and mobilization was present mainly in reference to the way that Philadelphia Green trained urban residents to organize their neighbors around identified needs, particularly greening projects that PHS could support with materials and technical knowledge. The organization did not focus on organizing gardeners to preserve their spaces or engage in much mobilization to increase security for garden sites . Over time, many of the gardens that PHS helped to build disappeared; some ceased to be tended as gardens, but many were lost to development as the city ramped up its efforts to sell off vacant lots . In the Greene Country Townes and other neighborhoods that had benefitted from Philadelphia Green’s concentrated revitalization efforts, property values did increase, but most gardens were lost along the way. Philadelphia Green was founded as a garden support program rather than a land trust, as Milwaukee Urban Gardens had been. The problem of garden loss did become evident to Philadelphia Green’s leadership, however, as did the problem of garden attrition which, in the case of MUG, has saddled the organization with some unused properties. In the case of Philadelphia Green, responding to the threats of garden loss and garden attrition took on two forms that have ultimately come to structure the broader efforts to preserve urban agricultural land in the city today. In response to garden loss, PHS never took on ownership of sites; their board of directors had long been averse to owning property. Instead, in the 1980s when the threat of garden loss became apparent, Philadelphia Green director Blaine Bonham worked with a network of urban planners, garden advocates and others to start a new organization, the Neighborhood Gardens Association, which was founded as a land trust in order to purchase and preserve threatened community gardens. Now called the Neighborhood Gardens Trust , this organization has remained close to PHS—and since a PHS-led board shakeup around 2010, NGT has essentially operated as a subsidiary of PHS. As of 2021, NGT has preserved over 40 community gardens in Philadelphia. Most of the organization’s early acquisitions were large, well-established gardens in which PHS had invested significant resources over time. In recent years, NGT has taken a new approach by prioritizing sites for preservation that are in gentrifying neighborhoods, even if they aren’t among the most well established. As will be discussed more in chapter 4, NGT and similar professionalized nonprofits are able to navigate the city’s complex land disposition process relatively effectively because of their expertise and good relationships with city officials. However, NGT’s professionalism, indoor plant table association with PHS, and collegial relationships with city officials also work to repel some gardeners seeking help with preservation. As noted at the start of this section, PHS sought legitimacy primarily from its donors and funders, rather than from the gardeners; skepticism of the organization among some Black Philadelphia gardeners endures to this day. One garden advocate explained why some gardeners were hesitant to seek preservation through NGT, “I do have a lot of people because especially in Black communities, in Black and Brown communities as well… there’s a lack of trust in regards to other organizations holding title to the land” .
Despite not being seen by some Black and Brown gardeners as a legitimate solution for garden preservation, NGT undoubtedly serves as an important part of efforts to secure agricultural land in Philadelphia, and the organization would not exist if it weren’t for leadership at PHS in the 1980s and 1990s who saw the need and helped get the land trust started. While playing a large role in garden preservation efforts, NGT is decidedly not a social movement organization. They meet individually with city council members when seeking to preserve sites in their districts rather than organizing public political pressure in an outsider strategy. The same approach characterizes PHS overall, although in a roundabout way the Philadelphia Green program has helped spur social movement activity for pro-garden policy change in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Green was founded as a garden support program, not as a land trust like MUG, so systematizing its operations in response to garden attrition took on a different form in Philadelphia Green than it did in MUG. While MUG had to overhaul its goals and activities to avoid investing in gardens that might dissolve due to lack of leadership, Philadelphia Green’s managers simply had to fine-tune their garden support activities to ensure they were building leadership that would endure at the gardens they invested in. To this end, they established clear criteria for sites to qualify for their garden support services, and they developed programs to cultivate the management and organizing skills that aspiring community gardeners would need in order to lead their sites effectively. Media accounts and two interviewees affiliated with the Philadelphia Green program noted that the leadership development work of their garden support classes has activated civic participation in other neighborhood concerns, such as crime reduction. And while PHS and NGT tend to engage mostly in insider political advocacy, another coalition has emerged, from efforts that PHS was originally involved with, that is dedicated to organizing Philadelphia’s growers for outsider strategies that pressure the city to overhaul its land disposition process and policy making. This organization’s radical perspective and outsider tactics constitute the strongest and most effective sustained social movement activity in any of the three case-cities. Beginning around 2012, an urban agriculture movement in Philadelphia began to get politically organized, and these efforts have evolved and been sustained over the last decade. Amy Laura Cahn, a lawyer with the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, established a program called the Garden Justice Legal Initiative to help gardeners gain ownership of land they had been cultivating for years. Through her advocacy, she learned that city officials did not view urban growers as a “constituency” and therefore did not consider their needs in policy making . She hired a community organizer to begin outreach and mobilization, with a goal of mapping the city’s gardens and convincing the city to stop selling them . When revisions to the city’s zoning code were proposed that would have banned urban agriculture in certain areas, the GJLI was able to quickly demonstrate that the changes threatened roughly 20% of the city’s community gardens . They were also able to mobilize gardeners to show up to hearings opposing the zoning change, in partnership with representatives from other organizations in a coalition that the GJLI initiated called the Campaign for Healthier Foods and Greener Spaces. PHS participated in the Campaign, and many of the gardeners that GJLI sought to organize had previously received some form of support through Philadelphia Green. It’s possible that PHS trainings had imparted skills in neighborhood organizing that proved valuable as the growers got mobilized, but it was GJLI that organized a citywide network of gardeners and staked out a political agenda. As noted earlier, PHS had always erred on the side of insider advocacy and had never cultivated political participation among gardeners. After the zoning proposal was successfully defeated, Kirtrina Baxter, the organizer of the Campaign for Healthier Foods and Greener Spaces, took the coalition in a new direction that did not include PHS. The group evolved into Soil Generation, a movement organization explicitly led by the city’s Black and Brown growers.As is common in alternative food movements, the organizational culture of PHS and some of the other original coalition members reflected professionalized white upper-class perspectives and ways of engaging that alienated many of the city’s growers, who are far more likely to be lower income, people of color, and/or immigrants. Despite PHS’s long history of working with and providing support for gardeners of color throughout Philadelphia, the organization did not prioritize gaining legitimacy from these gardeners, and its more elite-facing orientation likely prevented the organization from being seen as a legitimate representative of or advocate for gardeners’ interests.