The concept of structural vulnerability is crucial not only to refine anthropological analyses of the social production of suffering but also to reorient medical and public health attention away from individual behaviors and toward social structures.Growing and preparing food are fundamental to virtually all human societies, forming the basis of both cultural traditions and social relations. In contemporary society, urbanization has produced a historically wide rift between the production and consumption of food, with an unprecedented share of the population far removed, geographically and psychologically, from the production of the food they consume. However, this distance has never totally defined the urban population. Some level of food production has always taken place in cities, with important implications for the growers, their communities, and urban systems overall . The phrase “urban agriculture” seems, at first blush, to be an oxymoron. This is because, conceptually, “the urban” and its association with dense housing and limited space contrasts strongly with “the rural,” which is associated with open land, crop cultivation, and farming generally . While urban agriculture is more historically ubiquitous than is commonly conceived, plant benches with rare exceptions such as the Victory Garden movement during World War II, urban agriculture in the US context has mostly been small-scale and supplementary rather than a prominent feature of making urban life .
The seeming oxymoron of “urban agriculture” points toward a critical tension that infuses food production in the city: urban land is expected to serve a purpose other than growing food.This dissertation focuses on the ways that grassroots activists and urban gardeners in three United States cities have advocated for and organized the cultivation of urban land since the 1970s. Over this time period, alongside a general shift in governance away from social support and toward more free-market economic policies, a series of economic crises have brought increased attention to urban food production. Across the country, organized gardening activities have been sustained in many large cities, but the gardens continue to be viewed as temporary land uses in almost every case. Drawing on historical documents and interviews, I demonstrate how urban agriculture has come to be seen as a legitimate long-term use of urban land in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle in different ways that relate to key organizational decisions as well as to the local culture, economic conditions, and policy context. In all three of these cities, and, I argue, in cities around the world, urban agriculture advocates must navigate modern urban political economy in order to sustain spaces that go against typical land use patterns; in the process, they make use of limited resources to build legitimacy for their organization and for agriculture’s place in the urban milieu. Legitimacy, or an audience’s sense that a given entity’s actions are acceptable and appropriate, is an essential feature for the survival and success of any organization.
While the importance of organizational legitimacy may seem self-evident, I argue that organizations pursuing their own legitimacy can play an important role in shaping public discourse around the activities they undertake or promote—especially when those activities are not readily seen as legitimate on their own. In this regard, efforts to legitimize and preserve urban agriculture resemble other movements in which less powerful groups seek to transform urban life through the reallocation of resources and decision-making, such as the contemporary drive for community policing and calls to shift public safety funding toward mental health and social services . Regarding urban agriculture, the current resurgence in interest is also part of a wider socio-environmental process in which the ecological limits of modern industrial society are forcing a broad conversation around urban sustainability and resilience . Urban agriculture organizations therefore have an important role to play in negotiating how cities will change in the 21st century. Given the ongoing challenges of feeding urban populations, fostering economic activity, and promoting social cohesion that endure alongside increasing concern for urban environmental health, garden advocates have a range of social problems to draw on in constructing their claims to legitimacy and advocating for greater land access. My dissertation shows that the narratives advanced about urban agriculture’s value have implications for what advocates achieve both in policy and in practice. Using urban land for agriculture has typically required a concerted effort on the part of community members and organizations to secure the land—that is, to protect it from other potential uses such as housing or commercial development.
With the higher density of urban areas, demand for space can put pressure on any land use that isn’t maximizing a site’s potential. Of course, what is considered a site’s maximum potential is socially constructed; as predicted by the urban growth machine theory, land uses are largely determined by the alignment of interests among powerful growth entrepreneurs, investors, simple property owners, and local government regulations and regulators. However, when none of these parties takes a lead role in determining a site’s use, local residents often determine a use themselves for underutilized, interstitial spaces in order to fill a need or realize the potential most important to them; this is how many urban agriculture projects begin . In general, with or without institutional and landowner support, urban agriculture tends to proliferate in times and places where crises leave land underutilized and more people in need . Especially during a crisis, such as an economic crisis, war, pandemic, or local social instability, urban agriculture receives increased public attention as a potential solution to many of the problems that the crisis has brought on. This is because urban agriculture can provide numerous benefits—economically, nutritionally, environmentally, and socially—that vary with how the sites are structured and managed . While growing food in cities has many potential benefits, the notion that it can serve as a panacea to urban problems is misleading; because of physical and social constraints, no individual program or project can provide the full range of benefits that urban agriculture is commonly associated with . Nevertheless, urban agriculture seems frequently to be rediscovered at the onset of any new crisis – such as economic disruption brought on by war, recession or inflation . Activists, residents and/or the media contribute to a surge of excitement around the many potential benefits—healthy food, social connection, education, equity and justice, urban beautification, green space, blight removal, and/or economic development—that they envision urban agriculture will bring. Indeed, urban agriculture can provide valuable means of addressing common social problems that arise in cities—particularly when implemented in the form of community gardening, a practice that has been widely celebrated in the discourse around urban agriculture in the United States since the 1970s. While the anonymity, impersonality, and inequity of urban life can become alienating, community gardens can provide a place where residents can connect with one another , bridging socioeconomic, racial and generational divides and/or developing a greater sense of self-sufficiency and agency . In cities, many low-income residents and people of color are burdened with insufficient access to affordable, nutritious food as a result of racial segregation and economic dislocation, but community gardens have shown the potential to increase food security and sovereignty for these communities . Furthermore, rolling bench while most of the produce grown in community gardens is eaten by the gardeners and their families or donated to others for free, community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture can also spur local food retail, economic development, and employment in neighborhoods blighted by decades of disinvestment . Additionally, community gardens and urban farms function as a type of urban greenspace that helps ameliorate geophysical and ecological problems common to urban landscapes, including stormwater runoff, urban heat island effect, habitat loss, and poor air quality . With all of these documented benefits, it is no wonder that urban agriculture engenders much excitement during times of crisis. Marxist theorists have long held that crises are inherent to how capitalism functions . Heightened attention to urban agriculture during crisis has highlighted its paradoxical relationship with capitalism, too. At its core, urban agriculture holds the potential for producing and consuming outside the capitalist market system . Thus, urban agriculture can take on a “radical” character as a form of resistance and transformative practice . Yet urban agriculture can also serve as a “relief valve” that keeps a dysfunctional system just bearable enough, reducing suffering without solving the underlying issues, and thus propping up the dominant system rather than working against it . In this way, the paradox of urban agriculture today is similar to the broader problematic of civil-sector social service provision under roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism . Moreover, in some cases, as urban agriculture comes to be defined as a neighborhood amenity, it increases local property values .
When this happens, urban agriculture ultimately puts low-income residents at risk of displacement, nullifying any benefits the spaces may have provided for them. Community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture hold significant potential as means to improve the lives of marginalized residents, but improvement is neither inherent nor guaranteed; there are contingencies in how urban agricultural practices are designed and implemented. Since urban agriculture goes against the typical uses of urban land, those advocating for community gardens and urban farms often face resistance from urban growth entrepreneurs and the city government officials who support them. Schmelzkopf conceptualizes gardens as politically contested spaces, where multiple potential uses that would be social goods are pitted against each other. In 1995, Schmelzkopf predicted that urban gardens across the United States would continue to be challenged until gardeners could frame their efforts in ways that demonstrated the benefits of their work, or that asserted the right of residents to open spaces in their communities. Since that time, gardeners across the country have indeed worked to frame the value of their garden spaces in ways that legitimize their efforts and that increase the odds that they will retain control over them. As Schmelzkopf predicted, these arguments often do highlight the social and environmental benefits of urban agriculture, while others build a more rights-focused case for community access and control of urban lands. Urban agriculture advocates across the US have been contesting land in various ways, yet few studies of urban agriculture have focused on the land-tenure question and no prior research appears to use a comparative approach to analyzing these struggles. By examining how advocates for community gardens create and defend these spaces, and in particular how they engage in the social construction of urban agriculture’s value, we can learn a great deal not only about the benefits that urban agriculture can provide different communities, but also about the dynamics of legitimation and political-economic constraints involved when community-based organizations hybridize from service provision to social movement work. In the last 50 years, urban agriculture organizations in major US cities have come to oversee and formalize activities on vacant lots, over time building up the legitimacy required to attract the necessary resources for organizational maintenance. However, vacant lot use remains precarious, and when political and/or economic changes threaten the organization’s access to land, a new kind of legitimacy is required in order to recast urban agriculture as a permanent facet of the urban landscape rather than a temporary use of marginal land. These moments present a theoretically interesting situation in that CBOs are hybridizing to take on social movement work, and in the process are innovating legitimacy by introducing new narrative frames that can change perspective on their activities in order to shift public policy and mitigate the threat. Previous scholars have studied how organizations respond to challenges to their legitimacy, whether due to internal missteps or a change in the external environment . However, less consideration has been given to how existing organizations innovate new forms of legitimacy to buffer their activities against exogenous changes. A sociological perspective encourages us to ask: How do garden organizations legitimize urban agriculture? When vacant-lot gardens face development pressure, who mobilizes to preserve them? What strategies and framing processes do they use to mobilize in defense of threatened gardens? Why do these strategies succeed or fail, and what do they achieve in practice? Ultimately, who benefits from the creation and preservation of urban agricultural spaces? These questions require that we assess garden efforts by considering who is in charge, who will have access, and which of the gardens’ many potential functions are legitimated and thus prioritized. Investigating organizational dynamics is critical for understanding the impact that gardens may have on surrounding communities, since contradictions inherent to modern urban governance and resource allocation can yield garden programs that don’t ameliorate but reproduce inequality, prop up failing systems, or otherwise fall short of the benefits the gardens can produce .