The Baltimore example is especially noteworthy for its long-term planning approach to structuring urban agriculture into the landscape of the city, with considerations for equity in place. However, legalizing the ability to grow food in cities is not enough to promote equity and justice, nor resolve all the legal conundrums related to compliance with the terms of legislation . Creating incentive zones for certain types of UA practices is not the same as creating supportive policies to allow and encourage the existence of the diverse array of practices and practitioners that constitute UA. Especially in cities with growing population and housing pressures , particular attention must be paid in policy making to avoid advancing gentrification and displacement. This is less of a concern in cities without such housing pressures , but development is always a threat that must be considered when siting urban farms on private land. A promising policy direction pioneered by the City of Seattle is to dedicate public lands in low income neighborhoods to UA, which Seattle does through its P-Patch program. Other policy recommendations gleaned from the literature include: creation of a citywide UA task force with citizen representatives; efforts to tie in local “good food” policies with city Climate Action Plans to promote UA and alternative food waste management alongside climate benefits; devote public lands to urban farms and gardens in perpetuity; “retrofit” affordable housing developments with community gardens ; provide public storage, transport,cannabis grow setup and aggregation options for urban farmers; and convert corner stores into neighborhood groceries offering fresh produce from local farms. Many of these efforts have potential to address many city priorities at once, for example: food access, nutrition and fitness, transportation, community development and crime reduction .
Providing land access for low-income and minority farmers is an important step towards ensuring a food supply that is culturally appropriate, desirable, and marketable to food insecure urban communities. By publicly confronting land insecurity and tenure arrangements, policymakers can directly respond to research on UA’s uneven development .Smaller numbers of citizens are becoming involved in advocating for UA policies and improved zoning regulations that support food access goals, holding cities accountable to UA projects. Through direct participation, citizens are already voting with their feet in favor of UA initiatives . Existing literature states, “‘participants in a community garden continually express a heightened sense of self-esteem gained from sharing knowledge and skills with each other.’ Such community connections can, in some cases, lead towards participation at the larger [policy] level” . By expanding civic engagement into the local policy realm, it is more likely that sites designated, set aside, or incentivized for urban agriculture development will be strategically located, address food insecurity and food justice concerns, and provide long-term access for UA . Civic engagement can take many forms, including participating in neighborhood organizations, contacting elected officials and city council members to communicate multiple values of UA, aligning UA with existing city plans/ordinances, or participating in food policy councils. Citizen volunteers are participating in building community economies, often non-capitalist and non-exploitative in nature . Civic engagement advances the idea of creating “public commons” through urban agriculture, an idea related to ecological economics and explored in David Bollier’s book Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. A commons “integrates economic production, social cooperation, personal participation, and ethical idealism into a single package;” it is a paradigm of “self-help and collective gain” and an “alternate self-governance structure for resource management and ‘living well’” .
The commons paradigm espouses a political philosophy grounded in grassroots civic activism and proposes different “foundational premises for a new political economy” based on social connections and rediscovering “people’s knowledge” of natural systems in their local contexts . However, we must consider who is able to participate in creating such a space . Who participates, in both policy and urban farming as an activity, is a crucial factor in determining whether outcomes will subvert or reinforce existing power, privilege and structural inequities. As Ramírez states, “While recreating neglected urban spaces into ‘productive’ spaces to grow food is inspiring and beneficial on one level, the prevalence of white bodies inhabiting garden spaces reifies uneven geographies and catalyzes gentrifying forces” . It is the role of inclusive policy processes and watchdog citizen activists to counteract this retrogressive tendency of UA projects. One example of grassroots political action, working around rather than through institutional channels of policy making, is the Catatumbo Collective’s people-to-people reparations project. Developed by three immigrant women spearheading an urban agriculture organization in Chicago, the people-to-people reparations map locates minority-run farming projects on a map of the United States, providing a brief description of the project and their specific needs, and then a link or contact info so that visitors can donate directly to the project. They are motivated to publicize agricultural history from a minority person’s perspective and provide a means of public accountability through their mapping project, supporting “those who have borne the brunt of labor exploitation, land theft, and discriminatory agricultural policy” . This project has already led to funding for several farmers’ projects, as well as land gifts to create several minority-owned farms. While the founders recognize the need to continue litigation and action through formal policy channels, they honor the urgency of needing to “start right away” by facilitating “transfers of wealth.” They are also contributing to a more updated database of farmers of color, often underrepresented in USDA farm censuses. There is room for more participatory action research linking researchers to citizens and civic engagement projects . This will allow for data to be shared and transferred more easily, and for the network of UA and food justice participants to strengthen through ties to research institutions and each other. Researchers have an important role to play in addressing data gaps and strengthening the network of urban farmers who have clearly identified needs and are ready to work towards appropriate, measurable solutions.According to the literature, access to urban-produced foods is directly tied to the economic realities of urban farming operations.
Daftary-Steel, Herrera, and Porter make a compelling case for building coalitions to provide the necessary political and financial support to fund UA, as well as tackling the “root causes” of food insecurity through social services. From what limited studies exist, it seems clear that economic viability of urban farms is dependent on income far beyond sales capacity of the urban farm. Moving the conversation into the policy realm is vital. It is important to communicate to policy makers that urban farms are producing a lot more than pounds of food; they are also “distributing” social goods, creating a “commons”, and providing a connection to nature, community, and education , and these in turn are part of improving community food security. The primary benefits of UA organizations are often education , social integration, economic opportunity, and local environmental quality improvements. Producing enough food to transition a community from “food insecure” to “food secure” is not necessarily going to happen through urban farming alone; however, supplementing food intake with locally produced,grow rack systems healthy fruits and vegetables is an important step in building food security and community health. As such, researchers and UA practitioners may consider generating more robust data on the health, environmental and social benefits of UA to promote among policy makers the idea of UA as a public good, worthy of public investment in the same vein as schools, transportation and education. This is especially true in U.S. cities without strong policies supporting the existence of UA, and with high land values and development pressures. It is important to acknowledge that urban agriculture is not the only solution to food insecurity and food access and should not be the only forum of support/intervention from policymakers. In fact, in some cases “the emphasis on ‘grow your own’ reinforces self-help and government austerity arguments, absolving government of the responsibility to address the structural and institutional causes of food insecurity” . UA is part of the solutions portfolio to improve food justice and food access, but must be complemented and reinforced by other governance efforts to provide affordable, healthy food through neighborhood groceries, food hubs, cooperative markets, culinary and nutrition education programs, farm to school programs or other means of addressing structural causes of food insecurity . Civic engagement, critical scholarship from multidisciplinary perspectives, and alliances between housing, transportation, and food policy are all necessary components of a UA landscape that improves access and meets the needs of both producers and consumers. In conducting this literature review, using a combination of academic and gray literature, we recognize a significant gap between scholarship and practice. Urban agriculture is not a panacea that will automatically produce all the social, environmental, and economic “goods” attributed in the literature at large without proper structuring or policy frameworks in place. A more realistic, and holistic picture of urban agriculture can be advanced by further rigorous evaluation of what particular organizations are choosing to focus on, how much food they are producing currently , how they are distributing their food, and where they need support. It is not just about whether urban farms have the potential to feed food insecure people, but whether they actually do, depending on locally specific modes of distribution, channels of access, and policy climates. Key ideas from the literature about how to enable socially just, economically viable urban agriculture include a focus on food sovereignty, public investment and/or land rights, “agrihood” developments, and attention to disparate neighborhood race and class dynamics when siting UA operations.
Researchers can address key data gaps including the actual tracking and consumption of urban-produced food. We can answer lingering questions including: where does the food go, how much is accessed vs. wasted, what are consumer preferences around accessing urban produced foods, and where do institutions need to fill in gaps in access and/or distribution channels? Results of this literature investigation are next applied to our ongoing study of urban agriculture in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, characterized by a high amount of urban agriculture activities , yet undergoing rapid gentrification with persistent high levels of food insecurity and income inequality. Despite growing evidence of the diverse health, education, and environmental benefits of urban agriculture, these vibrant spaces of civic engagement remain undervalued by city policy makers and planners in the United States. Because urban farming takes on many different forms and functions, with intended outcomes that may or may not include yield and profits , thriving urban farms and gardens are under constant threat of conversion to housing or other competing, higher-value land uses due to rising land values, and other city priorities. This land use challenge and threat to urban farm land tenure is especially characteristic of U.S. cities like San Francisco, one of the most expensive land and housing markets in the country. Under the current urban agriculture paradigm in the U.S., food justice scholars and advocates either try to quantify and highlight the multiple benefits of UA or pursue a critical theoretical approach, arguing that urban agriculture can yield unfavorable results if pursued without an equity lens, especially in cities with intense development pressures and gentrification concerns . A productivist focus is problematic, because, while urban agriculture can be an important component of community food security, its other social and ecological benefits are just as, and sometimes more, significant . In this article, we suggest that the current debates around “urban agriculture” in the U.S. often lead to an unhelpful comparison with rural farms regarding yield, productivity, economic viability, and ability to feed urban populations, most notably in the policy arena. Defined in these ways, the radical, transformative potential of urban food production spaces and their preservation often gets lost or pushed to the side in city planning decisions in metropolitan regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area, where the threat of displacement is ubiquitous given high levels of economic inequality and extreme lack of affordable land.