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, drying cannabis 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, 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 green space that helps ameliorate geophysical and ecological problems common to urban landscapes, including storm water 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. 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, curing cannabis 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 .
In advocating for urban agriculture as a long-term land use, garden organizations participate in the ongoing renegotiation of both ideas of urban nature and the material ecological conditions in cities, which distribute the benefits and burdens unevenly among different social groups . Advocacy for urban agriculture is also similar to other efforts underway to transform urban life, such as calls for community policing, which attempt to relocate resources and decision-making for critical urban systems in potentially radical ways. In general, studying the distinct challenges that community-based service organizations face when they hybridize to take up social movement work is important because social movements are often the best way to overcome elite opposition and accomplish substantive transformation of any collective feature of social life.In order to better understand the strategies grass root activists and urban agriculture advocates use to secure long-term land access, I conducted a comparative historical analysis of three U.S. cities. In Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Seattle, well-established multi-site gardening organizations have engaged with city officials to win policies that secure land for community gardens. The strategies used to legitimize urban agriculture, the configurations of the programs themselves, and the wider political-economic context of each city vary significantly. Through a qualitative analysis of 55 interviews with key informants and archival material from each city , I show the relationships between legitimation strategies, program configurations and political-economic context as well as their impacts on local discourse and policy related to urban agriculture1. Employing spatial regression analysis to assess the spread of each program’s gardens across their respective cities, I also demonstrate the ways that movement strategies and organizational aspects of the community garden programs have impacted the outcomes achieved and populations served by each organization over time. For the remainder of this introduction, I provide background about each of the three cities, their major gardening programs, and the local policy victories that have helped to secure more land for urban agriculture, followed by a brief outline of the chapters in this dissertation. My research is a comparative historical analysis of the characteristics, preservation strategies, and outcomes achieved by community gardening programs in Seattle, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. All are large US cities , and all have been cited as exemplars for their thriving urban agriculture activities . The cities are also similar in that community gardeners in each locale have experienced at least one major development challenge and responded with political engagement that resulted in favorable policy changes. Further, all three cities have passed urban planning frameworks that incorporate urban agriculture. In each city, I gathered documents from the early 1970s to the present—decades in which community gardening has undergone several surges in both local and nationwide interest and attention—but my qualitative analysis focuses on specific periods during which gardeners overcame development threats and those in which gardens were written into the cities’ urban planning frameworks. Whereas much of the existing literature on urban agriculture is based on individual case studies of a single garden or program, my project builds new insights through comparative analysis. Examining the historical process of land use contestation in multiple cities in which urban agriculture has come to be seen as a legitimate long-term land use, I show that the process of securing land for urban agriculture varies considerably from case to case, yet some key similarities are evident—namely the perceived need for garden advocates to build an economic argument for the value of urban agriculture. While advocates in all three cities have been relatively successful in their efforts, I show that the different political and economic conditions in which land use contestation has unfolded and the strategies used to build urban agriculture’s legitimacy are related to important differences in the outcomes achieved . I selected Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle for comparison because these cities are diverse in geographic region, political and economic features, degree of site permanence achieved by garden advocates, and the characteristics of each city’s main urban agriculture organizations. The data I collected were then used to illuminate the strategies that garden advocates and organizations used during the process of developing and defending urban agricultural sites, the evolving public discourse around urban agriculture in each city, the internal considerations important to each organization as they built gardens and sought to defend them, and the historical development of gardens affiliated with each program.