McClintock’s framework helps explain the multi-functionality 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, cannabis dryer 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, 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 reducing residents’ 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. 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, cannabis grow room 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 well being 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. The organizations that manage formal community gardens have been part of this roll-back and roll-out process.
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 . With less money being distributed from the federal and state governments to city agencies, local governments have had to scramble to find alternative funding sources. Public-private partnerships are often formed in this context, but their viability as a replacement for the aid offered by the prior welfare-state remains in question . In this newfound and neoliberal context, local nonprofit organizations often have greater control of resources than local elected officials . However, community organizations may not operate as defenders of “use-value” as the urban growth machine model suggests. Instead, community-based organizations may operate largely in the interest of their own survival and growth—even if they appear to organize local residents politically. To this end, community-based organizations that partner with local government may craft their clientele as a reliable constituency and trade votes for government service contracts . Alternatively, they may deploy technologies of participation that stall resident opposition rather than addressing it . Thus, in the neoliberal era, community organizations cannot be viewed simply as representatives of civic and therefore local resident interests; it is important to look more closely, investigating how such organizations engage in local politics—especially as it relates to whether and how they cultivate civic participation among their members. Urban agriculture organizations are no exception; community gardens in particular require the coordination of many individuals, whose participation may or may not extend into civic action. Lyson has developed the concept of “civic agriculture” to describe the strengthening of local food systems, and at the same time community social ties, through operations such as farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and community gardens. Food-based organizations with a justice orientation can act as places of learning in which participants gain civic skills and critical perspectives . Civic agriculture initiatives build conscientious alternatives to the corporate-dominated industrial food system , and community gardens can further orient participants to challenging development models that exploit their neighborhoods . However, Passidomo cautions that more research is needed to understand how and when such projects promote greater civic participation in disinvested communities specifically. This focus is especially important in light of the finding that many urban agriculture projects actually work to support existing socio-economic structures and the neoliberalization of cities: by promoting a neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility , bolstering narratives used to justify reduced city services , filling in gaps left by the roll-back of the social safety net , or helping to brand a city as “green” and “sustainable” in the global competition to attract tourists and wealthy residents . Simply put, some urban agriculture projects organize participants to challenge and change prevailing socio-economic structures, and others do not. Attending to these distinctions is important because community-based organizations can in fact do a great deal to increase civic participation among their members and clientele. Community-based organizations can use civic participation as a resource in their efforts to survive and succeed, both as a source of legitimacy and as a base of power from which to seek funding, contracts, or favorable policies . The outcomes of successful civic participation may benefit the organization, the individuals involved, or both. As urban agriculture organizations must establish legitimacy for their unconventional spaces, attract resources needed to maintain the sites, and win favorable land use policies, they may come to view the civic participation of their gardeners as a valuable resource. Many community gardens are located in low-income neighborhoods, and like other CBOs that provide services in these neighborhoods, they may stabilize their own operation by teaching neighborhood residents skills to interface better with bureaucracies. For instance, Marwell describes how some housing cooperatives teach low-income residents to manage meetings and interface with the city as well as the private sector, such as by paying taxes and collectively managing their utilities. In this way the organization’s overhead is reduced, some of the residents learn valuable skills, and the organization simultaneously builds its legitimacy as a site where residents learn such skills.