As others have stated, the citizens of Philadelphia have notably little faith that their government is going to support resident ideas that serve the public interest. Philadelphia politics have long been dominated by the Democratic Party, which uses a ward system to organize voters and control which candidates get the party’s endorsement; this dynamic seems to have contributed to civic conventions in which corruption is commonplace. In 1903, Lincoln Steffens detailed the corruption of machine politics in US cities, describing Philadelphia as “the most corrupt and the most contented” [quoted in Fiorillo 2021]. Political corruption has not abated in the century since, with an ongoing parade of congressional representatives, state senators, and members of the Philadelphia City Council being convicted of fraud, bribery, conspiracy, and other corruption charges . Just in 2020, City Council member Kenyatta Johnson and his wife were indicted for corruption related to a land deal in his council manic district . In Philadelphia’s civic conventions, honest governance is not to be expected, and the public is widely cynical about the local government’s ability to function fairly or efficiently. Alongside the history of corrupt and inefficient governance runs a history of dispossession, violence and abandonment with clear racial patterns. Black Philadelphians are well aware of this history, which fosters an additional layer of cynicism that Brownlow calls “the collective resentment over the politics and geographies of race-based neglect” . As noted in chapter 1, racial inequality in public resources, capital investment, indoor weed growing accessories and urban environments is not unique to Philadelphia, nor is the extra skepticism in the Black community’s civic conventions engendered by their understanding of institutional racism.
For example, Beamish found that civic discourse in response to plans for a biodefense research facility in Roxbury, Massachusetts built on widely understood narratives about social injustice in the racialized distribution of environmental hazards and a history of “institutional recreancy.” In Philadelphia, the Black community’s historically rooted mistrust in city institutions has impacted the shape and direction of social movement activities to secure urban land for community gardens. As mentioned in chapter 2, PHS prioritized gaining legitimacy for its Philadelphia Green program in the eyes of its white elite donor base and has cultivated close ties with city officials who sign large contracts for the program’s greening work. Maintaining legitimacy with these audiences helped keep the program financially viable, but institutionalization with city elites also works to undermine the organization’s legitimacy with those skeptical of the prevailing order . In Philadelphia, the dynamics of cynical civic conventions and the legitimation strategy of the city’s main gardening organization have informed a split in organizational trajectories—one that provides a nominally “community-based” service , and one that is explicitly oriented to social movement work —rather than a hybridization from CBO to SMO within one entity.Evidence from interviews and historical documents shows that urban agriculture advocates involved in land preservation efforts understand the widely-shared ideas regarding cynicism and mistrust of the government. The code for appearance of impropriety was more common in Philadelphia materials than in those from Milwaukee or Seattle. Cynicism about government was expressed in Philadelphia twice as frequently as in Milwaukee and three times as often as in Seattle. One community organizer opined regarding the city’s land disposition process, “their institutional structure, and the way that power flows, is not meant to be understood. That’s the way it is” .
Such sentiments were especially common among advocates affiliated with Soil Generation, but even interviewees affiliated with more “insider” nonprofits like PHS expressed some degree of exasperation with the city’s land use governance. Especially given the high number of cultivated parcels the city has put up for auction without notice, urban agriculture advocates in Philadelphia have little faith that the local government will look out for their interests by default. One specific element of Philadelphia’s civic conventions stands out for its impact on land disposition, a political idea known as “council manic prerogative” that has become infrastructure over time. Closely related to Kenyatta Johnson’s corruption indictment and the cynicism that many urban agriculture advocates expressed in interviews, this convention gives district council members an especially firm grip over land deals. City Council must pass an ordinance to approve any land dispensation, and all of the other council members almost invariably vote the same way as the council member whose district contains the parcel in question. Using council manic prerogative, council members supportive of urban agriculture can help expedite sale of publicly owned garden lots that have the resources and wherewithal to access the council member and navigate the rest of the bureaucratic process for a land transfer . However, unsupportive council members can single handedly block a sale in their district—no matter what resources or legitimacy a garden group may bring. Virtually everyone I interviewed who works to secure land for urban agriculture in Philadelphia identified council manic prerogative as a barrier to preservation, but they see little chance of changing it because the council members themselves would need to vote for a policy change, and they have no incentive to reduce their own power. As development pressure has increased, with insider strategies out of reach for most of the city’s gardeners, urban agriculture advocates affiliated with Soil Generation have responded with sustained social movement mobilization to increase the legitimacy and tenure of the city’s community gardens. In short, local cynicism regarding governance has opened a discursive opportunity structure for promoting collective action and securing other forms of policy change. As described in chapter 2, Philadelphia’s urban agriculture movement started to get organized in 2012 and 2013 around changes to the city’s zoning code.
After hearing directly from city officials that they did not consider urban agriculture to be a constituency, advocate Amy Laura Cahn set out to make this constituency more vocal and visible by funding a community organizing effort through the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia . Her group initiated the Campaign for Healthier Foods and Greener Spaces to oppose a proposed zoning amendment that would have restricted garden activities. As the campaign launched, Cahn was quoted in PlanPhilly arguing against the proposed amendment by saying, “Creating this level of bureaucracy and legislating community participation is just a barrier. It’s not adding value” . This framing of the proposal appealed to the negative views of government that created a discursive opportunity structure within the local civic conventions—that is, high levels of bureaucracy creating barriers to community participation. The coalition that Amy Laura Cahn helped to build, Healthy Foods Green Spaces, brought together many organizations from across the city, rolling benches including PHS and the Neighborhood Gardens Association, to advocate for maintaining community gardens as a land use in Philadelphia. While PHS and the Neighborhood Gardens Association had been able to preserve a handful of community gardens over the years, they recognized that the lengthy, costly, parcel-by-parcel strategy they had relied upon until then was not enough to meet the citywide need. For one thing, the professional skills and working relationships with city officials that made the organizations’ efforts successful could not be scaled up easily. For another, their efforts could succeed only for gardens that the city was willing to preserve; in other situations, the council member whose district contained a garden might have other plans for the land, and because of council manic prerogative, preservation without their assent would be impossible. While gardeners or other urban agriculture organizations might take on a strategy of public pressure to overcome council member obstinance, PHS was unwilling to risk its close relationships with city officials— and the large maintenance contracts they approve—in order to preserve an individual garden. Nevertheless, recognizing the growing threat to garden tenure, they joined with other organizations in Healthy Foods, Green Spaces to advocate for a more streamlined land disposition process. As this coalition organized numerous constituencies and mounted a high visibility campaign to establish the Philadelphia Land Bank, PHS participated mostly in the background, donating professional skills such as graphic design to the coalition—but not mobilizing their gardeners to get involved in the civic process. With a long history in the city and roots in its elite social circles, PHS would be more likely to take for granted the city’s existing way of operating than to question or publicly challenge this system; moreover, outsider social movement tactics and vocal political organizing might threaten PHS’s legitimacy with city agencies and with its elite donor base. Yet, as noted above, civic conventions among everyday residents of Philadelphia— especially the city’s nonwhite majority—differ from the perspectives held by the social elite, and cynicism about government is high. Organizations and activists with less history of collaboration with city agencies and an outsider’s perspective on how the city functions have taken a more explicitly critical stance than PHS regarding the city’s governance. In the realm of urban agriculture advocacy, Soil Generation embodies this stance.
As described in chapter 2, leaders of the Healthy Foods Green Spaces coalition evolved it into Soil Generation, which is “a Black and Brown led coalition of gardeners, farmers, individuals, and community-based organizations working to ensure people of color regain community control of land and food, to secure access to the resources necessary to determine how land is used, address community health concerns, grow food and improve the environment” . As this statement makes clear, Soil Generation is focused on changing power relations in Philadelphia so that people of color have a seat at the table in decisions about land use and the local food system. In framing garden loss as a lack of community control, Soil Generation links the struggle to preserve urban agriculture to broader concerns that are reflected in local civic conventions, and also highlights the legacies of colonialism and racism that have displaced and oppressed Black and Brown people, immigrants, and indigenous communities in Philadelphia and beyond going back centuries. With this critical perspective, Soil Generation called for changes in the distribution of power—not only changes in the city’s land use policy, but also in the relationships that cohered among local community groups and large nonprofit organizations. As of 2021, this effort is ongoing. Soil Generation has been integral in bringing the voices of urban growers directly to public officials, remaining active in advocating for more garden preservation in the Land Bank’s biennial strategic plans and organizing a public hearing with City Council dedicated to urban agriculture in 2016. At that hearing, impressed with the diversity of testimonials—both the demographics of the speakers and the reasons they expressed for valuing urban agriculture—council members committed to pay more attention to the issue. The current process underway to formalize urban agriculture planning in the city is the product of Soil Generation’s efforts to re-legitimize urban agriculture through a rights- and justice-based framing, and the dynamics of this process are illustrative of how Soil Generation’s outsider status and social movement strategies have pushed the city to go further in revising land use policy than city officials would have through insider advocacy efforts alone.Compared to Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Seattle’s civic conventions hold the highest expectation of citizens’ participation in the political process. Long-held values for bottom-up rather than top-down governance have supported the establishment of a dense infrastructure for civic participation. Yet even with all of the participatory infrastructure they have achieved, Seattle residents remain distrustful of elites, and ideas about the need for active political engagement are still widely shared. The city’s political opportunity structure has offered numerous opportunities for residents to assert their interest in community gardens and to draw public resources for administration, site improvements, and even land acquisition; at the same time, the city’s discursive opportunity structure has enabled social movement mobilization through a framing of the need to safeguard public interests from potential government abuse.Seattle’s civic conventions around challenging elite control through political engagement have deep roots in the city’s history . The Seattle General Strike of 1919 was one of the most successful union actions of its time. More recently, the 1999 Battle in Seattle—mass protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization that brought together labor unions, environmentalists, and other civil society groups—made international news and soured the public on the mayor at the time due to his heavy-handed response.