Soil Generation was formed in conscious opposition to the PHS modus operandi that had long been the public face of urban agricultural activities in Philadelphia. Seeking its legitimacy from Black and Brown growers and community members, Soil Generation has worked to put forth a narrative that gives more voice to growers of color, who have long made up the majority of the city’s community gardeners and urban farmers. They have also taken a more critical approach to the city’s land use policy, working to reframe political struggles around urban agriculture in terms of equity and community control rather than economic development and revitalization. In Philadelphia, more than in Milwaukee or Seattle, stark contrasts are evident in the way urban agriculture is framed by different organizations , which points to Soil Generation’s efforts to re-legitimize urban agriculture in a way that proves more resilient in the face of development pressure. Codes for social cohesion and fairness, justice, equity were not applied at all to PHS documents; they were only applied in the Philadelphia case when brought up by gardeners testifying at public hearings or by Soil Generation as they advocated for policies such as the Land Bank . PHS did sometimes emphasize social benefits that community gardens offered; however, these social benefits tended more toward characteristics that city officials and elite philanthropic funders would appreciate, such as skill acquisition , self-reliance , flood table and a sense of pride in one’s neighborhood . While these social benefits are undoubtedly important, they are less reflective of what gardeners themselves have found valuable about the city’s community gardens.
In Philadelphia’s urban agriculture movement today, PHS looms large because of its long history, its citywide reach, and its well-funded public relations; nevertheless, the organization is seen as problematic by a portion of the city’s gardeners because it is more representative of white, professionalized, and upper-class conceptions of urban agriculture than those of the majority of Philadelphia’s urban growers. As PHS adapted its Philadelphia Green program over time in pursuit of available funding, the organization increasingly legitimized urban agriculture for its blight-removal and neighborhood revitalization potential, a framing which has resonated well with city officials and the wider public and which has shaped the big policy victories that urban agriculture advocates have achieved. PHS’s emphasis on greening as a tool for neighborhood redevelopment has also brought the negative effects of gentrification to the forefront of the public conversation around urban agriculture. PHS is not leading the charge to preserve gardens or counteract the negative effects of gentrification, but their activities have indirectly influenced organizing and mobilization in the city . Of all the organizations in the three case-cities, Soil Generation is arguably doing the most to challenge the logic of the growth machine and assert the interests of marginalized residents in its efforts to mobilize a social movement and secure permanent gardens.In Seattle, community gardens have gained a notable degree of site security because of social movement activities in the 1990s; while the garden advocates achieved virtual permanence for many of the city’s gardens, they did so in part by appealing to growth machine logic in framing the value of gardens .
The case of Seattle’s P-Patch Program, and the volunteer-led nonprofit advocacy organization that arose alongside it, demonstrates the clearest example of how an organization was able to pivot from community-based service provision to movement organizing , while largely maintaining its own legitimacy and augmenting the legitimacy of urban agriculture with a more compelling narrative about its potential benefits. The Seattle P-Patch Program was founded in 1973, when the City of Seattle stepped in to pay the property taxes of Rainie Picardo , who had been allowing neighborhood residents to garden individual plots on his former truck farm. The $950 expense from the city’s general fund was legally justified as support for residents’ recreation, and Council members advocating for the move also argued that it was a unique opportunity to help needy families feed themselves during an economic downturn. In 1974, due to the program’s huge success, the Picardo Patch was joined by ten additional community garden sites in different neighborhoods; since then, the P-Patch Program has continued its expansion to now include nearly 90 gardens citywide. At first, the program was administered by the Department of Human Resources because of its goal of feeding people. In 1997, the program was moved to the Department of Neighborhoods with the recognition that one of its primary effects was to build community among residents who wouldn’t otherwise know each other. In the Department of Neighborhoods, the P-Patch Program thrived under the leadership of department director Jim Diers. With a background in Alinsky-style organizing, Diers took to heart the department’s mission to act on residents’ ideas rather than imposing initiatives from the top down.
With Diers leading the Department of Neighborhoods, new gardens were added in many neighborhoods where residents wanted them, and existing gardens made improvements that increased their appeal for the non-gardening public. Diers provided steady leadership that saw the program grow and become more popular, but the framing to legitimize urban agriculture in Seattle had been established in earlier decades through the organizing efforts of volunteers leading the P-Patch nonprofit. Only a few years after the city government established the P-Patch Program, gardeners organized a nonprofit that has continued to operate alongside the program and fulfills functions that the public entity cannot take on. Originally named the P-Patch Advisory Council and now called GROW Northwest, the P-Patch nonprofit has had a different structure and has undertaken different initiatives over the years. Some of its primary, long-running activities have been advocating for favorable municipal policy, fundraising, paying plot rental fees for low-income gardeners, purchasing and holding title to gardens that were formerly privately owned, purchasing liability insurance for the gardens, serving as the fiscal sponsor for individual garden fundraisers, and facilitating communication among gardeners . The P-Patch nonprofit has effectively coordinated gardener activities and talking points, helping to streamline the program’s operations, maximize its impact, and legitimize PPatches in the eyes of the wider public. Evidence from interviews and issues of the P-Patch Post newsletter makes clear that over the program’s history, gardeners consciously organized their efforts and built the legitimacy for urban agriculture around the food production and community building aspects of the P-Patches. In the late 1980s, dedicated P-Patch volunteer Wendy McClure started an initiative called Lettuce Link that systematized food bank donations by coordinating a schedule of drivers from different gardens and providing information about the closest food banks for different sites. Over time, Lettuce Link installed storage bins, scales, and tracking lists at many of the gardens in order to facilitate measurement and annual reporting of the program’s donations to food banks. Gardeners I interviewed in 2016 would readily emphasize that the program had donated over 40,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce to local food banks the previous year. These interviewees understood that reporting a specific amount of food donated helps to make the gardens’ public benefit clear for city officials and any potential skeptics. As a result of Lettuce Link and the gardeners’ efforts to demonstrate the extent of their food bank donations, P-Patches were incorporated into the city’s strategic planning for food security, hydroponics flood table first undertaken in the mid-2000s. The P-Patch Program director was included on the Interdepartmental Team developing the city’s Food Action Plan, a group which also included at least one P-Patch gardener among the city employees involved. In order to increase food security and local food production, the Seattle Food Action Plan makes recommendations under Strategy 1, “Prioritize food production as a use of land,” and Strategy 2, “Develop and support programs to produce food on City-owned land,” that specifically advise implementing policies to support and expand the P-Patch program . The process of gardeners systematizing their activities, and then gaining additional recognition and legitimacy through the city’s actions, is characteristic of the interplay between city staff and the P-Patch nonprofit over the history of the P-Patch Program. The case of Seattle suggests that an organizational structure of a city gardening agency supported by a gardener-led nonprofit is a stable and effective model for developing, maintaining, and defending urban agriculture. Through a similar process, P-Patch participants gradually amplified the community building benefits of community gardens. In all three cities, the benefit of increased social cohesion among diverse people is widely understood by gardeners and urban agriculture advocates . However, in Seattle this social benefit was more clearly documented, and mobilized more in framing the legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use, than it was in either Milwaukee or Philadelphia.
As will be described more in Chapter 3, the process for documenting community-building in Seattle’s gardens was first evident in the PPatch Post, which ran a series of statements called “I Love My P-Patch Because…” from 1989-1993. These gardener testimonials offered many reasons to value the P-Patches that span almost the full “panacea narrative” attesting to urban agriculture’s wide range of potential benefits, but among these testimonials the community-building power of P-Patches is the most commonly noted benefit, with comments such as “I like my neighbors too: There’s always someone nice to talk to when I go to the garden” . In 1995-1997, when P-Patch advocates were pressuring the city to preserve a threatened P-Patch, and then appealing to the public to pass an initiative preventing the city from repurposing its garden sites, they emphasized how the gardens brought different kinds of people together and contributed to the neighborhood character of Seattle . In a 1998 edition of the P-Patch Post, the president of the P-Patch nonprofit explained the feedback advocates had received about how much the community-building potential of gardens mattered to decision makers and the public. Analysis of P-Patch documents shows that from the late 1990s onward, codes for diversity and design for community were much more frequent than they had been in the 1970s and 1980s. The latter code reflects interplay with city program staff who began to discourage fencing in the gardens, and the wider Department of Neighborhoods staff, who approved numerous grant applications from individual gardens seeking to add publicly accessible community-building features, such as picnic tables and benches, in garden improvement projects. Over time, the work of both the P-Patch Program and the P-Patch nonprofit have contributed to the longevity, popularity and security of community gardens in Seattle. Through the early 1980s when the city faced budget cuts, funding for the P-Patch Program shrank dramatically, and higher plot fees combined with reduced services caused foreboding rates of attrition . During these lean years, the program survived with two part time staff, Barbara Donnette and Barbara Heitsch, who according to interviewees familiar with the program’s early history and the P-Patch Post from that time, worked well beyond the hours they were being paid for. Moreover, the P-Patch nonprofit has relied solely on volunteer labor for its entire history. Almost every P-Patch Post newsletter contains a long list of acknowledgements for donations, tasks completed, and group initiatives fulfilled; indeed, the production of the P-Patch Post itself has been accomplished almost entirely through volunteer labor . The P-Patch nonprofit has been led by a series of extremely dedicated volunteer presidents, board and committee members, and the P-Patch Post attests to the organization’s ceaseless effort to recruit and train new leadership from among the program’s gardeners. Reviewing the program’s history through its newsletters reveals a remarkable level of dedication on the part of many gardeners, and even some non-gardeners, whose combined efforts have built, maintained, enhanced, and defended Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens for almost 50 years. The contributions of these volunteers should not go underappreciated, for the program would never have achieved such reach and longevity without them; however, making such a prodigious time commitment is not possible for everyone. Relying on volunteers and people who can accept low salaries to run an organization means that its leaders are likely to be relatively privileged. Indeed, for much of the P-Patch Program’s history, the leadership demographics have been far whiter than that of program participants overall . The PPatch Program has counted significant numbers of Southeast Asian refugee families among its gardeners since the mid-1980s, and surveys in the 1990s showed that the program’s demographics were more racially diverse than the city overall. However, program staff and nonprofit leadership alike were virtually all-white until the mid-2000s.