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.
In 2019, the city hired Ash Richards, a city planner with strong ties to Soil Generation, for the new position of Director of Urban Agriculture in the Parks and Recreation Department. Later that year, vertical grow the city began a notably bottom-up process to develop an urban agriculture plan. Soil Generation, along with design firm Interface Studio LLC, won a competitive Request for Proposal process to aid in the public meetings and plan development . The first public meeting was held in December 2019, and the next was held up by the onset of the pandemic. The second, virtual public meeting began in February 2021, delayed in part because of time taken to bring Soil Generation and Interface Studios together for “facilitation, education and healing” . Here, Soil Generation’s leader seeks to emphasize the organization’s legitimacy as “the community experts” with genuine relationships and knowledge of the needs of urban growers and people of color . Soil Generation’s framing around racial power dynamics speaks to the historically rooted resentment building in the civic conventions of residents of color in the city, and this framing is helping to mobilize a broader shift in the culture of decision-making across the city. According to my interviewees, Soil Generation and its allies have initiative similar conversations in groups such as the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council and the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance. In comparison to Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s civic conventions have included more cynicism about government and less expectation that city officials will be responsive to the desires of ordinary citizens. While these civic conventions have limited the opportunities for gardeners across the city to gain public resources or legitimacy for their sites, they have also created an opening for social movement mobilization to challenge a dynamic that has left much of the public dissatisfied. Soil Generation has sought organizational legitimacy as a representative of community interests—not as a service provider, but as an organizer of the social movement seeking policy and cultural change on behalf of the city’s Black and Brown growers.
The urban agriculture movement that Soil Generation is leading in Philadelphia is framing the problem of garden loss in terms of structural inequalities and unexamined cultures of control that have done more than just displace gardens. Their efforts are thus an important and energized node within a broader movement to evolve the city’s politics, policies, and culture to become more equitable and responsive to the needs of poor residents and people of color. Soil Generation’s framing around equity and community control of land use represents a potentially powerful augmentation in the legitimacy of urban agriculture from the narrative that PHS developed regarding urban agriculture’s potential role in neighborhood economic development, providing a stronger rationale for the long-term preservation of community gardens threatened by changing economic conditions. Overall, relative to the efforts at garden preservation in Milwaukee and Seattle, the social movement Soil Generation has built likely holds the greatest potential for achieving structural change beyond garden preservation.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 . 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. Seattle residents have organized resistance to more local political concerns in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, with campaigns to change the municipal government’s direction and increase its accountability. The officials elected under these campaigns were integral in creating and supporting the P-Patch Program, providing public funding and land for an activity that residents wanted to enjoy. Civic conventions in Seattle include ideas about organizing to challenge elites in order to assert resident interests, and also about neighborhood-level governance. The public is used to local initiatives and expects that residents in a particular neighborhood will be able to participate in decisions about their community . These conventions have formalized into civic infrastructure such as a large, active network of neighborhood associations; district councils that represent hyper-local interests in conversation with the city; and a Department of Neighborhoods that is tasked specifically with responding to resident interests. As described on its website, the Department of Neighborhoods exists to “provide resources and opportunities for community members to build strong communities and improve their quality of life. Through our programs and services, we meet people where they are and help neighbors develop a stronger sense of place, build closer ties, rolling grow table and engage with their community and city government” . The City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods oversees a Neighborhood Matching Fund, similar to Milwaukee’s CIP grants, that awards public resources to proposals that engage the community in making improvements that residents desire. Civic conventions in Seattle dictating an active, ongoing role for the public to participate in governance have contributed to the creation of robust infrastructure for asserting and actualizing resident interests. Both the ideas and infrastructure in Seattle’s civic conventions have benefitted the PPatch community gardens and advocates’ efforts to preserve them. With a multi-million-dollar annual budget, the Neighborhood Matching Fund has proven invaluable for building, improving, and legitimizing the city’s community gardens . The infrastructure of neighborhood associations and district councils was tapped in the 1990s both to legitimize residents’ desire to save a threatened garden and to mobilize the public around Initiative 42, a policy that effectively makes permanent all of the gardens on public land . Ideas about challenging elite control and respecting neighborhoods no doubt helped galvanize the public to support Initiative 42, which garnered almost 24,000 signatures in a matter of months. The flow of resident input in governance through structured channels, such as from neighborhood associations to district councils to the Department of Neighborhoods or from residents participating in the formalized neighborhood planning process of the 1990s, has made clear the widespread appreciation for P-Patch community gardens and legitimized their continued presence. Overall, Seattle has very strong civic conventions supporting citizens’ role in governance, creating numerous opportunities for garden advocates to both provide input directly to city officials and mobilize the public when more pressure was needed.Comparing against Milwaukee and Philadelphia, data from interviews and documents demonstrate the prominence of participatory civic conventions in Seattle. Codes for neighborhood association, citizen advisory committee, bottom-up governance, citizen voice, elected official accountability, neighborhood planning, and public hearing were all the most frequent in Seattle documents and interviews out of the three cities I investigated.
Civic ideas and infrastructure have supported public engagement in governance decisions related to PPatches and also the assertion of how much use-value residents get from the gardens. Furthermore, as the P-Patch Program expanded over time, encompassing more land and requiring more public resources for administration, the infrastructure created by Seattle’s civic conventions facilitated feedback that helped program leaders and garden advocates adjust their operations in accordance with the wider public interest and thereby insulate the program from any challenges to its legitimacy. Aligning gardening sites, activities, and communication with widespread values and concerns ensured that the P-Patch program remained popular and continued to receive public resources over time. Since the program’s inception, P-Patch leaders had invited city officials to “harvest banquets” and other opportunities for positive press. In the 1990s, leaders of the nonprofit supporting the P-Patches encouraged gardeners to significantly increase their contact with the city’s elected officials beyond the annual meeting. They did so in order to defend the program’s budget from cutbacks in 1991, secure a resolution expressing support for P-Patches as a land use in 1992, resist the removal of two threatened gardens in 1995 and 1996, and achieve the passage of Initiative 42 as an ordinance in 1997 . As the P-Patch program grew and increasingly formalized its operations, P-Patchers articulated the benefits of their program in terms of broadly shared values, taking advantage of another discursive opportunity structure that Seattle’s culture presented. Many gardeners made donations to food banks, and in the 1980s the program administrators began tracking contributions. When one of the program’s most active volunteers Wendy McClure organized a produce collection and delivery system called Lettuce Link, the reported food bank donations gradually increased. In editions of the P-Patch Post newsletter from the 1990s, gardeners were asked to measure and report the total pounds of produce they donated if they weren’t giving through Lettuce Link. The regular column for requesting help and equipment also noted the need for produce scales to ensure that donations could be weighed and tracked. In these ways the gardeners’ food donation activities were rationalized over time, and along with publicized events like the Day of Giving that began in 1994, the quantified donations helped build legitimacy for the P-Patch program as one channeling civic action to help low-income people. In addition to their food bank donations, P-Patch administrators and volunteers demonstrated their program’s commitment to low-income Seattleites by tracking how many low-income participants the program had, and by working with residents of the city’s public housing to build gardens specifically for them. Especially once the program hit political turbulence in the mid-1990s, when gardeners mobilized the public in a somewhat confrontational strategy to preserve threatened gardens, city officials scrutinized the extent to which the P-Patch Program was serving a truly public purpose. The program’s leadership and its most vocal advocates were homogenously white and middle- or upper-middle class, so opponents of the program may have wished to paint it as a giveaway to already-privileged people. However, surveys of the gardeners in the mid-1990s showed a diverse constituency, with higher percentages of renters, low- and moderate-income people, and people of color than the city’s overall demographics. The program’s demonstrated diversity, and the addition of an initiative specifically benefitting immigrant gardeners in public housing, served to align the program with the value of multiculturalism important to many Seattle voters at the time. In order to ensure that the gardens continued to serve the public equally, officials in the Department of Neighborhoods worked with the program’s advocates to prioritize building new gardens in underserved areas of the city . Over time, this has meant that the distribution of P-Patches across the city is genuinely more equitable in terms of access for low-income residents.