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, dry rack cannabis program configurations and political-economic context as well as their impacts on local discourse and policy related to urban agriculture.
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. The following sections provide a brief history of each city’s main community gardening programs, the political and economic conditions in which they have operated, and the policy victories they achieved.Like many cities in the US, Milwaukee has faced economic challenges from the 1960s onward related to globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs. The challenge has been particularly acute in Rustbelt cities such as Milwaukee, which lost over 100,000 residents between 1960 and 1980—a decline of almost 15%.
The city won federal funding to support urban gardening in 1978, and the resulting Shoots n Roots program expanded upon earlier cityled efforts with a focus on making use of vacant lots to mitigate the growing urban blight that had become a visible symptom of the city’s economic decline . The city permitted Shoots n Roots gardens on a year-by-year basis, wanting to ensure that the lots remained available for redevelopment; many sites were only part of the program for a few years. Shoots n Roots was ultimately housed in the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee County Extension, and like other public entities, the Shoots n Roots program was not positioned to engage in contentious politics, which precluded pressing the city for long-term land access. The program gradually came to focus on large, county-owned parcels outside of the city limits as its federal funding was reduced over time. Consequently, while the Extension still supports community gardening activity in and around the city of Milwaukee, this program is no longer the primary administrator for urban gardens in the city. Milwaukee’s primary community gardening program, Milwaukee Urban Gardens , was founded in 2000 by local residents who had lost their gardens to development following aperiod of relatively stable and gradually improving economic conditions in the 1990s. Originally created to purchase community garden sites and advocate for long-term garden and greenspace preservation, in 2013 the program merged with an environmental programming organization, Groundwork Milwaukee, and now serves as a single point-of-contact for anyone in the city looking to get involved with a garden or start a new one. Through the MUG program, renamed Milwaukee Grows in 2017, the city grants leases of generally 1-3 years for use of its vacant lots for community gardens. Groundwork Milwaukee also provides liability insurance, roll bench educational programming, and a paid youth work force to help residents build and maintain gardens. While the City of Milwaukee does not guarantee that its land will remain permanently available for the roughly 100 MUG community gardens, it has agreed to sell a few lots for urban agriculture projects in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, with an electoral mandate for progressive and environmental policies in the 2010s, the city government became actively involved in developing the local food system through the HOME GR/OWN program. Created by Mayor Tom Barrett in 2013, this initiative seeks to streamline the legal process for residents and groups wanting to build gardens, commercial farms, or new parks on city-owned vacant land. The city partners with a wide range of local organizations to carry out sustainability and economic development projects through this initiative. However, the HOME GR/OWN program could come to an end at the whim of a subsequent administration. Perhaps because the city has been so supportive and not inclined to sell off any of the garden sites, MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee have not been actively advocating for a more permanent legal basis for their gardens in recent years. While the city’s political climate is fairly liberal and recent green initiatives have been popular with the public, local economic conditions remain challenging; the city retains control of vacant parcels in case opportunities arise to generate tax revenue and employment on most of the land that is currently permitted for MUG’s gardens. To build a more comprehensive and historical understanding of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, I interviewed 18 key informants with firsthand knowledge of activities in the city’s main community garden organizations and those who were directly involved in forming and implementing city policy related to urban agriculture. I gathered archival documents from MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee, the City of Milwaukee, and other organizations that interviewees identified as having contributed to the local popularity of urban agriculture. I also built a historical database of relevant articles from the city’s two main daily newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel .
Combining data from these sources, I gained an up-close perspective on the process of contesting urban agriculture’s value as a land use in Milwaukee, and I developed a unique dataset of Shoots n Roots and MUG-affiliated gardens in order to map their locations over time. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was already nearly 150 years old when it began its community gardening program, Philadelphia Green, in 1974. Originally centered around the appreciation of ornamental plants and landscape design, PHS grew into “a more holistic understanding of plants as a tool for urban transformation” when it took on the role of greening Philadelphia in the 1970s. At this time, similar to both Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s population was shrinking and the economy was under strain from high unemployment and inflation. Over time, the Philadelphia Green program evolved to offer a range of greening services, and PHS played a role in shaping the larger policy debate around vacant land in Philadelphia. Today, the organization contracts with the City of Philadelphia to maintain parks, greenbelts, and museum grounds, in addition to supporting many of the city’s community gardens. For decades, these functions coexisted as part of the Philadelphia Green program; PHS has recently rebranded the work as a range of initiatives including City Harvest , Neighborhood Gardens Trust , Civic Landscapes , and LandCare . The program’s urban agriculture network includes 140 current community gardens and urban farms across Philadelphia. The City of Philadelphia has long supported PHS’s greening work on vacant lots, but over decades of collaboration the community gardens were generally viewed as a temporary land use. Philadelphia’s population hit its lowest between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, yet this period was also one in which many gardens were lost. Between 1996 and 2008, more than half of the city’s gardens were lost to parcel development or other changing conditions . PHS was involved in some land preservation efforts, but the organization did not pursue a blanket policy to preserve community gardens. As the discouraging trend of garden loss became apparent, and especially when a 2012 zoning amendment threatened the security of 20% of the remaining gardens, the city faced growing pressure to support and preserve its community gardens. Advocates from organizations including PHS, the Garden Justice Legal Initiative, and others sought changes to the city’s land disposition system, which at the time considered lots with gardens to be “vacant,” in order to improve the flow of information between gardeners and the city. They succeeded in halting the zoning amendment and then secured passage of the Philadelphia Land Bank Act in 2013. In the process of streamlining vacant lot disposition to spur economic development, the Land Bank must give gardeners priority to acquire their sites rather than listing these sites as vacant and available for developers. Today, PHS has a mostly indirect role in advocating for garden preservation. Its close affiliate Neighborhood Gardens Trust maintains a voice in policy debates while raising money to purchase and save gardens facing development threats as the city undergoes a period of rapid gentrification. In the last decade, in a context of gentrification and displacement heavily affecting low income residents and communities of color, other organizations—most notably Soil Generation, a Black-and Brown-led coalition of growers—have taken the lead in the citywide efforts to organize and advocate for garden preservation and land use policy. Soil Generation and allied groups continue to press the city for more socially just land dispensation through the Land Bank and for broader responsiveness to resident priorities regarding urban agriculture and other community-oriented land uses.