Greening Cities by Growing Food: A Political Ecology Analysis of Urban Agriculture in the Americas 3030882950, 9783030882952

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Colleen Hammelman

Greening Cities by Growing Food A Political Ecology Analysis of Urban Agriculture in the Americas

Greening Cities by Growing Food

Colleen Hammelman

Greening Cities by Growing Food A Political Ecology Analysis of Urban Agriculture in the Americas

Colleen Hammelman Department of Geography & Earth Sciences University of North Carolina at Charlotte Charlotte, NC, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-88295-2    ISBN 978-3-030-88296-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The research and writing for this book took place in a world facing increasing inequities, threats of global climate change, and growing authoritarian regimes. In this world, food injustices are widespread. Inspiring people and communities are fighting against those injustices through large and loud movements and quiet everyday activities. Each day, through decisions, advocacy, and action to change the systems creating inequities, individuals and groups are building more just and sustainable food systems. I must begin by thanking these actors and their actions in creating a better world for us all. I also want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who opened up their growing spaces, plants, homes, and offices to me. This research could not have been completed without many growers taking time to share their experiences and knowledge with me, and I am forever changed by those experiences. Mil gracias y un abrazo enorme to the many individuals that worked hard to make sure my time in their cities was welcoming and productive  – including Alexis Saenz-Montoya, Cesar Buitrago, Nicolas Paz, and many others that I cannot name here due to confidentiality concerns. Hopefully you all know how grateful I am for your generosity and ongoing partnerships. This book project could not have been accomplished without the ongoing support of numerous colleagues. This includes those that reviewed drafts and provided guidance as the book came together including Deborah Thomas, Charles Z. Levkoe, Kristin Reynolds, and Elizabeth Shoffner. This work was also supported by several research assistants and writing partners, including Samantha Lee, Ysabelle Maria Cruzat, Sophia Reini, and Evan White. Thank you to the many mentors and advisers I have had throughout this research and my academic career including Allison Hayes-Conroy, Melissa Gilbert, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Daniel Bender. Thank you also to the many friends and colleagues who have fostered spaces of collaboration and knowledge sharing that energize my mind and soul whenever we have the opportunity to spend time together. Finally, I must express my sincere gratitude to my family for their unending support and love. In particular, my partner, Bill, who supported me unconditionally throughout all of my endeavors and moves, and my two sons that supported their v

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mama with love and a contagious enthusiasm for traveling and eating. Thank you to my parents, Mark and Leslie; brother, Arthur; and friends and extended family who have always been supportive and willing to listen as I worked through ideas for this research.

My traveling partner and oldest son in Rosario, Argentina, during one of the many trips through urban agriculture projects we did together. (Photo by Author, 2018)

Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Evolution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North and South    1 Examining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas Through a Political Ecology Lens������������������������������������������������������������     4 Impacts of Global Political Economy on Urban Agriculture Practice����     7 Research Sites������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     8 Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina���������������������������������������������������������������     9 Toronto, Ontario, Canada��������������������������������������������������������������������    11 Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia�����������������������������������������������������������    12 Charlotte, North Carolina, United States ��������������������������������������������    14 Organization of the Book������������������������������������������������������������������������    15 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    17 2 Entanglements of Social Justice, Sustainability Governance, and Land Tenure: A Literature Review ������������������������������������������������   21 Expanding Scholarly Engagements with Urban Agriculture ������������������    21 Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability��������������������    23 The Role of Food Systems in Urban Sustainability Planning and Policy��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    24 Social Justice in Urban Agriculture ��������������������������������������������������������    27 Approaches to Food Justice ����������������������������������������������������������������    27 Pursuing Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Projects������������������������    29 Securing Land for Urban Agriculture������������������������������������������������������    31 Constraining Land Access via Neoliberal Urban Land Policies����������    32 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    35 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    36 3 Promoting Market Gardens and (Re)producing Uneven Development ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   41 Toward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable Urban Agriculture ��    42 Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects������������������������������������������    46 Growing Organic Crops for the Market in Medellín ��������������������������    46 vii

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Market Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in Rosario ����    48 Pursuing Community Economic Development in Toronto������������������    50 Employment Strategies in Charlotte����������������������������������������������������    51 Exclusions and Uneven Development�����������������������������������������������������    52 Contributing to the City Through Urban Agriculture Entrepreneurialism? ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    56 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    57 4 “It Is Not Just About the Food”: Integrated Qualitative Valuations of Urban Agriculture������������������������������������������������������������   59 Beyond Food Production ������������������������������������������������������������������������    60 Providing Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering Community Economies, Neighborhood Place-Making, and People and Land Relationships��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    62 Community Economies������������������������������������������������������������������������    63 Social Connections and Place-Making������������������������������������������������    65 Connecting to Land, Histories, and Traditional Knowledge����������������    68 Providing Environmental Value Through Food System Alternatives, Human-Nature Connections, and Education��������������������������������������������    70 Ecosystem Services and Environmental Alternatives��������������������������    70 Human and Environmental Health������������������������������������������������������    74 Food and Agriculture Education Outcomes ����������������������������������������    75 Valuing Urban Agriculture’s Interrelated Qualitative Contributions ������    76 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    78 5 Stewarding the Environmental Commons��������������������������������������������   83 Theoretical Foundations in Public Space and Environmental Commons   84 Literature on Public Space and Environmental Commons in Urban Agriculture ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    88 Productions of Lived Space in Urban Agriculture ����������������������������������    90 Policy Approaches to Stewarding the Commons ��������������������������������    91 Producing Contested Publics Through Lived Space����������������������������    94 Shifting Representations of Growing as a Collective��������������������������    96 Unsettling Public or Private Natures��������������������������������������������������������   100 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   101 6 A Way Forward����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  103 Challenges to Pursuing Social Justice via Neoliberal Sustainability Policy ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   104 More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints��������������������������   107 Pursuing Systemic Change����������������������������������������������������������������������   110 Embracing the Ever-Changing Urban Environment��������������������������������   111 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   113 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115

Chapter 1

Introduction

After nearly 5 years of walking through urban agricultural spaces throughout the Americas, enjoying countless samples of food directly from the vines, smelling compostable materials, and learning from growers, policymakers, and community leaders, a first happened. I was stopped by a research participant, as I was listening to him tell me and two undergraduate students about the medicinal properties and genus of plants in his teaching garden, because a butterfly landed on my head. I had had many interactions with animals, plants, soils, and people, but (beyond eating) this was the closest physical manifestation of human-environment relationships I had encountered. As we continued to talk, this urban agriculture advocate and agronomist reflected on that moment: “I think that we need to change the image of the farmer to a builder of a new landscape, creator of harmony and beauty because all that is also there. It’s another kind beauty that’s in the plants, smells, in the animals, like the butterfly that landed on your head.” For this person, and many others in this research, the socio-ecological relationships formed through urban agriculture are critical to sustaining urban landscapes. This research and book seek to make visible these relationships in order to better understand the complex assemblages in which they are embedded.

 volution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North E and South Historical texts and more recent academic publications depict a long history of urban agriculture worldwide, characterized by growth during times of economic downturn combined with retraction in economic booms. More recently, urban agriculture is being incorporated into sustainable development policies that further political economic goals. This chapter begins by briefly tracing this evolution.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_1

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Urban agriculture—the production, harvesting, and processing of crops or livestock in an urbanized area—has been practiced in cities around the world for millennia (Steel 2013). As early as the construction of Machu Picchu in the sixteenth century, cities have established spaces for food production. In early cities, urban agriculture emerged as necessary for addressing food insecurity and supporting the livelihoods of working poor residents (Lovell 2010). Early allotments were strategies for neighborhood and family resilience. This is evident as the practice increases during times of economic and political crisis and in early perceptions in the Global North that gardens were considered both something personal and private for upper classes as well as areas of ill-repute tended by working-class laborers (Kettle 2014). Barthel and Isendahl (2013) describe the loss of communal sites and ancient systems of local food production in Britain during the privatization and enclosure of green space in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. More recently, Reynolds (2015) notes that urban agriculture provided an important source of food for New  York City residents during the world wars and the Depression. Then in the 1950s–1960s, urban agriculture projects focused more on community development and social and environmental organizing. Many of these projects have been pursued to make city life more palatable, productive (a productive greening), and sustainable (WinklerPrins 2017). Additionally, in cities in the global North and South, urban agriculture is viewed as a contributor to social and ecological resilience. As Barthel and Isendahl (2013) point out: Cities sequester food from the farthest reaches of the planet via a fragile global food system where energy costs are escalating and marginal returns from fertilisers and pesticides are diminishing, while environmental problems, such as water degradation, topsoil loss and biodiversity loss, are accumulating at sites of food production. (pg. 2)

Thus, contemporary urban agriculture presents an opportunity to reconnect cities with food production and protect urban green space.1 In recent decades, urban agriculture has experienced a resurgence. The UN Development Programme estimates that more than 800 million urban agricultural producers cultivate 15% of the world’s food (Mougeot 2016). Whether backyard gardens and hoop houses, collectively organized community gardens, individual allotments, rooftop gardens, greenhouses, beekeeping, or other innovations, urban agriculture is practiced by a variety of stakeholders. Especially in times of economic recession, people participate in urban agriculture to increase social capital, social cohesion, nutrition education, public health, economic development, food security, community resilience, and sustainability, as well as contest the industrial food system (Certomà and Tornaghi 2015; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Hoover 2013; Wakefield et al. 2007; among others). Urban agriculture also aligns with several sustainable development goals seeking to reduce injustice and inequity while fighting climate change. International

1  The significant literature identifying the quantitative contributions of urban agriculture is beyond the scope of this book that focuses on more qualitative political, economic, and social features (see, e.g., Haberman et al. 2014, MacRae et al. 2010, among others).

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researchers recognized the links between the food system and addressing climate change in a 2019 report that called for reducing food waste, increasing plant-based diets, and producing food in more sustainable, low greenhouse gas emission systems (IPCC 2019). While not specifically addressing urban ecosystem dynamics, the report suggests that urban and peri-urban food production can be a strategy for reducing the impacts of urbanization on climate change and the loss of land available for food production. At a smaller scale, progressive cities around the world receive significant attention for their urban sustainability planning that frequently incorporates urban agriculture. Much of this planning, and urban agriculture projects more generally, pursues social equity as a potential outcome of urban agriculture practiced by marginalized groups. For example, the 2016 Philadelphia (US) Greenworks Plan includes urban agriculture in its vision of making healthy, affordable, and sustainable food available to all residents. Similar to other urban sustainability plans across North America, this document describes urban agriculture as instrumental for not only providing fresh produce to hungry communities but also animating community spaces. In addition, groups promoting urban agriculture often highlight potential contributions to countering the negative environmental and human impacts of the industrial food system, addressing urban blight, and transforming political economic systems in order to advance social justice (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Hoover 2013; Sbicca 2013). Others point to the gender dynamics of urban agriculture (and food systems more broadly), noting that women farmers contribute approximately 40% of world food production with less access to land, financial and educational services, inputs, and technology than their male counterparts (Sachs and Patel-­ Campillo 2014). Attending to such relationships within agricultural systems could unsettle traditional gender relations and a neoliberal emphasis on worker productivity, in favor of advocating for fair wages and employment conditions that promote a better quality of life and food. Despite these social justice and sustainability goals developed alongside advancements in urban agriculture policy and practice in recent decades, urban agriculture projects encounter many obstacles to implementation. In particular, urban agriculture projects created by historically marginalized residents often face exclusion in accessing land, resources (including financial capital), and political support (Cabannes 2012; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Daftary-Steel et  al. 2015; Glasser 2018; Hammelman 2019; Thibert 2012). It is also frequently governed by disconnected and contradictory municipal planning and policymaking (Lawson 2005). As urban agriculture competes for land with other, higher-value, uses (such as housing or commercial development), or contradicts policymakers’ visions of a modern city, its producers face significant pressures to end or relocate their practice. Better understanding these contestations in cities that are pursuing sustainability through neoliberal agendas can shed important light on the ability of urban agriculture projects to achieve the environmental and social goals outlined above.

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 xamining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas E Through a Political Ecology Lens Theorizing in political ecology provides a foundation for this book, which investigates the impact of global political economic processes on local urban agriculture initiatives. The field of political ecology traces its roots to political economy research on ecological processes (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987), but it has expanded significantly in the past decades. Many political ecologists are grounded in critical social theory and committed to in-depth, direct observation via qualitative and/or mixed methods in order to better understand the entanglements of political and environmental phenomena (Bridge et al. 2015). Early political ecologists considered co-constitutive relationships between society and natural resources including seeking explanations for land degradation in social, economic, and political processes (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Neumann 2005). Important for the research in this book is the plurality of approaches put forth for a greater understanding of marginality and environmental injustices (Blaikie 2012; McCarthy 2002; Muldavin 2008; Robbins 2012; Peet and Watts 2004). In the past decades, feminist and de-­ colonial expansions of political ecology have brought greater attention to historical, cultural, and linguistic forces; linkages between power relations, institutions, and environmental outcomes; and the production of socio-natures (Biersack and Greenberg 2006; Blaikie 2012; Forsyth 2003; Nygren and Rikoon 2008; Peet and Watts 2004). For example, Elmhirst (2015), in surveying feminist political ecology, notes the ways in which feminist scholarship in political ecology has brought attention to gendered resource access and control, gendered subjectivity and power, material feminist theories of human/non-human nature relationships, and a feminist ethics of care. Important in my research are ideas of the urban metabolism and assemblages, attention to urban socio-ecological relationships and practices of commoning, and the role of space and place in constructing and experiencing urban agriculture. Assemblage thinking often relies on theorizing by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to consider the ways that materiality, representation, and subjectivity interweave over space and time (Robbins and Marks 2010). These “tangled webs” arrange relational actors in ways that construct and code space for particular purposes (Braun 2006, pg. 644; Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020). Attending to assemblages highlights the flows, connections/divisions, and betweenness apparent in relations among material, bodies, and representation (Dovey and Wood 2015). One form of such assemblages identifies the urban metabolism through which assembled actors circulate through and co-constitute cities (Robbins and Marks 2010). It recognizes that cities are “dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and physical, cultural and organic” (Heynen et al. 2006, pg. 1). In such an urban metabolism, reciprocal and reinforcing flows of human and non-human labor support capital accumulation (Perkins 2007). Urban political ecology scholarship articulates the urban metabolism as a “dynamic process by which new sociospatial formations, intertwinings of materials and

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collaborative enmeshing of social nature emerge and present themselves, and are explicitly created through human labor and non-human processes simultaneously” (Heynen 2014, pg. 599). In other words, the urban metabolism is the process by which nature and labor are transformed through social, political, and economic systems into urban commodities critical for city survival (Shillington 2013). Recognizing co-constituted urban socio-ecological relationships is critical for bringing to light city-nature connections obscured by contemporary capitalist processes. WinklerPrins (2017) notes that urban agriculture can be approached as a healing of the metabolic rift as it rescales nutrient cycles in the city, builds community and social capital, and forms human-environment connections. “Urban agriculture is a means of reconnecting people to nature that improves their individual health, but also connecting them to work that makes people feel a productive part of society” (WinklerPrins 2017, pg. 6). McClintock (2010) also discusses urban agriculture as a way to mend the metabolic rift created by capitalist commodification of land, food, and labor. Restoring soil fertility, reconnecting human and non-human natures, and revaluing urban material via urban agriculture can address the negative outcomes of this rift. The emphasis on socio-ecological relationships in political ecology theory lends itself well to understanding urban agriculture practice at multiple scales. Political ecologists point to the co-constitution of nature and society. Given that nature and society are inseparable, in order to understand social or ecological phenomenon, it is critical to examine how they are essential to each other (Classens 2015). For example, in examining home patios in Nicaragua, Shillington (2013) notes that home space is embedded in social and socio-natural relations at multiple scales. The informal cultivation of fruit trees in domestic spaces (re)produces social ecologies through which marginalized households meet physical needs and appropriate urban space. Classens (2015) also points out that urban gardens must “be conceived of as socio-natural hybrids, comprised of both natural and social elements” (pg. 234). Clarifying the ways that nature operates in urban agriculture enables a more nuanced understanding of how capital impacts and is re-constituted and/or resisted in garden spaces. The constitution of urban socio-ecological formations also intertwines property rights, land use, and the commons. Many political ecology scholars focus on how socio-natures impact power dynamics in the commons and the practice of commoning to produce alternative urban futures (Ginn et al. 2018). They have long been concerned with the social mediation of property rights that are overlapping and contested (Turner 2017). Increasingly, political ecologists are also attending to practices of commoning. Understanding the social and political relationships that produce and regulate common natures is particularly relevant to this research on urban agriculture (as discussed in Chap. 5). Finally, political ecology is largely, although not exclusively, situated within geography and its attention to space and place. Many geographers concerned with space invoke Henri Lefebvre’s theorizations on the social production of perceived, conceived, and lived space. Barron (2017) notes the ways in which capital

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accumulation, human agency, and material processes shape urban space every day. Further, our knowledge about space is part of the processes of its (re)production and interpretation (Djokić et al. 2017). Considering the constitution of space through lived experience can bring light to the entangled socio-ecological assemblages involved in that production at multiple scales (home, urban, rural, nation, etc.). For example, Reis (2017) points to the impact of neoliberal globalization on the increasing fluidity of capital, commodities, and labor between urban and rural contexts. This fluidity is made visible through mixing farm and non-farm activities as livelihood strategies for rural and urban households (Tornaghi and Dehaene 2019). Urban gardens, in particular, have been studied as spaces reclaimed through labor, occupation, and the cultivation of natural systems (Barron 2017; Djokić et al. 2017). In this way, urban agriculture creates place in varied spaces throughout cities. It is critical to understand the influence of space and place when analyzing social processes of food systems (Hinrichs 2007; Lyson 2014). In examining urban farms in Los Angeles and Seattle, Mares and Peña (2010) point out how these reclamations continuously create cultural attachments to space or, in other words, make place. They elaborate: “The struggles toward alternative use of space through place-making practices that promote self-reliance, community, and autonomy constitute spatial practices that are both counter-hegemonic and revealing of unplanned-for outcomes and uses” (pg. 241). It is important to understand both the broader context in which urban agriculture is embedded and the ways it shapes place and space. This foundation in political ecology also supports the comparative nature of this project. This book examines four cities spanning the global North and South. In doing so, it follows the lead of other international comparative researchers systematically comparing similar phenomena across different sociocultural settings (Hantrais 2009). Comparative research is important for understanding urban phenomenon beyond local contexts, how cities participate in global political economic systems, and relations reaching across space, yet actualized in place (Ward 2010). In stretching across the global North and South, my research also responds to de-­ colonial calls for theorizing from diverse contexts, understanding “ordinary” cities, and considering multiple cities together (Robinson 2006; Roy 2011; WinklerPrins 2017). In this way, the global-local orientation of this book utilizes local cases to identify shared and different patterns, commonalities, and differences between groups and projects in order to shed light on global phenomena relating to sustainability, neoliberalism, and policy mobilities. As found by others (such as WinklerPrins 2017), while much literature on urban agriculture does not reach across broad geographies of the global North and South, the practices occurring across regions are increasingly converging. Worldwide, urban agriculture can be found cropping up in vacant lots, institutional spaces, backyards, and organized plots in parks and is motivated by goals for subsistence, community building, and recreation. While the diversity of garden projects is great, common values of sociality, cultural connections, health, and economics thread through initiatives in all four cities in my research.

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I mpacts of Global Political Economy on Urban Agriculture Practice In this book, I argue that examining differences and similarities between urban agriculture movements brings to light the global political economic processes—neoliberal sustainability agendas that rely on market solutions, economic quantification of land use, and privatizing the management of environmental commons—that disrupt efforts to pursue social justice via urban agriculture. My research highlighted territorial assemblages that privilege certain types of urban agriculture—collectively managed gardens that produce goods for the market—in ways that constrain achieving social justice objectives and maintain uneven development. This book traces theoretical and empirical explanations for the impact of global political economic structures (neoliberal urbanism and sustainability) on local efforts to promote social and environmental goals through urban agriculture. The following chapters engage with ideas of capitalism, neoliberal urbanism, and the sustainability fix to understand how urban agriculture contributes to urban imaginaries and is constrained by them. It pays particular attention to the prioritization of economic strategies for solving sustainability and social goals, the devolution of responsibility for managing commons and social safety nets to individuals and civil society, and efforts to resist urban regimes focused on private property, enclosure, and capital accumulation at the expense of social justice. Contemporary neoliberal urban policy pursues growth through capital-intensive development that prioritizes the economic value of urban land. This value can be buttressed through environmental projects that attract capital investments. As urban agriculture is practiced in this context, it is often either valued only for its (perhaps limited) contributions to the market or perceived as a temporary use that can attract neighborhood investment. These goals, then, can spur concerns regarding gentrification and displacement, particularly when urban agriculture projects are unable to withstand development pressures and growers lose investments and access to resources (such as food, green space, and social place). It is difficult to achieve social justice goals in this framing as the contributions of urban agriculture to social, cultural, political, and even environmental goals are devalued. Most of these urban agriculture values—such as creating social connections, connecting to the land, and disconnecting from the corporate food regime— are difficult to quantify in ways that prove their value in neoliberal urbanism regimes. But, rather than bend these values to fit hegemonic political economic goals, many growers in this research reported that their practice resisted these ideologies and instead can produce new urban imaginaries. One way these imaginaries take shape is through unsettling private property regimes and notions of public space. By nature of their physical and material contributions to urban natures, urban agriculture practitioners often felt their ability to claim rights to resources and the making of the city expanded. However, landowners disputed these claims and were careful to institute norms and rules that focused on the stewarding of common environmental resources instead of private claims to resources and land (given that most growers do not own

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the land they cultivate). Importantly, these imaginaries of public or private space are grounded in broader contexts of urban development and property rights such that within-garden tensions arise regarding the extent to which spaces are open to the general public (who may pilfer produce from plants) or should be enclosed. In these debates, particularly when the market value of urban agriculture is emphasized, notions of individualization and private property are reinforced. My research makes visible the complex assemblage of urban agriculture that is produced through material, social, and relational meaning and practice. This assemblage is co-constituted with neoliberal urban sustainability regimes through their impacts on urban agriculture as well as urban agriculture’s contributions and resistance to these regimes.

Research Sites This book presents comparative research about urban agriculture initiatives in four cities across the Americas—Rosario, Argentina; Toronto, Canada; Medellín, Colombia; and Charlotte, United States (see Fig. 1.1). During 2015–2019, I talked with 130 people across the four cities through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, community meetings, and informal settings (such as garden tours and at farmers’ markets). Those individuals represented agricultural producers, policymakers, and non-profit advocates. I also completed a discourse analysis of government planning materials in each city and reviewed the growing body of academic literature on urban agriculture. Each city presents a different context in which urban agriculture is practiced. In the North American context in Toronto and Charlotte, urban agriculture projects are more commonly practiced on government land (such as allotment gardens provided by Parks & Recreation Department), while in the South American context, in Rosario and Medellin, subsistence agriculture originating in informal neighborhoods can be more contested and uncertain. The cities were selected based on their stages of urban agriculture momentum and municipal support. Rosario and Toronto are home to long-standing urban agriculture movements with substantial government support, while Charlotte and Medellín are more nascent and operate with less municipal intervention. Additionally, I sought representation from diverse urban contexts. All four cities are growing yet struggle with socio-spatial disparities and poverty (albeit at different levels). Some of the cities are situated near water (Rosario and Toronto), in the mountains (Medellín), and in temperate climates that support longer growing seasons (Rosario, Medellín, and Charlotte) and are experiencing significant urbanization (Charlotte, Medellín, and Toronto). Each city’s economy focuses on different sectors, and the governments have different political leanings. While my research stretches across the global North and South, the growing economies in Medellín and Rosario enable sustainability and support that may not be evident in other parts of the global South. Unfortunately, my research was unable to incorporate empirical examples from other regions of the global South (such as Asia and Africa), although it is informed by literature from those regions. While each case study is situated within its own

Research Sites

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Fig. 1.1  Map of research site locations. (Source: Author and ESRI Topographic Basemap)

particular context, my research seeks to demonstrate cross-cutting themes that can be instructive for urban agriculture initiatives in other places and spaces.

Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina Rosario is located in a principal agricultural region (the Pampa Húmeda) along the Paraná River in the province of Santa Fe on the eastern side of Argentina. As the third largest city in the country, it is home to approximately 1.2  million people

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(INDEC 2010). It is a port city at the intersection of two railroad lines and several major highways driving an agroexport economy responsible for more than 70% of the country’s grains, subproducts, and oil exports (FAO 2015; Gorenstein 2005). While the city (and country) has weathered cycles of economic crisis and high unemployment rates, it tends to do better than the national average in terms of access to basic needs in health, education, housing, and access to water and sanitation (Almansi 2009). It is a destination for migrants from the interior of Argentina and neighboring countries, often forced into cities due to industrial agriculture’s land appropriation (in part related to Argentina’s heavy investment in genetically modified soybeans as a commodity crop). Many minimally resourced migrants and other lower-income Rosarinos reside in informal settlements (villas) on the outskirts of the city (Hardoy and Ruete 2013). The city also fights against a drug trade that brings violence to these neighborhoods (Eventon 2013). Politically, Rosario is remarkable for the continuity of its socialist municipal government since 1989. It has experienced significant coherence in policy approaches for several decades (Hardoy and Ruete 2013). The municipal government implements several participatory planning exercises through which residents can give input into the planning and management of the city. Urban agricultural practice gained steam in the 1980s–1990s as more residents of informal settlements took up the practice to supplement food budgets. By 1991, these efforts were supported by ProHuerta, a program established by the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) and the National Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing, as part of the National Food Security Plan (CIPPEC 2012). As a national program, ProHuerta supports small-scale, subsistence production in low-­ income urban and peri-urban areas (INTA 2011). Following a nation-wide economic crisis in 2001, urban agriculture practice expanded rapidly throughout Rosario as residents turned to empty lots to grow food in the face of unemployment and hunger (Bracalenti et al. 2012). At this time, the municipal government formed its Urban Agriculture Program (PAU) to provide tools, seeds, and training to 20 gardening groups. By 2003, this program had expanded to supporting 800 community gardens (Guénette 2010). As the economic crisis resolved and a consolidation process began, the number of gardens throughout the city declined. In mid-2019, nearly 250 families participated in six city-managed community gardens (parque huertas) on 30 hectares of public land (FAO 2014; personal communication 2019; see Fig. 1.2). The municipal government also began a peri-urban initiative in 2011, the Greenbelt Project, to support transition of conventional farming to agroecological practices (Terrile 2011). As of October 2019, the Greenbelt Project engaged nine producers cultivating a total of 73 hectares via agroecological methods with an additional 142 hectares in transition (Latucca 2019). Both PAU and the Greenbelt Project operate farmers’ markets (ferias) throughout the city every day through which participants can sell their goods. It is estimated that an additional 2000 home gardens are cultivated across the city (Latucca 2019).

Research Sites

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Fig. 1.2  A community garden supported by the municipality in Rosario. (Photo by author 2018)

Toronto, Ontario, Canada Toronto, in southern Ontario, is the largest economy and city in Canada. It has a population of more than 5 million people and covers an area of 243 square miles on the northern banks of Lake Ontario (Statistics Canada 2018). It is also one of the most diverse cities in the world with more than 50% of its population originating by birth from outside of Canada. Toronto serves as the commercial, financial, industrial, and cultural center of Canada (Ochoa and Ramírez 2018). It is home to 8.2% of Canada’s workforce, and the growing economy and population have resulted in significantly increased housing prices and limited land available for urban agriculture. Toronto is also a leader in food policy in North America. The Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC) was founded in 1991 within the City’s Board of Health to address food policy issues across city government. The TFPC supported writing and adoption of the Toronto Food Strategy in 2010 and has long been a supporter of urban agriculture. This is evident in the adoption of policy mechanisms and programs, such as the GrowTO Urban Agriculture Action Plan (2010) and the Toronto Urban Agriculture Program, both of which seek to enable easy access to resources for growing. A network of gardeners, Toronto Urban Growers, is also instrumental for expanding and raising the profile of urban agriculture across the city. In 2020,

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there were more than 200 documented growing spaces representing a diversity of practices, participants, and urban contributions (TUG 2020). In recognition of the importance of this movement, in 2017 the Toronto mayor declared each September 15th as Urban Agriculture Day. During my research there was strong momentum for establishing market gardens on public lands and responding to the densification of the city by building more rooftop gardens. While the urban agriculture movement was growing and gaining international attention, it was constrained by limited access to cultivable land and city regulations that did not recognize agriculture as a land use. Many innovations in container gardening, indoor growing, and other alternative spaces (such as shipping containers) worked to overcome these limitations (see Fig. 1.3).

Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia Medellín is the capital city of the department of Antioquia in northwestern Colombia. The city of more than 2.5 million people is located in the Aburrá Valley of the Andes Mountains (Betancur 2007). It recorded the fastest-growing urban economy in Latin America in 2014 and has gained international attention for its urban development strategies, including hosting the UN World Habitat Urban Forum (Franz 2018). These strategies focused infrastructure investments and social programming in the most marginalized neighborhoods through an approach known as social urbanism.

Fig. 1.3  Community garden in downtown Toronto. (Photo by author 2017)

Research Sites

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Economic elites in the city also concentrated capital in financial, services, construction, and food processing sectors in order to draw international investments. Medellín absorbs significant numbers of migrants and internally displaced persons from the northwest regions of Colombia, due to the decade-long civil war. Many of such lower-resourced residents live in informal settlements sprawling up the valley’s slopes on unstable terrain (Hernandez-Garcia 2013; Sotomayor 2016). While Medellín has a mild climate supporting year-round growing, these informal, self-built neighborhoods high up the mountain slopes are at risk of mudslides and present challenging terrain for establishing gardens. Yet, residents are organizing gardens to supplement food budgets, improve neighborhoods, and claim a right to the city (see Fig.  1.4). My research focused mostly on community gardens in neighborhoods on the eastern edge of the city, including one where women created a space for 40 families to have garden plots in 2011. As emblematic of efforts in other parts of the city, these gardens provided fresh food for consumption, exchange, and sale at occasional markets in the center city. These gardeners originally received government support (via a yearly lease) as a temporary land use preventing further expansion of their informal neighborhood. During 2014–2017, the municipal government also incorporated urban gardens into a large-scale greenbelt project (El Jardín Circunvalar de Medellín) that demarcated the city’s rural-urban border in Comuna 8 (see Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020 for more information on this project). My research also included growers (established and aspiring) in other

Fig. 1.4  An urban garden high up the hillsides of Medellín. (Photo by author 2017)

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informal neighborhoods who participated in community meetings for sharing knowledge and seeds and seeking to build a network of urban growers.

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States Charlotte is the largest city in North Carolina, in the southeastern United States. The Charlotte metropolitan region is home to more than 2.6 million people with a rapidly growing immigrant population upsetting traditional black-white binaries (US Census 2019). Historically, Charlotte was an influential trading post and textile producing region. Today, it is home to the second-largest banking sector in the United States, which is driving overall population growth. It is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, with many new residents drawn to employment opportunities in high-income banking sectors and, relatedly, low-income service sectors (such as construction, food service, and domestic labor). This has produced increased housing prices and a lack of affordable housing (Nilsson et  al. 2020). Between 1990 and 2010, Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is located) recorded an increase in its foreign-born population of 595% (Furuseth et al. 2015). By 2019, Latinx residents represented more than 14% of the Charlotte population. Charlotte has struggled with spatial inequality and segregation. A report in 2014 found that Charlotte had the lowest rates of economic mobility of the 50 largest cities in the United States (Chetty et al. 2014). Located in the Carolina Piedmont, it enjoys mild weather and a long growing season. As Charlotte has grown over the past four decades, it has expanded its borders into farmland areas. This history makes fertile soils available in many neighborhoods, but recent growth has also reduced access to land for urban agriculture. Instead, some farms that are perceived as urban today have rural histories that evolved as development came to their doorsteps. Those farmers are finding innovative ways to adapt to their now more urban or suburban landscapes. Charlotte’s suburban landscape also makes more backyard gardening available than in other cities in my research. Despite those trends, Charlotte has an increasingly active food movement and many urban agriculture projects. My research documented more than 100 growing spaces in various stages of development (decade-old, newly energized, and/or recently abandoned) (see Fig. 1.5). The county Parks and Recreation Department hosts 19 community gardens, many churches and schools manage gardens, and non-­ profit organizations, particularly in lower-resourced neighborhoods, have organized projects. The local government has also demonstrated a recent interest in expanding the local food sector through investments in farmers’ markets and addressing limited food access in low-income neighborhoods. Yet, Charlotte’s inequality continues to be demonstrated through a rapid increase in trendy restaurants and grocery store wars, while food insecurity grew to nearly 15% in 2018.

Organization of the Book

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Fig. 1.5  Indoor garden shop in Charlotte. (Photo by author 2019)

Organization of the Book This book surveys relevant literature and examines key themes arising during nearly 5 years of research in the four cities described above. First, Chap. 2 considers the extensive and growing body of literature on urban agriculture with a particular focus on the relationship between urban agriculture and sustainability governance, social justice, and land tenure. It argues that capitalist neoliberal urbanism ideologies influence the ability of urban agriculture projects to achieve sustainability and social justice goals, particularly given the emphasis on the potential economic value of urban land uses. Chapter 3 then builds on this literature to use an urban political ecology lens for examining how the prioritization of urban agriculture’s market outcomes fosters uneven development. Most projects encountered in this research, and especially those supported by governments in Medellín and Rosario, extolled the economic potential of urban agriculture. They focused on pursuing models and policies that contributed to the economic development of growers, neighborhoods, and cities. But, my research also found that such market-focused approaches excluded the most marginalized residents seeking to grow plants in order to supplement food budgets and constrained efforts to address structural economic inequities.

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Chapter 4 reports on the perceived value of urban agriculture from all of the stakeholders encountered in my research. A key finding is that, while access to food is an important outcome of urban agriculture, it is not necessarily a primary driver for participating in the practice. Instead, growers were motivated by environmental, political, social, and cultural goals. These included countering the industrial food system and its degradation of environmental and social systems, fostering community and social interaction, bolstering mental and physical health, and connecting to agricultural histories and the land. Importantly, however, these urban agriculture contributions to urban food landscapes were difficult to quantify in order to demonstrate their legitimacy in neoliberal urban sustainability regimes. Chapter 5 problematizes ideas of public space and environmental commons in urban agriculture. Given the salient obstacles to securing land tenure, especially for marginalized producers, urban agriculture presents challenges to our understanding of the publicness of these urban spaces. Landowners often perceive growers as stewarding environmental commons. Yet, growers that committed labor, made investments in the soil, and created place attachments in gardens experienced the gardens as more private spaces through which they could make claims to resources, land, and a place in the city. Utilizing Lefebvre’s theories on lived space, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which notions of public space and environmental commons are unsettled through urban agriculture. Finally, Chap. 6 concludes the book by synthesizing the key arguments developed throughout, presenting ideas for moving forward, and highlighting inspiring urban agriculture projects encountered throughout my research. In particular, this closing chapter considers the neoliberal urbanism strategies demonstrated through sustainability governance and land tenure regimes that impact urban agriculture. It also relies on compelling examples in my research of successes and failures in order to provide suggestions for moving beyond those constraints. This includes engaging and empowering more diverse stakeholders, better valuing non-economic outputs of urban agriculture, and working within the temporary dynamics of complex urban systems. This book contributes to literature on urban agriculture, sustainability, and urban geography through examining the ability of marginalized communities to compete for land on which to grow produce in contribution to their food security, livelihoods, communities, and environments. This book also contributes a qualitative approach to understanding the perceived value of urban agriculture. Throughout my research, stakeholders emphasized the qualitative values of urban agriculture that are not easily captured in statistical representations of the economic value of a given piece of urban land (and perhaps should not be quantified in that way). As such, this book seeks to add to understandings about the contributions urban agriculture projects make to the urban metabolism beyond the food produced. I also use a political ecology lens in order to fill gaps in literature regarding the local manifestations of global policy in urban agriculture projects seeking to address both sustainability and social justice objectives.

References

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Chapter 2

Entanglements of Social Justice, Sustainability Governance, and Land Tenure: A Literature Review

Expanding Scholarly Engagements with Urban Agriculture Urban agriculture is a long-standing practice in cities worldwide and is characterized by cycles of interest and abandonment. In this research it is understood broadly as the production, harvesting, and/or processing of crops or livestock in an urbanized area. This chapter reviews the extensive literature regarding urban agriculture in both the global North and South. Examples and scholarship intentionally cover wide geographies in order to bring light to larger systemic issues that manifest in similar ways across divergent regions. To be clear, I do not argue that the experience of urban agriculture is the same everywhere. But instead, that global political economic systems can be seen influencing urban agricultural practice across a diversity of geographies. Over the past decades, interest in urban agriculture grew extensively. A 2009 study of gardening in the United States found that 36 million households were growing food, while another 2012 survey identified more than 9000 community gardens across the country (McClintock 2014). Today, urban agriculture takes on a more permanent place in many cities as more diverse groups participate in it for a wider variety of goals and with more local support (Birky and Strom 2013). Scholarly literature examines varied urban agriculture projects around the world from beekeeping in Japan and South Korea (Kohsaka et al. 2017), home gardens in Brazil (Murrieta and WinklerPrins 2009), and allotment gardens in Greece (Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017), to organized vacant lot cultivation in the United States (Drake and Lawson 2014) and large-scale commercial hydroponics farms and zero-acreage farming (Hochman et  al. 2018; Specht et  al. 2014). The edited volume Global Urban Agriculture (WinklerPrins 2017) chronicled urban agriculture projects and theory from six continents. From opening stories of indigenous and immigrant communities growing food in (soon to be) urbanized areas during the 1800s to contemporary sack gardening in the Kibera informal settlement in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_2

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Nairobi, Kenya, the chapters detailed the variety of urban cultivation occurring in cities worldwide. Scholarly literature also investigates a myriad of urban agriculture characteristics and processes. Some research seeks to quantify the ecosystem services and food production provided by urban agriculture (e.g., Altieri and Nicholls 2018; CampsCalvet et al. 2016; Orsini et al. 2014). Others attend to the motivations of gardeners (Blecha and Davis 2014; Pourias et al. 2016; among others) or the impacts of garden projects on civic consciousness (DeLind 2002; Ghose and Pettygrove 2014). For example, Buchmann (2009) describes home gardens in Trinidad de Cuba before and after the Cuban revolution and the economic and food crises promulgated through US trade embargoes. She found that home gardens provided important socio-­ ecological resilience through enabling growers to supplement ration cards and cultivate and exchange particular plants as herbal remedies for illness. Many historical accounts of urban agriculture highlight its importance for providing supplementary food to families in poverty or during times of crisis alongside a decline during times of economic growth when urban agriculture comes to be viewed as backward or out of place in the contemporary city (Gibas and Boumová 2020; Lawson 2005; Maxwell 1999; Morgan 2009). However, many of these tellings overlook kitchen gardens that have consistently been the purview of working class and immigrant families to both supplement food budgets and contest urban logics of land use and who has the right to remake the city (Mares and Peña 2010). Finally, a growing body of literature considers the political economy of urban food production (and this is a launching point for this book). This approach investigates whether urban agriculture projects reproduce neoliberal urbanisms or resist them (Crossan et al. 2016; McClintock 2018; Pudup 2008). For example, McClintock (2018) examines the contradictory relationship between urban agriculture and capital in neoliberal sustainable cities of the Global North. He points out that urban agriculture is increasingly viewed as aligning with market logics through providing a sustainability fix for powerholders seeking to balance economic and ecological development goals. In this formulation, investment in urban agriculture can spur development and gentrification. Similarly, Pudup (2008: 1229) argues that community gardens in the United States are often “a response to pronounced and recurring cycles of capitalist restructuring and their tendency to displace people and places through investment processes governing industries and urban space.” Further, roll-­ back neoliberalization led the way for community gardens to become a strategy to remedy urban degradation and blight. Within political ecology, in particular, urban agriculture has been approached as a complex socio-nature that contributes to the urban metabolism; mobilizes people, institutions, and policies in pursuit of social and environmental goals; and holds potential for both resisting and reproducing neoliberal logics (Classens 2015; Crossan et al. 2016; see also Chap. 1 for more discussion on political ecology). For example, Gibas and Boumová (2020) argue that allotment gardens are examples of socio-natural artifacts through which the urban is manifest. Specifically attending to gardening in Prague from the socialist era through to contemporary neoliberal governance, the authors interrogate power relationships that underlie uneven urban

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geographies rooted in neoliberal governance. Further, political ecology perspectives point to urban agriculture as a potential way to mend the metabolic rift through which capitalism has divided nature and society (Bellwood-Howard and Nchanji 2017; McClintock 2010). This rift, driven by the commodification of land, food, and labor, has separated humans from their integrative role in larger ecosystems. Yet, urban agriculture has the potential to rebuild these relationships through bringing to light the complex circulation of natures critical to sustaining urban life. In my research, topics of sustainability governance, food justice, and land tenure arose as critical for understanding political ecological processes in urban agriculture. These topics represent important fields that influence approaches to urban agriculture, its feasibility and sustainability, and its broader impacts. Tenets of neoliberal urbanism run throughout the case studies of urban agriculture in this research. In particular, the privileging of capital accumulation, devolution of governance, and primacy of private property all underlie hegemonic approaches to sustainability, social injustice, and land tenure as well as their resistance. This chapter briefly surveys urban agriculture literature focused on each of these topics before identifying linkages across them that informed my research. This review seeks to lay a foundation and context for the chapters that follow.

Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability Policies and planning addressing food systems and urban agriculture often entangle with city sustainability goals. As urban sustainability gains traction as a policy and planning goal worldwide, cities are increasingly understood as the site of many environmental and social challenges that impact far-flung environments (in relation to energy use, pollution and waste, and food acquisition) (Banister 2008; Haarstad and Oseland 2017; Portnoy 2003). Further, cities can be leaders in addressing climate change and ecological degradation through implementing sustainability action plans and going beyond national and international regulations (Affolderbach and Schulz 2016). Many of those actions align with neoliberal goals through promoting the city as a sustainability entrepreneur and relying on public-private partnerships to achieve sustainable development goals. For example, McPhearson et al. (2014) discuss sustainability planning in the Global North with particular attention paid to ecosystem services and PlaNYC.  PlaNYC is a legislation and planning effort in New  York City that sought to expand and enhance ecosystem services related to stormwater, drinking water, food provisioning, and recreation. McPheason et  al. found that while PlaNYC is a regional/city initiative, it is also carried out in partnership with community groups and non-profit organizations, particularly with the latter managing concerns related to food production and access. In this example, sustainability governance relies on public-private partnerships often considered characteristic of neoliberal urbanism. Further, many cities worldwide utilize sustainability policy to position themselves as world-class global leaders. Multiple international awards, and resulting

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investments, recognize these efforts. For example, Medellín, Colombia, developed a Sustainable Medellín campaign in which it prioritized greening the built form, held high-profile events in outdoor amphitheaters alongside a river running through the city, and encouraged residents to ride their bikes or the metro instead of driving. The city’s sustainability programs earned it international recognition. It won the Lee Kwan Yew World City Prize in 2016 for its contributions to sustainable urbanism. Urban sustainability programs and policy can also break down nature-society divides by recognizing the complex exchanges, adaptations, and mutations among the human and non-human agents that form cities (Affolderbach and Schulz 2016). For example, Blok (2013) examines a large-scale urban sustainability project in Denmark to demonstrate how urban ecology can be a site for reassembling nature, technology, and society. In this example, architects and interested publics form and resist particular urban natures. Sustainability policymaking and projects take place within widespread, power-­ laden processes that seek a balancing of economic, ecological, and social demands. In this regard, some scholars identify a “sustainability fix” through which urban governance strategies address capital and environmental needs while making structural inequalities invisible (Nciri and Levenda 2019; While et al. 2004). Such strategies attract capital investments, foster continued economic growth, and build private-public partnerships, without truly upsetting the capitalist logics that produce environmental degradation. As discussed further below, within food systems and urban agriculture, this also leads to critiques that much sustainability governance is inadequate for addressing social justice concerns. Finally, these ideas and approaches to sustainability move among cities in both the global North and South through knowledge exchange and norms reproduced in translocal policy circuits (Haarstad and Oseland 2017; McCann 2011). This is evident in my research as similar strategies for meeting neoliberal sustainability goals through urban agriculture arise in both Medellín and Toronto. Such policy and programmatic strategies “travel” through a complex interchange of knowledge mobilization, resources, and stakeholders.

 he Role of Food Systems in Urban Sustainability Planning T and Policy Historically, throughout much of the world, planning professionals and local governments paid only limited, and disconnected, attention to food systems (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000; Thibert 2012). Beyond questions of how food (and waste) is transported in and through the city and concerns with food insecurity, food system issues were perceived as a rural concern. Indeed, modern ideas of cities sought a rejection of agricultural connections, deeming them obsolete to urban life (Barthel and Isendahl 2013). Further, the urban imaginary often excluded notions of “nature.” Instead, non-human natural elements (trees, animals, food production) were perceived as existing in and better suited to rural environments. For example, in terms

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of urban agriculture, Sanyé-Mengual et  al. (2016) found that stakeholders in Barcelona perceived urban agriculture as “false agriculture” (pg. 117) and a social, not ecological, activity such that food production in the city was not perceived as feasible. Yet, in recent decades, global climate crises laid bare the interconnected ecologies of urban systems. City policymakers and planners increasingly recognize their integrated role in environmental and food systems. More cities are developing comprehensive food strategies (Mansfield and Mendes 2013, who note, however, that urban agriculture is often treated separately from other food system concerns in such policies). Today, many cities in North America have some policies or programs that are supportive of food systems, often managed through local planning departments (Cohen and Reynolds 2014). The call for more of this is grounded in arguments that food systems greatly impact urban sustainability as they touch transportation, energy use, management of organic waste, land permeability, and other urban systems (Lovell 2010). Sustainability plans also demonstrate a growing attention to food systems and support for urban agriculture (Camps-Calvet et al. 2016). More initiatives to support urban agriculture, including leasing land, supporting bee hives, and installing school gardens, are increasingly supported by city planning departments. Urban agriculture is viewed as critical to urban resilience due to its potential to meet economic goals through contributing to household food budgets and enabling small business creation; environmental goals through providing green space and reducing energy needs, waste production, and storm water runoff; and social goals through reducing food insecurity (Ackerman et al. 2014; Henriques and Campbell 2009). Urban agriculture presents an opportunity to innovate for green space governance as it is incorporated into various public and private spaces (Middle et al. 2014). Walker (2016) highlights the sustainability plans in Vancouver and Detroit as examples that include urban agriculture. In Philadelphia (US) the Greenworks Plan includes urban agriculture in its vision of making healthy, affordable, and sustainable food available to all residents. Similar to other urban sustainability plans across North America, this document describes urban agriculture as instrumental for not only providing fresh produce to hungry communities but also animating community spaces. Through including urban agriculture in its sustainability plan, the city elevated the practice to an activity it recognizes and supports (Rosan and Pearsall 2017). Similarly, in Medellín urban gardens were explicitly incorporated into a Greenbelt Project as a strategy to stabilize soils on the hillsides in order to prevent landslides (Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020). More broadly, RUAF (2014) argues that urban agriculture is an important strategy for addressing climate change. Looking at examples around the world, they find that urban agriculture can decrease city temperatures, reduce waste, and make urban communities more resilient in the face of food price shocks driven by changing climates. In order to successfully implement sustainability plans that rely on urban agriculture for meeting environmental, economic, and social goals, municipal planning and community activist interventions are critical (Henriques and Campbell 2009; Lawson 2004). Pearson et al. (2010) suggest that cities and governments need

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to conduct future research to decide how to best manage, incentivize, and legislate urban agriculture at multiple scales. In addition, groups promoting urban agriculture often highlight the potential to counter the negative environmental and human impacts of the industrial food system, address urban blight, and transform political economic systems in order to advance social justice (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Hoover 2013). Okvat and Zautra (2011: 385) described this: “There is no panacea to all problems, but community gardening presents a promising method of parsimoniously enhancing the well-­ being, and furthering the resilience capacity, of individuals, communities, and the natural environment.” In this regard, and as discussed further below, much planning and many urban agriculture projects pursue social equity as a potential outcome of urban agriculture practiced by marginalized groups. Yet, urban agriculture and greening strategies are constrained by their ad hoc implementation and an urban political economy that privileges certain uses and groups. Urban agriculture is not often considered the “highest and best use” of urban land (Lovell 2010). Instead, it is seen as competing with higher value uses such as housing and retail. As Rosan and Pearsall (2017: 82) note: From the city’s perspective, the “highest and best use” of urban land may be new development that expands the city’s property tax base rather than an urban garden or farm, which may have significant community benefits and neighborhood spillover effects but does not directly generate tax revenue.

As a result, many urban food producers utilize land that they do not own, and their practices are viewed as a temporary use to be relocated or discontinued when greater investment potential arises. Urban agriculture is also frequently governed by disconnected and contradictory municipal planning and policymaking. There are divides between those who plan, build, and use urban spaces that limit the ability of urban planning to adequately respond to the desires of diverse urban communities (Tornaghi and Van Dyck 2015). This challenge was described in my research by an advocate for school gardens in Toronto: The Ministry of Education does not want to do food because you can see from their perspective it’s a bottomless pit. They do not want to be responsible for yet another piece of healthy living. They have enough on their plates. Ha, ha – pun intended … So, again, the barrier is that these things are siloed, that the Ministry of Agriculture is basically looking at rural Ontario and not urban and the Ministry of Education is not looking at food at all or frankly, not very much. The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change is good with urban ag, but wouldn’t step on toes at the Ministry of Education…So, there’s all these little pieces that people like me keep trying to fit together into a whole. …So, in terms of public advocacy, the silos and the sort of difficulty in finding a home for school gardens – is it Health, is it Environment, is it Education – that’s a sort of set of barriers and then sort of stemming from that is, if the public sector is not finding money for it, then we’re reliant on private foundations and corporations to demonstrate that they will support this in the absence of that public funding.

For this advocate, overcoming the disconnected approach to food systems and urban agriculture was a salient challenge.

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Further, as urban agriculture competes for land with other more high-value uses (such as housing or commercial development) or contradicts policymakers’ visions of a modern city, its producers face significant pressures to end or relocate their practice. Cabannes (2012) notes that urban agriculture requires both political and financial legitimacy, yet this is hard to obtain when growers lack land titles, are seen as temporary, or are perceived as making a limited economic impact. This makes such work (and its long-term contribution to environmental goals) much more precarious and devalued. Such investments are instead viewed as part of the sustainability fix through which urban natures contribute to ecological goals while maintaining mechanisms of capital accumulation (Pudup 2008; Walker 2016). McClintock (2018) points out how the visibility of urban agriculture (especially that practiced by white and wealthy residents) can serve as a global selling point for sustainable cities. Anguelovski (2016), Wolch et al. (2014), and others also considered how creating green amenities such as urban agriculture can contribute to gentrification processes (introducing terms such as greenlining, ecological gentrification, or the urban green space paradox). These researchers are concerned that environmental investments that make neighborhoods more desirable also increase nearby housing prices and force resident displacement. At the same time, urban agriculture projects created by historically marginalized residents often face exclusion in accessing land, resources (including financial capital), and political support (Cabannes 2012; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Daftary-Steel et  al. 2015; Glasser 2018; Hammelman 2019; Thibert 2012). Better understanding these contestations in cities pursuing sustainability through neoliberal agendas can shed important light on the ability of urban agriculture projects to achieve the environmental and social goals outlined above.

Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Approaches to Food Justice Many food systems activists and scholars interrogate the meaning, implementation, and negotiation of food justice. Bradley and Herrera (2016) identify an original notion of food justice which focused on struggles against racism, exploitation, and oppression to enable access to fair, equitable, affordable, and culturally appropriate food in low-income communities of color. They emphasize that ownership and governance of these systems should be maintained by those communities. Building on the work of Alkon and Agyeman (2011), Gottlieb and Joshi (2010), and many others, Cadieux and Slocum (2015) further examine the doing of food justice. They advocate for greater control of food production and consumption by those already marginalized by mainstream agri-food logics and question the efficacy of solutions that appeal to consumer purchasing. Instead, they argue for “creating innovative ways to control, use, share, own, manage and conceive of land, and ecologies in general, that place them outside the speculative market and the rationale of

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extraction” (pg. 13, emphasis in original). Food justice scholars raise concern about several aspects of food systems—the invisibility of labor in localization campaigns (Allen 2010), food access and its relationship with neighborhood disinvestment (Bradley and Galt 2014; Shannon 2014), connections to environmental and spatial justice (Anguelovski 2013; Tornaghi 2017), and urban agriculture (as detailed below). A constant in this scholarship and action is attention to power, ownership, and/or space and place. For example, Curran and Gonzalez (2011, pgs. 209–210) argue that food justice is “always already involving situated group power, constrained yet meaningful group agency, group responsibility, and the messy promise of interracial healing.” Others bring to light the broader systems in which food justice and urban agriculture operate, noting that they are inseparable from racism, patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism (Passidomo 2014; Sachs and Patel-Campillo 2014). Political ecology approaches also unpack the neoliberal logics that reproduce food injustice. Agyeman and McEntee (2014) argue that the attention to hybridity, scale, and commodity relations in urban political ecology can lend itself to better focusing food justice efforts on outcomes and processes, in addition to symptoms and causes within the contemporary neoliberal system. For example, Premat (2009) examines the workings of governmentality in Cuba’s urban agriculture movement. In this case, sustainability and urban agriculture ideals are produced through often-­ unrecognized interrelations between everyday individual actions and international and national institutions that can utilize alternative sources of power. Food justice ideals also transcend geographical and political boundaries as people worldwide make sense of ideas like food sovereignty in their particular context (Cadieux and Slocum 2015). In this regard, Smith II (2019) presents an intersectional agriculture that celebrates resiliency and agency, critiques corporate and local food movements, and recognizes sociohistorical systems of race, sexuality, class, and gender inequalities. Others call attention to place-based relationships and challenge dominant approaches to land ownership and concentration (Brown et al. 2020; Gilbert and Williams 2020; Tornaghi 2014). For example, Brown et al. (2020) discuss the exploitative histories of land ownership (and resistance) that ground pedagogies employed by the Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans. They argue: “if there is going to be food justice (or any type of justice), then we must first learn the histories of the land in order to build new relationships with the land” (pg. 247). Given the systemic challenges to achieving food justice, many call on alternative food movements to reflect and readjust in order to challenge the capitalist food system that produces economic, educational, and cultural inequalities (Lyson 2014). Passidomo (2014) points out that too much food movement attention to social justice has focused on access to the commodity of food, without enough consideration of how power structures produce and reproduce landscapes of (in)access. Many BIPOC urban farmers, food justice activists, and communities are embracing these calls under an umbrella of food justice that interrogates the historical materialities of an unjust food system through utilizing an emancipatory discourse and mobilizing activists to dismantle these systems (Smith II 2019). Importantly, though, food system movements and actors are complex. Bradley and Galt (2014) note that people perform particular identities and memberships as

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they (re)build cultural foodways that are embedded in both industrial food and justice-­oriented approaches. For example, White (2011) calls attention to ecofeminism and Black women farmers in Detroit that rely on traditional gender roles to form collaborations among oppressed communities to pursue self-determination. “Through a strategy of engaging the environment [via food systems], communities that have been polluted and abandoned show agency by rebuilding themselves while restoring their environment” (White 2011, pg. 17). Finally, Tornaghi (2017) argues that food justice alliances can critique neoliberal urbanism and challenge urban-­ rural divides through urban agriculture practice that legitimizes urbanites control of their own food production.

Pursuing Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Projects Social justice is also central to many urban agriculture projects. To be clear, not all urban agriculture activities pursue social justice goals, and not all research on urban agriculture has a concern with social justice. But urban agriculture is increasingly approached with a particular goal of resisting systemic oppression and neoliberal urbanisms via food justice and food sovereignty frames. And such efforts are not new. The Black Panthers, operating under a slogan of “survival pending revolution,” included school gardening in their breakfast and other resistance programs as early as 1969 (Curran and Gonzalez 2011). Much academic literature identifies urban agriculture contributions to social justice such as providing opportunities for forging dynamic socio-ecological relationships, forming solidarities, building social capital, reducing food insecurity, expressing identity and culture, claiming a right to the city, and contesting capitalism (Bonacich and Alimahomed-Wilson 2011; Freeman et  al. 2012; Galt et  al. 2014; Kingsley and Townsend 2006; and Macias 2008). As with food justice more broadly, urban agriculture provides an opportunity to interrogate place-based manifestations of neoliberalism in the food system. Efforts to promote social justice via urban agriculture respond to and are impacted by neoliberal urbanisms, particularly the commodification of food and land that has led to industrialized agriculture, the privatizing of land for development, and the distancing of growers and eaters (Ghose and Pettygrove 2014; Lovell 2010; Tornaghi and Van Dyck 2015). The geopolitical and globalized economy that relies on trade in food across distant lands disconnects urban residents from the agricultural landscapes in which their food is produced (Lovell 2010; Tornaghi 2014). Further, the commodification and consolidation of agricultural lands under today’s corporate, industrial system have driven massive migration patterns and increased inequalities. This is particularly clear in processes through which the dominant industrial agriculture system that feeds many urban dwellers drives small, family farmers worldwide off their land and into cities. Industrial farming technologies (mechanization, large-scale processing) have reduced the availability of farmland near urban areas (Mendes et  al. 2008). In turn, families rely on small, interstitial, pockets of

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cultivable urban lands at risk of development and further displacement. These processes further divide urban eaters and rural growers in ways that limit critique of this status quo (Tornaghi and Van Dyck 2015). For transnational migrant communities in particular, urban agriculture can provide important space and land to preserve cultural identities, create a sense of belonging and home, and form community in new countries (Agustina and Beilin 2012; Galt et al. 2014; Johnston and Longhurst 2011). Mares and Peña (2010) identify efforts of diasporic people to rebuild kitchen gardens at the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, noting that “these jardincitos are spiritual and political symbols of a process involving nothing less than the re-territorialization of place as a home by transnational communities” (pg. 246). Similarly, in my research, many migrants engaged in growing food in order to maintain cultural connections with the countryside and to claim a place in their new cities. Urban agriculture has the potential to disrupt urban-rural dichotomies by reconciling production and reproduction activities. Several scholars also argue that urban agriculture is always political as it operates in contested spaces, transforms the urban fabric, and creates opportunities for solidarities that lead to political action and self-determination (Certomà and Tornaghi 2015; Galt et  al. 2014; Kato et  al. 2014; Tornaghi 2017; White 2011; among others). Tornaghi (2017) points out the food injustices produced by urban capitalism: It should now be clearer that the capitalist city as we know it, with its land markets, development and planning priorities, circulation of pollutants and nutrients, pockets of food deserts and obesogenic environments…is deeply involved in the reproduction of food injustice. (pg. 793)

In investigating gardening in post-Katrina New Orleans (United States), Kato et al. (2014) point out the always political nature of contestations over urban space and the political struggles that arise when gardening occurs in subversive spaces. Gardeners engage in “place-making from below” (Certomà and Tornaghi 2015: 1124) through making visible ties to place and creating cultural energy through living in place (DeLind 2002). As food justice and urban agriculture approaches critique these systems, they may also align with discussions on neoliberal sustainability governance. Urban agriculture, as both a material production of urban goods and a land use, is caught up in strategies for attracting capital investments and divesting responsibility to individuals and civil society actors who then compete for scarce resources (Ghose and Pettygrove 2014; Pudup 2008). Pudup (2008) makes clear how urban agriculture responds to recurring cycles of capitalist restructuring that displaces people: If we value the right to self-determination in respect to how we sustain and nourish ourselves, and accord recognition to global food ethics and human rights, then we have to consider the right to produce one’s own food–which includes the right to engage with nature and to grow our own. These reflections inevitably invite considerations on the urban environment, on private property rights and on the management of natural resources, which pose a whole set of constraints towards people’s empowerment in the fulfilment of their right to produce food. (pg. 787)

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At the same time, several scholars identify ways that urban agriculture projects themselves perpetuate injustices. Particularly when it is practiced on behalf of others and is inattentive to systems of oppression, urban agriculture projects have the potential to reproduce inequality and systems of privilege (Passidomo 2014). Hoover (2013) argues that urban agriculture advocates do not sufficiently consider who is driving the growing wave of projects seeking to address food insecurity and inaccess, urban blight, social capital, and environmental degradation. Similarly, Passidomo (2014) argues that “food projects initiated and maintained by white exogenous groups on behalf of communities of color risk exacerbating the very systems of privilege and inequality they seek to ameliorate” (pg. 385). As discussed above, others make clear the potential of urban agriculture to contribute to gentrification and displacement (Sbicca 2020). Similar to concerns about ecological gentrification overall (Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2012; Pearsall 2010), urban agriculture advocates and researchers note how developers build on the amenities and reputations of urban agriculture in ways that then displace that practice (and residents). Finally, the reliance on volunteers, non-profit organizations, and external funding can limit the ability of urban agriculture projects to achieve social justice goals. As such, urban agriculture should not be presented uncritically as a solution to multiple food systems challenges or understood mostly in utilitarian economic terms that do not adequately characterize many marginalized producers’ experiences (Slater 2001; Tornaghi 2014). Instead, to achieve social justice goals, projects, advocates, and other stakeholders must intentionally pursue them. Urban agriculture is not inherently socially inclusive, but instead is embedded and practiced within larger systems of inequity (Macias 2008). To intentionally pursue social justice and sustainability via urban agriculture, cities and groups must ensure equitable participation of marginalized groups; support for activities led by Black diaspora, indigenous, and people of color; facilitate community control of land; build social capital; and better align planning objectives with those of community activists (Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Hoover 2013; Macias 2008; Reynolds 2015). Such efforts can go beyond addressing symptoms of injustice (such as disparate food access) to disrupt social and political structures but may be limited by a focus on (and need for) building legitimacy for an activity that is often critiqued as an inefficient use of city land or an ineffectual strategy for reducing hunger (Reynolds 2015). All of these contentions within urban agriculture and the wider political systems in which it is embedded are evident in the case studies presented in the chapters that follow.

Securing Land for Urban Agriculture Conflicts between neoliberal sustainability motivations and social justice goals are particularly evident in everyday challenges to secure access to land. Questions about land relationships are central to contestations in urban agriculture. First, a majority

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of urban agriculture practitioners operate without secure land tenure (Lovell 2010; Redwood 2008; Tornaghi 2017). Lovell (2010) points to limited access to land and a lack of secure tenure as among the greatest constraints of urban agriculture, particularly for marginalized groups that do not have resources to purchase land. Further, a growing number of actors remaking urban space through growing food are relying on interstitial spaces such as roadsides and rights of way. Galt et al. (2014) note that a driving force in the move toward interstitial spaces is a global geography of agriculture that prioritizes large-scale horticultural production for world markets. And the small pieces of land that many marginalized groups can occupy for growing are shrinking as a result of urbanization processes that make land scarcer as well as neoliberal property regimes that discount cultural- and place-­based use connections to land (Ubink et al. 2009). Mares and Peña (2010) describe these challenges for the South Central Farm in Los Angeles and Marra Farm in Seattle, United States. They note that farmers were being displaced because commercial/industrial uses of land have resulted in its overvaluation, while the public land use benefits (ecological, social, and economic) are consistently undervalued. Tornaghi (2017) further notes that the urban agriculture projects she researched in Europe: happen within the cracks of the system, in marginal urban spaces reclaimed from aggressive urban development practices and policies; they strive within temporary land tenures with little hope for expansion, and often rely on volunteerism, self-exploitation and grants issued in a range of areas other than food (pg. 783).

Growers in both the global North and South depend on such interstitial spaces for creating livelihoods, reducing food insecurity, and connecting to cultures, neighborhoods, and cities. Thus, limited land tenure can greatly impact the ability of urban agriculture to survive and achieve social justice goals.

Constraining Land Access via Neoliberal Urban Land Policies (De)valuations of urban agriculture as a land use are embedded in questions about legitimate uses of urban space. As noted above, in many cities, food systems and urban agriculture are not systematically integrated into urban planning. This is despite the growing ad hoc support for food systems as a result of their connection to other urban systems such as health, transportation, waste management, etc. Urban agriculture has historically been perceived as an incompatible urban land use, not the highest and best use of land, and/or maintenance for future development (Huang and Drescher 2015; Lovell 2010; Thibert 2012). Indeed, in some cities, such decision-­making has led to the decline of urban agriculture in favor of promoting private-sector-led commercial urban development (Glasser 2018). For example, Gibas and Boumová (2020) point out that allotment gardens in Prague were historically viewed as lacking aesthetic and function beyond supplementing food and recreation. As a result, they are regarded as unfit for contemporary times. Similarly, urban planners in some African cities argued for the removal of urban agriculture based on notions of progressive and modern cities (Hamilton et al. 2014). When

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urban agriculture does exist, it often struggles to withstand competing pressures (such as housing, open green space, or development) (Lovell 2010). Despite these views, there are increasing calls for using vacant land in post-­ industrial cities of the global North (such as Detroit, MI, or Philadelphia, PA, in the United States) to promote urban agriculture as an economic justice strategy (Mogk et al. 2010). It is argued that such efforts could help meet nutritional needs in disinvested communities while also reducing city expenses related to the maintenance of vacant or tax delinquent property. Urban agriculture is also increasingly employed as a reinvestment strategy in neighborhoods where economic margins are small, barriers to entry (such as land costs) are low, and the opportunity to build symbolic capital and attract new investments is high. In this way, “cultural mechanisms like the popularity of local food work in tandem with political economy mechanisms like the rent gap” (Sbicca 2019, pg. 30). As discussed above, urban agriculture is also promoted as a strategy for providing urban green space. In the Global South, farmers are increasingly growing in marginalized or threatened urban and peri-­ urban land. In these spaces, there is often tension between land uses and livelihoods (Lerner and Eakin 2011). Especially as cities continue to grow geographically, peri-­ urban agriculture can be devalued as a land use when other uses such as industry or housing can garner higher rents. Devaluations of urban agriculture that create insecure land tenure present a myriad of challenges for urban growers. First is the potential for displacement, which may reduce willingness to invest labor and resources in the long-term productivity of land (Ubink et al. 2009). For example, Cook et al. (2015) noted that Indian farmers near the Yamuna River in Delhi were discouraged from investing in land from which they could be removed at any time, especially as this land is increasingly attracting developer attention in the rapidly densifying city. Displacement also risks separating producers from the fruits of their labor, livelihoods, and survival strategies. In the Delhi example, the majority of growers sell their products and risk losing that lifeline when land access is revoked for development and infrastructure purposes. Second, without secure tenure, growers may be prevented from growing in ways they desire. For example, in my research, some peri-urban farmers in Argentina that lease land were unable to implement agroecological approaches to fertilization and pest management due to landowner prohibitions. At the same time, gardeners utilizing public land in all of the cities in my research encountered restrictions against building structures to shade them from the sun, expanding their land use (and thus productivity), and/or selling produce from their gardens. Others noted the need to secure longer leases and change the mindset of some landowners that urban agriculture is a temporary land use. One advocate in Toronto explained: We recognized that we had agricultural lands in our jurisdiction that we should try to conserve and the only way we could conserve them is if we treated agriculture as an appropriate use for our land, not an interim use. So, that was kind of the first step. The second step was offering longer term lease agreements. We had very short term, annual lease agreements which – depending on what we wanted to do with the land – could end. So, it didn’t really give a lot of incentive to the farmer that was leasing our land to invest financially.

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The potential for displacement, devaluation, and a lack of independence all hamper attempts to achieve social justice through urban agriculture. In response to these challenges, researchers and advocates have called for incorporating land for urban agriculture into sustainability planning (Rosan and Pearsall 2017), creating land inventories to better identify land available for urban agriculture and align it with sustainability goals (Huang and Drescher 2015; Mendes et al. 2008), and creating land banks and community development initiatives to help groups secure long leases and/or raise funds to purchase land (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). Wooten and Ackerman (2012) also encourage supporting urban agriculture through land use laws that secure access to and preservation of land for agriculture. But these challenges also raise broader concerns with how urban land is conceived and managed. In many cities, urban land is considered either the private property of a landowner or public property held in trust by institutions (e.g., municipal agencies). Such notions of property confer particular rights upon landowners, especially in capitalist societies that equate property ownership with responsible citizenship and economic entrepreneurship (Blomley 2003). These notions highlight the economic value of land as a key marker of efficiency and the legitimate pursuit of landowners. This was clear in Rosario, where one research participant noted the extraordinary power of the real estate market. In this case, a 2016 ordinance to set aside 800 hectares of peri-urban land for agriculture was eroded by lobbying efforts by real estate groups. Instead, because these groups were able to argue for the greater exchange value of classifying that land as industrial, the amount of land available for agriculture continues to decrease. Wekerle and Classens (2015) point out that when urban agriculture makes claims for land and property in entrepreneurial neoliberal cities, it forms linkages between local food production, global forces of real estate development, and transnational circuits of capital. They elaborate: “Land wars taking place around the world remind us that access to land to grow food is not only an issue of social justice, but is also integral to global practices of capital accumulation through financial investment in crop lands by processes of accumulation by dispossession” (pg. 1178). In turn, cultural and social ties to land (often fostered through urban agriculture practice) are deemed insufficient causes for maintaining certain land uses. At the same time, urban agriculture has the potential to contest these hegemonic land relations. Growers can pursue alternatives grounded in collaboration and sharing economies. Wekerle and Classens (2015) note how urban food activists utilizing privately owned land in Toronto actively challenge neoliberal discourse and material relations to private property, particularly individualism, private ownership, and speculative investment. Urban agriculture approaches to land ownership also demonstrate that dominant perspectives lose sight of relationships that are always actively negotiated by those who own the property and those who do not. As demonstrated in Chap. 5, existing uses, ecological functions, and people-place relationships formed through urban agriculture practice are not adequately represented in dominant conceptions of property or related land tenure regimes.

Conclusion

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Conclusion This chapter seeks to provide the wider urban and political economic context in which urban agriculture is practiced and contested in the global North and South. Through examining interventions in urban sustainability governance, notions of food justice, and connections to land policy, I identify several broad themes from critical urban studies literature that influence urban agriculture. Namely, global tenets of capitalism and neoliberal urbanism impact both the success of urban agriculture projects and their efforts toward creating more sustainable and equitable food systems. The shift toward sustainability governance that devolves responsibility for social welfare to civil society and volunteers impacts the potential and desired achievement of urban agriculture. When urban agriculture is proposed to address food injustice (including hunger, restricted food access, and limited self-determination), it can represent one of the many ways in which underfunded civil society actors seek to provide social services and impact change at scales that were previously the purview of government. Further, the focus on economic growth as a key strategy for legitimizing urban agriculture aligns with the capital accumulation goals of contemporary urban regimes. Discussed as entrepreneurialism by Harvey (1989), city governments focus efforts on increasing economic growth, investment, and employment, instead of earlier emphases on provision of services, facilities, and other urban benefits. Such a preoccupation with economic growth privileges the exchange value of urban space over social and environmental goals (Barron 2017). A focus on the exchange value of land use forces urban agriculture projects into interstitial spaces deemed not (yet) attractive to capital (McClintock 2014). In this environment, urban agriculture projects must demonstrate how they contribute to such economic goals in order to withstand land pressures (even if their primary goals are not economic). Finally, the primacy of private property and land ownership is evident in sustainability planning that attends to public land access for urban agriculture and in challenges encountered in pursuing social justice objectives. Neoliberal urban policy emphasizes capital-intensive development (such as festival marketplaces or dense mixed-use skyscrapers) at the expense of uses for social services (such as public housing or public space) (Barron 2017; Hackworth 2007). This is demonstrated in sustainability planning that further privatizes green space in order to achieve market objectives (see Chap. 3). Further, urban land access and use operate under logics of private property that accrue to individuals, corporations, and the state. Such logics often preclude community or shared uses such as community gardens. Importantly, many urban agriculture projects seek to resist such logics through creating different socio-ecological relationships. As Mares and Peña (2010) point out in discussing urban farming in LA and Seattle (United States): Against the surveillance grids, jacked-up ecological footprints, and fragmented echoes of failed suburbia that define the post-Fordist cities of neo-liberal dreams, inner-city urban forms are being reinvented and reshaped from the bottom up through the spreading ­multitude of heterotopias, the diverse shifting mosaic of cultural forms that everywhere transform space into place (pg. 253).

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While community groups now claim more responsibility for achieving social welfare goals, they also buttress citizenship, political consciousness, and community building for resistance (Barron 2017; Levkoe 2006). The division between projects that reproduce or resist neoliberalism is murky. Projects and people evolve in relation to mission-shift, local context, and people involved. Some projects may contest neoliberalism at one point and reproduce it later or even at the same time. In the remaining chapters of this book, examples will be presented that demonstrate this fluidity and the determination that governance structures, individual growers, civil society, and other actors possess to either impose neoliberal urbanism logics or resist them. The following chapters build on this literature and integrate political ecology and urban studies theories to better understand the contestations and contributions of urban agriculture to urban food landscapes.

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Chapter 3

Promoting Market Gardens and (Re) producing Uneven Development

I think the other one, the really important one that people are struggling with, is that if you’re a farmer, you’re trying to make a living, but you’re also in a low-income community, you want to be able to give access to people to food. It’s really weird to be growing food in a low-income community and then selling it for really high prices and not trying to do something. So people are trying to figure out that piece, like what’s the balance of being able to offer affordable food, but also to be viable, to be financially viable? – Urban agriculture advocate in Toronto.

This chapter discusses urban agriculture efforts that seek to achieve the environmental, social, and economic goals of neoliberal urban sustainability through market-­focused projects. Throughout the research sites, urban agriculture projects pursued economic goals through focusing on growing food for sale. These projects pursued not only sustainability goals but also economic development for low-­ income residents by bringing them into the market. Such approaches can provide economic benefits to marginalized communities, but a singular focus on such market solutions also risks reproducing uneven development. Of course, pursuing urban sustainability strategies that enable continued capital accumulation is not new. Many scholars have studied such “sustainability fixes” that further neoliberalization processes through commodifying and privatizing natures, including food and agriculture. But the tension, described in the quote above, between making affordable, healthy food available in under-resourced neighborhoods and ensuring growers earn a living wage through market-focused interventions was salient throughout my research. Examining the market-based inclinations of urban agriculture projects in both the global North and South sheds light on how neoliberal narratives of entrepreneurship and the commodification of nature for public good flow through diverse geographies with real impacts on the structure, goals, and success of urban agriculture. This chapter contributes to existing literature examining the economic potential of urban agriculture, which is largely focused on North America, by adding case studies from Latin America and providing a comparative analysis that highlights the global political economic practices that impact these projects. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_3

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 oward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable T Urban Agriculture In order to examine the market inclinations of the urban agriculture projects studied in this research, it is critical to first understand the capitalist logics in which they are embedded. This research is grounded in political ecology approaches that take into account political economic processes, such as neoliberal urbanism, for understanding ecological projects. Using such a lens to examine the market-oriented approaches of urban agriculture projects in four cities across the Americas can be helpful for understanding how nature operates to produce or foreclose socio-political change and to bring to light the power, exclusions, and injustices (re)produced and resisted (Classens 2015; Tornaghi 2014). For the past several decades, city governments worldwide have pursued neoliberal strategies of capital accumulation that prioritize privatization, entrepreneurialism, and devolution of social responsibilities to civil society. Many scholars note that neoliberalization varies across global contexts such that providing a generalized definition is overly simplistic, yet many examples include spatial forms of exclusion (Newman 2013). It is, perhaps, best understood as a set of processes that shifts the locus of wealth production and distribution from the state to the market in ways that have profound impacts on urban space, sustainability, and urban agriculture (Barron 2017; Brand 2007). As a social, environmental, economic, and global project, neoliberal processes (re)negotiate “boundaries between the market, the state, and civil society so that more areas of people’s lives are governed by an economic logic” (Castree 2008: 143). Some scholars discuss neoliberalization as a process that liberates individual entrepreneurial freedoms (Weissman 2015). Others focus on the ways in which citizens and civic organizations are called upon to embrace neoliberal goals of institutional efficiency, without concomitant increases in resources and power (Rosol 2010). Importantly, capital accumulation, human agency, and material processes shape urban space in ways that impact social life and productions of (in)justice. Through neoliberal processes, state apparatuses pursue market-centric policies focused on increasing land values and global investment under the guise of entrepreneurialism. They also dismantle public programs and outsource social service provision to civil society. Such efforts promote individualization, fragmentation, and competitive social relations (Brand 2007). Additionally, neoliberal strategies seek to privatize common resources, especially land and nature. As a result of circulating knowledge and actors, neoliberal urbanism strategies are evident worldwide (Clement and Kanai 2015; Robinson 2011). It is a global project through which the “invisible hand” of the market is spatially expansive and environmentally exorbitant (Castree 2008). These processes do not occur without resistance, however. In theorizing post-neoliberal social and political movements, Elwood et  al. (2017) interrogate what neoliberal projects bring into being regarding space, power, contestation, and resulting possibilities for creating new worlds. Through tracing geohistorical relations of place, knowledge, and power and examining transnational efforts to

Toward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable Urban Agriculture

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materialize complex post-neoliberal ideologies, they argue that new possibilities of theory and action emerge. Neoliberal urbanism strategies influence environmental management in cities worldwide. In order to meet goals of “sustainable development,” urban agendas have linked healthy environments with economic competitiveness. These linkages emphasize building green city images in order to attract investment, tourists, and middle-class professionals and demonstrate global responsibility through participation in international environmental programs (Brand 2007). In response, urban sustainability programs are promoted internationally and through city networks as well as measured by sustainable urban development indicators. In one example, Clement and Kanai (2015) described the Detroit Future Cities initiative (United States) as an ecological entrepreneurialism project through which the city symbolically and materially reconstitutes disinvested neighborhoods of color as investment-ready spaces. This initiative conjures imagery of “green and blue infrastructure,” “desirable landscapes,” and “flowering fields that clean contaminated soils” in order to portray the neighborhoods as “investment-ready” while also making long histories of uneven development, disinvestment, and spatial oppression invisible (pg. 281). The privatization of common environmental resources, such as public parks, contributes to these neoliberal urbanism goals through attracting investment and attention to environmental amenities while also governing acceptable uses of such spaces. For example, Newman (2013) considers the neoliberal remaking of urban commons in Paris through which management of urban parks produces particular material and social space, defines it as normative, and renders it legible as a domain of the state. Following these efforts in the Jardins d’Eole in Paris, responsibility was then devolved to citizen association members to manage and define the space through what he calls “vigilant citizenship.” Neoliberal approaches to the environment have increasingly sought to commoditize urban natures. Natural objects are given commodity status through processes of privatization, alienation, and valuation that then enable the exchange of goods (Castree 2003). This produces a separation between commodity producers and commodity consumers that occludes comprehensively seeing all parts involved in a particular good. Commoditization also has material consequences for human-nature relationships. Within food systems, solutions to social inequity are concomitantly found within commodifying local agricultural production. As discussed further below, literature on urban agriculture in North America and my comparative research found that such commodification focuses on the exchange value of goods cultivated in urban gardens at the expense of promoting urban agriculture for self-consumption. Put together, the commoditization of nature and urban entrepreneurialism contribute to an “environmental fix” through which capital stakeholders utilize natures to gain commercial advantage and solve crises of capitalism (Castree 2008). Such fixes have included ideas and practices for conserving ecosystems through privatization and marketization (e.g., wetland mitigation as a commercial opportunity); making previously protected or state-controlled natural environments available for market rationality and capital accumulation (for instance, the purchase of 15 million

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hectares of land in Mozambique in order to capitalize on potential carbon credits from planting trees); exploiting previously protected natures in order to increase profit (e.g., the expansion of palm oil plantations for “carbon-neutral” biofuels); and fixing internal state contradictions by devolving responsibility to private and civil society interests such that citizens are encouraged to take responsibility for the goods and bads that arise (Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012; Castree 2008; Fairhead et al. 2012). Within the food system, commoditization of agricultural goods is integral to industrial food system logics that seek to maximize profit and make invisible the resulting environmental destruction. In response, many food system alternatives have arisen. But these alternatives face critiques of reproducing neoliberal logics. In particular, efforts to create change through shifting market demand (e.g., vote with your fork strategies) may prove inadequate as they do not attend to structural failings in protecting labor, the environment, and marginalized communities, further devolve social safety net responsibilities to civil society, and limit collective imaginaries of what change is possible (Alkon 2014; Tornaghi and Certomà 2018; McClintock 2014; Weissman 2015). This focus on individual choice, entrepreneurialism, and self-improvement ignores systemic causes of marginalization in industrial and alternative food systems (Mares and Alkon 2011). Stehlin and Tarr (2017) point out the impacts of these processes: “But a politics of quality of life separated from questions of racism, patriarchy, and class power tends to blunt its critique, limit its possible alliances, and make it available to capture by the very interests that profit from uneven geographical development” (pg. 1342). Neoliberal urbanism processes influence urban agriculture approaches, discursive framing and valuation, and capacity to change the food system. Barron (2017) notes that community gardens tend to seek transformative change through the neoliberal lens of economic change (instead of politics). In this way, gardeners internalize neoliberal logics, such as entrepreneurialism and self-reliance (Classens 2015). McClintock (2014) further argues that “rather than resisting an unrestrained market, they may be naively implicit in certain processes of neoliberalisation: by serving as a flanking institution for the shadow state, contributing to neoliberal subject formation by emphasising personal responsibility, or by advocating market-and consumption-­based solutions” (pg. 158). Pursuing economic change through urban agriculture can continue to privilege the market (and not the state or society) as the site of possibility for change. For example, Weissman (2015) notes that urban agriculture projects in Brooklyn, NY (United States), focused on youth development are important for providing jobs, but also serve to “disciplin[e] youth to be good neoliberal subjects, trained in the skills and modes of conduct required by the neoliberal economy and its ‘cult of entrepreneurship’” (pg. 360). In these examples, while there is some potential to provide economic benefit to under-resourced growers, the emphasis on economic entrepreneurialism crowds out efforts to form leaders of social struggle. At the same time, narratives of self-reliance have been critiqued as emblematic of “roll out neoliberalism” and a process by which people self-govern as neoliberal subjects (Drake 2014). Importantly, many organizations and groups

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may reproduce these narratives in order to demonstrate their legitimacy as they compete for volatile funding streams (Drake 2014; McClintock 2014; Reynolds 2015). Neoliberal processes can also constrain urban agriculture when those projects are materially and discursively presented as low-revenue social goods occurring in non-private space (Barron 2017). Thus, urban agriculture is intertwined with tensions in the overvaluation of urban land for (tax-revenue-generating) commercial or industrial uses and the undervaluation of their economic, ecological, and cultural contributions to the urban metabolism. Tensions further arise between the exchange and use value of land for urban agriculture. Projects are perceived as contributing little exchange value for capital accumulation, while the use value for social and cultural life is undervalued (Barron 2017). At the same time, these processes reduce invaluable and complex ecosystems to commodities, while the autonomous agency of gardeners is perceived as spatially and politically marginal (Castree 2008; Crossan et al. 2016; Heynen and Robbins 2005). Much theorizing on neoliberalism in urban agriculture is focused in North America, but my research found that these processes extend across broader political and geographic contexts. As policy and politics circulate worldwide, they are invested and adapted in new ways that produce varying effects. Thus, my research sought a better understanding of how these neoliberal processes flowed in and through urban agriculture projects across the Western Hemisphere. Importantly, the cooptation of urban agriculture projects by neoliberal forces should not be understood as total. And not all projects that pursue economic goals are necessarily neoliberal. Instead, the relationships between neoliberal cooptation and social change are complex, heterogenous, and murky. Projects can be neoliberal and counter to neoliberal processes at the same time such that the presence of neoliberal logics within a project should not foreclose other socio-political subjectivities (Crossan et al. 2016; Drake 2014; McClintock 2014; Weissman 2015). There remains possibility within many of these projects (and in food activism more broadly) for addressing inequities via market-based strategies (Alkon 2014). Projects can empower (or provide feelings of empowerment) through shared governance and seeking more control of the food system (Barron 2017). They can reframe approaches to economic empowerment (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). They can provide emancipatory political openings. They can both subvert food commoditization through prioritizing it as a public good while also subsidizing capital accumulation (McClintock 2014). They can reconnect farmer livelihoods to ecological and social values (Bellwood-Howard and Nchanji 2017). In these ways, more agency should be afforded to socio-natures for their ability to constrain neoliberalization and/or structure alternatives (Classens 2015). The urban agriculture projects presented in this book are embedded in neoliberal cities, and thus many reproduce neoliberal logics in their orientation toward market-­ based solutions to inequality. While they provide important contributions to economic development in particular neighborhoods and communities, such an orientation also makes invisible the systemic disinvestment that has hampered past efforts at economic development and limits the social, political, and economic efficacy of such projects.

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Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects In all of the cities examined in my research, there was an emphasis by planners, policymakers, advocates, and non-profit organizations on furthering the potential market capabilities of urban agriculture. This section describes projects in each city that pursued such market-oriented goals. It demonstrates how much of the neoliberal urbanism agenda discussed above is embedded in the projects that promoted entrepreneurialism as a solution for social inequity, sought to “green” the city, and/ or devolved responsibility for solving food insecurity to individuals and civil society.

Growing Organic Crops for the Market in Medellín In Medellín, a non-profit organization partnered with the local government to establish collective garden projects in under-resourced neighborhoods that can produce organic goods for sale at markets in wealthier neighborhoods (see also Anguelovski et  al. 2018). This organization has a national reach through which they pursue social, environmental, nutritional, technical, and economic goals via agricultural projects. The organization seeks to install more vegetable gardens in the city’s peripheral areas in order to improve food security, pursue economic and environmental outcomes, and provide an entrée into neighborhoods where the government does not have much presence (personal communication, 2017). At the time of this research, it was implementing 22 projects that were on average 1500–2000 square meters each. Approximately 20% of gardeners in these projects produced goods for self-consumption, while 80% were geared toward commercialization. In neighborhoods in Comuna 8 in the eastern hills of Medellín, six gardens were supported. Each garden was managed as a collective of families producing organic crops (instead of utilizing individual plots). According to research participants, the organic goods from these gardens were sold at markets in wealthy neighborhoods, such as El Poblado, for three times the cost of conventional produce. Gardeners also received training for processing their goods into soaps, shampoos, and other necessities. They expressed that the gardens provided many benefits, especially the economic opportunities associated with organic production. One gardener elaborated: Looking for the organic option, which is an important aspect because organic products are more expensive, you can sell it more expensive in a market and if people ask you why then you can let them know it is an organic product. And that gives a better price.

The proceeds from selling produce and goods were perceived as critical for maintaining the development of the gardens. The economic component of the gardens was emphasized by an advocate of the program:

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Why do we focus on the economic component? Because that is the reason why a person wants to be a farmer. And the economic conditions that we provide for them and the opportunities to have access to some money or to integrate into a bank-based system, or to legalize it or to have other opportunities based on their income, is what generates changes.

In this way, project advocates saw the economic development potential of gardens as critical to engaging marginalized producers and creating neighborhood change. Such economic accomplishments were also viewed as important for the sustainability of gardens despite changing political climates. The mayor in office at that time supported the urban agriculture projects in the Rural Peripheral Area and a burgeoning Greenbelt Project (see Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020). But there was concern that support would diminish if the economic potential waned. Pursuing economic goals in the project did not occur without tension, however. As described further below, some families left the gardens when it was clear not enough income could be generated. Several other garden projects were also created in informal settlements in the periphery of Medellín, but without the formal support and management of organizations. These gardens are more likely to be managed as allotments in which each family has their own plot and retains decision-making power regarding what to grow and whether to consume or sell their produce. For many of these gardeners, sale was not the primary motivation for gardening, but instead simply an additional opportunity (see Chap. 4 for a discussion on additional benefits). As one gardener described: But they work in the community because they sow and for example my mom, who is the person that I’ve seen working more frequently in that garden, she buys products from the other people, and she goes and resells it. So it is an opportunity, it is not only for our basic food basket but also for other people. And a financial aid for her, she gets some money from it, so the gardener wins and also the one that resells the product.

The economic potential of these individual gardens is dependent on the exchange of goods among families, not simply access to markets. As described below, tensions arose between stakeholders involved in organizational programs and unaffiliated growers because access to resources required pursuit of market-based economic goals. All of the families in the collective and individual gardens in this research struggled with low wages from informal work or unemployment. Thus, for the organizations involved, growing organic crops for the market is seen as an income-­generating strategy. Integrating these communities into the local market is a key economic development strategy to which collective gardens contribute. This narrative and strategic goal of economic development through urban agriculture in marginalized communities is reiterated throughout the cases in my research. This example from informal settlements in the Global South can demonstrate how the privileging of the market pervades and is resisted in everyday activities.

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 arket Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture M in Rosario In Rosario, the market potential of both urban and peri-urban agriculture was also emphasized as key to the success of institutional programs. Urban and peri-urban agriculture is supported in Rosario through the municipal Programa de Agricultura Urbana (PAU) and el Proyecto del Cinturón Verde (Greenbelt Project). PAU manages six garden parks (parque huertas) covering 30 hectares of public land through which gardeners, largely from informal settlements, grow produce in individual plots relying on agroecology principles. The Greenbelt Project supports peri-urban farmers with transitioning to agroecology. In October 2019, it included nine producers cultivating 73  hectares of land through agroecology principles, with another 142 hectares of land transitioning to agroecological methods (Latucca 2019). Some Greenbelt farmers cultivate land passed down through family for generations, while others, more likely to be Bolivian immigrants, rent land from larger landowners. Participants in the PAU and Greenbelt projects sell their goods at farmers’ markets (ferias). PAU hosts gardeners in 12 markets located throughout the city, with at least one market operating each day per week. Greenbelt producers sell their goods at six other markets, 6 days per week, and in a permanent indoor market, El Mercado del Patio, in the city center (see Fig. 3.1). These markets are described by advocates and participants as crucial for promoting economic development and demonstrating the productive potential of small-scale agroecological production. PAU emerged out of widespread economic crisis in Argentina in 2001 and largely engages residents of informal settlements with limited employment opportunities. It is part of the municipal Secretariat of Social Economy. As such, it emphasizes the ability of urban agriculture to bolster economic development. One PAU advocate noted that many early participants wanted to produce goods for sale and further elaborated: And so the idea was that people who were unemployed could produce vegetables and sell them in the ferias. For the first time, the people of Rosario could have agroecological vegetables because at this time there were none. And that’s how it began.

PAU advocates also noted that in addition to providing some income for families, the markets were valuable for demonstrating the economic contributions of marginalized residents. The Greenbelt Project further emphasizes the economic dimension of peri-urban agriculture through its focus on the productive capacity of its growers. The project is incorporated into the Secretariat of Economic Development, Innovation, and Employment and coordinates with other municipal secretariats. The project seeks to improve the socio-economic conditions of small-scale peri-urban farmers through strategies of agroecological production, strengthening social relationships, and buttressing commercialization of their goods. It supports commercialization by enabling growers to access markets via hosting farmers markets and permanent stalls and a proposed certification program that would make clear the higher quality of agroecological goods in order to garner higher prices. The project also sets prices

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Fig. 3.1  Produce stand in the Mercado del Patio in central Rosario. This market sells goods produced in the municipal Greenbelt Project and is staffed by growers and their families

for goods at the markets to better represent the value of their products. Project advocates emphasize that such commercialization processes are critical to encouraging a transition to agroecological practices and to provide security to producers. Peri-­ urban and rural farmers throughout the region also expressed the importance of having central city market access. Some members of the Greenbelt Project located in the neighboring municipality of Soldini struggled to find buyers for their higher-­ value and higher-cost goods in their smaller markets. Thus, some partnerships developed within the Greenbelt Project allowed farmers in neighboring municipalities to sell goods in Rosario markets. Finally, while many garden projects operating outside the PAU and Greenbelt framework emphasized self-consumption and other community health benefits more than economic goals (see Chap. 4), several noted the need to provide economic opportunity in order to engage young people in the gardens. As a result, one garden began partnering with the province in order to hire young people to participate. They further explained: “Well, until the kids were growing up and we saw that they needed to work, they needed money and to see another way, to see how they could find a place to work and keep participating in some way.” In this way, while the garden’s primary goal was not economic, but, given the need to survive, there was an imperative to provide economic opportunity for participants living in

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marginalized neighborhoods. The attention to economic development, and marketfocused urban agriculture as a strategy to achieve it, was evident throughout the projects in Rosario.

Pursuing Community Economic Development in Toronto In Toronto, urban agriculture is acclaimed not only for its ability to feed people but also for its economic contributions in low-income neighborhoods and families. To this end, a key focus of urban agriculture advocacy at the time of my research was creating and supporting more gardens producing food for sale in  local farmers’ markets. These efforts were grounded in ideas of community economic development. One advocate explained the goal of these efforts: So, for the market garden it actually gives access to people to have another income. It’s just like a mini farm, but not really like a big, big farm, but something for them where they can work on the land, plant on the land, and to produce [crops] they can sell somewhere else. So, that’s another added income to the family and the person really wants that.

Some fully commercial enterprises exist, while other gardens grow for both consumption and market sales. Growers operating on municipal land were prohibited from selling their goods. According to research participants, historically, there has not been much municipal support for farming as an urban industry. One commercial urban farmer questioned whether farming was accepted as a commercial enterprise, as opposed to just tolerated. At the same time, a coordinated effort was underway to allow commercialization of goods produced at gardens on city- or province-owned land. The Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development (CEED) gardens project sought to establish market gardens in rights of way owned by the provincial power company. Initially, a collaborative of civil society organizations was working to build four small-scale market gardens in under-resourced neighborhoods. The impetus for these gardens was to directly connect gardening to economic development strategies in under-resourced neighborhoods. Instead of only providing food for food-­ insecure families, these gardens can provide income, skills in budgeting and account management, and linkages with other businesses (such as catering). This project also sought to pilot changes to city ordinances to make farming as a commercial enterprise more accepted and accessible. One garden advocate noted: But in terms of trying to tackle something like an urban farm or a CEED garden was to take it as a next step to be able to influence policies and to see how you’re trying to tie in broader issues like lack of economic opportunities or just an economic development of neighborhood economy in a sense, but also take it to a little bit more of a systemic level discussion piece where you’re looking at a more sustainable form of addressing food security, which means also tying in the decision makers at some of the different levels of the government.

Importantly, these strategies were not seen as finding a new way to generate large profits, but instead as community economic development (hence the CEED name).

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In this way, they complicate the critiques of neoliberalism in urban agriculture presented above. The gardens are small scale and allow part-time participation in order to generate some income. Through a focus on community economic development, growers and advocates pursue self-determination through market mechanisms. Thus, they may be perceived as both resisting the systems that marginalize lowincome growers and also inculcating neoliberal ideas focused on the primacy of market solutions. CEED gardens were initially perceived as demonstrative of small entrepreneurship projects developed through creating a process whereby such initiatives can be operated on public land (Hammelman 2019). While these projects faced many bureaucratic obstacles that increased the time and expense of creating CEED gardens, a promising pilot project was started in north Toronto in 2020. Finally, alongside generating support for commercial urban agriculture as an accepted activity, advocates more broadly noted the need to break down economic systems in which only the wealthy can afford local, organic, and specialty crops.

Employment Strategies in Charlotte In Charlotte, where the predominance of agricultural communities in and near the city is more recent and the urban agriculture movement is more nascent, there are fewer examples of urban agriculture projects geared directly at earning an income for growers. Instead, there was a broader narrative focused on building a local and urban farming economy through integrating local farms into the city’s economy, supporting farmers’ markets, establishing a Voluntary Agriculture District, and training young urban residents for agricultural and related trade careers. Similar to Toronto, but divergent from Medellín and Rosario, community gardeners on public parks and recreation lands in Charlotte are prohibited from selling their goods. Efforts to recognize urban agriculture as an industry that contributes to the economic growth of the city involved, in part, efforts to establish a Voluntary Agriculture District (VAD). A VAD is a designation in North Carolina state statute that supports conservation of existing farmland and its productive use, preserves rural heritages and economies, and establishes a Voluntary Agricultural Review Board to oversee farmland protections. The Charlotte region and the state of North Carolina have experienced significant urbanization in the past decades with a resulting loss of farms and farmlands. The USDA reports that North Carolina lost 6500 farms between 2007 and 2018 (Cockman 2019). Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is located), in particular, lost over a third of its farms and over half of its farm acreage between 1997 and 2012 (KKP 2018). Small local farmers in the Charlotte region note that the city’s expansion has resulted in farmland being purchased by developers to build residential areas, new highway construction cutting through farms, and changing regional environments overall. Importantly, this decline also represents a precipitous drop in family farms across the state that have been replaced by large, corporate-owned farms. Advocates of establishing a VAD argue that it could protect farms against these processes while strengthening the local farm economy. There

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has also been a growing effort to expand and support farmers’ markets in order to bolster the local farm economy (KKP 2018). Beyond preserving commercial agriculture, the economic potential of urban agriculture in Charlotte is often highlighted as a vocation for young people. Hydroponics systems, school gardens, and horticulture programs seek to train young people for careers in agriculture, pesticide application, food production, and marketing. One urban agriculture educator explained: The amazing thing about this program is it produces a lot of product. That product can then be used to teach business classes and come in and analyze expenses and revenue. Marketing classes, you can design brands around the products, literally package up products and get real, firsthand experience with customer service and brand development.

Other programs have also worked with school children to process and market salad dressing from garden products, while Food Corps programs provided a fertile training ground for young people. Yet, some advocates argued that in city discussions, food system contributions to the economy are not part of the conversation. They noted that there was a need to further lift up agriculture (in urban and rural areas) as a possible skill and career. While some of these programs are focused on increasing access to experiential science and business afterschool programs, many promote agriculture as a career path targeted at young people from under-resourced neighborhoods and families. This can present challenges because, as discussed above, it may simply be tracking these young people into low-paying careers. Similar to findings by Weissman (2015), these efforts discipline young people from neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment into being “appropriate” contributors to the neoliberal economy while also seeing the generation of market demand as needed to preserve local farms.

Exclusions and Uneven Development All of the examples in this chapter discursively pursue social justice goals (particularly those of social and economic equity), but also maintain the primacy of the market in achieving urbanist goals. While the focus on the economic development potential of urban agriculture can be perceived as part of addressing social justice concerns, literature on neoliberal urbanism and alternative food movements indicates that the relationship is more complex. To be clear, this chapter does not suggest that urban agriculture projects should not pursue economic goals. In fact, they are important avenues for bringing jobs and income to communities. Literature about urban agriculture in North America points the potential for economic empowerment, subverting commoditization, and addressing food insecurity (McClintock 2014; Reynolds and Cohen 2016; Smit et al. 1996). Similarly, in parts of the Global South, researchers have investigated linkages between urban agriculture and livelihoods (Bellwood-Howard and Nchanji 2017). Yet, little literature considers the complex relationships between urban agriculture and economic goals in Latin

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American cities and from a comparative perspective in order to demonstrate how they are embedded in global political economic systems. Further, contrary to some of the program goals identified in my research, the limited literature that does consider economic impacts in Latin America (such as Dielman 2017) finds that its importance for employment and income generation remains limited. By taking a comparative approach in this research, and including case studies from Latin America, it becomes clear that in order to achieve social justice goals, economic approaches should be considered as only one part of a larger strategy. The examples in my research make clear that a singular focus on producing for the market as well as embedding such projects in urbanism goals of marketing the sustainable city can exclude the most marginalized producers and make invisible systemic challenges to social justice. In this way, uneven development is reproduced. In Medellín, exclusions became evident in tensions between gardeners participating in market garden programs and those that desired to grow for subsistence. Long-standing gardeners that cultivated individual plots in a neighborhood space found they were unable to participate in non-profit projects because they refused to grow as a collective in order to meet market demands. These women invested in their gardens for several years, grew food to meet family subsistence needs, and exchanged goods with neighbors in relationships that fostered community building. Yet, holding to these goals meant that these gardeners, who were seeking more autonomy to grow in individual plots, were unable to avail themselves of municipal and non-profit resources being invested in their neighborhoods. It also demonstrates the commitment by the Greenbelt Project to pursue economic development by fostering entrepreneurialism and relying on the market to provide income for under-­ resourced families, instead of giving residents more autonomy and the ability to offset expenses via non-market relationships. The market focus in Medellín also dictated what goods were produced. One gardener involved in a project with the non-profit organization described above noted that they only grew organic foods for the markets in wealthier neighborhoods. She explained: The only requirement is that it has to be organic because that’s the image we are selling. It has to be organic because in El Presidente [a farmers’ market in a wealthy neighborhood] they buy our products and they don’t say anything to us.

Yet, the food insecure gardeners do not consume the food they are producing. While they earn some income from the gardens, they continue to struggle to meet daily needs, including purchasing sufficient food for their families. This demonstrates, as Anguelovski et al. (2018) also noted, that the collective, market-oriented urban agriculture projects promoted by the city in the Greenbelt instead primarily served to insert marginalized residents into a more formalized market while also promoting its sustainability efforts. In Toronto, the focus on market goals was also a part of branding and growing the city through environmental projects. It was argued by some that the shift toward promoting market gardens and high-volume producers in broader city rhetoric put

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questions of equity and anti-oppression politics on the back burner. One advocate elaborated: How can we support that [promoting economic potential] and keep a focus on social justice as opposed to making money? That’s what ends up taking over is like, oh, it’s great to have urban agriculture accepted into the mainstream except that what that means is that it’s market-driven and that we haven’t looked clearly enough at the problems of capitalism and the problems of the market for disenfranchised and marginalized folks. So, we end up reproducing a system that we, in theory, are trying to undercut.

These concerns and exclusions also raise questions, as seen across the cities in my research, regarding whether enough income can be generated from market gardens to be a successful economic development strategy for low-income families. In both Rosario and Toronto, despite economic goals, it was unclear whether urban agriculture projects could garner enough income to support a family. Projects encountered challenges in asking for a fair price so that growers could earn a living. In Rosario, community gardeners disconnected from municipal programs questioned how much income could be generated through participating in the weekly farmers’ markets. Everyone that comes and participates [in our garden] has their own space, but the idea is that it is just for consumption. Not that we’re against them selling it, just that it’s not sustainable. Gardening doesn’t leave an income, you have to be dedicated, for sure, but if you want an income that gives people some dignity, it’s not enough.

While in Toronto, one grower spoke directly to these challenges: There isn’t a special grant specifically for small-scale farmers. So, a lot of people that get involved – to be honest – they have good intentions and they want to do well, but then get sucked into a system that a lot of farmers are struggling financially to be able to farm. It takes a lot of hours and devotion and if, at the end of the year, you looked at, “Oh my gosh, all I paid myself was $2.00 an hour.”

Several advocates in Toronto also noted the obstacles encountered in pursuing economic goals: But, there’s a lot of challenges around it because it almost seems to be a lot of the bourgeois folks are able to have the time or afford to be able to spend on it. So, it becomes a little bit more challenging for folks who are on the lower economic scale to be able to do it either because they’re working a couple of different jobs or they just don’t have the time to do that. So, it becomes a little bit harder for them.

In Medellín, the collective market gardens also struggled to keep growers engaged because not enough income could be earned from participation. One garden that began with 25 people eventually shrunk to only four when growers found that they could not sufficiently meet their needs through growing collectively for the market. The challenges of addressing economic inequity through entrepreneurial projects and the market then become clearer. In response, some organizations and advocates look to place urban agriculture within conversations of neighborhood investment. In Toronto, one grower noted that urban agriculture exists within a larger inequitable food and economic system, and thus there is a need for a broader community economic development strategy:

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So, how can the farm also be part of the conversations around the economic development of the community as well, right? …We need to create a real just food system whereby food is accessible and affordable, culturally appropriate, for all members of society and not just certain people.

A grower in Rosario agreed that attention to the larger economic system is important: What I think is good, is when you get real. You say, can you really live off of this? Is it real or not? Because if you lie to yourself and say yes, I’m doing this, but then you also have another job that is what really sustains you to eat every day, I think it’s a lie. I think you have to be clear and transparent and say no, we can get this amount of money from this and it’s enough to pay the electricity. The rest of what I have, I need to get from somewhere else. But well, I think there is some kind of discourse that you can live off of an organic garden and that’s really a lie because there’s this whole other system that works behind it in a totally different way and there’s a lot of focus on this.

In this example, and similar to others in my research, growers called attention to economic systems that constrain the ability of urban agriculture to meet employment and food security goals. In Charlotte, a focus on employment opportunities in agriculture also occludes the limited opportunities for employment and wealth building in this industry. As described above, farms and farmland in the Charlotte region face pressures from urbanization such that fewer opportunities exist to pursue those careers. Additionally, real wages for farmers have been declining across the country, while many farming families turn to off-farm labor in order to make ends meet. Thus, as discussed in other cities, it is not clear that career pathways in urban agriculture can provide a living wage. Instead, literature in North America has found that there are few good-­paying jobs in this sector. Many urban agriculture positions are low or unpaid internships for young people or simply don’t produce enough income to be a sole source of employment. Rosan and Pearsall (2017) found that new growers in Philadelphia (United States) encountered a steep learning curve, grueling work, and limited long-term economic prospects. As such, several organizations focused on transferrable skills learned in urban agriculture instead of viewing it as a career pathway. One grower in Charlotte also advocated for framing urban agriculture projects as community wealth building strategies instead of simple paths for individual growers to participate in existing markets. Such a framing, for his project, enabled a multi-tiered approach that focused not just on generating income through market production but also improving health and social relationships and solving long-term community needs. Finally, an advocate of school gardens found more traction in involving students in afterschool programs focused on business skills instead of horticulture. Teaching students to market and sell agricultural goods provided more legitimacy and attracted more attention than a focus on agriculture. These examples demonstrate that, while there is the potential to create economic opportunities through urban agriculture, without grounding it in broader strategies to build community wealth, counter exclusionary markets, and integrate with other social values, the contribution to community economic development is likely quite limited. In the four cities of my research, this complexity revealed the ways that a

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market-led approach to addressing economic inequity through urban agriculture can preclude possibilities for systemic solutions to historical disinvestment in neighborhoods and industries.

 ontributing to the City Through Urban C Agriculture Entrepreneurialism? Across the four cities in my research, there was a focus on the market possibilities of urban agriculture. For many, a strategy for addressing poverty and marginalization is growing and selling food. Market-focused urban agriculture also aligns with neoliberal urbanism processes that privilege entrepreneurialism and market strategies for pursuing economic development and sustainability. This was evident throughout many projects described in this chapter, as market-focused urban agriculture projects were presented as a strategy for improving economic outcomes for individuals and families living in poverty as well as meeting environmental and economic urbanism goals. Yet, real questions remain about whether urban agriculture projects designed in this way can in fact raise families out of poverty and address food insecurity. Instead, in the cities in this research from the global North and South, it was not evident that urban agriculture projects can provide a sufficient wage for growers. In today’s urban and industrial food systems worldwide, the income generated from either urban agriculture projects or agri-food careers is often limited. The global corporate food regime stretches across the global North and South with impacts for urban agriculture as an economic development strategy (McMichael 2009). For example, farming as a profession in Argentina, Canada, Colombia, and the United States has faced lower wages and margins and greater risks for exploitation such that fewer and fewer young people view it as a viable career. Advocates of agroecology in Rosario noted that the emphasis on growing GMO soybeans for export in the region surrounding Rosario drove many farmers and their families off the land. Yet, policy mobilities help circulate narratives of urban agriculture as a market-based solution to poverty. This is demonstrated in my research when, despite specific context-­ based manifestations, similar goals and narratives were integrated into projects in all four cities. Several research participants also noted the ways in which the singular focus on the market potential of individual projects takes attention away from systemic solutions to economic development. Instead, they called for a focus on neighborhood and community investment beyond being able to take crops to market. This also raises the potential of urban agriculture to contribute to non-economic needs. Many participants highlighted values of urban agriculture outside of the market and the potential for different relationships with urban agriculture and food systems more broadly. One urban agriculture practitioner in Charlotte emphasized the importance of growing for consumption: “you may never get rich from gardening but you’ll

References

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never go hungry” (Queen’s Garden 2020). A peri-urban farmer practicing agroecology in Rosario also discussed the broader human-environment connections engendered through growing: It’s important to take agroecology as an ideal. We take it as an ideal because we believe that social questions are very strongly linked to agroecology. It goes beyond the product that we make, it transcends it. Because, with the people at the feria, we transcend the product that we make and we link it to a social question because we link agroecology directly with the common good. When [we] say the common good, we aren’t talking about money, it goes beyond money. We’re referring to humans. We’re referring to all species, plants and animals. We’re referring to the environment, water, we’re referring to the land.

Building on these ideas, the next chapter turns to the many other values of urban agriculture discussed in both the literature and my research.

References Alkon AH (2014) Food justice and the challenge to neoliberalism. Gastron J Critic Food Stud 14(2):27–40 Anguelovski I, Irazábal-Zurita C, Connolly JT (2018) Grabbed urban landscapes: socio-spatial tensions in green infrastructure planning in Medellín. Int J Urban Reg Res 43(1):133–156 Barron J (2017) Community gardening: cultivating subjectivities, space, and justice. Local Environ 22(9):1142–1158 Bellwood-Howard I, Nchanji EB (2017) The marketing of vegetables in a northern Ghanaian city: implications and trajectories. In: AMGA WinklerPrins (ed) Global urban agriculture. CABI, pp 79–92 Benjaminsen T, Bryceson I (2012) Conservation, green/blue grabbing and accumulation by dispossession in Tanzania. J Peasant Stud 39(2):335–355 Brand P (2007) Green subjection: the politics of neoliberal urban environmental management. Int J Urban Reg Res 31(3):616–632 Castree N (2003) Commodifying what nature? Prog Hum Geogr 27(3):273–297 Castree N (2008) Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environ Plan A 40(1):131–152 Classens M (2015) The nature of urban gardens: toward a political ecology of urban agriculture. Agric Hum Values 32(2):229–239 Clement D, Kanai M (2015) The Detroit future city: how pervasive neoliberal urbanism exacerbates racialized spatial injustice. Am Behav Sci 59(3):369–385 Cockman C (2019) The number of farms in North Carolina is declining. Urban Institute Newsletter. University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Web. https://ui.uncc.edu/story/number-­farms-­north-­ carolina-­declining. Accessed Oct 2020 Crossan J, Cumbers A, McMaster R, Shaw D (2016) Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow’s community gardens: the practice of DIY citizenship. Antipode 48(4):937–955 Dielman H (2017) Urban agriculture in Mexico City: balancing between ecological, economic, social, and symbolic value. J Clean Prod 163:S156–S163 Drake L (2014) Governmentality in urban food production? Following ‘community’ from intentions to outcomes. Urban Geogr 35(2):177–196 Elwood S, Bond P, Martínez Novo C, Radcliffe S (2017) Learning from post-neoliberalisms. Prog Hum Geogr 41(5):676–695 Fairhead J, Leach M, Scoones I (2012) Green grabbing: a new appropriation of nature? J Peasant Stud 39(2):237–261

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Hammelman C (2019) Challenges to supporting social justice through food system governance: examples from two urban agriculture initiatives in Toronto. Environ Urban 31(2):481–496 Hammelman C, Saenz-Montoya A (2020) Territorializing the urban-rural border in Medellín, Colombia: socio-ecological assemblages and disruptions. J Lat Am Geogr 19(2):36–59 Heynen N, Robbins P (2005) The neoliberalization of nature: governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation. Capital Nat Social 16(1):1–4 KKP (2018) Unlocking the potential of Charlotte’s food system and farmers’ markets. KarenKarp&Partners, New York Latucca A (2019) Promoting sustainable urban and periurban agriculture: an example of agroecology practices in Rosario. Video webinar for the Food and Agriculture Organization, https://fao. adobeconnect.com/_a1026619000/rpsuyw8gllh8/. Accessed 1 Oct 2019 Mares TM, Alkon AH (2011) Mapping the food movement: addressing inequality and neoliberalism. Environ Soc 2(1):68–86 McClintock N (2014) Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions. Local Environ 19(2):147–171 McMichael P (2009) A food regime genealogy. J Peasant Stud 36(1):139–169 Newman A (2013) Gatekeepers of the urban commons? Vigilant citizenship and neoliberal space in multiethnic Paris. Antipode 45(4):947–964 Queens Garden (2020) Rickey hall, west boulevard neighborhood coalition. Oral Histories of the Piedmont Foodshed, Queens Garden Web. https://sites.uncc.edu/food-­oral-­history/. Accessed 27 Mar 2020 Reynolds K (2015) Disparity despite diversity: social injustice in New York City’s urban agriculture system. Antipode 47(1):240–259 Reynolds K, Cohen N (2016) Beyond the kale: urban agriculture and social justice activism in New York City. University of Georgia Press Robinson J (2011) The travels of urban neoliberalism: taking stock of the internationalization of urban theory. Urban Geogr 32:1087–1109 Rosan C, Pearsall H (2017) Growing a sustainable city? The question of urban agriculture. University of Toronto Press Rosol M (2010) Public participation in post-Fordist urban green space governance: the case of community gardens in Berlin. Int J Urban Reg Res 34(3):548–563 Smit J, Nasr J, Ratta A (1996) Urban agriculture: food, jobs and sustainable cities. New  York, USA 2:35–37 Stehlin JG, Tarr AR (2017) Think regionally, act locally?: gardening, cycling, and the horizon of urban spatial politics. Urban Geogr 38(9):1329–1351 Tornaghi C (2014) Critical geography of urban agriculture. Prog Hum Geogr 38(4):551–567 Tornaghi C, Certomà C (eds) (2018) Urban gardening as politics. Routledge Weissman E (2015) Entrepreneurial endeavors: (re)producing neoliberalization through urban agriculture youth programming in Brooklyn, New York. Environ Educ Res 21(3):351–364

Chapter 4

“It Is Not Just About the Food”: Integrated Qualitative Valuations of Urban Agriculture One of the gardeners I met described in detail the multiple impacts of her urban agriculture practice. Ana1 migrated from a rural province in northeastern Argentina to one of its largest cities, Rosario, in 1990. Like many rural-to-urban migrants around the world, she came from a farming background, but arrived in Rosario with very few economic resources. Initially, she lived in an informal settlement, where she did not know anyone and worked very hard to just survive each day. There was no stable work (as there often is not for new migrants to the city), but she knew how to cultivate the land and found that working the land resulted in getting food, so she did that. Shortly after arriving in Rosario, she met an agricultural engineer who had been involved in urban agriculture with the municipality. He gave her some seeds. In late summer he returned, and they gathered with neighbors to share a meal with the food born of those seeds. Thus began a relationship through which that engineer and the municipality continued to return with seeds that Ana distributed among neighbors who all began establishing gardens. In less than a year, the gardeners collectively built a structure to store seeds and tools and to gather together. The municipality supported this effort by installing a roof. And by the end of the season, enough vegetables had been grown by the nine families involved to sell their produce to others. With the support of the local government, the gardeners sold their produce at a nearby social club, providing economic benefit beyond only food for the families. Over time the gardeners learned to preserve and package their produce. They also used the vegetables to make beet and carrot jam. They learned how to make ointments and other home remedies with flowers and medicinal plans. Today, Ana manages a large community garden in Rosario supported by the municipality through which dozens of families grow food for their families or to sell in city-­ supported markets. But beyond economic gains, Ana and her neighbors learned how to survive in the city, how to exchange knowledge, and how to grow their lives in new places. When I spoke to her, she discussed how municipal staff that supported the garden she runs also taught her a range of other skills, such as how to use taxis, look people in the face, and walk tall. She described her garden as part of a social economy where urban orchards provide a diversity of flowers, vegetables, and friends with an ear to lend. In this way, she clearly articulated the many

 All names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.

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interconnected values of urban agriculture beyond just the food—a sentiment that was emblematic of many other gardeners that I encountered. All research participants were asked what value urban agriculture provides for the city. This chapter synthesizes answers to that question focusing on the most frequently cited values of urban agriculture. Despite the wide range of values cited, there was remarkable similarity across the research sites. In responding to calls for theorizing from multiple ordinary cities (Robinson 2006), this chapter attends to points of commonality in cases across varied geographies in order to demonstrate how ordinary urban agriculture practices are converging (or not).

Beyond Food Production The multifunctionality of urban agriculture described in this story from Rosario was evident throughout the different cities in my research as well as in the growing academic and grey literature.2 Throughout this chapter, I argue that a strength of urban agriculture is the intertwined contributions it makes to socio-ecological systems. Much literature has sought to measure the food production potential of urban agriculture for cities (MacRae et  al. 2010; Orsini et  al. 2014; among others). Urban agriculture practitioners noted that cultivating plants provided an important supplement to family food supplies. For example, one grower in Charlotte profiled in a series of oral histories (Queen’s Garden 2020) noted that his grandmother always had a backyard garden in their neighborhood without easy access to grocery stores or fresh produce. This garden (producing both fresh and canned goods) was an important part of the food his family ate and contributed to his more recent construction of a community garden in his neighborhood. However, for this grower, and many throughout this research, food is only one part of their urban agriculture experience: A garden is more than just the provision of healthy food and vegetables. It’s actually the provision of food as a means of improving health and the social determinants of health. It’s also about capturing and creating economic development opportunity, that creates community around solving a long-term community need. And it’s also a community wealth building strategy and it’s a multi-tiered approach that brings all of the [communities] together. To focus on solving a long-term community need and to do it from a collective community impact perspective. That in and of itself is the crux of what this gardening effort is all about. (Queen’s Garden 2020)

Similarly, in Rosario, urban agriculture advocates noted that many growers from marginalized communities consume the food they produce and that, since they were established during a time of severe economic crisis, early goals were focused on ensuring hungry residents had something to eat. However, these goals have shifted

2  Multifunctionality refers to the multiple functions (economic development, social capital creation, neighborhood revitalization, etc.) served by urban agriculture (Lovell 2010; Poulsen et al. 2017).

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over time to focus more on the economic capabilities of urban agriculture (see Chap. 3) and the social and environmental benefits derived from the practice. In Toronto, urban agriculture advocates noted that while gardens can provide some supplemental food for families facing food insecurity, gardens alone cannot solve those problems. One advocate argued that “Food is almost a sidebar in urban agriculture projects. Beyond the food, it supports children growing up and learning about where their food is from.” Another non-profit manager of an urban agriculture project further elaborated: Our research is now showing that gardens – the primary purpose is not meeting food security – but it’s to combat social isolation. It’s to combat feelings of helplessness. It’s to bring community together and to join in, to then collaborate for more rights or more power people want to receive. So, basically, it’s a tool to reach out to get to know the community we serve and to know how to help them better.

In Toronto, city government’s involvement in community gardens recognizes their social and environmental values. This is evident in the incorporation of urban agriculture into formal documents such as the Environmental Plan (2000) and the Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Energy Action Plan (2007), among others. These sentiments were further elaborated in Medellín where most of the growers faced food insecurity and viewed their gardens as an important source of food. But for them, urban agriculture also does much more. One urban agriculture advocate discussed his motivations: For me, lettuce is not the goal, it’s the means. For me, sowing is not the goal; it’s the means to accomplish all what is generated as a consequence of that… The ultimate goal is social cohesion.

Thus, while everyone I talked with appreciated having greater access to fresh food (one aspect that is quantifiable in terms of pounds produced and/or economic outputs), many participants reported that the food itself was only one part of the story. As further described throughout this chapter, the urban agriculture functions identified by research participants were multiple and interconnected. The most frequently cited values focused on politically contesting the industrial food system, improving the environment, claiming neighborhood space or contributing to community, connecting to the land and ancestors, bolstering social interaction, improving mental and physical health, and nutrition education. This perspective of multifunctionality is also mirrored in the academic and gray literature where the number of publications focused on non-food benefits of urban agriculture far outstrips those focused on food production. Several authors question the ability of urban agriculture to address food insecurity (Thibert 2012). Many articles and books on urban agriculture begin with a few paragraphs extolling the multiple benefits of the practice. Some focus on organizing communities to counter the industrial food system and other urban challenges (Angotti 2015; Hoover 2013; Levkoe 2006; Levkoe and Offeh-Gyimah 2020; Macias 2008; Mares and Peña 2010; Pourias et al. 2016). Others focus on environmental benefits and the creation of closed life cycles (Angotti 2015; Colasanti et al. 2012; De Zeeuw et al. 2011;

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Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017; Wooten and Ackerman 2012) and on the health benefits for humans evident in increased social capital, nutrition, exercise, and mental health improvements (Audate et  al. 2019; Birky and Strom 2013; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Colasanti et al. 2012; Orsini et al. 2014; Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017; Teig et al. 2009). Some attend to the education possibilities of urban agriculture (Cohen and Reynolds 2014). Other literature focuses on the urban agriculture benefits for social cohesion and connections to nature, land, and place (Birky and Strom 2013; Mares and Peña 2010; Pourias et al. 2016; Teig et al. 2009; Thibert 2012). Galt et al. (2014) note the interrelationship of these goals as gardeners are “transforming selves and relationships, social and socio-ecological, at multiple levels” (pg. 133). Pourias et al. (2016) found that all of the gardeners in their research noted multiple functions: This attests to the fact that they are far more than just a place of production. Even if their harvests have an expected benefit and are an important motivation for the gardeners, the gardens have many other functions, without which the gardeners would perhaps not participate. (pg. 270)

At the same time, others connect urban agriculture benefits to goals of urbanization and community revitalization (Daftary-Steel et al. 2015; Hoover 2013). For example, Glasser (2018) examines narratives of productivity for vacant land, creating jobs, and addressing food access. Yet, Sbicca (2019) questions the ability of urban agriculture to truly meet such urban development goals given that perceived property value is derived from profit potential, not the less quantifiable benefits discussed above. Classens (2015; with reference to Lawson 2005) similarly notes that the prevailing narratives of urban gardens as contributing to nature, education, and self-help reproduce the marginal positioning of gardens as unviable for scalable food production and/or social change. In this regard, some scholars point out the potential drawbacks of urban agriculture noting that there are many unexplored controversial and unjust dynamics embedded in the movement (Tornaghi 2014) and that the potential health and environmental risks need to be further examined and managed (de Zeeuw et al. 2011).

 roviding Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering P Community Economies, Neighborhood Place-Making, and People and Land Relationships Research participants identified multiple values provided by urban agriculture that were connected to social, economic, and cultural benefits. These values included fostering relationships among people and land, neighborhood place-making, and (relatedly) building social capital. Urban gardening supports the formation of meaningful relationships as people collectively build shared histories, lived space, and experiences (Barthel et  al. 2015; Okvat and Zautra 2011; McClintock 2014; Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017). Urban agriculture can reconnect urban residents

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with food production systems, land histories, and communities. Researching allotment gardens in Dublin, Kettle (2014) emphasized that these practices respond to disconnections created in modern urban capitalism. In particular, urban growing enables (re)connecting to land, traditional knowledge, and other people in ways that can provide a sense of belonging in the city. This includes fostering economic relationships based on social relations that pursue community development instead of a sole focus on market involvement (such as bartering, gift-giving, and building community economies). Further, urban agriculture can contribute to neighborhood place-making when the spaces are used to sustain socio-ecological knowledge, re-imagine “nature” in the city, and catalyze community development (Barthel et  al. 2015; Kim 2016; Certomà and Tornaghi 2015; Pourias et al. 2016). For example, Teig et al. (2009) examined community gardens in Denver, Colorado (United States) and found that they were important for residents to feel that they are part of a community or neighborhood, develop mutual trust, and create a space for civic engagement. For migrant communities in particular, urban agriculture provides a place to preserve cultural identity and form new connections (Agustina and Beilin 2012). Urban agriculture has also been discussed as a strategy for self-determination in economically depressed African American communities (White 2011). Urban agriculture can be important for building social capital when it supports residents in connecting across racial, income, language, and/or generational divides and fosters pride in a place (Audate et al. 2019; Kim 2016, Kingsley and Townsend 2006; Vitiello and Wolf-­ Powers 2014). In my research, participants emphasized the value urban agriculture provides for forming community economies, bolstering neighborhood place-­ making, and fostering relationships between people and land.

Community Economies Beyond the employment and market-led economic impacts of urban agriculture discussed in Chap. 3, some participants discussed the ways that growing supplemented food budgets and, thus, helped their family economics. As indicated in Chap. 3, previous studies indicate that the broader economic potential of urban agriculture (including its ability to increase land value) is less proven, while the financial or employment opportunities derived from the practice may be insufficient for supporting a family (Houston 2005; Pourias et  al. 2016; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014). Yet, for many, the ability to supplement income, diminish food costs, and foster social capital that leads to new economic opportunities is salient. For example, Vitiello and Wolf-Powers (2014) argue that some of the most important economic outcomes of urban agriculture are unrelated to farming jobs. Instead they can be viewed as social enterprises that create connections and build social capital. As such, scholars call for going beyond the quantification of economic benefits to better understand the diverse ways that urban agriculture can produce value for families (Slater 2001).

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The community-based economic value for households was particularly evident in Medellín where growers living in informal settlements grow and/or exchange foods that they otherwise would be unable to purchase in stores. Sprawling up the city’s hillsides are informal settlements inhabited by low-income residents, many of which were displaced from the countryside due to the decades-long civil war. The self-built neighborhoods climb up difficult mountain terrain where there are limited public services, infrastructure, and employment opportunities (BID 2009; Calderon 2012; Fadnes and Horst 2009). Many women I spoke to turned to urban agriculture in response to experiences of poverty, food insecurity, and a disconnect from the land. In addition to collecting leftover and discarded food from markets, begging for food, and limiting meals and food types, they grow fresh produce and herbs within the limited space constraints of their always-evolving neighborhoods (Hammelman 2017). Some grow in the interstitial space next to their home, in organized allotment gardens, or in community gardens (as described in Chap. 3). The gardeners frequently discussed the important economic values that enabled access to food and goods they otherwise couldn’t afford. Some participants noted that they did not buy any vegetables beyond what they grew or exchanged with neighbors and that the quality and variety of produce consumed are greater than before they had a garden. This also reduced expenses for transportation to salvage or purchase food from other sources. Additionally, if a family grew more than they consumed, many reported exchanging with neighbors, local stores, or the food bank in order to obtain goods they can’t grow such as sugar, cooking oil, or household items (e.g., toothpaste, shampoo). Some gardeners were also learning how to make soaps, shampoo, and other goods to continue to offset family expenses. In this case, the economic value of urban agriculture contributed to several community needs beyond participation in a market. The economic contributions of urban gardens were also evident in Rosario where many growers live in marginalized neighborhoods and struggle to make ends meet. They reported the importance of getting food through growing, and, for those that chose to participate, income generated from participating in municipal farmers’ markets was important. One grower described the value of this practice for her family’s food budget: You are not buying the vegetable, you are not buying some vegetables such as zucchini, sweet potatoes, because you have it there. And then all the other vegetables. And in all cases there is a crisis so heavy and if you have to barter you can exchange vegetables for flour, for sugar, for soap.

Other garden managers in Rosario discussed this practice as the ecology of low-­ income communities in which residents use all that they have in order to cobble together enough to support their families. In Toronto, urban agriculture advocates from civil society organizations noted the importance of being able to access fresh, organic vegetables and herbs, particularly culturally relevant foods, as a result of growing food. Especially given the high costs of living in the city (in terms of rent, transportation, etc.), they reported that people are turning toward growing food to cut costs. One community garden

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manager reported that the average community garden in Toronto (approximately 3,000 square feet) can produce up to 9,000 lbs of food per growing season. That can equate to as much as $7,500 in food savings. For migrant communities cultivating specific foods that can be hard to find or expensive, this savings is even greater. One advocate elaborated: When you say cultural food, that is something that is really expensive and community gardens are one way for people to access their cultural food that mostly they find expensive in the market or sometimes they cannot find in the market. So, that is one of the importance of a community garden.

In Charlotte, growers and urban agriculture advocates similarly noted that growing food can provide some savings. However, many were careful to indicate that while growing can supplement food budgets, it is rarely a solution to food insecurity on its own. In all of the cities, the ability to supplement food budgets, exchange produce for other goods, and cultivate relationships in their neighborhoods was a critical value afforded by participating in urban agriculture.

Social Connections and Place-Making The significant social and cultural contributions of urban agriculture to urban life were particularly illustrated through the story of Toronto’s vibrant urban agriculture movement. As described in Chap. 1, Toronto is a sprawling city home to a dynamic urban agriculture movement. Toronto Urban Growers (TUG) reported more than 200 growing spaces ranging from rooftops and large-scale commercial farms to small allotment gardens on Parks, Forestry and Recreation land and school gardens. Urban agriculture received important support from the Toronto Food Policy Council in its 2010 Toronto Food Strategy and the 2012 GrowTO Urban Agriculture Action Plan. The social value of urban agriculture was demonstrated through resident struggles to maintain growing space in one low-income downtown neighborhood that is home to a large public housing project. This neighborhood, originally designed according to Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” ideals, was reportedly the location of the first community garden in Toronto. Over time, ad hoc resident actions (alongside support from public housing authorities during participatory budgeting exercises) built many gardens around the low-rise public housing buildings to supplement food budgets, improve health, and foster social relationships among immigrants, their histories, and the land (Hammelman 2019). According to an urban agriculture advocate, as many as one in ten families tended gardens in this neighborhood. The neighborhood recently experienced significant public-private investment to rebuild housing to meet greater density, mixed-use, and mixed-income planning goals. While the new investments include important neighborhood amenities, including new residential buildings, a swimming pool, and a large neighborhood park, many residents and urban agriculture advocates lamented the loss of growing

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space in a city where accessing land for urban agriculture is a consistent challenge. As residents, churches, health centers, non-profit organizations, and advocates fought for the inclusion of urban agriculture in redevelopment plans, they frequently invoked a range of social benefits. A developer that eventually incorporated rooftop gardens into its designs remarked that food served as the “glue” for social cohesion in the neighborhood (Cohen 2015). Residents advocated for park space to serve as a location for community gathering including a garden. Local non-profit organizations also created community gardens and pop-up gardens in the neighborhood with the recognition of the social value they provided. One garden manager described these values: So, this is the way some people – if they have a mental health issue, it also reduces their stress. It increases their socialization, and also brings people together more in equal ways. Each garden has a different style to growing food. So, in the garden, they learn from each other, because our garden is multicultural, and we are working together.

This advocate and others were concerned about the diminished capacity to form such socio-ecological relationships with the substantial loss of garden space in the neighborhood as a result of the revitalization. The sentiment that urban agriculture contributes to combating social isolation and forming new relationships was also expressed in other neighborhoods and garden projects in Toronto. One advocate elaborated: Maximizing potential lands by turning something into a green space where people could meet, where people could plant their own [garden], where people could build a community, and people could have food security, that is a vision that is something in the future and I would say that, urban ag, it is something that we are visioning with.

Indeed, one urban agriculture advocate noted that yard-sharing projects, in which a homeowner opens their backyard to a grower that doesn’t have access to space, struggled to find participants because gardeners wanted the sociality of a garden. Others emphasized the potential of intergenerational and multi-cultural relationships formed through bringing people together in meaningful ways, such as garden projects and harvest festivals. As gardens become a “second home” or “safe space” for families, newcomers, and other residents, they also began to serve a place-­ making role for building community in and outside of the garden. Participants in Toronto reported that gardens often evolved into spaces where people gathered for conversations related to food systems and community development that can spur future claims for rights and power. Social and cultural connections forged through urban agriculture were also evident in Charlotte. The city has a more nascent urban agriculture movement with approximately 75 school, church, allotment, and community gardens. In one community garden in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, seniors were supported in planting, tending, and harvesting their garden plots by high school students. Both groups benefited from this intergenerational interaction through sharing knowledge, energy, and experiences. In gardens such as this, but also the many school gardens throughout city, Parks and Recreation allotment gardens, and urban farms engaging diverse volunteers, “organic” interactions were formed between people and the

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land. As one garden leader and educator told me, community gardens create an agora, a commons, a place to imperfectly solve problems together. They are “a story of people and the land.” Urban agriculture projects in Charlotte were also discussed as places for building and forming community. One research participant described the impetus for building a garden in a particular neighborhood because that neighborhood lacked a physical center or gathering space and identity. The garden was perceived as being able to fill that role. Others reflected on how the gardens served as community gathering spots and places of peace. They also discussed the importance of luncheons, tomato sandwich parties, and other events for fostering social cohesion. These activities can form bridges across difference and improve communities as a whole. One participant reflected: “You have to be about cultivating people.” At the same time, other advocates pointed out that food can be a uniter and that it can bring people together around common goals. In both Medellín and Rosario, social cohesion and bringing community together to address family and neighborhood challenges were also discussed as values ­produced by urban agriculture. In Medellín, several neighborhoods struggled with gang activity. The gardens were described as a productive activity for young people and a place in which mothers strategized collectively to protect their families. In Rosario, gardens were also presented as spaces to counter neighborhood violence and provide productive activities for residents. One grower described this objective: “The idea is to strengthen those connections in the commons. And that the kids, the kids and the parents, the community exists.” In both of these cases, having a physical presence of the collective and productive spaces of urban agriculture was perceived as a strategy for displacing unwanted neighborhood activity. Finally, for gardeners in all four cities, the social capital formed through the gardens enabled discussing bigger neighborhood concerns, seeking redress for injustices, and/or devising new initiatives for neighborhood revitalization. Many reported that building gardens enabled broader efforts at community building, resident organizing, claiming a right to the city, and countering the negative impacts of industrial agriculture. In Medellín, growers often represented groups with little political power. They were described in public rhetoric as outsiders that only cause problems in the city. As a result, growing gardens created a visible manifestation of their positive contributions. Residents tapped into the pride they felt from building their gardens to organize neighbors in addressing gang activity, fighting against forced relocation in the city, and claiming rights. One grower further described the political benefits of gardening: For example, I believe we are strong because of the garden… It has helped us to fight and make ourselves stronger. In the way that we are able to struggle with them because they haven’t been able to find an answer and let us know what would happen to us and the proposal was, are you going to move us from here? But you need to provide us with space where we could grow vegetables because we’re not going to make it in a building. So that has been one of our most important struggles.

For this grower, the success of their gardens provided a foundation upon which they could fight against forced relocation. Advocates in Toronto also discussed how

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participating in urban agriculture can give residents more sense of community engagement through which further organizing can take place. In Charlotte, gardens were advocated for as a means to build social capital, while in Rosario, gardeners described in detail the growth they experienced. One grower in Rosario explained: They taught me that I can look people in the face. My tears were not due to just wanting to cry but that I was alone. I couldn’t look like that. I was ashamed. And all the time I walked with my head slouched. And so the engineer, and his team, taught me how to walk. That’s why I always say that they gave me the fishing rod, not the fish. And there, I was becoming wiser.

The emphasis on social capital is particularly relevant in disinvested neighborhoods where urban agriculture is perceived as a mechanism to connect across class, race, and generations in ways that produce broader social benefits. In this way, the relationships produced through urban agriculture are perceived to have valuable impacts on neighborhoods and groups. Similarly, for some in Charlotte, participating in community gardens enabled new approaches to problem solving and building relationships. Gardens supported tapping into long histories of growing while also creating a common space for people to talk and problem solve together. Importantly, however, those communities are not formed without tension. Instead, they can be mirrors of divisions that exist outside the garden space. One garden manager in Charlotte noted that conflicts arose based on different ideas of what garden maintenance should occur: “what we see here playing out are the dynamics in our culture of rules, adherence to rules, how flexible you should be, what you should choose to have battles over, and so on.” For him, those conflicts were mirrors of societal tensions. Thus, while urban agriculture has the potential to bolster socio-ecological relationships and improve neighborhoods, it also has the potential to reproduce the power dynamics in which those relationships are embedded (as discussed in Chap. 2).

Connecting to Land, Histories, and Traditional Knowledge Many growers and advocates in my research discussed the ways urban agriculture helped forge connections to land, histories, and ancestral knowledge through growing and sharing certain foods in particular ways. In Medellín, many gardeners held vast agricultural knowledge and histories from the countryside from where they were forcibly displaced. Thus, the cultural benefits of reconnecting to memories of the countryside and family they lost cannot be overstated. One grower described her experience: Through these gardens we mitigate a little bit the hunger, despair, sadness of some people who had to flee their lands, leaving the most precious, leaving even their loved ones buried there. Now we are very happy because, for example, I acquired some good ideas from there like I learned to do chimichurri, I learned a little bit to do the picante, I learned to prepare sweet pickles, and then water and crackers, several things that we have prepared from the

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plant because it is true we don’t have enough to plant a large extension of banana and yucca, but it is enough to grow some plants of banana and yucca, and all this is produced for us. So in that way, we are able to cope with the sadness and memories that we have from our fields, and at the same time we have a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the field, we eat in a healthy way.

Other growers in Medellín noted how community members came together to share food grown from the gardens. During one community meeting held toward the end of my research in Medellín, I gathered with growers and residents from multiple neighborhoods around the cooking and sharing of a sancocho or a festival lunch with a large stew at its center. During this event, participants reflected on the importance of being able to share food in this way (whether grown in their gardens or not) in order to create a sense of solidarity and shared purpose (Hammelman et al. 2019). In these and more regular gatherings among growers, they not only meet basic needs of hunger but also provide cultural connections with memories of similar gatherings and working the field in the countryside. Advocates in Toronto also discussed the multicultural sharing of knowledge (and food) among migrant communities. In gardens, one can find growers of different generations, world regions, and languages that share their knowledge of growing techniques and particular plants. One non-profit advocate further explained: For a lot of people, it’s also interesting because it’s also becoming very multicultural in terms of what is grown on these lands and what we taste as well. So, I remember in one of the gardens they try to grow produce from other countries and then folks are like, “Well, what is it?” “I don’t know how to harvest it because I don’t know what it is.” But then that learning opportunity is there as well so I think to have ethnic crops being grown, there seems to be a lot of interest in growing that.

Another urban agriculture advocate in Toronto similarly noted how these processes have been important to sustaining the production of world crops. In Rosario, growers discussed how agroecological production in urban and peri-­ urban farms represents a way of life. For some, it was not seen as a job but instead as an orientation to living. Similar to growers in Medellín, many in Rosario have long family histories in agriculture, and thus there was an impetus to maintain their ancestral knowledge. One of these growers explained these cultural benefits: The orientation that we have in our seed production is toward local knowledge. The people from the countryside, the small-scale producers, they are the ones that make sure the region is fed. They are the ones that make sure that there are seeds for the next harvest. They take care of their own seeds. They know about the seed’s maturity, when is the best time to cut it, when is the best time to dry it, when is the best time to clean it and when is the best time to package it and under what conditions it should be done and how to label it so the variety isn’t lost.

For this grower, fostering this knowledge sharing into the future was a key value of urban agriculture. Finally, growers and advocates in Charlotte similarly pointed out the cultural benefits of growing as connected to preserving a way of life and human-­environment connections. Growers discussed the commitments to the environment, community, and religion that motivated their practice. A grower from one of the oldest community gardens in the city, located in a now gentrifying neighborhood, expressed that

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many of the growers in her garden feel closer to God when putting their hands in the dirt and serving as caretakers of the earth. There are many church gardens in Charlotte in which parishioners are motivated by a religious calling to care for the earth and community. Other urban agriculture growers described memories of planting and harvesting with their parents or grandparents while growing up. They viewed their current practice as continuing that tradition and contributing to a better way of life. Importantly, the social, cultural, and economic values described in this section are interrelated. Being able to connect to shared histories of land can foster solidarity, shared organizing, and social and economic capital. Through exchanging produce, seeds, ideas, and stories, new connections to place are made in ways that can improve neighborhoods. The intertwining of urban agriculture contributions in this way was valued by all participants but was also reflected on as a challenge for demonstrating the importance of the practice in neoliberal capitalist urban systems.

 roviding Environmental Value Through Food System P Alternatives, Human-Nature Connections, and Education Throughout the four cities in this research, and often in the literature, urban agriculture’s environmental successes were described as key for urban landscapes. These environmental goals varied in their contributions to ecosystem services, urban green space, and countering the negative effects of industrial food production, but also included contributions to human and environmental health as well as food and agriculture education.

Ecosystem Services and Environmental Alternatives In academic literature on urban agriculture, many scholars have considered urban agriculture’s contributions to ecosystem services, including reducing the urban heat island effect, stormwater runoff, energy use, and waste creation as well as increasing habitat for pollinators and wildlife and sequestering nitrogen and carbon (Ackerman et al. 2014; Clinton et al. 2018; La Rosa et al. 2014; Lin et al. 2015; McPhearson et  al. 2014; Okvat and Zautra 2011; and Orsini et  al. 2014). These environmental contributions, alongside increasing environmental knowledge, can build urban resilience (Camps-Calvet et al. 2016). Further, Lin et al. (2015) found spillover services related to energy, resources, and organisms beyond the garden itself, while Clinton et  al. (2018) noted the importance of built environments to address climate change and unsustainable development. Scholarly literature also attends to environmental benefits that increase the livability of cities, in part through improving or creating urban green space, regulating climates, and increasing access to natural systems and fresh food (Clinton et  al. 2018; La Rosa et al. 2014; Reynolds and Cohen 2016). For example, Middle et al.

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(2014) point to the benefits of green space created through garden parks in Perth, Australia. In addition to providing more natural systems, urban agriculture engages residents in producing greater environmental value. Rosan and Pearsall (2017) similarly found that many urban growers in Philadelphia, United States, perceived urban agriculture as offering vital environmental benefits and challenging existing food systems. Urban agriculture practice is discussed in the literature as a counter to industrial approaches to food when projects operate in collaboration with natural systems instead of relying on large-scale chemical inputs. This also has the potential to enable growers and consumers to reconnect to the land that feeds them and to cultural histories, support community self-determination, and counter contemporary capitalist logics (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Hoover 2013; Reynolds and Cohen 2016). Importantly, urban agriculture does not automatically produce these environmental benefits, but must be managed intentionally to do so. Much literature notes potential environmental challenges from urban agriculture. Dalla Marta et al. (2019) identified the competition for water in urban areas as a challenge (e.g., between agriculture, industry, domestic needs, etc.). Urban agriculture can also require additional maintenance and infrastructure while increasing the presence of agricultural pollutants, mosquito breeding, and disease transmission (Clinton et al. 2018; Lin et al. 2015). In my research, growers and advocates in all four cities discussed urban agriculture’s contribution to urban systems through environment-focused outcomes. The agroecology approach to urban and peri-urban agriculture in Rosario is particularly illustrative as it brings together the many environmental values discussed in the literature. As described in Chap. 1, Rosario is located in the fertile pampa húmeda region in eastern Argentina. The region is known for its vast areas of industrially produced soybean and wheat that are transported to other parts of the country and around the world via the ports of Greater Rosario and Buenos Aires. Within this context, municipal actors promote agroecology in its urban (Programa de Agricultura Urbana, PAU) and peri-urban (Proyecto del Cinturón Verde, Greenbelt Project) programs as an alternative to industrial agriculture. Agroecology is understood as an approach to agriculture grounded in the ecological knowledge of local farmers (Altieri and Nicholls 2018). It relies on natural systems instead of chemical inputs to produce agricultural goods and pursue food sovereignty. Importantly, in Latin America (and elsewhere), it is approached as a science, practice, and socio-political movement (Toledo 2011). The agroecological framing of urban and peri-urban agriculture in Rosario focused on the varied environmental impacts of its practice, and this is embedded in discourse about municipal programs. For example, during a tour of Greenbelt farms, participants spotted an owl resting in one of the fields. In response, a tour leader emphasized that seeing such animal life signaled the importance of agroecology for preserving a biodiversity not only of crops but also of animals. During this tour, we also visited an agroecological peri-urban farm that was surrounded by informal settlements, conventional farms, and a women’s prison. Through a partnership with Rosario’s Greenbelt program, this farmer had not only converted his land to

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agroecological production but also began extolling the environmental values of agroecology in public fora and in markets where he sells his produce. He especially highlighted human-environment relationships and reflected: We take [agroecology] as an ideal because we believe that social questions are very strongly linked to agroecology. It goes beyond the product that we make, it transcends it. Because with the people at the feria, we transcend the product that we make and we link it to a social question because we link agroecology directly with the common good. When [we say] the common good, we aren’t talking about money, it goes beyond money. We’re referring to humans. We’re referring to all species, plants and animals. We’re referring to the environment, water, we’re referring to the land.

For this grower, a key value that urban and peri-urban agriculture provided was promoting the environment as a common good that must be sustained. These narratives are also careful to identify human-environment connections. One advocate in Rosario described how these connections were important from the beginning of municipal support for urban agriculture: From the start it was ecological because we didn’t just want to take care of the animal life but also people and land. Ecological agriculture is not dependent. Here people can make their own compost, biopreparations, seedlings, and they can have semillas libres [seeds free of chemicals]. So, we give freedom and not dependency. That’s why the idea of ecological agriculture has been around since the beginning.

Such framings of human-environment relationships also seek to change the image and responsibilities of farmers away from the application of chemical inputs and mechanical harvesting. Instead, farmers are understood as “creators of harmony and beauty” among the plants and animals of agricultural landscapes (urban agriculture advocate, 2019). Other advocates and growers in Rosario also repeatedly described the positive impacts of their practice on increasing biodiversity and reducing environmental toxins. This is particularly evident in presenting the agroecology programs as counter to industrial agriculture. One advocate described the differences: [Agroecological] production is more efficient from every point of view because industrial agriculture is subsidized by petroleum. And also if we were to measure from the ecological point of view, industrial agriculture is totally inefficient. Our way of doing things is much more efficient because we also recycle and we don’t waste energy. There’s also human participation. Industrial agriculture is almost completely dehumanized, almost no people participate. It’s mechanical and there’s no human labor.

Many other growers described these benefits as the most important added value provided by urban agriculture in Rosario. The emphasis on connecting with nature and growing in harmony with ecological processes was also expressed by gardeners in other cities. In Medellín (and also in Rosario), several growers had “recovered” lands that were previously dumping grounds for garbage3. One community garden manager remarked that through building the garden on a site that used to be a dumping ground, they were improving the 3  These growers (and others throughout my research) reflected on the potential dangers of growing on contaminated urban lands and pursued strategies to protect against those dangers (e.g., growing in raised beds, etc).

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environment. In these examples, the vegetable gardens were able to utilize previously marginalized spaces while also cleaning up neglected neighborhood environments. In Toronto, several advocates and growers discussed the ways in which urban agriculture connects urban residents with natural systems and inculcates an environmental ethic. One grower explained: “We are really looking at growing on our doorstep… so we understand five acres is [only] five acres, but how can we support community members to look at the whole community as a garden.” Others in Toronto fostered their urban agriculture projects as pollinator spaces and ways to protect trees and green space in an otherwise concrete-filled built environment. One advocate of rooftop gardens described these environmental impacts: Here [pollinators] get a full diversity and a buffet table of different plants and food. And they’re not covered in chemicals and pesticides and all that. So, teaching people that, teaching people to take on seeing the role of pollinators is really important.

Finally, some growers in Toronto noted the ability of urban agriculture to remove chemicals from polluted urban spaces. Before planting near a school, one non-profit organization tested the soil for contamination and found that, despite earlier remediation programs, lead was still present. Additional remediation action was taken in order to make the soil safe for growing and for children to play. In this case, it was the garden that acted as a catalyst for testing and cleaning the soil. In Charlotte, several growers emphasized the environmental values of urban agriculture as evident in its protection of green space, adaptation to climate change, and countering the effects of industrial agriculture. One grower described this: “You can plant things that promote healing instead of grass. Today’s food system doesn’t produce food from the earth.” Thus, through his garden and markets, he teaches many different ways to grow organic food (in pots, water, raised beds, etc.). Many growers were driven by an environmental ethic of seeking to connect with and conserve the environment. They described urban agriculture as promoting environmental ethics through creating “organic interactions” among flowers, crops, and people (particularly youth). One advocate in Charlotte simply stated: “It is life.” For growers in all four cities, their practice also represented a strategy for changing food systems. One advocate in Medellín felt that making organic food available (via gardens, farmers’ markets, or local markets) was a way to intervene on individual eating habits. In Toronto, advocates felt that growing was a political act as it had the potential to promote food sovereignty and food justice. One urban agriculture advocate from a civil society organization further explained: We should shift the focus from the big, bad food system to a more resident-controlled food system, which is what we need to help fight climate change right now. I think also just having food cultivation front and center in Toronto and cities is a way to reconnect people with land and what they consume and put them in control of what they want to eat, what they consume and to give people that power of saying no to certain food systems and saying yes to others, to plant that seed of an idea in people.

In Rosario, growers, scientists, and advocates similarly described how the practice can provide independence from industrial and capitalist food systems and create demand for different relationships with food, the environment, and the economy,

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while in Charlotte, growing projects were seen as a way to bring light to exploitative histories and processes of agriculture and urban development. In this way, growers and advocates in all four cities emphasized environmental outcomes, embedded in socio-ecological relationships, as a key value added to urban food landscapes by urban agriculture.

Human and Environmental Health Several research participants across the four cities discussed how working to improve the environment through growing gardens also improved human health. The benefits emphasized included the physical impacts of consuming fresh, organic foods; participating in a form of exercise; and mental benefits of reducing emotional stress and connecting with natural systems. First, many reported that they felt healthier or that others experienced better nutrition outcomes because their urban agriculture practice afforded more access to healthier foods. For example, in Toronto, one non-profit community garden leader discussed the impacts for young people: So, if you don’t have a taste for fresh garden foods, you’re not gonna be likely to want to learn to grow them or appreciate them when you have that opportunity. So, that’s our kind of core focus is helping to develop that taste at a young age because those flavors you would not have kids eating them off a plate like kale, parsley, like chives, like these crazy things that they will eat down to the nubs in your garden because they’re so flavorful.

In Rosario, many growers also discussed the perceived negative health impacts of consuming foods produced with genetically modified organisms, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides (Hammelman et al. 2021). One peri-urban grower commented: One [value] that is fundamental is health. We’re living in a contaminated environment and our bodies are constantly being contaminated, it’s important to eat these foods to be able to clean ourselves, purify ourselves.

In this way, many research participants noted that they and their communities were healthier because they consumed the foods they grew without chemicals and/or because they found a plant-based lifestyle improved their health outcomes. At the same time, many gardeners discussed the medicinal values of urban growing. Many, especially in Rosario and Medellín, grew herbs specifically to address ailments. One grower in Rosario noted the importance of having access to these herbs: “Then that served for ulcers, injuries, and those things. We would heal each other. We would get hurt with something but then we would get healed. We had the remedy right there.” Another garden in Rosario was integrated into a hospital landscape and municipal urban agriculture programming included trainings on the medicinal uses of certain plants (such as for teas to alleviate colds). In other cities, urban agriculture programs similarly incorporated cooking and nutrition classes. Some participants also argued that the physical activity of urban agriculture promoted better health outcomes. One Toronto garden manager indicated that for many growers in his program, Saturday workdays may be the only physical activity they

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participate in each week. In this way, this garden was seen as contributing to the social determinants of health. In addition to physical health, many growers and advocates reported feeling improvements in mental health from participating in urban agriculture projects. As noted above, growers in Medellín said that spending time in their gardens reduced despair and helped to cope with the sadness of being displaced from the countryside. Another grower remarked: “When we feel sick, we are together, talking, working in our garden.” They felt that spending time in the garden was part of the remedy for anxiety. Similarly, gardeners and advocates in Toronto described growing as therapeutic, calming, and a means of stress release. In Rosario, one garden space hosts patients from a psychiatric hospital where they work on motor skills and mental health: “Whoever it is, a family, a group, the idea of what they tell us is that these meetings mean a lot to them, being able to be with the earth, having this contact and from there, it even has the possibility of resolving problems related to diet and medicine.” While these valuations were not systematically studied or quantified (as they might be in a health-focused study), the physical and mental health values were stressed by a majority of participants throughout my research.

Food and Agriculture Education Outcomes Many participants in my research also argued for the potential of urban agriculture to contribute to environmental education. Several programs focused on sharing knowledge about growing food, nutrition, culture, and community. This included programs that work specifically with schools (whether training university students in plant biology and social work or elementary and secondary school kids in hydroponics and marketing), while others focused on public and multi-cultural education. One garden manager in Toronto explained this value in detail: Your question about what’s the value provided by urban agriculture, I think food production obviously but food production is I think a small – I mean it’s a fraction of that piece. I think food education is a huge piece. I think that food education becomes not just a piece by which people learn but also which connects to other people who learn and that people form communities based on the learning and bring people to the classroom. Teachers connect to students. Students become teachers. Students connect to other students and they learn from each other….Because as more people learn about different vegetables, if you know nothing about Lal Saag, which is a really popular red spinach vegetable in the Bengali population, once you learn how to grow it really easily, then it’s really easy to grow, and you can supplement some of your diet. It’s iron, iron and fiber, iron and vitamins. So, now that you’ve learned about that from a different community member or community group – because you know how to grow it and eat it – that actually helps – you’re actually participating in your nutrition.

To further these goals, many garden programs in all four cities intentionally include public education and outreach through workshops on growing and processing produce as well as opportunities to learn about the food system as a whole. Many programs also focused on the ways in which urban agriculture can educate young people to be stewards of the environment and their own health. They argued

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for the need to reconnect young people with food systems, the environment, and agricultural heritages. One researcher in Rosario discussed the importance of these initiatives: I think we have to place our bets on educating children. Because that’s an important sociological challenge since working the earth is devalorized. Farming is not valued as much as other jobs. And this can only be changed by starting in early childhood, teaching children how important it is that someone is producing health foods, working the earth, how important it is to society.

Many research participants worried that the modern urban experience provided a disconnect between consumers (including children) and their food systems (e.g., the impression that the life of food starts in grocery stores). Participating in urban agriculture projects was perceived as a way to counter that disconnect. Similarly, in Charlotte many programs focused on the ability of urban agriculture to introduce children to environmental systems through experiential learning. One school garden leader noted: But we’ve found that it’s really encouraged young people there to become engaged in learning because there’s a tangible result that’s not a test score. They’ve done something, and they can see it. They produce things, and they can see it. And for people who already have learning challenges, which many of them do, it’s really been transformational.

In this way, urban agriculture provides education opportunities related not only to nutrition and food but also to STEM, marketing, and business. The participants in my research demonstrated that many advocates and growers were motivated by environmental goals. Most research participants also highlighted that these multiple environmental values were intertwined. Creating agricultural education opportunities can further environmental benefits and increase social capital. Providing opportunities to forge socio-ecological relationships can maintain cultural traditions and memories while also improving mental health outcomes. The majority of participants emphasized these integrated qualitative benefits as key aspects of their urban agriculture practice and its value to the urban metabolism.

 aluing Urban Agriculture’s Interrelated V Qualitative Contributions The stories in this chapter demonstrate that from Argentina to Canada, and many places in between, communities of gardeners and policymakers are implementing urban agriculture projects that contribute socio-ecological values that go beyond simply producing food. As one urban gardener and educator in Charlotte explained: It is a story of people and the land. If you ask most of these gardeners why they are here, they will say to produce food; but pretty quickly they will also tell you that they see their friends here. Community gardens must be doing more for a space than producing food if they are, as many fear, a harbinger of gentrification.

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Many involved in urban agriculture perceive significant interconnected benefits arising from contributions to urban environments, household budgets, social relationships, cultural and political connections, physical and mental health, and education. Growers and urban agriculture advocates that I spoke with emphasized multifunctionality in countering the negative effects of the industrial food system on people, nature, and communities; (re)connecting people and land in ways that build social capital and solidarities; and improving economic, health, and education outcomes. As Ana’s story that starts this chapter demonstrates, many of these values were cited within individual projects. Many saw the potential to connect to many benefits as a particular strength of urban agriculture. One urban agriculture advocate in Toronto explained: I think the way that urban agriculture connects to a lot of different issues gives it strength. So the fact that you can come into it as an environmentalist, you can come into it as someone who grew up with a strong culture of food that you’re missing, as a way to integrate people, or whatever.

For this advocate, the multifunctionality of urban agriculture is important for appealing to diverse people and groups but also for filling multiple needs within a city. Importantly, however, most individual urban agriculture projects cannot accomplish all of these goals. Instead they focus only on some aspects and must do so intentionally in order to achieve those objectives. As such, the same urban agriculture advocate in Toronto quoted above cautioned: But people sometimes think that one urban agriculture program can do everything, and that’s not the case. Urban agriculture, as a field, can accomplish all of these things, but we really need to think very carefully about what they’re trying to accomplish and one can’t do everything.

There also remain many challenges to pursuing the benefits described in this chapter. While gardening has the potential to create savings for family budgets, it rarely fulfills all needs for food consumption (in part because food insecurity is rarely caused simply by a lack of access to food). Community gardens have the ability to create community and form social relationships, but they also exist within in larger social contexts, such that tensions can arise and uneven power relationships can be reproduced. Reynolds and Cohen (2016) similarly emphasized the racial and class dynamics that underlie urban inequities and can be reproduced in urban agriculture if they are left unattended. While there are many potential values for urban ecosystems, urban agriculture also utilizes potentially scarce resources (such as water) and can increase environmental pests. Urban agriculture has the ability to improve land use and neighborhood outcomes when it is practiced on vacant land in disinvested neighborhoods, but by itself it does not frequently produce high tax revenue for cities and, instead, can spur further development that displaces residents and other uses (Angotti 2015). Therefore, and as discussed in Chap. 2, Tornaghi (2014) and others call attention to the power, exclusion, injustice, and inequity that are potentially embedded in urban agriculture practice.

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Finally, most of the values described in this chapter are hard to quantify in ways that account for the complex interplay of contributions described. Quantification was desired in some spaces in order to make the value of urban agriculture more translatable to capitalist urban logics (particularly related to land use provisions). But, the pursuit of quantifying contributions to ecosystem services, economic development, or social capital risks simplifying the connections between these values. The discussion about pursuing food justice via urban agriculture in Chap. 2 made clear that achieving such goals requires an understanding of the complexity of food insecurity and marginalization produced through neoliberal, sustainable urbanism systems. Thus, the solutions must be equally complex. Further, for some (such as Djokić et al. 2017), introducing such unquantifiable values into urban landscapes is, in and of itself, an act of resistance as it forces the production of new kinds of space and urban imaginaries. This chapter demonstrates the many ways in which urban agriculture contributes to creating more sustainable and equitable urban landscapes. But, more must be done to recognize these less quantifiable, complex, and intangible values produced by urban agriculture.

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Lawson LJ (2005) City bountiful: a century of community gardening in America. University of California Press, Berkeley Levkoe CZ (2006) Learning democracy through food justice movements. Agric Hum Values 23(1):89–98 Levkoe CZ, Offeh-Gyimah A (2020) Race, privilege and the exclusivity of farm internships: ecological agricultural education and the implications for food movements. Environ Plann E Nat Space 3(2):580–598 Lin BB, Philpott SM, Jha S (2015) The future of urban agriculture and biodiversity-ecosystem services: challenges and next steps. Basic Appl Ecol 16(3):189–201 Lovell ST (2010) Multifunctional urban agriculture for sustainable land use planning in the United States. Sustainability 2(8):2499–2522 Macias T (2008) Working toward a just, equitable, and local food system: the social impact of community-based agriculture. Soc Sci Q 89(5):1086–1101 MacRae R, Gallant E, Patel S, Michalak M, Bunch M, Schaffner S (2010) Could Toronto provide 10% of its fresh vegetable requirements from within its own boundaries? Matching consumption requirements with growing spaces. J Agric Food Syst Community Dev 1(2):105–127 Mares TM, Peña DG (2010) Urban agriculture in the making of insurgent spaces in Los Angeles and Seattle. In: Hou J (ed) Insurgent public space: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities. Routledge, pp 241–254 McClintock N (2014) Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions. Local Environ 19(2):147–171 McPhearson T, Hamstead ZA, Kremer P (2014) Urban ecosystem services for resilience planning and management in New York City. Ambio 43(4):502–515 Middle I, Dzidic P, Buckley A, Bennett D, Tye M, Jones R (2014) Integrating community gardens into public parks: an innovative approach for providing ecosystem services in urban areas. Urban For Urban Green 13(4):638–645 Okvat HA, Zautra AJ (2011) Community gardening: a parsimonious path to individual, community, and environmental resilience. Am J Community Psychol 47(3–4):374–387 Orsini F, Gasperi D, Marchetti L, Piovene C, Draghetti S, Ramazzotti S et al (2014) Exploring the production capacity of rooftop gardens (RTGs) in urban agriculture: the potential impact on food and nutrition security, biodiversity and other ecosystem services in the city of Bologna. Food Security 6(6):781–792 Partalidou M, Anthopoulou T (2017) Urban allotment gardens during precarious times: from motives to lived experiences. Sociol Rural 57(2):211–228 Poulsen MN, Neff RA, Winch PJ (2017) The multifunctionality of urban farming: perceived benefits for neighbourhood improvement. Local Environ 22(11):1411–1427 Pourias J, Aubry C, Duchemin E (2016) Is food a motivation for urban gardeners? Multifunctionality and the relative importance of the food function in urban collective gardens of Paris and Montreal. Agric Hum Values 33(2):257–273 Queen’s Garden (2020) Rickey Hall, West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition. Queens Garden: Oral Histories of the Piedmont Foodshed. Web. https://sites.uncc.edu/food-­oral-­history/. Accessed 27 Mar 2020 Reynolds K, Cohen N (2016) Beyond the kale: urban agriculture and social justice activism in New York City. University of Georgia Press Robinson J (2006) Ordinary cities: between modernity and development. Psychology Press Rosan C, Pearsall H (2017) Growing a sustainable city? The Question of Urban Agriculture. University of Toronto Press Sbicca J (2019) Urban agriculture, revalorization, and green gentrification in Denver, Colorado. Polit Land 60:149–170 Slater R (2001) Urban agriculture, gender and empowerment: an alternative view. Dev South Afr 18(5):635–650

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Chapter 5

Stewarding the Environmental Commons

There have been challenges with the perceptions that community gardens are an exclusive use of park space. However, we ensure that community gardens have a minimal impact on other park uses because they are located in “dead open spaces” or underutilized areas of parks (e.g., turf in peripheral park areas). Our implementation process …is intended to build consensus amongst park users and to identify park areas/garden designs that do not interfere with other park uses. This can help to make gardening experiences accessible to more people, and to promote a greater sense of stewardship, rather than ownership, of park space. (Garden project manager in Toronto)

This chapter examines the varied perceptions of urban agriculture projects as an environmental commons, private property cultivated by rights-holders, or something in between. As the quote above indicates, by nature of their work, gardeners may perceive a sense of ownership over garden space, while landowners and project managers may instead view gardeners as stewarding an environmental commons. Public space and commons are understood in this chapter as spaces or resources that are managed to promote the public good, as opposed to being owned and used exclusively for an individual or small group of individuals. Some research participants pointed to land ownership as a key determinant of the publicness of a project, while others claimed rights to space as a result of their labors. In other words, for some growers and advocates, if they were cultivating on public land or as a collective on land they did not own, then the space and resources were considered shared or public. Yet for others, the act of growing on the land, and related investments, implied ownership and enabled claims to those resources. This tension was evident in each of the cities in my research. The desire to cultivate an environmental commons as part of wider urban change goals was palpable in projects in all four cities and was guided by multiple objectives (whether they were seeking environmental, social, and/or economic improvements). environmental commons As discussed in previous chapters, urban agriculture can be viewed as part of a sustainability fix through which gardens are included in environmental planning that makes the city or certain neighborhoods more attractive for capital investment. From this perspective, relying on gardeners to collectively maintain the commons creates value (either until a more lucrative © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_5

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land use can be found or to meet sustainability goals). On the other hand, growers view their gardens as contributions to the urban metabolism that counter marginalizing political economic processes and enable claims to a right to the city. Both of these positions, and tensions between them, unsettle strict understandings of public or private space in urban agriculture. In synthesizing these debates, this chapter considers how commons are created and disrupted through urban agriculture materiality, practice, representation, and policy. First, I review literature on public space and commons, especially as applied to urban agriculture, and examine the role of public policy approaches by which governments seek to engage growers in maintaining environmental commons without enabling rights claims. Next, I present claims to land made by participants in my research based on material productions or ownership as well as everyday practices of place-making. I highlight representations of commons or public space based on collective or allotment management approaches and tensions that arise accordingly. In the end, I argue that the complex assemblages of urban agriculture operate in and through commons in ways that are constrained by neoliberal policy but also create opportunity for solidarity movements.

 heoretical Foundations in Public Space T and Environmental Commons Urban space that is cultivated by the public as groups or individuals on land they do not own can be perceived as part of public space and environmental commons. There are, at times, both overlaps and divergences in literature regarding public space and commons. This section summarizes academic literature that addresses the definition, production, and use of public space and environmental commons with particular attention paid to the ways that everyday representations, practice, and policy form spaces and natures inhabited and maintained by the public. Public space and environmental commons can be understood both as physical spaces and resources to which publics have varying responsibility and access and as a way of thinking and being in social worlds. Publicness is fluid, emergent, variable, and networked, as it is invoked through collective habitus, imaginaries, struggle, and discourses (Qian 2018; Staeheli et  al. 2009; Vigneswaran et  al. 2017). Vigneswaran et al. (2017: 498) elaborate: To understand public space is to understand the diverse and contested ways in which a variety of actors seek to shape places and their possibilities, and how such struggles “make spaces public” in a dual sense, by making them both the site of particular forms of being together as well as making them the target of public action and politics.

Public places and spaces are where tensions arising from close interaction among diverse human and non-human bodies are played out each day (Amin 2008; Bodnar 2015). Whether in a public park, sidewalk, outdoor shopping district, or community garden, each day people practice democratic politics, (de)construct commons,

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define publics, care for urban natures, and claim a right to the city in public commons. Many link public space to public participation, but note that this participation does not just occur (Aptekar 2015). Instead it must be constituted through everyday material dynamics, policies, and social interactions (Amin 2008). This has the promise to cultivate civic-mindedness as the encounter of strangers in open urban spaces—cafes, parks, streets, etc.—can produce public awareness. But this is not assured, as these spaces can also be territorialized by particular groups via design, surveillance, and privatization and/or involve little interpersonal contact (Amin 2002; Aptekar 2015). Many community gardens can be considered public spaces of interaction with the unfamiliar that unsettle categories and foster deliberation (Aptekar 2015). Commons have been identified as property that belongs to everybody (and hence nobody), while, more recently, commoning focuses on collective community ownership and management of resources and/or land (Eizenberg 2012). Commoning occurs through enclosing or maintaining resources or bringing spaces and resources into common management (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). These spaces and resources are produced through negotiations over rights to occupy and utilize them and require collaboration, cooperation, and communication in order to meet social and political needs. Through claiming public spaces and resources as commons, people participate in commoning (including through growing food) in order to claim a greater say in how they are used and who benefits from the land (Klein 2001). Many political ecologists have studied the utilization of common property as a counter to regimes of enclosure and individualization and increasingly focus on the practice of commoning (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). Such approaches are concerned with divergent material interests and power and recognize commoning as grounded in ever-­ changing social relations (Turner 2017). Within such readings, definitions of public space or commons have, at times, centered around accessibility or the ways space and resources are not private property. Yet, there are very few, if any, spaces in which all people have truly unrestricted access (Atkinson 2003; Staeheli et al. 2009). The growing prevalence of privately owned public spaces supports accessibility for some (such as consumers) at certain times, while private owners remain as the rights-holders (Németh and Schmidt 2011). Blomley (2004, 2006) argues that common property and public space counter private property in that they are imagined as spaces of shared citizenship from which there is a right to not be excluded from use (so long as you are part of that group). Such commons can be formed through collective use, occupation, and place-making over time. Yet, claims to private property rights are also invoked in fights over space in which individual property rights often take precedence over community ownership formed through self-determination and labor on the land (Barraclough 2009). Such ability to invoke property rights is, however, embedded in the social production of space, class, and race such that not everyone has an equal ability to claim a right to space. Barraclough (2009), in examining two social movements in Los Angeles (United States), found disparities between the ability of wealthy homeowners to claim access to open space and that of low-income, racialized growers from the South Central Farm, who critiqued hegemonic models of

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property in favor of community ownership and self-determination. This example, and my research, can also problematize how claims to “public” space are invoked differently when those making the claims already have (or don’t have) a disproportionate claim to “private” resources and power. The contestation of the full publicization of space is also grounded in different imaginaries of public space (Mitchell 2017). While public space and commons have often been considered by divergent literatures, the emphasis in both on the collective approaches to producing socio-natures is instructive for my research. The co-constitution of socio-natural relationships and materialities that occurs in public space and environmental commons can be helpfully understood through Henri Lefebvre’s theories of urban space (1991, 1996, 2003) in its intersection with complex assemblage thinking (see Chap. 1 for more discussion of assemblages). Lefebvre calls attention to the interlocking of material space, representations of space, and lived space such that public space is produced through physical environments, knowledge, and embodied interactions (Eizenberg 2012). For example, Eizenberg (2012) demonstrates how gardens protect material space; build collective, practical knowledge that enables reproducing sustainable discursive frames; and celebrate various cultures through lived space. In this way, public space and environmental commons are produced by complex assemblages of material natures, bodies, representation, and policy operating through everyday forms, uses, and rhythms (Qian 2018). Consistent with my research, some seek to problematize the public-private dichotomy and instead recognize a continuum and overlapping or layered publics. Importantly, public and private spaces intermingle in ways that make fluid the division between each (Blomley 2006). The interface between public and private spaces can be viewed as a socio-spatial assemblage that unsettles categories through the performance of identities, forming and contesting boundaries, and exposure to or retreat from the public gaze (Dovey and Wood 2015). Complex relationships between property and people can blur these public-private boundaries. At times, publicly accessible space is created through private means and advancing private interest (such as the commercialization of pedestrian precincts), while, at others, public space is enclosed in order to serve public goods (such as women’s only beaches). Such blurring of private and public produces different results and can demonstrate urban priorities (Németh and Schmidt 2011; Schmelzkopf 2002; Staeheli et al. 2009). Thörn (2011), in examining the policing of homelessness in Sweden, elaborates: “Here, clearly, safety, security, and the effort to provide a calm and untroubled public environment for latté sippers trumped the idea of creating public dialogue concerning access to urban space by fringe groups” (pg. 999). Rights to property—whether land or resources—can also operate in overlapping and intersecting ways (Blomley 2004). Some political ecologists call attention to the relational, and hence political, characteristics of property claims. They are embedded in livelihoods, derive from social legacies of tenure and value, and are continuously contested (Turner 2017). Eizenberg (2012) argues that re-envisioning commons, in part through gardens, beyond the public-private dichotomy can enable alternative frameworks for social relations and practices.

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Bodies form publics (and micropublics) through lived space, everyday social contacts, and encounters (Amin 2002). Such encounters can form democratic publics and collectivities, but they can also be unpleasant and frightening, resulting in the construction of borders. Bodnar (2015: 2095) explains: Uncertainty, while it can be seen as threatening or disorienting also means possibility; one can transgress the thin sociability of public space, engage with others, care for them, as vendors keep track of their often marginalized regulars at the market place, and become part of a concerted political action.

As such, social practices and relations are part of producing environmental commons. Further, the presence of certain bodies in space can raise questions about the intended users and force confrontation with societal exclusions (Mitchell 2017). For example, Egerer and Fairbairn (2018) found that tensions about resource use and access to environmental commons in gardens in northern California (United States) were grounded in the social reproduction of the city’s racial dimensions of urbanization. Public space is constructed in ways that educate citizens, promote public participation and social interactions, and banish behavior perceived as uncivilized, inappropriate, or antisocial. At the same time, the materialities of space and commons are codified and circulated through social struggle and varied urban imaginaries (Mitchell 2017). The labors and agencies (the oeuvre) of bodies are critical for producing or constraining public commons and the material dimensions of social life (Qian 2018). Lefebvre’s (1991) representational space focuses on knowledge about space and its production (Eizenberg 2012). Representations of common spaces and resources as “public,” under the purview of local government stewardship, or as part of public-­ private partnerships are important for the material, everyday realities of those spaces and resources. Approaches to managing public space and written (and unwritten) rules reflect public or private norms. For instance, growers identified in the literature and in my research questioned the meanings associated with producing gardens as collectively managed or individual allotments and the related claims that emerge for having a say in decision-making about the gardens, neighborhoods, and cities (as described further below). Staeheli et al. (2009) also point out that regimes of publicity and property can reinforce or break down social norms of inclusion and exclusion such that participating in the public realm is not always straightforward for all groups. In terms of policy and planning, city stakeholders have sought to manage public spaces in order to foster the sociality and civic engagement that results from encounters among strangers (Amin 2008). For city leaders, positive public space symbolizes urban well-being and achievement and can be sites for building civic culture. The ordering of public space and/or commons management is a tactic of territorialization, social regulation, and delegation (Amin 2008). City decision-makers claim territories for particular uses when managing them as public spaces (including a reliance on surveillance and control to code acceptable uses), while the interaction of bodies can order or disrupt these objectives. Entanglements of informal practices and institutions, as well as political (dis)commoning tendencies, co-produce urban

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commons (Pikner et al. 2020). Terzi and Tonnelat (2017) call for more analysis of processes of publicization in order to attend to the democratic social processes required to maintain the accessibility of urban space. Further, commons exist within broader systems of power such that capitalist urban development, gentrification, and other socio-spatial processes structure the claiming and enclosure of resources and are reproduced through within-commons relations (Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Lefebvre points out that capitalism encroaches on urban space by seeking to turn public assets private (Bastia 2018). As such, fights for spatial justice can be embedded in resisting such appropriations and rebuilding urban commons (Follmann and Viehoff 2015). In particular, movements for creating commons as spaces of liberation, even when they exist within other sites of enclosure, have been identified as a key strategy for making value visible where others have diminished it (Woods 2009; Ramírez 2019). In my research and the literature, there remains, then, a tension regarding the ability to claim power in social spaces and how that is collectively or individually manifested.

 iterature on Public Space and Environmental Commons L in Urban Agriculture Several scholars of urban agriculture have engaged with ideas of public space and commons. This literature argues that urban agriculture can support or constrain commoning through producing collective socio-ecological relationships and a sense of place, resisting neoliberal property regimes and/or participating in boundary-­ making, and pursuing divergent urban imaginaries. Community garden literature has understood space as contested, controlled, and neoliberalizing (Eizenberg 2012). For others, urban agriculture is an example of urban commoning (Chatterton 2010; Follmann and Viehoff 2015). The collective inputs of time, soil, sun, and labor demonstrate the commons-in-the-making characteristics of gardens (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). It is also perceived as a collective claiming of rights to urban land, resources, and priorities (such as building an ecological city). The improvisational claiming and management of resources in urban gardens are part of co-constituting collective socio-ecological subjectivities in an era of individualism and anthropocentrism (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). The small life territories formed through gardening can foster a sense of place, social connections, new imaginaries, and a sense of home through which people collectively fight for self-­ determined productions of space (Djokić et  al. 2017). As an example of public space, urban agriculture projects have been identified as places in which strangers can interact and discursively negotiate (Amin 2002). These processes of negotiating and enacting shared resources are malleable as they bring together activism, care, and institutional urbanisms (Pikner et al. 2020). Growers invest meaning into space in ways that contribute to an ecological sense of place (Pikner et al. 2020). Nonetheless, especially in allotment gardens, growers

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often view their garden as private property for which they have autonomy to grow as they wish as long as it does not impact others. Some growers argue that they earn exclusive right to the space as a result of labor or financial investments. These questions of impact are not always straightforward, however, as tensions can arise regarding the perceived cleanliness and aesthetic appeal of different gardening methods. In this way, the gardens are perceived as a “managed commons” instead of a common resource (Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Outsiders may similarly place ownership/management responsibilities on gardeners when they view inadequacies in garden maintenance as individual failings. Framings of urban agriculture as a commons also focus on resistance to neoliberal property regimes (Blomley 2005; Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Through the act of cultivating collectively, urban gardeners make claims of collective ownership, enact shared property, and participate in place-making (Blomley 2004; Pikner et al. 2020). Gardens can be sites of resistance where people claim a right to public space and participate in decision-making. Schmelzkopf (2002), in examining a very public fight over gardens in New York City (United States), noted that the visibility of public garden spaces is important for cementing their place in the urban landscape. In New York City, the gardens were viewed as geographic hubs for congregating and forming allegiances around social concerns. Importantly, resistance is not always strictly understood as alternative since claims to land may be individualized and align with neoliberal ideas. Yet, for growers in my research (and in the literature, such as Ramírez 2019), these individualized claims still represented resistance because they were being made by people not traditionally afforded property rights (such as migrant communities). Land ownership matters in determining the public or private nature of gardening commons. The lack of land tenure can restrict a sense of ownership, with many growers in the literature and my research noting the salient and constant concern about the future of spaces owned by outside actors (such as the city) (Aptekar 2015). In studying gardens in Lisbon as subaltern commons-in-the-making, Ginn and Ascensão (2018) found that the government evicted marginalized groups growing on interstitial spaces under the guise of ensuring access of all to that space. At the same time, the government implemented its own gardening projects in order to discipline methods of, and users engaged in, commons management. The authors reflected: “One form of commons (implemented following a model; run according to the rules of the bureaucracy) ascends over another form of commons (historically embedded; bottom-up)” (Ginn and Ascensão 2018: 17). Finally, some landowners are reluctant to lease space to gardeners or to allow gardeners to use the space as they see fit (see Chap. 3 for more details on this occurrence in my research). Rosan and Pearsall (2017) found that a landowner in Philadelphia (United States) was unwilling to provide land to a gardener for fear of future questions regarding ownership. The landowner was reported as stating: “You let these people cultivate the ground and after a while they will get to thinking they have a natural right there” (pg. 31). The more private nature of gardens can also be read in their boundary-making. As physical borders (such as fences) and social norms are constructed, they signal

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to others that not all people and uses have unfettered access. At the same time, enclosing resources such as gardens can be interpreted as necessary to sustaining those commons. For example, Colding and Barthel (2013) argue that allotment gardens are key for forming links between people and ecosystems because within their longer-term leases, association rules, and collective monitoring, gardeners are better able to pass on socio-ecological memory. Thus, gardeners must navigate ways to protect gardens from misuse while also fostering public participation in commoning. Importantly, garden spaces are not always open, inclusive, and homogenous. Individual growers within the same agricultural space may imagine their space variously as private property, commons green space, simply a farm, and/or a community space. These imaginaries drive different normative frameworks, boundaries, deliberations, and physical manifestations (Aptekar 2015). Further, within-garden relationships can reproduce urban logics and micro-politics (such as racial othering and enclosure) in ways that generate tensions (Ernwein 2014). For example, Egerer and Fairbairn (2018) found that tensions regarding water use and land management and values (including whether to erect fences around individual plots or to allow neighbors to spend time in the garden) reflected broader narratives of urban property rights. They argue that “the beneficiaries of gardens are not random, but are filtered through sociopolitical and racial sieves that regulate access to garden communities and environmental commons” (pg. 68). Thus, it is important to understand how “the public” is defined and included in garden projects and to collectively consider gardener responsibilities toward such a public (Follmann and Viehoff 2015). Many of these notions of public or private space and common resources arose and/or were points of tension in my research. While the vast majority of growers did not own the land they cultivated, the growing spaces surveyed across the four cities varied widely in their collective nature. In Medellín, some gardens were adamantly managed as allotments, while others were required to form collectives in order to use the land. In Rosario, most municipal garden programs are allotments or individual farmers that own or lease their land, while several gardens organized by community organizations are collectively managed. In both Toronto and Charlotte, allotment gardens can be found in municipal Parks and Recreation lands and in some projects managed by organizations and churches. There are also many gardens in both cities that are managed collectively with shared responsibility, decision-­ making, and produce. As discussed in the remaining sections of this chapter, in all of these cases, questions of publicness and commoning arose.

Productions of Lived Space in Urban Agriculture My research on urban agriculture in Rosario, Toronto, Medellín, and Charlotte demonstrated the slipperiness of public-private framings of space and resources. As found by others, urban gardens are variously conceived as private space cultivated by rights-holders, public maintenance of environmental commons, or something in between. This section builds on political ecology and urban studies theories of

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public space and commons to consider how policy, lived materialities and practice, and representations of space unsettle and re-envision the commons. In doing so, it looks to Eizenberg’s (2012) use of Lefebvre’s moments of material, lived, and representational space to understand community gardens in New York City. She argues that the intersection of efforts to protect and control material space with mechanisms of cooperation and communication produces alternative knowledge and experiences of space in ways that change its meaning and value. In my research, this was evident in the different framings of urban agriculture as stewarding of the environmental commons or as a site of labor and place-making through which new rights are formed.

Policy Approaches to Stewarding the Commons As described in the literature, public space and commons are produced through public policy and official perceptions of space. Government approaches to commons shape who can use them and for what purpose. Governments are also often the landowners for urban agriculture projects. As such, it is critical to consider their approaches to the public or private nature of urban agriculture commons and how that impacts the everyday lived experience of growing in cities. In many examples in my research, a tension arose in the desire to engage residents in managing environmental commons on public lands without supporting growers’ claims to those resources. As described above, landowners can have a significant role in determining if gardens are spaces through which growers manage public environmental resources and space or whether the investments made by gardeners create rights to make decisions about how spaces and resources are used and by whom. In government-supported programs in all four cities, urban agriculture was seen as a means for managing public commons (such as park space and environmental resources) as well as for building community. This aligns with neoliberal urbanism regimes that devolve responsibility for social concerns to individuals and civil society (as discussed in Chap. 2). In Medellín, the local government approached environmental projects—such as the  Greenbelt and urban gardens—as a means of achieving urban sustainability and development goals. The city sought to grow its world reputation through investments in environmental projects and supported urban agriculture as a means to further those goals (Hammelman and Saenz-­ Montoya 2020). Policy priorities had important implications for garden operations. The government-supported projects in a new Greenbelt were to be carried out as collectives managed by non-profit organizations. Such structures foster a stewarding of the environment while foreclosing potential rights claims derived from working the land. These projects used collectives and non-profit management to produce organic goods for sale at farmers’ markets in wealthy neighborhoods. They were also publicized with signage extolling the government’s investments, alongside messages throughout the Greenbelt project proclaiming the values of stewarding the environment (see Fig.  5.1). The growers in Greenbelt gardens were residents of

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Fig. 5.1  Signage describing an urban garden built as part of the Greenbelt project in Medellín. The sign includes logos for non-profit organizations and the municipal government. It reads: Here an agroecological community garden will grow. Support the work of your community. Avoid throwing garbage and rubbish. (Photo by Author July 2017)

informal settlements, most of whom were displaced from the Colombian countryside. Since many of those involved had squatted on land in self-constructed neighborhoods, their ability to formally claim a right to land and a place in the city was limited. The Greenbelt project and associated gardens further precluded those rights claims by positioning growers as only stewards of common environmental resources. Other urban agriculture projects in Medellín were seen as a strategy for preventing the growth of informal settlements, since growers were positioned on the edge of neighborhoods and were prohibited from constructing any structures on the land. These guidelines were intended to prevent the further sprawl of informal settlements since the only approved land use was urban agriculture and, eventually, fences were constructed around them. Thus, from a policy perspective, these urban agriculture projects were viewed as public approaches to managing the commons. However, growers and residents increasingly saw encroachments on the use of public space more broadly which they feared would translate into limits to their access to public space (for instance, restrictions on public music or theater or limiting the size of bags that can be carried on public transport). This produced tensions that called into question who and what uses have access to public space.

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In Rosario, municipal urban agriculture programs sought to formalize the practice as an accepted land use in order to protect projects that originated through informal squatting on land. During the 2001 economic crisis, many people occupied unused lands to grow food. Once the economy began to recover, more land use tensions arose in these spaces. In response, the municipal government identified available lands that would not compete for other land uses—such as housing—and established garden parks in those locations accordingly. The garden parks are organized as allotments. The growers that were incorporated into the garden parks largely represented low-income residents and migrants that are marginalized by poverty and exclusions from the formal labor market. This land use policy approach supported multiple goals. First, it provided more stable land tenure for growers to maintain environmental commons. One advocate explained: We have to keep working toward this and the land, the water, the air, as our Indigenous populations say, are not things that are given, they are common goods. And the land has to be available to be worked.

It also ensured that urban agriculture practice would not compete with potential higher-value land uses. The municipal government and researchers surveyed neighborhoods to determine locations for garden parks that would not interfere with other land uses. Developing urban agriculture in these spaces also prevented residents from establishing their homes in unstable areas—such as floodplains or along train tracks. Thus, the practice of urban agriculture was instrumental for stewarding the land against unauthorized use. While the growers had autonomy in what they grew and whether they chose to sell or consume their products, they were prevented from making formal claims to that land. In Toronto and Charlotte, where many urban agriculture projects are situated in municipal Parks and Recreation land, policy approaches also sought to enable growers to maintain environmental commons without making claims to the space. The growers in my research from Toronto and Charlotte represent diverse groups. In Toronto, many growers, especially those with plots in Parks and Recreation gardens, are middle-class residents participating in gardening for leisure. However, this research also included many migrant and/or low-income growers connected to civil society organizations in order to supplement food budgets. In Charlotte, the majority of growers represented middle-class groups seeking to connect to the land, build community, contest the food system, or participate in a hobby. While these different backgrounds may present different desires for claiming rights to public space or environmental commons, the emphasis on stewardship remained evident in both cities. For example, in Toronto, one advocate situated within the municipal government described a process of establishing community gardens in park space. This process included consultation with various stakeholders in order to build consensus and identify areas and designs for community gardens that would not interfere with other park uses. For this advocate, such an approach was important for promoting “a greater sense of stewardship, rather than ownership, of park space.” They also addressed concerns about the efficacy of gardeners in managing commons (e.g.,

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complaints about individual plot appearance) through establishing procedures and guidelines that make clear maintenance standards and community stewardship models. A garden advocate further explained: Allotment gardens are faced with the issue of demand exceeding supply, and yet some plots allocated to individuals still go un-used and un-tended. Some sites have been subject to complaints about plot appearance, and declining state of good repair of allotment garden infrastructure. In 2012, development of procedures and guidelines began to address some of these issues, such as the development of maintenance standards and a community stewardship model to enhance community involvement in maintenance and monitoring.

In these examples, the public-private nature of gardens becomes muddled when public policy approaches seek growers who will merely steward the commons, while, through the practice, materiality, and representation of garden projects, growers often begin to claim rights to space and resources.

Producing Contested Publics Through Lived Space The practice and materiality of urban growing can facilitate claims to public space and commons. Invoking Lefebvre, Eizenberg (2012) argues that gardens are lived space through which emotional and cultural values and meanings, place attachment and identities, and a sense of ownership and control are developed. This lived space and its extension to claiming a right to the city were evident in Toronto, Medellín, and Rosario.1 One of the most common methods of growing in Toronto is in allotment gardens managed by the municipal government (through Parks and Recreation, Toronto Community Housing, and other large landowners). Historically, gardeners have been able to maintain their plots for many years, thus making significant investments into the ecological and social health of common land and resources. Garden managers discussed the contributions growers make in building up soil quality and improving urban environments as well as sharing ecological knowledge and cultures. One large landholder in the city began to recognize the ability of agricultural practice to conserve lands and so began offering longer-term leases to growers (for a small fee). Other municipal landowners began to lament the long tenure of allotment gardeners, and some research participants noted that Parks and Recreation was considering limiting tenure to 2 years. One advocate explained this potential: The thing though is right now the city’s community garden program, I don’t know if they’re gonna go ahead with this because they got a lot of pushback from garden organizers, but they were moving towards the model of a new – if you have a plot in a community garden

1  This section focuses on these three cities because desires to claim ownership were not frequently discussed by research participants in Charlotte. This is likely because the more suburban landscape in Charlotte means that those who wish to have their own land to grow are more likely to be able to do so in their backyard. Further, most of the garden projects in Charlotte rely on more communal decision-making than in the other three cities.

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you can only have it for two years, with a rotation system, because the demand is very high. And so they thought that this would be a way to address that scarcity, and to get people to stop thinking about “I have a plot of land,” and to think of it almost as more of a recreational program. As well as using a soccer field for an hour once a week as opposed to “This is my patch of land,” which was shot down entirely by most of the community garden organizers as being totally unfair and really bad for the community process.

Another garden manager and advocate critiqued this recent push by municipal authorities to limit the tenure of growers in allotment gardens. If these people love this outdoor space and they stay there 20 years, then great. Why try to move them, they are doing something, they are performing a city service. Even just, investing in your soil, building up the humus layer, how much more water you are retaining. I feel like in Europe it is much more common to rent like your home, they have a different ­relationship there when you get your allotment and you are going to stay. It’s a North American private property ideology that we are so married to.

For this advocate, the contributions made by the practice of urban agriculture should entitle growers to certain rights for maintaining their investments. Another advocate similarly explained the material importance of allowing people to maintain their individual plots: I’ve been told that – at least on the part of parks – so they’re moving in the direction of wanting to invest more into community instead of individual plots. Yeah, and they say that because they say, “Oh, people will keep these plots for years and they don’t give them up.” Well, they’re feeding their families. Do you expect them to give that up?

Thus, the material production of the garden is an important aspect of gardens’ lived space and contributes to demands to maintain access. In other gardens, particularly those associated with non-profit organizations (that were organized both as collectives and allotments), this lived experience changed the growing spaces by granting marginalized individuals (such as recent immigrants) access to spaces where they aren’t normally invited, introducing agriculture as an appropriate land use for conservation purposes, and bolstering the questioning of private property ideologies. For these growers, the lived space of the garden was forged through the practice of growing and sharing produce and knowledge in ways that muddied the perceived publicness of the land and resources. In Medellín, where growers cultivated land in informal settlements (and thus were often squatting on land while in their homes), they also viewed growing as a way to claim rights to space in their neighborhood. One grower described how the practice of building gardens supports claiming rights to the space and resources: For example, there are certain territories where people want to send you away, for example, [in another informal settlement neighborhood]; they fought for that territory. They arrived, settled and claimed that territory as theirs and made some gardens so they could continue to produce food. The gardens were finished or the fact that you get there and make a garden, that’s a way to claim a territory as yours.

For many of these growers, who are identified with groups that are often marginalized in public rhetoric as not contributing to the city, they also found that participating in urban agriculture demonstrates their contributions. They reported that tourists

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began passing through neighborhoods on their way to eco-parks and admired the gardens. Their gardening was important for demonstrating their place in the city to others. But such claiming of a right to the city is not fully settled through growing. Many growers noted that they were squatting on land or that they had leased it from a foundation or the municipality. Thus, they were constantly fearful that the land (and thus the perceived rights that come with it, not to mention the food resources) would be taken from them. Finally, in Rosario, the material and embodied experience of growing food was important for maintaining undeveloped land and gaining legitimacy for urban agriculture as a land use. For some municipal growers, their ability to take care of and preserve unoccupied lands through growing is a way of demonstrating that it is possible and valuable to maintain urban commons. One agronomist described this perspective: “We talk about this like this, we were winning over territory with people. Face to face. And they told this strongly. Because we were doing something impossible with urban agriculture.” For them, the ability of migrants from the interior of Argentina to maintain commons and culture through growing food from their home regions, despite their marginalization and precarious living experience in Rosario, was a powerful outcome of urban agriculture practice. In all of these cities, the practices (labor and occupying space) and materialities (soil investments, maintaining heritage crops, producing food for families) of urban agriculture were a critical component in claiming a right to public space and resources. This experience of lived space fomented an understanding of gardens as more private spaces, conflicting with policymaker goals of stewarding the environmental commons. As found in the literature discussed above, urban agriculture practice can produce collective socio-ecological relationships with other growers and places that disrupt notions of public or private space.

Shifting Representations of Growing as a Collective In addition to the lived and perceived space produced through practice and policy, the representation of gardens as private or public space, or somewhere in between, plays an important role in the value and meaning ascribed to urban agriculture. Gardens can be perceived as a site for exchanging feelings, knowledge, values, seeds, and plants in ways that counter neoliberal rationales (Eizenberg 2012). They can be a place for organizing to claim a (collective or individual) place in the city. Socio-spatial collectives can be formed through dialogue and action among strangers (Ernwein 2014). Through experiences of informal learning and meaning-­ making, new representations of gardens as part of neighborhoods, communities, and the city are forged. “The production of the commons is a collective action that challenges the hegemonic social order and follows instead an alternative logic of justice” (Eizenberg 2012: 779). Yet, within-garden enclosures (such as fences around individual plots) can also disrupt representations of gardens as non-commodified commons and public space

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(Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Discursive representations of gardens alongside physical barriers can bring to light tensions over whether a space is public, for whom and what. In my research, this was particularly evident in determinations of management structure—whether a garden should be managed collectively and produce shared among growers, as an allotment in which growers make decisions over their own plots, or a combination of the two. In many cases, the management structure evolved over time. It was also associated with success or failure in achieving goals of enhancing access, building community, addressing food insecurity, and maintaining public goods. The discussions surrounding these decisions demonstrate an uneasiness with determining a strictly public or private nature of urban agriculture. In Medellín, two different garden management approaches arose over the years, particularly as investments in urban agriculture evolved. One early garden managed by internally displaced persons in an informal neighborhood in the eastern hills of the city began with 40 families that each had a plot of 60 × 30 m. The land was leased from the mayor’s office, and growers had authority to decide what to plant, how, and when. Most grew food for personal consumption and exchanged any excess with neighbors or a nearby food bank. The main rule was that growers could not build any structures in the garden, but otherwise they operated with great autonomy. In more recent years, the local government invested more significantly in other informal neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city through its Greenbelt Project (see Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020 for more information). This project was organized and managed through a non-profit organization with the goal of producing organic goods for local markets. The management structure required growers to form collectives in order to participate in the program. Each garden was required to have at least three or four growers or families that were self-organized as a collective, in which joint decisions are made regarding which areas of the garden need more work, when and how to invest contributions, and the overall development of the garden. This requirement of collective management produced tensions with the more autonomous gardeners above who did not want to organize as a collective. One grower described their objections to collective management approaches: So each of them has space, it is not like other spaces that have a communal garden and all the people work on that… we weren’t part of this [Greenbelt] project because we were individual gardeners. We would be in a debate because of this, when we began as gardeners in front of the mayor’s office, we started as individual gardeners, 40 people but working individually, each person works in his or her plot, gets a product, we support each other but that’s all. So if we want to get into [the Greenbelt project], we need to have a group in one garden, at least four gardeners and that’s precisely what we refuse to do. We don’t want to lose our individuality as gardeners, and since we don’t depend on that, we decided to become self-consumers and also self-sustained, so the idea is, if you are coming to support us then that means that’s all. We are 40 gardeners, but if someone is getting a little bit of something, that person is going to get it in an individual way. It doesn’t have to do with anything else, that’s a huge battle with other entities because they want us to unify, generate a group and that is precisely what we refuse to do.

These growers felt that while they are part of a community of gardeners, having the autonomy of individual garden plots (and an associated ability to make decisions

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and claims) was critical. Over the years, they were also successful in maintaining garden participation, while the collective gardens struggled to keep large numbers of participants. One collective garden manager noted that they began with 25 people but had dwindled to only 5 active participants at the time of my research. In Toronto, urban agriculture advocates and garden managers, especially those serving low-income and migrant communities, also discussed decision-making regarding management structure. Several gardens evolved into offering both communal sections and individual plots. This developed in part because of a perceived reluctance of growers to participate in communal growing. In those cases, the communal parts of the garden could offer a starting place to learn how to grow or to engage in a more limited way for those with fewer resources or time. It was also a way to grant access for those that simply want to be able to spend time in the space, thus adding to the public nature of the garden. These gardens were more likely to attract growers of diverse ages and expertise. Individual plots were more likely to be requested and maintained by long-term growers who knew how to cultivate large yields from the space and had more time to devote. These growers represent diverse groups, some were retired migrants growing for extended families, and they represented both lower- and middle-class residents and were spread throughout the city. For many of these growers, the gardens represented more individual space through which they held autonomy and a claim on the resources produced. Some noted, however, that a focus on individual plots can limit participation to only those who can fully commit to their gardens (and pay fees for the plot) and contributes to long waiting lists. As described above, it was reported that Parks and Recreation was considering moving away from supporting individual allotments in order to limit the amount of time a person can have a plot and to shift their support to new communal gardens. One urban agriculture advocate explained how this management approach might impact participation: They’re moving away from the sense of “ownership” of a plot because that supposedly conflicts with the public nature of parks. It’s weird for me, because years ago I advocated for communal gardens with people who insisted that the only way to engage gardeners (particularly immigrant and racialized gardeners) was to give them their own plots. For me, communal gardens were great for engaging people who were marginalized in a variety of ways, but they take a phenomenal amount of organizing resources and are not a sustainable model for volunteers. So Parks recognizes the challenge of finding community groups with enough organizing capacity to run a garden, yet that’s the model they want to impose?

Thus tensions arose regarding which management structures can best invite more people into public space and maintain common resources without giving them too much sense of ownership over public land or resources. In Rosario, most of the contemporary municipal gardens were managed as allotments within a communal space. One advocate explained that the focus on allotments evolved over time. Initially they began with collective gardens, but after 3  years, gardeners asked for individual plots. One urban agriculture advocate reflected on that evolution: For us it felt like a failure at first but then we realized that it was actually a very practical thing because each person is able to work the way that they want to at the time that they are

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able to. That’s because there are a lot of people here who have temporary work so sometimes they couldn’t [work] in the morning or in the afternoon, so each person has their own plot…There still is community work, but each person is responsible for their own space.

Growers can then choose whether or not to participate in municipal markets to sell their goods or to keep them for self-consumption. This urban agriculture advocate finds that the gardens are both collective and individual. While each person or family has their own plot for which they hold responsibility, there are still decision-­ making, socialization, and work that are completed collectively. This experience of collectivity in gardens with individual plots was also reported in the other cities. In this way, the garden moves between public and private spheres throughout gardener experiences. Notably, many of the gardens I visited in Rosario that were organized by non-government organizations were collectives, and growers were not relying on the gardens as a source of income. They espoused proudly collective ideals in which work and produce were shared and the space was considered accessible to the wider public. Finally, several growers in Charlotte similarly presented different ideas as to whether gardens should be managed collectively or as individual plots. Several expressed critiques of collectively managed gardens. They noted that the motivation may be to organize a cooperative project, but in reality, it often ends up being a couple of people with the desire and means that run the garden while also trying to find volunteers. One advocate noted that this arises from the personal involvement required in growing. “It’s like you’re becoming part of an ecosystem, and that’s hard to do in the way that we generally approach volunteerism.” Other managers of collective gardens heard concerns from growers about not having their own space and not receiving enough produce. Yet, for those who choose cooperative approaches, the focus was on more than just the produce. It was also about creating community and maintaining a commons-based approach to projects (as also found by Follmann and Viehoff 2015). These different approaches to garden management, and tensions that arise therein, demonstrate that the private or public nature of gardens is slippery. If all gardeners have individual allotments by which they plant and grow their own food without interacting with others, is that truly a public space? And if not, does such work then affirm the rights of those gardeners to the fruits of their labor and a place in their community? In answering these questions, the representation of the gardens as collective or individual is important for demonstrating their value to urbanism goals. For many in positions of power, the ability of gardens to provide food for an individual or to provide a site of socialization is not a sufficient return on their investment. Instead, they perceive more value in representing the gardens as collectives that contribute to stewarding the environmental commons, produce goods for the market, and raise the sustainability profile of the city.

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Unsettling Public or Private Natures Examining the public and private nature of urban agriculture spaces and resources across the four research sites revealed important dynamics of relational, material, lived, and representational space that is mediated by neoliberal urbanist policy ideologies. Urban agriculture is a complex assemblage formed through material (seeds, water, plants, soil) and practice (labor, investments, socializing); the lived experience of being in and creating places imbued with cultural value and meaning; and representations of collective practice, claims to land and resources, and contributions to urbanism goals. For example, gardeners in all four cities argued that they developed rights to grow as desired and to environmental resources as a result of their physical investments into urban lands. Additionally, through urban agriculture practice, growers contributed cultural and embodied knowledge to particular places and cities at large. For some, these contributions to city materialities and meanings represented their civic contributions through which they could claim further rights to participate in decision-making about territory and the city. As found in other cities, threats to these gardens were then perceived as threats to material needs for survival and cultural values. In this way, urban gardens may be experienced more as private spaces. However, the degree to which such material, practice, lived experience, and representations contributed to public or private natures varied across the research sites and were dependent on relationships, wider context, and policy approaches. For example, in all four cities, municipal land owners enforced rules regarding keeping garden spaces clean and not erecting structures. In some cases, especially in Medellín and Toronto, these landowners were careful to represent gardeners as stewards of environmental resources and spaces. In doing so, they sought to make clear that the gardens are indeed spaces for pursuing public, not solely private, goals. However, the growers themselves in Medellín, Rosario, and Toronto argued that through investing in the soil and their communities, they were better able to claim rights to those spaces. Landowners’ representations of urban agriculture as a strategy for maintaining environmental commons and contributing to sustainability goals could be seen as aligning with neoliberal strategies that devolve responsibility to individuals and civil society, yet without affording them any of the property rights prized by neoliberal urbanism ideologies. But these arguments are disrupted through the lived space of gardens. Further, gardens are not homogenous spaces disconnected from the lived realities outside the garden gates. Several urban agriculture scholars point to the commoning evident in urban agriculture as a strategy for resisting hegemonic regimes of enclosure and individualization. In this way, they create potential for forming solidary movements that seek to disrupt capitalist urbanisms. Yet, in much of my research, the collective possibilities of urban agriculture are not where avenues for resistance were found. Instead, more tension arose in the desire of growers to have individual plots and be able to claim rights to resources despite not being property owners. Importantly, organizing gardens as individual allotments did not foreclose opportunities of collective

References

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engagements. As demonstrated in debates regarding collective or individual organization of gardens in Medellín, even when organized as individual plots, growers still engaged in sharing of produce and knowledge, socialization, and collectively claiming a right to their city. For residents who are often excluded from property regimes (such as those living in poverty and/or informal settlements), the simple act of having autonomy to invest in and claim land is an act of resistance (see also Ramírez 2019). Thus, urban agriculture has the potential to produce alternative conceptions of space grounded in both collective and individual value. The urban agriculture projects in Rosario, Medellín, Toronto, and Charlotte made clear that the publicness of urban socio-natures is fluid. It can be invoked collectively through imaginaries and material struggles. Yet, it can be constrained by individual interpretations of space, land ownership, funding, and policies that determine how the resources can be used and by whom. For some, the need to obtain funding, land, or investments has impacted their ability to act as collectives or grow individually (see also St Clair et al. 2020). Given the uncertain land tenure of most growers, those who can claim property rights are often in the position of determining the parameters of practice and discourse. Yet, for many in my research, the act of gardening unsettled whether the space, land, and resources were public or private and the related rights to participate in the making of the city.

References Amin A (2002) Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity. Environ Plan A 34(6):959–980 Amin A (2008) Collective culture and urban public space. City 12(1):5–24 Aptekar S (2015) Visions of public space: reproducing and resisting social hierarchies in a community garden. Sociol Forum 30(1):209–227 Atkinson R (2003) Domestication by cappuccino or a revenge on urban space? Control and empowerment in the management of public spaces. Urban Stud 40(9):1829–1843 Barraclough LR (2009) South Central farmers and Shadow Hills homeowners: land use policy and relational racialization in Los Angeles. Prof Geogr 61(2):164–186 Bastia T (2018) Transnational migration and the gendered right to the city in Buenos Aires. Cities 76:18–22 Blomley N (2004) Un-real estate: proprietary space and public gardening. Antipode 36(4):614–641 Blomley N (2005) Flowers in the bathtub: boundary crossings at the public-private divide. Geoforum 36:281–296 Blomley N (2006) Enclosure, common-right and the property of the poor. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby Bodnar J (2015) Reclaiming public space. Urban Stud 52(12):2090–2104 Chatterton P (2010) Seeking the urban common. furthering the debate on spatial justice. City 14(6):625–628 Colding J, Barthel S (2013) The potential of “Urban Green Commons” in the resilience building of cities. Ecol Econ 86:156–166 Djokić V, Trajković JR, Furundžić D, Krstić V, Stojiljković D (2017) Urban garden as lived space: informal gardening practices and dwelling culture in socialist and post-socialist Belgrade. Urban For Urban Green 30:247–259

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Dovey K, Wood S (2015) Public/private urban interfaces: type, adaptation, assemblage. J Urban Int Res Placemak Urban Sustain 8(1):1–16 Egerer M, Fairbairn M (2018) Gated gardens: effects of urbanization on community formation and commons management in community gardens. Geoforum 96:61–69 Eizenberg E (2012) Actually existing commons: three moments of space of community gardens in New York City. Antipode 44(3):764–782 Ernwein M (2014) Framing urban gardening and agriculture: on space, scale and the public. Geoforum 56:77–86 Follmann A, Viehoff V (2015) A green garden on red clay: creating a new urban common as a form of political gardening in Cologne, Germany. Local Environ 20(10):1148–1174 Ginn F, Ascensão E (2018) Autonomy, erasure, and persistence in the urban gardening commons. Antipode 50(4):929–952 Klein N (2001) Reclaiming the commons. New Left Rev 9(May/June):81–89 Lefebvre H (1991) The production of space. Blackwell, Oxford Lefebvre H (1996 [1968]) Writings on cities. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA Lefebvre H (2003) The urban revolution. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Mitchell D (2017) People’s park again: on the end and ends of public space. Environ Plan A 49(3):503–518 Németh J, Schmidt S (2011) The privatization of public space: modeling and measuring publicness. Environ Plann B Plann Des 38(1):5–23 Pikner T, Willman K, Jokinen A (2020) Urban commoning as a vehicle between government institutions and informality: collective gardening practices in Tampere and Narva. Int J Urban Reg Res 44(4):711–729 Qian J (2018) Geographies of public space: variegated publicness, variegated epistemologies. Prog Hum Geogr 44(1):77–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518817824 Ramírez MM (2019) City as borderland: gentrification and the policing of black and latinx geographies in Oakland. Environ Plann D Soc Space 38(1):147–166 Rosan C, Pearsall H (2017) Growing a sustainable city? The question of urban agriculture. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Schmelzkopf K (2002) Incommensurability, land use, and the right to space: community gardens in New York City. Urban Geogr 23(4):323–343 St Clair R, Hardman M, Armitage RP, Sherriff G (2020) Urban agriculture in shared spaces: the difficulties with collaboration in an age of austerity. Urban Stud 57(2):350–365 Staeheli LA, Mitchell D, Nagel CR (2009) Making publics: immigrants, regimes of publicity and entry to ‘the public’. Environ Plann D Soc Space 27(4):633–648 Terzi C, Tonnelat S (2017) The publicization of public space. Environ Plan A 49(3):519–536 Thörn C (2011) Soft policies of exclusion: entrepreneurial strategies of ambience and control of public space in Gothenburg, Sweden. Urban Geogr 32(7):989–1008 Turner MD (2017) Political ecology III: the commons and commoning. Prog Hum Geogr 41(6):795–802 Vigneswaran D, Iveson K, Low S (2017) Problems, publicity and public space: a resurgent debate. Environ Plan A 49(3):496–502 Woods C (2009) Introduction: Katrina’s world: blues, bourbon, and the return to the source. Am Q 61(3):427–453 Hammelman C, Saenz-Montoya A (2020) Territorializing the urban-rural border in Medellín, Colombia: Socio-ecological assemblages and disruptions. Journal of Latin American Geography 19 (2), 36–59.

Chapter 6

A Way Forward

City governments worldwide continue to look at sustainability through a neoliberal lens that prioritizes projects and policies that best contribute to environmental goals while also increasing capital accumulation. Under an umbrella of sustainable urbanism, approaches to addressing ecological concerns have been integrated into strategies of economic development that emphasize central city redevelopment and the creative class (Long and Rice 2019). Increasingly, urban agriculture is part of these strategies as such projects are viewed as urban amenities that attract investment. Investigating sustainable urbanism approaches through the ordinary, everyday motivations and interactions of urban agricultural practitioners and advocates in four cities in the global North and South demonstrates these neoliberal impulses as well as the ways that they devalue non-economic outputs and constrain social justice achievements. It is important to understand these phenomena from an everyday scale because such experiences and collective experimentation shape urban imaginaries and socio-ecological futures (Bunnell et al. 2018). This book thus sought to tell the story of urban agriculture movements across varied geographies in order to make clear the multitude of urban impacts derived from this practice and the ways these initiatives are embedded in, reproduce, and resist neoliberal urbanisms as they relate to land use, social justice, and environmental commons. This conclusion briefly returns to these ideas while sharing stories from growers whose hard work, optimism, and knowledge inspire a way forward for creating more just and sustainable cities through urban agriculture and broader food systems. During 4 years of research, I was fortunate to be welcomed into urban agriculture spaces (whether urban farms, rooftops, community and allotment gardens, teaching gardens, or bee hives) in Rosario, Medellín, Toronto, Charlotte, and many other cities. As growers and advocates shared their social, spiritual, physical, political, and economic connections to plants, land, animals, and each other, it was made clear that many maintain a strong commitment to growing food and pursuing social justice despite the challenges described in this book. Additionally, while my research was completed over many years, the writing took place during the turbulence of economic, social, and health crises in 2020. During this year, many people staying at home to prevent the spread of COVID-19 turned once again to growing food. In the United States, National Public Radio reported in May 2020 that pandemic “victory” gardens were on the rise as seed suppliers reported such an increase in demand that nurseries were running short on plants and seeds (Mayer 2020). As described © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_6

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throughout this book, those gardens are reported to contribute much more than food during supply shortages, including serving as a form of connection in a world of zoom meetings and stay-at-home orders. The remainder of this chapter continues to share stories from my research that suggest ways forward for fostering urban agriculture movements that can better create and sustain more equitable urban socio-natures.

 hallenges to Pursuing Social Justice via Neoliberal C Sustainability Policy Political ecology theorizing encourages scholars to look toward political economic structures—such as capitalism, neoliberal urbanism, and sustainability regimes—to understand human-environment relations. Utilizing such a frame to understand the successes and struggles of urban agriculture movements in several countries brought to light constraints these systems create through solely valuing the economic potential of urban agriculture as a land use while devaluing its non-economic contributions to the urban metabolism. One urban agriculture initiative that stood out in this regard is located on multiple acres of farmland and greenhouses in North Toronto surrounded by public and low-income housing. This farm distributes organic produce at a sliding scale, serves as a community gathering space through hosting public events and workshops throughout the year, and provides educational opportunities for children in nearby schools, internships for young people, and senior programming to address social isolation. It was founded by a collaborative with a core focus on addressing food insecurity and catalyzing social change. As a result of its social change mission, this urban agriculture project seeks to bring to light systemic challenges to achieving social equity through a non-profit farm. Through its anti-oppression and food system-focused educational and public programs, it brings attention to social equity concerns in the city. Yet, it is constrained by a neoliberal system that does not fully value its contributions and devolves responsibility to civil society without making available the resources needed to survive. As a result, this urban farm struggles to obtain sustainable funding in order to maintain adequate staffing. One farm advocate elaborated: So, that’s also part of the challenge especially with the funding climate right now where a lot of funders are moving out of core funding and one of the things we’ve been thinking about is what are the long-term implications overall for community-based organizations who depend on these funds… I guess I’ll say for the farm we have opportunities to generate a bit of our own income.

Yet, that income is limited such that the farm managers struggle to obtain a living wage. One manager discussed this challenge: It’s a different kind of self-exploitation whereas I own my own business but I’m poor. Do you know what I mean? So, I think it’s also opening up that bigger issue around how do we

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change the system so that the food that is grown – think about it - your grocery stores, they get government subsidies. They get government support too and then on top of it they pay people low wages. A lot of the farms…we’re trying to pay people fair wages.

For this stakeholder, the reliance on civil society to address food insecurity and create living wage jobs was difficult in a funding environment in which private and public funders were unwilling to pay for core expenses. Instead, they saw the government subsidies provided to grocery stores as creating an uneven playing field. Further, they sought to bring attention to the non-economic contributions the farm provides to the urban metabolism. Chapters 3 and 4 also demonstrated these challenges in which the predominant focus on the economic valuation of urban agriculture devalues other outputs. Instead of focusing exclusively on economic development—which can be limited—advocates throughout my research argued that more support was needed to further the social, political, cultural, and environmental contributions of urban agriculture while also calling attention to systemic constraints. An advocate for this farm in Toronto further explained: How can we get more city champions to really push this conversation forward from where it is at now? I think it’s important and it’s key and I think it’s about time that the politicians started realizing that urban ag is not a hobby. Urban ag plays a key role in food systems and we need to see that and we need to nurture that and we need to support that so that it is channeled in the right ways to get food to the people that really need it the most.

For this grower, and many others, it is time to more clearly recognize and compensate the multitude of unquantifiable contributions urban agriculture makes to the urban metabolism. Additionally, relying on political ecology frameworks supports investigating how approaches to stewarding public space and environmental commons are disrupted when the socio-natures created through labor and materials necessary for maintaining gardens further claims to space, resources, and decision-making. In this regard, Chap. 5 describes the production of lived and representational space in urban agriculture. Tensions arise when landowners (public and private) view growers as stewarding public space and resources while growers experience their labor, investments, and place-making as enabling claims to the land and the city. Growers in all four cities reported that they felt more included in the work of creating the city as a result of their urban agricultural practice. These claims also make clear the contributions urban agriculture makes beyond merely producing food or fostering urban economic development. In all of these examples, neoliberal urbanism approaches to sustainability embrace urban agriculture as a strategy for building capital while devaluing its contributions to environmental goals; to cultural connections between people, place, and land; and to resisting social inequities. Such devaluing makes it difficult for urban agriculture projects to survive longer term, which is especially evident in a lack of land tenure, and to foster alternative urban imaginaries grounded in social justice. Stakeholders throughout this research described concrete examples of how this devaluing made their work harder or unsustainable. One community garden manager in Toronto indicated that the government had recently stopped collecting

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yard waste and garbage from the garden, creating a “logistical nightmare.” They reflected: “I’m surprised we’re having this much resistance from big stakeholders because it’s something…It’s not a bad thing. We animate empty Hydro field space, right?” Other growers in Toronto discussed challenges with funding, access to land, water, and other resources, complying with local land uses, and vandalism. Many of these challenges were viewed as stemming from a lack of support from landowners, lawmakers, and other stakeholders. Two urban agriculture advocates elaborated: We’ve had gardeners who aren’t allowed to grow stuff on their balconies because… it was junk, [landowners] don’t get it. So in terms of land access, I think one of the things that we want to work on is raising the awareness with landholders that there actually are benefits and there are good processes you can go through that give access to land. It’s challenging to get resources for small-scale, sustainable urban and peri-urban farming because of the scale - it’s not considered significant enough in terms of job creation, impact on climate change or food security (at least at the provincial level). While it’s true that urban farming may not generate the big numbers, there are other benefits that come from working at a relatively smaller scale - such as flexibility and adaptability to local needs. This is the scale that often supports the most marginalized people, the ones who fall through the cracks. Also getting institutions to recognize that what they consider small-scale impacts may mean a great deal to individuals - having access to fresh, culturally appropriate food; showing their children how to grow it or having a few extra dollars in the pocket to pay for better quality of life.

For the second advocate, raising awareness of the multitude of values ascribed to urban agriculture is important for overcoming material constraints to the practice. In Medellín and Rosario, growers and advocates also noted that limited access to cultivatable land and resources, as well as vandalism (dumping trash in garden sites, pilfering plants), were salient challenges. For many, this was perceived to be a result of the devaluation and limited visibility of urban agriculture. One advocate in Rosario described this perspective: I think urban agriculture still lacks visibility. Urban agriculture is something that we need to have. Even though we’re the only city in Argentina where there is a public policy about urban agriculture and we are, of course, very happy that these policies exist, all of the benefits of urban agriculture still aren’t fully understood…Urban agriculture needs to be transversal. It should be present in all policies: social policies, healthcare and culture because it rescues foods.

In Charlotte, advocates similarly expressed that the lack of public and institutional support for urban agriculture is a challenge: People don’t care if they lose urban agriculture and farming. Most white people see it as an interim land use until development comes along. They don’t care if farms are gone, they can still get [food] from California or Chile.

In response, advocates across the research sites emphasized the need to better value the multiple contributions of urban agriculture in order to protect their investments in the urban metabolism. For some, this also demonstrated a need to upset larger systems of urban valuation (such as neoliberal capitalism).

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Alongside recognizing the multifunctional value of urban agriculture, many in Rosario and Charlotte highlighted the need for understanding the hard work and investment required to be successful. One advocate in Rosario reflected on these challenges: The parque huertas (garden parks) are places that were deserted, places with trash and now they’re transformed into gardens, but this initial work is hard. The first two years, people who don’t know a lot about agriculture need to learn if they want to become farmers… It takes some time when the land was being used for industrial agriculture, the land is like an addict that you take away their drugs. So it takes some time to recuperate.

Similarly in Charlotte, there was quite a bit of skepticism reported about the potential impact of urban agriculture. Several stakeholders provided examples of people starting urban gardens without realizing the hard work needed to sustain them. One garden manager elaborated on this mindset: One of the things that community gardens do really effectively is remind people that growing food isn’t just a slam dunk and that if you imagine delicious local food, it will just appear. There are these things called weeds, and there are these things called bugs. There’s this thing called timing. The complexities of being a good farmer.

For this garden manager and several others, the investment needed to be successful in urban agriculture is a barrier to engaging in the practice with social justice motivations. Instead, they argue that only those with resources can participate. These challenges, alongside the devolution of social responsibilities to civil society organizations, have led to tensions between non-profit organizations seeking financial investment from small pots of money. In Charlotte, where there is more limited municipal support for urban agriculture, there were many more reports of conflicts between organizations working in the food movement. These stories demonstrate the challenges encountered as a result of the neoliberal urbanism context in which they are embedded. Political economic approaches that focus on capital accumulation as a strategy for achieving sustainability goals (while devaluing non-economic outcomes) create tangible, everyday challenges to urban growing.

More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints Despite these challenges, there is growing momentum in all of the cities in this research to support and expand urban agriculture and to address social inequity in those initiatives. Several strategies for achieving these goals and upsetting norms were discussed. One frequently discussed need was to engage and value more diverse viewpoints in urban agriculture movements. This was particularly salient in Charlotte as a city that experiences significant racial and economic segregation and uneven development (and in light of the influential protests against police brutality and racial oppression in 2020–2021). Several growers lamented that in public rhetoric and funding opportunities, leaders and projects in communities of color are often

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left behind. Yet, these are the places where some of the longest-lasting and more impactful projects can be found. One of the first community gardens established in Charlotte that is still active today celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2021. It is located in a gentrifying neighborhood known for challenges with drug violence when the garden began. Managed by African-American women who have lived in the neighborhood since long before the garden’s founding, it is primarily cultivated by 20–30 seniors living nearby. The collective also eventually expanded to include seven gardens throughout Charlotte and now hosts regular garden events with cook-offs and awards given to the best garden each year. The reported primary values provided by this garden were encouraging people to eat healthier (one grower brought bread and mayonnaise with her to the garden in order to cut fresh tomatoes to make sandwiches and eat directly at a picnic table), forming intergenerational bonds (a boy scout troop regularly helped maintain the garden, built planter boxes, worked on the greenhouse/shed, and helped plant and harvest), and providing social space (one gardener often brought snow cones for groups working in the garden and neighborhood kids). The garden moved once in order to acquire more space, and a garden manager reported that despite signs that the neighborhood is gentrifying, they were optimistic the garden won’t be displaced. Instead it was understood to be a valuable project that provides green space in a neighborhood where it was rapidly disappearing. Importantly, however, the managers of this and related gardens were not often at the table for decision-making regarding the food movement and urban development in Charlotte. They sustained the garden through donations collected from a variety of places. Growers connected with this garden and others throughout the city reflected on the unequal ways in which decisions are made in Charlotte that impact what is valued and how resources are distributed. One urban agriculture advocate (not directly affiliated with the garden described above) noted the importance of recognizing these challenges: That is the hell of it all in terms of justice because we won’t achieve it until we, white people, get – peel off enough layers because we’ve all – we have got layer after layer after layer of privilege and white supremacy that we don’t even begin to acknowledge. I mean every single day, there is something that I believe we could all put on the list of well, I see that this way now, maybe tomorrow I can get down a little deeper and the next day and the next day. But never will we get all the way to what [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] really feel, which means we have to just do what they say do, whether it’s right or wrong, we need to just do it with them. If they say that’s what we need, we need to say, okay, well I’ll stand here with you and do it.

The sense that achieving social justice goals in food systems required valuing the knowledge and experience of diverse groups was echoed throughout my research. These perspectives align with ideas of food sovereignty in which multiple ways of knowing are valued such that all people have more say over how their food is produced, distributed, and consumed. One grower and teacher in Rosario explained: We have to be in equal conditions because knowledge is knowledge. There’s no scientific knowledge about everything, there is knowledge of how to change the reality of certain conditions. And sometimes campesino knowledge isn’t kept in mind and it’s lost. The

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knowledge is eroded. And we are fighting so that this campesino knowledge is in the same condition to be able to make wider knowledge. Because, it’s true that there is a lot of research that erodes knowledge.

For this person, one way toward achieving food justice is valuing diverse knowledges, not just those that emerge from academic settings. In Toronto, several urban agriculture advocates similarly argued that many people most impacted by inequality in food systems are not often included as experts and actors in devising solutions. Instead, many participants in food system conversations are from affluent communities. One advocate discussed the need to change that dynamic: So, a lot of that is we need garden programs for [marginalized residents], for them to be able to share what they already know and for them to interact with the food system in a way that they just normally aren’t invited to really. So, it’s like for them to be able to take in some of that power and to take that space…. The root cause isn’t just that someone doesn’t have a garden.

Further, decision-making related to urban planning can omit or ignore the voices of marginalized communities. In the revitalization plans of a low-income neighborhood and social housing project, residents regularly attended community consultations to ask that their growing spaces be maintained in the new design (Hammelman 2019). Yet, the final designs included much fewer spaces for growing in order to meet density demands. In this case, while residents did participate in planning conversations, their demands were still not met. In addition to decision-making, some advocates also reported the important ecological contributions made by diverse growers. One advocate in Charlotte noted the multitude of plants and growing styles brought to community gardens by migrants. But no, so we got all kinds out here, and the garden itself – all these metaphors – it’s a quilt. I mean, as you walk from place to place, you see somebody gardening like their grandmother’s ex-slave garden, and next to them, someone from Jamaica, and next to them is someone from Rajasthan, and next to them is somebody doing something completely different and they’re from Puerto Rico. She had maize corn  – indigenous corn  – that was 25-feet tall. It was towering over the garden. So, it’s a delightful place.

For this advocate, the diversity of growers contributes to feelings of delight in the garden and to the urban fabric. A grower in Rosario similarly reflected on the importance of urban agriculture for sustaining indigenous plants: Because it’s always like the people that come from the interior part of the country, from the countryside, they bring a plant that they used to grow there. A fruit, oregano, lettuce… a variety from there, with a colored seed. And even though they just have a plant in their house, in their little land, in their precarious living space, it’s powerful.

In examples throughout my research, growers and advocates noted the need for more clear and transparent processes regarding land use, funding, and other planning decisions. Many people argued that valuing the expertise and experience of growers from marginalized backgrounds was one step toward ensuring that they have more power in their food systems and cities.

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Pursuing Systemic Change Another strategy for change described by research participants focused on the multiple ways in which social equity can be pursued. Participants focused particularly on the need to pursue systemic change in order to have more widespread and lasting impacts. This was particularly evident in Rosario where urban agriculture enjoys more public policy support. Several of the growers, scientists, and advocates involved with the municipal urban agriculture program in Rosario (PAU) had been engaged in the practice (whether in Rosario or other parts of the country) for decades. Some held deep ecological knowledge as a result of a lifetime of growing food in the interior of Argentina and connections to generational histories. These growers migrated to Rosario for a variety of reasons but found it challenging to survive in the city where their knowledge was devalued. They also widely critiqued industrial agriculture in Argentina, which they viewed as degrading the environment, making people sick, and severing cultural connections to the land. Such growers expressed that their urban agriculture practice sought to remedy those negative outcomes of industrial agriculture at the everyday human level. But, they also sought to create more systemic change. Through teaching others, supporting each other, and raising the profile of urban agriculture, they hoped to change the systems such that more people could pursue food sovereignty. One advocate reflected: There can’t be change in a society like Argentina’s unless it’s in its structure. How did Argentina’s agriculture history form? It’s a country that feeds the world. And so, how can it be that people that are feeding the world are dying from hunger? The problem is in the distribution. It’s not well-distributed. And society’s access to understanding that they need to claim and demand their rights. Human beings need to claim their rights. It’s an environmental, social and even legal problem. Yes, we find out that people are coming out strong with a demand for food sovereignty, there’s still a lot left to build. Being sovereign is what we want, but the actual construction of that sovereignty is hard.

Several advocates in Toronto also debated whether urban agriculture furthered incremental or systemic change. While urban agriculture was often discussed in strategies of food access for under-resourced neighborhoods, others questioned its ability to make a dent in those challenges. At the same time, strategies to address food insecurity through food banks and tax credits to grocery stores that participate in food recovery programs were perceived as insufficient. One advocate elaborated: “It’s not just about saying to Campbell’s Soup, ‘If you have extra, you give it to the food banks and you’ll get a tax credit.’ This is ridiculous. There’s got to be a better way and that’s not the way. We actually have to deal with poverty.” Several other growers, supporters, and decision-makers across the four cities discussed the need to see urban agriculture and food as part of larger systems that produce social inequity. For many, while the everyday contributions to families are important, these larger systems must also be disrupted in order to really address social inequity.

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Embracing the Ever-Changing Urban Environment Finally, the urban agriculture projects encountered throughout my research frequently adapted to the changing dynamics of their environments. Cities and neighborhoods are always changing. Places experience waves of investment and disinvestment, residents move in and out, leadership changes, and city and grower priorities evolve. There is often a sense that urban agriculture projects must be sustained in their current state into perpetuity in order to be successful. But my research made clear that different measures of success can be valuable. In Medellín, residents in a newer informal settlement in the north of the city began a community garden during my research. There was debate between the Medellín government and its northern neighbor regarding which municipality had responsibility for the neighborhood. As such, it received very limited infrastructure investments. Many residents struggled with food insecurity. Food banks and other social service agencies would periodically bring carts of food to the neighborhood, but, in those instances, residents reported waiting hours to receive a small bag of food. A group of residents began planting in land near a church in order to make more fresh produce available for their families and to claim a collective space in the neighborhood. The nature and ownership of the space evolved over time, as the leaders found they needed to negotiate use of the space with local gang leaders. During some of my visits, the growers reported success with tomato plants as they worked to improve the soil. In other visits, less progress had been made. Importantly, however, during the visits in which plant growth and resources to invest were less forthcoming, the garden was not understood as a failure. Instead it was part of an ongoing process that produces different values along the way. In Toronto, the temporary nature of using urban space was embraced in some projects. There were new innovations of building hydroponics systems in shipping containers, growing plants in milk crates that could be relocated if needed, and using movable containers for pop-up gardens that would allow intermittent involvement throughout the year (see Fig.  6.1). Other commercial enterprises seek to respond to evolving consumer demands related to organic products or on-demand, ready-made meals. A stakeholder in one such enterprise explained: So, we’re definitely niche, but we’re trying to be nimble and responsive for our market so that we can keep just creating a space for ourselves and that’s a big priority and that’s an ongoing challenge while still trying to be a farm.

These initiatives embraced the need to pivot in response to policy or land use changes, new and less neighborhood investment, market logics, and consumer and resident demand. In Charlotte, several advocates noted that gardens ebb and flow alongside the evolution of cities. For some, this provides opportunities for learning. One advocate reflected: When a garden collapses, it often moves, and those lessons move with it. But you need ongoing support, and political support comes and goes, so gardens need to be organized within and pay attention to the outside as well.

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Fig. 6.1  Growing in milk crates on the site of a former gas station in downtown Toronto. (Photo by author 2017)

In this regard, it is important to recognize the dynamism of the cities in which urban agriculture is located and to embrace similar evolution within the gardens. One agricultural scientist in Argentina further described the factors that may impact a garden’s success from year to year: I think in relation to the success, the most important thing about this program is having accompanied the dynamics that have come out, the different political dynamics, the different social moments and I’d even say the different times of year. For example, if we’re in a school for a year, you can do a garden project in four months, talking about sovereignty, develop these concepts, have the plant in your hand, harvest it and eat it and the next year not do anything. So, there’s that possibility of one year doing a lot and the next nothing, and we don’t see it as a failure, rather we understand it’s a question of people’s time, the school’s time, the possibilities, the changes that come. If this principal left, this year the kids aren’t having recess outside because of dengue, and just understanding all of these different dynamics, even political ones, even micro ones, like that could be going on at the school, all the way up to national politics.

For this advocate, and many growers, success can be defined in more micro and short-term effects. One grower in Toronto noted that she was proud of the food grown and relationships built, remarking simply: “We grow food for people.” In order to achieve these goals of growing food for people, the environment, and cities in a socially just way, it is important to recognize the multi-faceted contributions of urban agriculture, the diverse knowledges that inform the practice, the need for systems-level change, and the temporary and dynamic nature of urban environments. Throughout this book, urban agriculture projects in four cities in the global

References

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North and South have been described as socio-natures. These socio-natures are constituted as complex assemblages of soil, plants, and water; human labor and connection; land value and policy priorities; and cultural, social, and political representations. As assemblages do (Guthman 2019), these elements move in and through each other at different times, scales, and places to contribute varyingly to the urban metabolism. Thus, in order to create more just and sustainable urban food systems, urban agriculture must be understood as a valuable, always-evolving piece of the puzzle.

References Bunnell T, Gillen J, Ho ELE (2018) The prospect of elsewhere: engaging the future through aspirations in Asia. Ann Am Assoc Geogr 108(1):35–51 Guthman J (2019) Wilted: pathogens, chemicals, and the fragile future of the strawberry industry. University of California Press Hammelman C (2019) Challenges to supporting urban agriculture through food system governance in Toronto. Environ Urban 31(2):481–496 Long J, Rice JL (2019) From sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism. Urban Stud 56(5):992–1008 Mayer P (2020) Pandemic gardens satisfy a hunger for more than just good tomatoes. National Public Radio. Mar 9. Web. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/852441460/pandemic-­gardens­satisfy-­a-­hunger-­for-­more-­than-­just-­good-­tomatoes

Index

A Agroecology, 48, 56, 57, 71, 72 Alkon, A.H., 3, 26, 27, 44, 45, 71 Allotment gardens, 8, 21, 22, 32, 63–66, 88, 90, 94, 95, 103 Amin, A., 84, 85, 87, 88 Assemblage theory, 4, 84

F Farmland conservation, 51 Food justice, 23, 27–30, 35, 73, 78, 109 Food security, 2, 10, 16, 46, 50, 55, 61, 66, 106 Food sovereignty, 28, 29, 71, 73, 108, 110

B Blomley, N., 34, 85, 86, 89

G Greenbelt project in Medellín/Jardin Circunvalor de Medellín, 13, 92 Greenbelt project in Rosario/Proyecto del Cinturón Verde, 48, 71

C Charlotte, United States, 14 Claiming territory, 93 Classens, M., 5, 22, 34, 42, 44, 45, 62 Collective gardens, 46, 47, 98, 99 Collective organizing, 2, 95–99 Commodification of nature, 41 Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development (CEED) gardens, Toronto, 50, 51 Community economies, 62–70 E Ecosystem services, 22, 23, 70–74, 78 Eizenberg, E., 85–87, 91, 94, 96 Environmental commons, 7, 16, 83–101, 103, 105 Environmental education, 75

H Heynen, N., 4, 45 I Industrial food system, 2, 3, 16, 26, 44, 56, 61, 77 L Land tenure, 15, 16, 21–36, 89, 93, 101, 105 Land use policy, 93 Lefebvre, H., 5, 16, 86–88, 91, 94 Levkoe, C.Z., 36, 61 Lived space, 5, 16, 62, 86, 87, 90–100

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9

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Index

116 M Market gardens, 12, 41–57 McClintock, N., 5, 21–23, 27, 35, 44, 45, 52, 62 Medellín, Colombia, 8, 12, 13, 24 Multifunctionality of urban agriculture, 60, 77 N Neighborhood revitalization, 60, 67 Neoliberalization, 22, 41, 42, 45 Neoliberal sustainability, 7, 24, 30, 31, 104–107 Neoliberal urbanism, 7, 15, 16, 23, 29, 35, 36, 42–44, 46, 52, 56, 91, 100, 104, 105, 107 Nutrition education, 2, 61 O Ordinary cities, 60 P PAU, 10, 48, 49, 71, 110 Place-making, 6, 30, 62–70, 84, 85, 89, 91, 105 Political ecology, 4–6, 16, 22, 23, 28, 36, 42, 90, 104, 105 Private property regimes, 7 Privatization of environmental resources, 41 Public-private dichotomy, 86 Public space, 7, 16, 35, 83–94, 96, 98, 99, 105 R Ramírez, M., 11, 88, 89, 101 Representational space, 87, 91, 100, 105

Reynolds, K., 2, 3, 25, 27, 31, 34, 45, 52, 62, 70, 77 Right to the city, 13, 29, 67, 84, 85, 94, 96 Robinson, J., 6, 42, 60 Rosario, Argentina, 8–10, 56, 59, 71, 96, 110 S Sbicca, J., 3, 31, 33, 62 Social capital, 2, 5, 29, 31, 62, 63, 67, 68, 76–78 Social integration, 32 Socio-natures, 4, 5, 45, 86, 101, 104, 105, 113 Sustainability fix, 7, 22, 24, 27, 41, 83 T Tornaghi, C., 2, 6, 26, 28–32, 42, 44, 62, 63, 77 Toronto, Canada, 8, 11, 12 U Uneven development, 7, 15, 41–57, 107 Urban green space, 2, 27, 33, 70 Urban metabolism, 4, 5, 16, 22, 45, 76, 84, 104–106, 113 Urban political ecology, 4, 15, 28, 42–45 V Value of urban agriculture, 8, 16, 64, 65, 67, 69, 78, 107 W White, M., 29, 30, 63