These elements of urban political economy can be seen as the municipal government’s own organizational environment, which the government and its representatives must attend to in order to maintain their legitimacy, resource flows, and survival. Whether in pursuit of land tenure for community gardens or other public investments in quality of life, residents and community organizations inevitably bump up against large-scale structural constraints—no matter how much access and influence they have with local decision-makers—as they try to change local policy to meet their goals. In recent decades, American governments at all levels from local to national have been affected by the spread of neoliberal ideology, encouraging a turn toward A city’s civic conventions form an important piece of the organizational environment in which community gardening programs develop and define themselves. Yet what is possible for urban agriculture in any given city is also contingent upon its political-economic context. As urban political ecologists would describe it, ideas about appropriate uses for urban space combine with material flows and conditions, as well as ideas governing the legitimacy of governments themselves, in order to determine the actual production of urban socio-nature . In this regard, the distribution and character of urban agriculture in any city is influenced by local economic pressures, the sources and extent of public resources, and political factors at larger scales such as the laws and activities of state and federal governments. These elements of urban political economy can be seen as the municipal government’s own organizational environment, plant grow table which the government and its representatives must attend to in order to maintain their legitimacy, resource flows, and survival.
Whether in pursuit of land tenure for community gardens or other public investments in quality of life, residents and community organizations inevitably bump up against large-scale structural constraints—no matter how much access and influence they have with local decision-makers—as they try to change local policy to meet their goals. A primary set of structural constraints affecting all three cities is their existence in a market economy. In recent decades, American governments at all levels from local to national have been affected by the spread of neoliberal ideology, encouraging a turn toward privatization and new forms of commodification, reduction in taxes and public services, and government intervention to support market processes through deregulation and “entrepreneurial” initiatives . Local governments differ on many fronts, as reflected in the civic conventions they pay homage to, but in the US context they have all been forced into a fiscal squeeze by the reduction of federal funding, and they have confronted this challenge with the shared goal of increasing property values, the local population, and with them the overall prosperity of their local economy . All three case-cities are participants in a globalizing competition to attract capital and “win” at urban growth, and although they vary in their recent histories of “winning” and “losing” the competition for growth, all three cities show how urban growth machine logic and the political-economic pressures on municipalities influence the ways in which urban agriculture has been legitimized as a long-term land use. One common thread is the commodification of nature that runs concurrently with the commodification of land. In each of the case-cities, urban agriculture advocates have taken a different approach to building an economic argument that bolsters the legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use.
The commonality—bolstering urban agriculture’s legitimacy with an economic rationale—reflects how pervasively market logic is applied to land use in American cities, while the differences between the cases demonstrate variations in how land is commodified based on the local growth coalition’s status in the competition for capital. By drawing attention to the ways that commodification of nature contributes to the production of uneven urban environments, urban political ecology enhances understanding of growth machine dynamics and their impact on the use value available to residents.In a similar vein, urban political ecologists employ the metaphor of urban metabolism to show how the constant reconfiguration of socio-natural space opens up opportunities for transforming relations of power. Addressing the tension between earlier Marxist and more recent actor-network theory approaches within the field of urban political ecology, Heynen highlights the “egalitarian potential that is embedded within a robust conceptualization of urban metabolism” . According to political ecologists, the tendency of nature to reproduce itself freely runs counter to the private property foundations of capitalism, and urban agriculture holds radical potential as an opportunity for people to produce and consume outside of the market, nourishing non-capitalist material flows . However, because the land on which urban agriculture occurs is commodified, I argue that this radical potential is limited in important ways. Urban growers and the spaces they cultivate do contribute to the creative dynamism of socio-natural circulation: they work to reshape the ecology of cities, sustain bodies left undernourished by the capitalist food system, and promote a wider reimagining of urban relations; however, these material and discursive metabolic flows are still subject to the gravity of capitalist property relations and the mutually reinforcing interests of urban growth coalition members.
Asserting the ongoing relevance of Marxist readings of urban political ecology, I show in this chapter how urban political economy serves as an inescapable force influencing land use policy and the decision-making of elected officials. As noted above, in all three cities I investigated, community garden organizations ultimately succeeded in legitimizing urban agriculture as a land use by building narratives that emphasize the potential economic benefits of growing food on vacant lots, a commonality which demonstrates just how strong urban growth and market logics are as governing principles in US cities. Yet there is more to learn from comparing the commodification of nature across the three cases. The economic rationales for urban agriculture developed along distinct trajectories that illustrate how variations in organizational legitimation strategies, local economic conditions, and state-level political contexts combine in the construction of different discursive frames and physical manifestations of urban nature. Comparatively, the local governments in Milwaukee and Philadelphia have faced more acute financial strain in recent decades than the City of Seattle. Milwaukee and Philadelphia have both struggled in the globalized competition for urban growth, while Seattle has largely succeeded. Compounding the effects of reduced federal funding, capital flight has limited the public resources available for social services and urban agriculture investment in both Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Many of the cascading challenges and social maladies are similar for all cities coping with capital flight, but Milwaukee and Philadelphia have diverged in how they construct the role of land in reversing the city’s fortune. In Milwaukee, land is a lifeline that needs to be reserved for potential property tax revenue, while in Philadelphia, land is a liability that has burdened the city budget and deterred development. In Seattle, where the local growth coalition has been winning in the competition to attract capital and the creative class, land has served as a selling point for the city’s livability. The City of Seattle currently has the most public resources available to invest in its community gardens—but upon close inspection, the benefits still accrue unevenly.In Milwaukee, civic conventions that support bottom-up governance facilitated the communication of resident desires regarding urban agriculture, hydroponic table including access to vacant lots and public resources to improve existing projects. As much as city officials are receptive to resident desires and cognizant of the multiple potential ways that urban agriculture works to meet these desires, the scale of poverty in Milwaukee—and legal limitations imposed by state laws—make it difficult for the municipal government to provide consistent financial support for community gardens and similar resident-led initiatives. Facing a severely constrained budget and compounding social problems caused by capital flight and economic decline, the City of Milwaukee is essentially caught doing triage as it attempts to address pressing social problems and attract new investment to regrow its tax base and the economy. Like many cities in the Midwest, Milwaukee has struggled to maintain its economic base with the decline of American manufacturing. In every decade since 1960, the city’s population has decreased, with the most precipitous contraction between 1970 and 1980 when the city lost 11% of its residents. It was during this time that in Milwaukee, as in many other American cities, community gardening received a surge of attention as a strategy to help residents feed themselves amid rising unemployment and higher food costs. Unemployment and poverty persist as major problems in Milwaukee today; the poverty rate is over 25%, and while the unemployment rate has moderately improved to a little under 7% in 2021, the rate for the city’s Black population is almost twice as high . With the decline of the manufacturing sector and inadequate access to transportation, many in Milwaukee—especially on the Near North Side, with the highest concentration of Black residents—cannot commute to what jobs are available .
High unemployment and concentrated poverty have brought on a host of problems including food insecurity, poor health outcomes, crime, and housing instability .Because urban agriculture has been legitimized as a land use and city leaders appreciate potential benefits that the gardens provide, officials have helped gardeners find funding where possible. In addition to the funding from CIP grants described in chapter 3, the Common Council has allocated over $600,000 for beautification and food access initiatives in recent years, some of which has been used to support community gardens. Given the city’s dire fiscal situation, such an amount of money that indicates the impact that urban agriculture organizations have made on the city’s priorities. Without the resources to provide more from the municipal budget, supportive city officials have partnered with other organizations in the region to leverage additional funding for Milwaukee’s community gardens and other green spaces. One source of funding is directly tied to the notion of urban agriculture as a source of employment. In partnership with the county’s federally funded workforce development office, Employ Milwaukee, the City of Milwaukee runs a summer youth employment program called Earn & Learn. Employ Milwaukee pays the wages for young people ages 14-24 who work for local government, nonprofit, and faith-based organizations and gain marketable skills in the process . Groundwork Milwaukee and some individual community gardens participate in Earn & Learn, employing youth to maintain gardens and other green spaces or to prepare and sell food from local urban farms. The organizations could not afford to pay the youth from their own budgets, but they are able to supervise them and provide job training that is considered a valuable workforce development experience by the county, the federal government, and the corporate and philanthropic donors that support Earn & Learn. As governments have reduced their own budgets and the scope of social service provision, the Earn & Learn program is typical of the kind of public-private partnerships that are expanding as the public sector becomes increasingly reliant on nonprofits to fulfill a public service. Furthermore, the fact that “workforce development” is considered a public service at all demonstrates the restructuring of relationships between the public, private and third sectors that has occurred through the influence of neoliberal ideology. With limited resources for the public services of food provision, urban beautification, and community programming, the City of Milwaukee seems to be doing what it can to support these areas as an ancillary benefit of the Earn & Learn workforce training, which is ultimately funded to benefit the private sector. The City of Milwaukee has found another financially motivated partner to support community gardens and other open space investments in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewer District . Like 850 other municipalities in the US, Milwaukee uses a combined sewer system which drains storm water along with sewage and industrial wastewater, creating the risk for sewer overflows during heavy rainfall that presents a “priority water pollution concern” for the federal government . Due to climate change, the Great Lakes region is facing an increased likelihood of heavy rainfall events—and therefore more frequent combined sewer overflows . Because of the potential for being fined by the Environmental Protection Agency when overflows occur, local water utilities with combined sewer systems, especially those in the Great Lakes region, have a serious financial interest in increasing their capacity for storm water management. Working in partnership with the City of Milwaukee, the MMSD and the Fund for Lake Michigan have invested billions of dollars to expand both “grey” and “green” infrastructure for storm water management—not only increasing the capacity of pipes and underground storage tanks, but also adding trees and bioswales and preserving open spaces so that more rainwater can be absorbed into the ground rather than flowing into the sewer system.