Rejecting the notion that urban agriculture is a legitimate land use mainly for its revitalization potential, Soil Generation is framing the need for preservation as an issue of community control over land use decisions. The City of Seattle’s original funding for the P-Patch Program was legitimized as support for recreation, but the program and its advocates have maintained legitimacy over time by documenting and emphasizing other benefits more in keeping with the departments in which the program has been housed—that is, providing food for people in need and a network of community-building spaces that bring diverse people together . While urban agriculture has been legitimized as a land use in all three case-cities, the different framings do not all translate equally well into making claims about the need to preserve community gardens in the face of more profitable potential land uses. For example, the economic development potential of urban agriculture confers legitimacy on such spaces, but does not preclude replacement with another form of development that would likely yield more jobs. Legitimacy is built up over time; once urban agriculture has come to be associated with particular benefits in a given locale, shifting the narrative proves more difficult. Furthermore, shifting an organization’s emphasis becomes more difficult once that organization has gained legitimacy and built up ties and commitments with other organizations in its environment. The challenge of gaining legitimacy to begin with was more difficult for MUG than for Philadelphia Green or the P-Patch program and its supporting nonprofit, how to dry cannabis because MUG lacked any affiliation with an existing, already-legitimized organization.
When seeking policy change to increase land tenure for gardens, MUG, Philadelphia Green and the P-Patch Program all erred on the side of insider advocacy, having built close relationships with city agencies . When insider strategies were not enough, the P-Patch nonprofit had relatively more flexibility than these groups to parlay its organizational legitimacy into social movement organizing. Since the PPatch nonprofit had gained legitimacy as a forum for supporting gardeners, rather than as a garden site administrator, its primary legitimizing audience was the gardeners themselves, and the organization depended relatively less on approval from city officials. Framing appeals for collective action as looking out for the interests of its primary, already-engaged audience, the PPatch nonprofit was able to take up the function of a social movement organization with relative ease . Finally, let us consider how the various organizations’ efforts to legitimize their operations have impacted the physical institutionalization of urban agriculture within each city’s landscape. For example, most Milwaukee residents and visitors are just as likely to encounter young people selling cottage goods made from produce they grew as they would be to encounter the space in which the products were grown. Given the relative scope of Philadelphia Green’s different projects, residents and visitors in Philadelphia are far more likely to see lots with the “clean-and-green” treatment than they are to see community gardens. Meanwhile in Seattle, the P-Patch gardens have been gradually developed into public gathering spaces rather than just growing spaces, and residents and visitors are increasingly likely to encounter them as inviting, park-like places. Thus, the organizations have legitimized urban agriculture around some benefits rather than others, not only discursively through media coverage, publicity, and political engagement, but also materially through the manifestations of their work that reinforce particular ideas about urban nature.
Organizational sociologists and social movement scholars have long emphasized the influence of external factors on organizational practices and outcomes . Yet an aspect of the organizational environment that has not received much attention in the literature is the locality’s civic conventions . Civic conventions are shared beliefs about expected and acceptable forms of interaction between the government and the polity, an institutionalized understanding of “how we do things around here” . This chapter will demonstrate how civic conventions are especially influential for hybrid organizations as they attempt to expand into a new organizational function which positions them differently with respect to civic action. Deploying the concept of civic conventions, I contribute to the literature on hybrid organizational forms by exploring the dynamics at work when service providers take on social movement work, rather than the reverse scenario described by Minkoff . Unlike hybrid organizations that begin as movement organizations and later take up service provision as a form of civic action, urban agriculture groups initially work to organize communities in the civic action of transforming land and must then take up social movement work later, when the transformed land becomes threatened. In doing so, garden organizations must navigate idiosyncratic local expectations regarding civic and political engagement. Organizations that build their legitimacy around social movement activities may be able to push the boundaries of local civic conventions, but organizations that are legitimized for community service provision face an extra challenge in gaining legitimacy for new activities, and thus pressure to conform to extant civic conventions is stronger.
Building connections between organizational theory and the literature on social movements, I argue that the local civic conventions can be understood as a combination of political and discursive opportunity structures, working together to shape the terrain on which hybrid organizations cultivate civic participation of various forms among some or all of their members. When they first form, urban garden organizations must work to establish legitimacy for themselves as community-based service providers. In order for a garden organization to be viewed as legitimate, the gardeners must be seen as contributing to the public good rather than as benefitting unfairly from public resources such as land and water. Even when urban garden organizations become familiar and widely accepted in a city, the use of urban land for agriculture is almost always viewed as a temporary practice . Once gardens are established, they often become quite meaningful to the gardeners and those living nearby; this emotional connection makes the loss or removal of the garden a difficult prospect. Facing an impending removal or changing economic conditions that increase gardens’ vulnerability to development, garden organizations must work to build a new kind of legitimacy for urban agriculture as a permanent fixture of the urban landscape. This effort requires new framing processes and political strategies, often including social movement mobilization. The strategies that can be pursued at this point will depend somewhat on the local civic conventions, as well as the existing frames that have been used to legitimize garden organizations.In this chapter, I highlight the role of civic conventions throughout the life of urban garden organizations and the movements they spur to preserve urban agriculture as a land use. When urban garden programs are building their initial legitimacy, when gardens are about to be replaced with a different land use, or when garden advocates propose a change in local policy that would increase the long-term security of growing spaces, they can build strategies that draw on local civic conventions to amass broader support from the general public . I discuss two main ways that civic conventions can promote garden legitimation at these different points in time. First, civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance can help build the legitimacy of urban agriculture as garden organizations are getting started and seeking out basic resources and support—in other words, as the garden programs are seeking to gain legitimacy as community-based organizations. Like other resident activities and use-value rich land uses, urban agriculture tends to have its strongest base of support at the grassroots level. If the municipal government is generally receptive to resident preferences and interests, this convention creates a relatively easy way for resident demands for urban agriculture to be incorporated rationally into local policy. In Seattle and, how to cure cannabis to a lesser extent, in Milwaukee, civic conventions which held that city officials should be receptive to bottom-up governance created many opportunities for residents to express their desire to use vacant land for growing food directly to key decision-makers, and the cities’ main garden organizations and policies gained legitimacy through this process.
Conversely, in the case of Philadelphia, civic conventions carry far less expectation for bottom-up governance. In this city, cynicism about government runs high in part because of a complex, opaque bureaucracy that seems to discourage formal resident input. In this case, when cultivated lots were being sold without gardeners’ prior knowledge or input, lack of access to decision-making and perceived injustice became rallying cries for broader mobilization around community control of land and urban planning. Comparing the social movement dynamics in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle, in this chapter I show how civic conventions present a landscape of discursive and political opportunity structures that hinder or make possible certain strategies for achieving an organization’s desired policy outcomes. Civic conventions that exist as widely shared ideas about what is unacceptable for, expected in, or salient to the local policy making process can be considered an aspect of the local discursive opportunity structure. That is, these conventions are cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate in the context of local policy making . When civic conventions are built into the local governance infrastructure, such as the mandates of various agencies or the procedures for urban planning, these formalized conventions are an aspect of the local political opportunity structure. That is, civic conventions involve legal and institutional arrangements that can present openings for social movements to pursue particular policies or decisions . Civic conventions in the form of policy infrastructure create important leverage points for organizations to apply political pressure, while conventions in the form of ideas are important to movement formation and mobilization. Civic conventions are not uniform across the three cities I investigated, yet as this chapter will demonstrate, these features of the local context have played a role in shaping the nature of mobilization to support urban agriculture in all three cases. The political opportunity structure in Milwaukee supported efforts to legitimate gardens through insider strategies to craft and enact supportive policy, while the discursive opportunity structure seemed to suggest less need or opening for widespread mobilization. Philadelphia’s civic conventions created essentially the opposite opportunity structure, in which advocates have successfully organized to build pressure from the outside with narratives about the injustice and inefficiency of the city’s existing policies. In Seattle, both the discursive and political opportunity structures supported the gardeners’ efforts to preserve their sites; periods of both insider and outsider strategies have contributed to the robust, secure, and thoroughly institutionalized network of gardens Seattle has today.The civic conventions in Milwaukee include a tradition of bottom-up governance that has translated from ideas to infrastructure over time. As a result, urban agriculture organizations have enjoyed a political opportunity structure favorable to voicing their interests directly to city officials, securing policy improvements and some public resources for their projects, without having to depart from their legitimized role as community benefit organizations. However, as Chapter 4 will explain, public resources in Milwaukee are severely constrained, meaning the city government has ultimately been unable to invest much in garden development or preservation, no matter how legitimate they consider urban agriculture to be. Additionally, the local civic conventions foster an expectation of bottom-up engagement while assuming good governance overall; these civic conventions do not broadly extend to an expectation that citizens should engage in ongoing activism and social movement activities to pressure their government for accountability. In other words, the discursive opportunity structure is less favorable to mobilization in defense of threatened gardens. Overall, Milwaukee’s civic conventions have created opportunities for community-based organizations to use insider advocacy strategies through the existing infrastructure for bottom-up governance, without presenting as much opportunity for organizations to organize a robust social movement to pressure city officials for longer-term garden tenure or greater community control over land use. Historically, Milwaukee was the center of “sewer socialism,” a political movement organized around public investments in physical infrastructure. Between 1910 and 1960, the Socialist Party was highly successful in Milwaukee politics, winning public support in large part because of honest-government platforms and improvements that Socialist officials achieved in sanitation, water and energy systems, and community parks—including the preservation of the Milwaukee lakefront for perpetual public access . Unlike Socialist Party politics elsewhere, Milwaukee’s Socialist movement was less ideological and more pragmatic. The civic conventions that developed in Milwaukee as a legacy of this era include ideas about good governance, but not as much identification with confrontational “usvs.-them” politics as may be expected for a city with a strong Socialist history.