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, seedling grow rack 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. Nevertheless, an ethic of straightforward and transparent policy making in the interest of the general public has endured from the days of sewer socialism, contributing to the development of some bottom-up governance infrastructure. One notable element of the city’s governance infrastructure that serves to actualize resident ideas is the Community Improvement Projects program administered by the Neighborhood Improvement Development Corporation. Through this program, the city provides matching grants of up to $4,000 for resident-proposed projects that “stimulate resident engagement and support sustainable projects within a small geographic area” . Community gardens across the city have won these grants to support garden improvements, increasing the legitimacy of these sites because of the city’s endorsement and financial backing as represented by the CIP award. In recent years, particularly through its Department of Community Development, the City of Milwaukee has paid attention to residents’ ideas and priorities and has brought them into consideration in their urban planning. In 2012 and 2013, the Barrett administration conducted a survey and outreach meetings with residents to develop a sustainability plan for the city. One interviewee stressed that the prevalence of food in public opinion was unexpected: “when surveys have been taken over the years around Milwaukee, and there are issues around sustainability, I think the City people were shocked how much food came up” .
The ReFresh MKE Plan produced in 2013 showed that residents identified “empty lots and abandoned buildings” and “access to healthy food” as two of the city’s greatest sustainability challenges . Furthermore, “Fresh local food” was the single most common response given for “ideas that you think Milwaukee should focus on in its Sustainability Plan.” At the same time as ReFresh MKE was being drafted, the Department of Community Development was compiling a Vacant Lot Handbook with ideas for how residents could work with the city to repurpose unused land, based on examples of existing neighborhood projects that residents had initiated—including community gardens. As they developed these plans with attention to resident activities and priorities, city officials gained appreciation for the potential for urban agriculture to address important public needs. Thus, urban agriculture increased its legitimacy in the eyes of city officials as a tool to address public priorities developed from the bottom up. Adhering to civic conventions supporting governance in the public interest, Milwaukee city officials have been receptive to many proposals related to urban agriculture. The Common Council has approved land transfers to some formally organized community gardens located on unbuildable lots or in the city’s most economically depressed neighborhoods. When Will Allen, a local celebrity and nationally renowned director of Growing Power, sought to build a 5-story vertical farm and urban agriculture center, the city’s planners and Common Council worked with him to make necessary changes to the zoning code. The Common Council also approved a $250,000 forgivable loan for the expansion of Sweet Water Organics, an aquaponics business that hoped to scale up its operations and create more urban agriculture jobs. In 2012, in pursuit of a $5 million award in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, a competition to support innovative ideas for city improvement, the Barrett administration sketched out a proposal around addressing foreclosed properties while growing the local food system. When they made it to the semi-final round of the challenge, the administration set up a website to receive project ideas from Milwaukee residents, and then held a public forum to hear presentations for the top ten ideas. In all of these situations, greenhouse growing racks the city showed its interest in urban agriculture and openness to advocates’ proposals for new initiatives. Demonstrating the favorable political opportunity structure for garden advocates in Milwaukee, the city government has also been amenable to broader policy changes that facilitate urban agriculture. In 2010 the Common Council and city planners collaborated with the Milwaukee Food Council to revise the city’s zoning policy in a way that would permit urban agriculture in almost all parts of the city. With government officials so receptive to advocates’ input, the leaders of urban agriculture organizations my not have felt it necessary to mobilize the public around preserving community gardens, as doing so would potentially step outside the city’s civic conventions. While ideas about good governance are widely shared, they largely assume that the city officials will act in the public interest without needing constant vigilance and the pressure from grassroots mobilization and protest. Ideas about the value and need for active civic participation are not as widespread in Milwaukee as, for example, I found them to be in my investigation of Seattle. Over the history of the Milwaukee Urban Gardens / MKE Grows program, gardeners have been asked at a few moments to call or write to their Aldermen or to attend a particular public hearing. However, at no point did the program or other advocates in the city appear to sustain any outsider political strategies, as has occurred in both Seattle and Philadelphia.
Out of the three cities, Milwaukee interviews and archival materials demonstrated the least engagement with neighborhood associations or citizen advisory committees. In my qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and community documents, codes for civic participation, citizen voice, organizing and mobilization, and political pressure or influence were also the least frequent in Milwaukee documents and interviews, while the code for assumed city support had its highest frequency in Milwaukee. As mentioned above, the city sold some land in its inventory to community gardening groups; this happened between 2013 and 2017, with very little public engagement. In the six Common Council meetings where these land sales were approved, the only people who showed up to speak were the purchasers themselves and Yves LaPierre, an official from the Department of Community Development’s real estate division who manages the city’s garden leases. Apparently, LaPierre’s presence alongside the purchasers served to confer adequate legitimacy on the transaction for it to win council approval. Additional supporters of the purchasing organization, community gardeners or other urban agriculture advocates did not participate in any of the hearings. Their absence aligns with the city’s civic conventions that suggest grassroots political pressure is not a normative aspect of the local public’s civic expectations or repertoire. Indeed, the city has acted favorably toward urban agriculture without much public pressure. With Will Allen forming personal relationships with Mayor Barrett and other city officials and bringing a national spotlight to Milwaukee as a place using urban agriculture to improve people’s lives, government support for urban agriculture appears to have been greater than for other types of resident-driven activity. The city’s multi-million-dollar HOME GR/OWN program demonstrates a belief in the potential of urban agriculture as a community investment. This “catalytic project,” designed to meet goals in the ReFresh MKE sustainability plan, leverages public funds, land and staffing along with private investments and philanthropic support specifically to repurpose vacant lots and help people grow food. In Milwaukee, the prestigious national awards that Will Allen has won for his innovations in urban agriculture have helped to bring urban agriculture additional legitimacy along with that accrued due to the city’s baseline receptivity to resident interests. City officials have come to appreciate how urban agriculture could be used to define the city, attract outside funding, and build the local economy. However, this appreciation has its limits. As Chapter 4 will illustrate, city officials are loath to remove potentially developable properties from the tax rolls by transferring ownership to a tax-exempt organization. Eight out of my 18 interviewees, both garden advocates and city officials, stated this as if it were a matter of fact. One garden program leader, recounting a time when they were previously told to move their garden from a city-owned lot, explained that the city was prioritizing a potential development over the garden “because the city of course is looking at their tax base. And being a nonprofit, whether we purchase the land or whether we’re leasing the land, the city’s not making any money that way” . Like other interviewees from Milwaukee, this program leader took for granted that the city’s primary interest in land use decisions is tax revenue. Widely recognizing the limits to the city’s appreciation for urban agriculture, garden advocates in Milwaukee have rarely mobilized to resist garden removal. Both before and after MUG was established, when particular gardens have faced development threats, the more common reaction has been a sense of inevitability. Thus, while government support for urban agriculture is often assumed in Milwaukee, the people involved in urban agriculture projects understand that support only extends so far. In line with the city’s civic conventions, advocates have used the political opportunity structures available to them, such as Community Improvement Projects funding and the Barrett administration’s receptivity to citizens’ ideas about urban agriculture, to advance pragmatic policies to improve residents’ lives through urban agriculture. However, Milwaukee’s discursive opportunity structure does not support more confrontational strategies or radical, redistributive demands.