Specifically, my spatial analysis indicates that the main citywide programs in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle have generally developed gardens closer to marginalized communities than to more privileged ones. Overall, gardens in each city have been located closer to neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and greater proportions of Black and Hispanic residents than to more affluent, whiter neighborhoods. In the 1990s and 2000s, Seattle’s P-Patch program sought to counteract concerns about fairness in the use of public resources by prioritizing new garden development in lower income areas, an effort that worked to flip the relationship between income and garden proximity over time such that communities with higher poverty rates are now likely to be closer to the nearest garden than otherwise similar communities with lower poverty rates. However, over time Seattle’s gardens appear to be growing less accessible for immigrant communities. Across all three cities, garden proximity to Asian Americans and foreign-born residents has been mixed, despite the significant labor that immigrants have contributed to the development and maintenance of each program’s gardens. In Philadelphia, high rates of garden attrition reflect the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s emphasis on greening as a tool for economic development. Indeed, numerous gardens have disappeared in neighborhoods where housing costs have increased and poverty rates have decreased, cannabis dry rack while garden proximity to neighborhoods with a higher share of Black residents has decreased over time. The examples of Seattle and Philadelphia show how programs can achieve clear outcomes by prioritizing a certain benefit that they want urban agriculture to provide in their city.
In contrast, Milwaukee’s historical garden distribution does not show significant changes in accessibility over time, other than a gradual increase in the distance to the nearest garden for all neighborhoods. In this chapter, I show how decisions at the organizational level can impact urban forms and the distribution of growing space across the urban landscape, and I highlight the apparent impacts of the different strategies observed for marginalized groups. Finally, I summarize my major findings and discuss their implications for social scientists as well as urban agriculture advocates and planners. As cities become increasingly important sites of contestation over governance and resource allocation in the 21st century, understanding how community-based organizations interact with local government is critical— not only how these organizations secure resources from public sources, but also how they win policy victories in the face of elite opposition. In developing and defending community gardens, the urban agriculture organizations that are the focus of this dissertation provide instructive cases in the potential power that everyday people have to influence urban land use patterns. At the same time, they demonstrate various ways that organizations are constrained by their environments: insufficient funding led Milwaukee Urban Gardens to shift from preservation to programming; in Philadelphia, two organizations with vastly different relationships to the city’s elite have put forth competing narratives for urban agriculture’s value; and in Seattle, the PPatch program’s public nature has forced its accountability to democratic priorities but has also left blind spots around outcomes like gentrification that were not widely anticipated. In an era of compounding socio-environmental crises, efforts to build recognition, legitimacy, and security for urban agricultural space have implications for the broader conversation around urban sustainability and environmental justice .
My analysis highlights the multiple waysthat legitimacy figures in the process of contesting urban land, providing empirical support for theories that conceptualize an ongoing interplay between organizational legitimacy and the social forces shaping organizational outcomes. Extending these theories, I discuss how an organization’s pursuit of legitimacy as a community service provider comes to structure its possibilities for hybridizing into a social movement organization, and I highlight ways in which the organizations studied here also shaped the local legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use by influencing public discourse and the physical landscape to remake human-environment relationships in urban space.Investigating movements that advocate for gardens and the institutions that support and regulate urban agriculture is valuable, both because of farming’s potential to meet important human social and material needs and because of the paradoxical political and economic forces that are exposed when urban land is set aside to be farmed rather than developed. How do advocates secure long-term use of garden and farm sites in cities? How do the organizations involved and the local political economy influence what is valued, and what is considered possible, for these spaces? What are the outcomes of preservation efforts in terms of policy, program characteristics, and garden accessibility? In this chapter, I take up what urban agriculture research has suggested about forms of urban growing, urban development processes, and the impact that community gardens can have on the urban landscape, as well as what remains to be understood about these dynamics. To illustrate what is at stake and what forces shape the possibilities for urban agriculture, I then summarize the research on key aspects of the urban context including food system inequalities; the politics of shaping and understanding urban nature; urban development and its contestation; and the role of community-based organizations in making urban life.
Next, I discuss the research on how social movements effect structural change, a critical question for urban agriculture advocates looking to win favorable land use policies. I close the chapter by highlighting the major contributions of this dissertation, addressing the uncharted nexus of organizational sociology and political ecology and discussing the limited research on the shifting relationship between community-based organizations and social movement organizations, whose blurring is especially pronounced among groups working to preserve urban agriculture sites. Organized efforts to grow food in cities have a long history in practice, but they have only recently caught the attention of researchers. Following a handful of studies in the 1990s and early 2000s , Lawson’s history provided a comprehensive picture of the long history of community gardening in the US. Urban agriculture can take many forms, including private gardening and animal husbandry in backyards, balconies and rooftops; community gardens; edible landscapes such as food forests and community orchards; gardens at schools and other institutional sites; demonstration gardens; and commercial urban farming operations of various sizes . Community gardens are the most common sites for urban agriculture research in the developed world, perhaps because of their rich social relations, commonality and ease of accessibility. This dissertation touches on many forms of urban agriculture, trimming tray because policymakers and the public often tie them together; however, the primary focus is on community gardens, because these multifunctional sites offer the most potential benefits and are often at the center of collective action in defense of urban agricultural space. Much of the research on community gardens to date has taken the form of case studies about individual gardens or programs , needs assessments , and measuring or estimating potential contributions to food security, urban redevelopment, political mobilization, or other aspects of social life . While several researchers have noted the vulnerability of gardens to urban development pressure , few studies have focused directly on the land use issue. Studies about the threat of garden removal and resistance to it have almost exclusively taken up the case of New York City’s urban agriculture movement . This local movement coalesced in response to a major land transfer plan in the 1990s, a conflict that received a great deal of coverage at the time. Though they have received less attention in the literature, similar dynamics have played out in cities across the US, creating an opportunity for comparative research regarding the social movement activities, organizations and outcomes in different cities. Following Allen et al.’s distinction between alternative and oppositional food movements, scholars of urban agriculture have begun to analyze variation in community gardens according to their political orientations and outcomes. Some grassroots projects are described as radical because they take an oppositional stance toward existing social structures, explicitly challenging industrial agriculture and the political-economic system that has virtually abandoned many urban communities . Others are more reformist, seeking to provide urban residents with new opportunities for environmental connection and self-provision, without confronting the structural context in which these needs have arisen . Still others serve to support the existing social system by signaling the type of neighborhood change that benefits elites. Counterintuitively, while gardens often become vulnerable to removal when land values increase, they are also an attractive neighborhood amenity and can themselves contribute to gentrification.
Urban real estate tends to increase in value when community gardens are built nearby, especially in areas with initially low land values . Community gardens sometimes receive support from developers and other elites because of their potential impact on the exchange value of urban land . However, increasing real estate value also contributes to displacement of vulnerable populations, and/or the destruction of gardens themselves to make way for development . Thus, gentrification can serve as a source of elite support for gardens, but it can also threaten low-income residents’ access to a garden and even the garden’s very existence . Scholars who approach gardens as “contested spaces” have noted that community gardens tend to proliferate in declining urban areas, yet they can also have an appreciating effect on neighborhoods which then increases the garden’s vulnerability to development. Even if gardens remain secure as the surrounding neighborhood gentrifies, their internal character may be contested. As a social and recreational activity that produces green spaces and healthy food, community gardening is associated with a range of individual and collective benefits: community empowerment , economic opportunity , safety and security , neighborhood development , environmental health and sustainability , cultural preservation , food security and nutrition , alternative medicine , rehabilitative therapy , and healthy recreation . Community gardens vary widely in their form and function , and the benefits they provide are not consistent across all gardens. Scholars suggest that attaining the full range of touted benefits at once is likely impossible, because community gardens and other urban agriculture initiatives are constrained by limited resources and market-based economic contexts. The wide range of benefits envisioned for community gardens means that participants at a given site do not always agree about how the garden should look or what purpose it should serve . This is especially true in gentrifying areas or other neighborhoods undergoing demographic change, in which residents from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds bring different norms and expectations to the space . Like other alternative and local food initiatives, community gardens fit well with a certain white, middle-class ethos , embodying a set of pastoral or “green” values. When the dominant social group universalizes its own values, the meanings and perspectives held by other groups are obscured, which can lead to a sense of exclusion . Yet food growing practices are important to every culture; people from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds have built urban community gardens and find meaning in these spaces . It is particularly important to interrogate the nature of community gardening programs before assuming that they are beneficial for those most in need, since community gardens can produce not only food, health, and community, but also displacement and exclusion, and since they are built amidst the inequality and uneven contexts of urban life.Inequalities in food access and health are large and growing problems in the United States. Across the country, food insecurity is significantly higher for Black and Latinx Americans than it is for whites . In cities, access to affordable healthy food is constrained in both low-income neighborhoods and in predominantly Black neighborhoods of any income level, a problem that is most pronounced in low-income Black neighborhoods . With insufficient food access, individuals are unable to make healthy decisions about their diets and consumption . Not having access to affordable food is a problem on its own, and also because food insecurity is associated with diabetes and other chronic diseases among low-income Americans . In low-income communities where nutritious food is less available, obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related health problems are more common . While proximity to an affordable food retailer certainly makes it easier to eat healthily, food insecurity is even more strongly correlated with income and race than with the food environment itself . Whether measured as distance to a grocery store or as income and purchasing power, spatial inequalities in food access are so stark that the correlation between food insecurity and diet-related health problems is observable at the neighborhood level.