Urban political ecology contains a political program “to enhance the democratic content of socio-ecological construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved” . As a result, urban politics play a key role in this emancipatory political project. At the forefront of any radical action must be considerations of how social actors can take control of the production of urban space “in line with the aspirations, needs and desires of those inhabiting these spaces” and questions of “whose nature is or becomes urbanised” . While gardening may present revolutionary or transformative approaches to urban spatial production, blind enthusiasm for the potential of these projects does not engage the essential questions of where, how, and with whom the gardeners’ work is developed. Gardens reflect and reproduce different boundaries of enclosure, inclusion and exclusion – both with participants and material, spatial land tenure relationships – within neighborhoods and within movements. Decisions on the construction of these boundaries shape the character of a garden and the role it will play in social change. Recognizing the multiple meanings and representations of ‘community’ in urban agriculture, Pudup calls for the adoption of the term ‘organized garden project’ instead of community garden. Organized garden projects refer to specific places,vertical farming in shipping containers geographical spaces not typically used for growing agricultural products that are cultivated by organized groups of people with collectively defined goals.
One such goal is securing tenure arrangements that allow gardeners to continue their projects in the manner they desire, whether that be through roving gardens moving from vacant lot to vacant lot, acquiring the use of public parks and public programing to support urban agriculture, or using gardens as a political tool in resisting development and gentrification. Gardeners recognize that their tenure strategies are bounded or to some degree shaped by contemporary property relations. Their assessment that property relations are a determining dynamic for the future of their gardens is acute. Many gardeners also contend that they are active participants in shaping the property relations that may determine the fates of their projects. Gardeners stress their projects are making a real impact on how local municipalities are embracing urban gardening as land use, how residents view the use of land for food production, and how gardening can challenge the priority of land value for development. I term the process of decision making gardeners that take in manifesting a land access strategy landing. Landing is a process of creating closure, when utopian desires are enacted on the land and preexisting property relations. Through landing gardeners recreate old or develop new socio-spatial relations, setting direction, and foreclosing on other possibilities if only for the moment. In analyzing organized garden projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, this dissertation explores two central themes: the political project to gain secure land tenure for the future of urban agriculture and the production of practices and narratives of property and urban space through garden projects. The first theme stems from the argument by gardeners and garden advocates that contemporary urban agriculture projects should become a permanent part of US cities. Gardeners are acutely aware of the lack of land tenure security on both public and private land due to the politics of ownership. A 1996 survey conducted by the American Community Gardening Association found that of urban gardens in thirty eight cities in the US, only 5.3% were owned by the gardeners or in permanent land trust .
The desire and commitment amongst garden advocates, spurs the questions: what form of garden are being promoted as the ideal for permanent urban agriculture, and what are the potential material and discursive consequences of these forms? The second theme explores how gardeners are engaged in reimagining the production of urban space and property as a dominant capitalist institution. In doing so, it also examines the tensions among differing cultures within urban agriculture that participate in utopian projects of recreating contemporary cities in more just and sustainable ways. These projects exist within conditions of possibility produced by urban development politics and also shape, through rhetoric and practice, a terrain of political possibility for change. Analyzing the ideologies, institutions, and practices of property promoted by differing garden projects can shed light on the potential contributions of these projects to transformative urban and food politics.Urban agriculture has had a presence in US cities since the 1880s, with several periods of popularization and growth . However, with the reemergence of gardening as a strategy in the community food security, food justice and food sovereignty movements, scholars debate how and if this new wave of urban agriculture can contribute to radical urban transformation. Historically, gardens served as a tool to improve urban conditions, especially during times of economic or social crisis when small patches of cultivation expanded to city or nation-wide projects . Urban agriculture has served as a social safety-net by feeding low-wage workers and subsidizing the social reproduction of workers during these times of crisis . Today’s social movements engaged in urban agriculture focus on lack of physical access to healthy food, racism in US food systems, and gaining popular control of the food system.
Self-provisioning through urban food production has been embraced as a means to address these social problems. In addition to improving food resources, scholars assert that urban agriculture contests dominant logics about the best use of urban space. McClintock argues that urban agriculture exists in tension with capital simply by putting underutilized land to use in the production of food . Mares and Peña agree that urban agriculture projects are forms of resistance to commodification of space, asserting that the use of spaces for agriculture that would gain higher rents for other uses . In highlighting that use-value is prioritized over exchange value, scholars are reviving Lefebvre’s arguments about the resistance potentials of urban social movements. Urban agriculture can raise questions about who deserves access to urban land and urban development processes. For Lefebvre, abstract space, like Marx’s abstract labor, contains the seeds for differential space, the seeds for resistance. In describing exchange-value coming to overpower the mode of production in the processes of urbanization, he saw the potential for urban revolution in the struggle for the ‘right to the city’ . To Lefebvre, the entire world was becoming the urban as the production of space became a more dominant force than industry. ‘Urban’ carried the prioritization of use-value as space became “an inscription of time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource” . Yet, within his critique of growing urban hegemony, Lefebvre proposed the concept of the right to the city, a right that is not bound to the city,hydroponic vertical farming systems but is better described as a right to “a place in an urban society in which the hierarchical distinction between the city and the country has disappeared . This can be read in the increasing financial investment in farmland nationally and abroad; for example in 2010 the pension fund TIAA-CREF invested $2 billion in farmland in the US . In the face of growing inequity in cities dominated by neoliberal practices, critical urban theorists and community activists have once again returned to the framework of ‘right to the city’ proposed by Lefebvre in 1968 . The concept of right to the city connects both the just distribution of material resources and the democratization of the processes of urbanization. Urban gardening that prioritizes the use of city land for food production, cultural engagement and community building can both challenge the dominant logics of development and also provide the seeds for coalition building under the banner of ‘right to the city’. Gardeners in the Bay region argue that their work does this by demanding a say in urban governance. At the same time gardeners also question if their work contributes to urbanization that continues to benefit capital’s interests and does little to empower marginalized communities. Gardening led by non-profits can be read as part of the contemporary trend where third sector organizations have proliferated and become institutionalized as the appropriate site space for the formation of citizen subjects . Social change enacted through volunteerism and non-profit groups, as opposed to state agencies, can have undemocratic consequences of limiting who is invited or able to participate in decision-making processes, such as those of governance and production of urban space. Furthermore, gardeners are also aware that their work may be and is, as illustrated in several examples in this study, aiding in the processes of gentrification, a significant issue in the region. Urban gardening has become increasingly popular at the same time that discourses of sustainability have gained increasing political influence within US cities. Sustainability policies and discourses have opened possibilities for urban improvement projects such as gardening under the umbrella of larger plans for continued urban development and capitalist accumulation .
Such reasoning has given scholars and activists hesitancy in their desire to view urban agriculture projects as materially or discursively transformative land use practices. The potentials of radical land use through gardening must be contextualized in the actually existing practices of the social movements in which gardeners participate, i.e. contemporary food movements. Some scholars have argued food politics has largely been de-politicized and individualized as neoliberalism impacts food and agricultural activism . Other scholars have cited gardens as a site of “against and beyond”3 politics both challenging contemporary capitalism and building new forms of social relations . This dissertation engages the question of how gardeners frame the politics of possibility. Although all the gardeners interviewed in this study were committed to food movements as discussed in Chapter 3, the politics and urban utopian imaginaries of the gardeners vary. One thread of politics that has a strong presence in organized garden projects is what Dixon calls “the anti-authoritarian current” articulating the work of “against and beyond”. Anti-authoritarian politics, the politics of “another world is possible”, seek to create political spaces beyond party building used by liberals, social democrats, and Leninists alike, as well as beyond non-profit dominated spaces or isolated affinity group organizing . Activists work against domination, exploitation, and oppression through bottom-up organizing strategies to create new social relations and forms of social organization beyond contemporary models, thus ‘prefiguring’ more desirable practices . “Against and beyond” resists a dichotomy of oppositional or alternative politics that emphasizes either changing contemporary systems or creating new ones, seeing the potential in prefigurative politics in spaces like the land politics of urban gardens. Hegemonic power structures, like the dichotomy of private and public property, while dominant are not singular, complete, or without internal contradiction . The power of hegemony must be continually renewed and defended through multiple cultural and material processes . Thus, I read gardens as an essential site to understand contestations of the institution of property. Althusser described the process of subjection as part of the processes of securing hegemonic power . Through practices ideology is made material; when these practices are repeated, ritualized and institutionalized, we can observe the form of ideological state apparatuses. Ideology functions to constitute individuals as subjects through a process of interpellation. Simply put, the individual is hailed, recognizes the call, and freely submits to her subjection. The subject not only recognizes herself in the interpellation, but also recognizes that this is an accurate representation of reality, seeing others as subject. Gardeners, within and beyond food movements, seek to create subjectivities of possibility, thus creating conditions of possibility for intersubjective change. Althusser recognized that the processes of interpellation and the development of ideology are simultaneous processes or “things that happen without any succession” . This mechanism permits the reproduction of the relations of production and resulting social relations of oppression, resistance, or multiple forms in and outside of hegemonic social relations depending on your reading . Thus when one gardener calls for the need for more ‘vandals’ as subjects called to create more food through guerilla tree grafting, they recognize subject formation as part of a broader process of engendering ideology challenging the dominance of private property’s boundaries and production urban environments that favor possibility, both oppositional and alternative, through gardening. Political projects, like the one of the vandal, are also not singular, complete or without internal contradiction. Analyzing the internal contradiction of political projects within particular spatiotemporal contexts can open possibilities for alternatives .