A Caucasian man ran over and into the garden, from the direction of the condos on the corner, according to one version. The man slapped her and took the greens away from her. I was told this story twice by different parties, and am not sure what to make of the truth or fiction contained within. One group of African-American men who hang out at the garden regularly, “entrepreneurs” who sell a variety of goods in the park, initially relayed the story to me shaking their heads angrily and looking pissed. The second time I heard the story from a homeless man, Kenny, who was in tears. He said, “A black woman was harvesting and a man ran out of the condo at the corner and hit her, slapped her. A white guy. Kenny cried. We was gonna do something real bad to [the man who hit her]. She just wanted some greens for the Fourth of July.” When I relayed the story to the white CSF employee in charge of maintaining the urban farm,she was disbelieving. The “truth” of the story matters less than what it reveals in the telling: clear tensions between the local residents of newer, more costly housing and those who live in the adjacent spaces and who may sleep underneath the nearby overpass or in the garden itself. The story illustrates racial tensions inscribed in space. It is an overt telling of the policing of space along race and class lines, square plastic plant pots projecting the idea that material changes in the space result in changed regimes of discipline for local residents – with that discipline reinforced physically if necessary.
Neighborhood power and race divides are embodied in the nameless African-American woman and Caucasian man. Although City Slicker Farms tries to maintain a neutral stance and explicitly and repeatedly states that they don’t want to displace anyone, this tension is played out in a structure – both the physical infrastructure and the rules of use – laid out by the nonprofit. Thus they are seen as inevitable arbiters, and have drawn ire from all sides. They strive for a neutral stance, but I would argue that even the attempt to remain neutral is a political stance in and of itself, embedded in a place of privilege. Many of their attempts at neutrality ended up directly affecting the access of various groups.Confronted with a cacophony of voices and opinions, often at odds with one another, I fell back on some traditional social science methodology: the survey. For years, I had been volunteering and walking neighborhood streets, chatting with residents and park users, and attending neighborhood meetings. To reach a different segment of the population and ask a broader group a consistent set of questions, I abandoned any attempts to “blend in” and explicitly took on the mantle of the social scientist, with credentials on my name tag. I designed a 34 question survey to try to tease out who used the park and their understanding of the park’s purposes. I completed a survey of 44 park users and neighborhood residents from July – September of 2011, focusing on those within a two-block radius of the park.
Survey topics included the nonprofit’s community outreach, understanding of the urban farm’s purpose, attitudes towards the project, access to fresh food, and demographics. I talked to homeowners, renters, people I encountered on the street, and people actively using the park, taking care to vary survey times and days of the week to be inclusive of a wide variety of people. It became clear early on in the survey process that any assumptions which I had held – with regards to race, class and length of time in the neighborhood, for example – did not easily map onto people’s opinions about the park. Survey responses showed shifting categories of “them” versus “us.” I completed most of the surveys while hugely pregnant, which I believe was an asset. Without the belly, I was just a white girl with a name tag. A face would peer at me reluctantly from behind a door open just a slit, and then change expression dramatically after glancing downward. The door would open wider, and people would want to talk. I didn’t look dangerous, and the belly created a visible point of connection. My survey research showed that many residents who live within a few blocksof the urban farm do experience food insecurity. While almost half of local residents and park users never experience food insecurity, a large portion do: 39% lack money to buy food on a monthly basis, and in that group 21% lack money for food on a weekly basis. Therefore, the survey determined that a large percentage of those surveyed were food insecure and their diet could possibly benefit from increased access to fresh fruits and vegetables grown at the Union Plaza urban farm. As I completed the surveys, I met an Asian-American filmmaker who had been making a documentary following several of the scavengers in the area.
Clearly well-educated and from a middle-class background, he had spent a lot of time with the scavengers, interviewing them, getting their life stories and following them in their daily labor. He felt aligned with them, and angry on their behalf. He commented that an urban farm is essentially a perfect front – innocuous, hard to criticize – for wealthy and educated new residents to use to push out scavengers and homeless people. He alleges that Nadel, in order to represent the condo owners, is using CSF and their good intentions to drive out people the Council member sees as “undesirables” and to gentrify the neighborhood. He thinks Nadel sees the garden as a “progressive solution for a non-progressive problem. It’s brilliant in its deviousness. It’s conservatism in the guise of progressivism.” These sentiments were echoed by several respondents that might be categorized as a “hipster” presence in the neighborhood. These tended to be young people, mostly white, who dress in distinctively styled clothes often culled from thrift stores. In gentrification literature, “hipster” and artist presence in a neighborhood is often a precursor to changing demographics and rising real estate prices, but these groups are in turn often resentful about the more affluent and older condominium residents who follow them into the neighborhood . A self-identified Caucasian youth living across the street from Fitzgerald Park in a cooperative house identified the biggest problem in the parks as “displacing people.” Specifically: “Make sure there’s still places for people to use the parks. That it’s not just exclusively for gardening.” Every Thursday, the organization Food Not Bombs hands out a hot meal, and is often staffed by those who might be categorized as “hipster.” The organization has a strong anarchist presence and the folks involved tend to be skeptical of authority in all forms. The young, Caucasian, dread locked and pierced folks handing out food were initially very hesitant to talk to me or give any information to a survey, square pot plastic and had to be assured that I wasn’t from either the city government or the nonprofit who ran the local garden. But after being assured of their anonymity, they proceeded to express doubt about whether the garden was helping folks or merely nudging them out. Use and access in the park is important to City Slickers; it surfaced repeatedly in interviews with their Executive Director and several of their employees, and it continues to be a sticking point. A question I heard again and again from employees and neighbors was: If you don’t use the park, should you have a say in what happens there? Perceptions of illegality and danger persist, especially among more recent residents, and are repeated as a justification for not using the park. The creation of the Union Plaza Urban Farm increased self-reported use of the park substantially: 39% used the park before the urban farm was built, but 66% report visiting the park after its construction – a 27% increase. Park use increased for sitting and walking dogs, with slight increases for games and meeting with friends, but organized sports such as football, baseball, or kickball were no longer possible in the space.
Park uses also changed when the public water fountain was removed and when new park rules forbid barbequing. Both changes occurred at around the time that the urban farm was constructed. It is my understanding that these were city-level decisions, yet they coincided with and therefore became connected to the appearance of the urban farm project and any disgruntlement the new rules generated was directed at the nonprofit. I completed several more in-depth interviews with CSF employees and former employees, including Makena Scott, an African-American woman who had formerly been coordinator of the Union Plaza and Fitzgerald Urban Farm project. For her, only actual use of the park justified who should be in control of the space, a point she returned to again and again.By rearranging physical space in order to install a garden, CSF has reordered racial and class relationships within the neighborhood, highlighting and therefore heightening them. Their presence makes more visible in contrast people whose main tool is invisibility, thereby creating a situation where it becomes more and more uncomfortable for them to be in the space over time. I am struck by the ways that small material changes can dramatically reorder space, behavior and relationships. City Slickers built a wooden platform in the Fitzgerald Park space, outside of the fenced urban farm, nearer to Alliance Recycling, for the eventual purpose of environmental education. It was part of the City Slickers imagined landscape, and a way that they were trying to increase interactivity and incorporate people and education into their design. I was told that the initial plan was to cover it with a trellis – they envisioned beautiful, vine-covered classroom – but it was not a top priority amid many competing needs and was left unfinished, with only the low, bare wooden platform completed. There remains much less seating in the parks than before the urban farm was constructed, so understandably this platform has proved to be a magnet for homeless and scavengers who use it for sitting, sleeping and talking. However, if they do lie down on it, they are technically breaking the law and can get ticketed by the police, who regularly come through to remove them. They are also much more visible there as opposed to stretching out in bushes or under freeways. But it is in some ways irresistible – a clear, open space elevated off the ground in the area they gravitate towards daily after selling scrap metal to Alliance. And while it may be easier to ignore someone sleeping in a less visible place, the police don’t feel they can ignore people sleeping on the platform, a few feet away from the sidewalk. It is a natural focal point for sociality as structures such as bandstands, platforms and stages are meant to be in parks around the world, yet because it results in a congregation of homeless and scavengers, most of whom are people of color, police and some neighbors perceive it as a threat to social order. In this case, the imaginings of City Slickers, local homeowners, the police, and the homeless were at odds due to material enactments of those imaginings. It does not seem an overstatement to say that, while unintentional, CSF created a situation of increased conflict between the homeless and the police by the way they structured the space.Fences are another clear example of ways that landscape mediates relationships; choices about space send clear messages about social interactions. Even when unlocked and not physically a barrier, fences create an inside and outside. Because most of CSF’s staff and volunteers are white, and they control the inside, it is hard to avoid the visual appearance of white in/black out. Crucially, prior to the farm stand’s move, many park users and local residents had expressed confusion or disbelief that the produce from the farm was going to feed West Oakland residents, so moving the farm stand there provided direct proof that it was feeding local residents, allowing them to tangibly benefit.