While there are significant concerns over the implications of and ideologies implicit in garden projects, urban agriculturists situate gardening in contemporary food movements and their quest for critical self-reflection and change. This wave of urban agriculture has arisen in a time of unprecedented national attention to the politics and potentials of social transformation through food. The next chapter will address the development, commitments, and key debates of contemporary urban food movements in more detail. What is notable in characterizing urban agriculture today is the proliferation of new alternative food institutions, which bring together food movement actors with governmental and broader civil society audiences. In the last two decades food policy councils and collaborations have been a key location for the development and support of garden projects, local policy to support the improvement of food systems, and the enrollment of support of more powerful community actors. FPCs frequently involved public-private partnerships or within local government . The first FPC was formed in 1980 in Knoxville, Tennessee after a local organization partnered with the Metropolitan Planning Commission to lobby the city to form a body to enact change in the local food system . By 2004, there were fifteen FPCs in the US and Canada . A 2012 Community Food Security census of FPCs in the US and Canada reported one hundred fifty-five FPCs in operation,drainage pot one hundred eleven of which were independent organizations and forty were housed in government offices .
In the Bay Area several food policy organizations have been active in mobilizing and shaping work in urban gardening communities including the Berkeley Food Policy Council, Oakland Food Policy Council, Richmond Food Policy Council, San Francisco Food Policy Council, San Mateo Food System Alliance, and Santa Clara Food System Alliance. In addition to food policy organizations, garden networks and policy oriented gardener groups have been active bodies shaping movement priorities and actions. These include the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance and the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance. Urban agriculture has also been embraced as a strategy by large regional non-profits with foci broader than food including health based organizations such as the Health Trust and the HOPE collaborative, and urban planning organizations such as San Francisco Planning and Urban Research . New agrifood institutions have in many areas sought to bring together alliances across racial, ethnic, and class differences. This work of collaboration and alliance building has also occurred outside and beyond the reach of alternative food initiatives . McClintock identifies cross-racial organizing and alliance development as key characteristics to urban agriculture in Oakland, stemming from coalitional work of black liberation, environmental and environmental justice, and community empowerment organizing. Urban agriculture has the capacity to be a means of connecting differing urban movements oriented towards justice including interests in healthy food, immigrant’s rights, racial discrimination and institutionalized racism, etc. In alignment with the calls for the right to the city, as discussed in the introduction, gardeners have used cross cultural alliances to marshal material and political resources, as well as used privileged access to resources to support the work of movements led by low income people and people of color.
Phat Beets’ resistance against gentrification, La Mesa Verde’s work to build cross-cultural networks of backyard gardeners for food security support, and Growing Home’s work to advocate for the unhoused population in San Francisco’s need for spaces of refuge and creativity through gardening are all examples that will be discussed in Chapter 4. These examples point to key moments of cross difference work and movement alliance building that represent one side of advocacy for change within predominately white, middle class food movements, a tension that is explored in Chapter 3. One thread of food organizing that has attempted to engage cross-difference organizing and environmental sustainability, is the holistic, interconnectedness approach of permaculture and agroecology. Most municipal community gardening programs require gardeners to use organic methods. Nearly all non-profit garden organizations promote sustainable and low-input gardening. In the Bay Area both argoecology and permaculture, specific forms of sustainable agriculture, have played significant roles in urban gardening as it defines its commitments to land access strategies and movement building. Permaculture originated in Australia in the mid 1970s as a collaboration between professor Bill Mollison and his graduate student David Holmgren. A movement soon began to promote “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture” as ecological design. As such, permaculture is not just a gardening method but a philosophy and form of environmental and social design that promotes “harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non- material needs in a sustainable way bounded by the ethics of care of people, care of earth and reinvestment of surplus” .
In California, permaculture gatherings began in Orleans in 1994 and the San Francisco Permaculture Guild was founded in the late 1990s . Today guilds and several informal permaculture groups exist in San Francisco, the East Bay, and Santa Cruz. Courses are taught at Merritt College and by local trainers. In 2010 Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center held the first Liberation Permaculture course that brought together leaders from social justice and urban agriculture organizations in the Bay Area to learn and build a “permaculture for the people” with a focus on justice. Agroecology has also had a strong influence in the work of urban gardeners in the Bay Area. Many leaders have been trained at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems Apprenticeship Program. CASFS dates back to 1967 when Alan Chadwick first developed a student garden and began teaching students about sustainable gardening. This effort would later be transformed into a formal apprenticeship program. In 1980 Dr. Steve Gliessman was hired to start the Agroecology program at UCSC and in 1993 the program was renamed the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems in order demonstrate agroecology’s duel focus on social and ecological change. Many nonprofit garden project staff graduated from UCSC and studied agroecology in some capacity while at the University. At UC Berkeley, another founder of agroecology,Miguel Altieri, has taught agroecology to thousands of students since 1981. In addition to the influence of agroecology through the University of California system, Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, founded in 1975 and based in Oakland, has long been committed to agroecology and sustainable agriculture as a pillar of international movements addressing the root causes of hunger and farmer insecurity. As an organizational leader of political food movements in the Bay, Food First’s publications, events,large pot with drainage and commitment to agroecology have influenced many gardeners. The effect of agroecology and permaculture in Bay Area gardens is evident in the ecologically sustainable practices deployed in the urban gardens and in the movement’s approaches to land tenure and property. Gardeners debate if long term tenure is necessary for developing sustainable and resilient agroecosystems, which in turn shapes both ideological and practical approaches to accessing land. As gardener, former planning professor, and citizen scholar, Sam Bass Warner stated in 1987, “Control of land has always been the rock that smashed American urban garden projects”. In this chapter we have explored the history of gardening in the US and in the Bay Area. Urban agriculture has had a rich history with period of massive expansion and support from municipal, federal, and urban planning institutions. It has, however, largely remained in the realm of “interim use”. Although gardens provide many social and ecological services, municipal agencies and private landowners have held other priorities for long-term use of land. This historical approach to urban agriculture limits gardeners today who wish to develop long lasting projects. Gardeners today are working with planners, local officials, universities, and others to advocate for gardening as a more legitimated land use. The movement is mainly led by coalitions of non-profits and puts significant emphasis on agroecological approaches. These characteristics facilitate particular approaches towards and debates over land access. The next chapter explores the strategies, tools, and politics of gardeners’ approaches to land access, which demonstrate complex engagements with tenure and property and conflict within gardening communities over these engagements.
A new wave of urban agriculture is coming at a time of an explosion of food activism in the United States. Popular culture, the First Lady, and new media are abuzz with discussions of sustainable food, local food, growing your own food, and food as a means towards improved lives and an improved world. Urban gardening and local food are trendy. Many are drawn to food-based social action as a means to create change at more than the individual level. People are drawn to food as a space for organizing for social change. Urban food projects of many varieties have focused on food as a mechanism towards justice. This chapter traces the growth and development of concerns for social, economic, and racial justice in food movements. In California, many older alternative food initiatives have their roots in the 1960s and 70s movements for social justice and environmental protection . Rural organizing for racial and economic justice manifested through the interethnic coalition that become the United Farm Workers union. In cities, the War on Poverty provided resources for communities organizing to address hunger, community disempowerment and racial injustice. Nationally, the environmental movement won victories for the greater regulation of pesticides. Concerned about the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, as well as expressing resistance to the Vietnam War and consumer culture, many youth turned to the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement, helping to initiate the organic food movement. Environmentalists and natural foods advocates found a place of solidarity with people looking for social and economic justice through the creation of alternative food initiatives . By the 1990s alternative food initiatives focused on rural issues had shifted their attention away from the needs of farm workers . The social justice commitments of alternative food organizing in California turned towards the urban centers. Since the 1990s, urban efforts have focused on increasing food access, empowering marginalized communities, strengthening producer-consumer connections, challenging historic inequities, and building more democratic food systems. Through self-critique, external critique, and learning through experience, food activists have shifted, refined, and recommitted to practices in pursuit of justice. This chapter will explore how justice has been constructed and sought as a practical frame with which to change society through three iterations of the alternative food movement in the last three decades: the community food security movement, food justice movement, and food sovereignty movement. This chapter does not suggest nor seek to represent the entire food movement as principally concerned with justice, but instead delves into a deeper understanding of those how subgroups of this broader movement have understood and sought justice through their work. The alternative food movement has evolved in response to internal and external pressures over the last several decades. Many scholars argue that since the early 2000s there has been an increasing focus on justice within alternative food organizing . At the same time many have noted the increasingly dominant role of neoliberal ideologies and policy strategies in food movement work . Critiques from within and outside of the food movement have made activists consider or reconsider their organizing strategies and trajectories. How activists engage in framing, or the tactics of defining and bounding their work for social change, has important material and symbolic consequences. This chapter will explore three ideological points of tensions that create debate and internal change within these movements: approaches to centralized and decentralized power, approaches to racialized histories and identity, and justice as a question of socionatural relations. Contrary to the arguments of many food scholars, I claim that food movements are both conflicted with and drawn to a tendency in contemporary social movements, a trend that is less neoliberal and more radical leftist: a move away from reliance on the democratic socialist state ideal that reinforces the notion that the appropriate site of political action is that of government institutions. While many in food movements still believe that food injustices can be successfully addressed through state reform and bolstering welfare programs, others take a more nuanced approach. While they may still support movement actions on the farm bill or national policy initiatives, many activists are turning towards notions of self-determination and sovereignty that decenter and question the capabilities of nation state systems in the pursuit of justice.