As István Mészáros explains, “the historically primary relationship between man and nature [is] nature’s relation to itself, on the grounds that man is a specific part of nature.” Since “earth is the first condition of man’s existence, land is, of course, absolutely inalienable from man” , and by extension, inalienable from all sorts of non-quantifiable social significance; precisely why Polanyi considered it inseparable. It follows, then, that the expropriation and commodification of land and nature—a process central to the cleaving of social rift—rends not only a material rift between land and labor, but also an internalized rift in our cognitive and experiential understanding of ourselves as functional organisms existing as a part of a larger ecosystem. This alienation from nature is well documented in developmental psychology, education, and evolutionary biology, as well. The shift from direct to “increasingly abstract and symbolic” contact with the outside environment in the contemporary political economy limits affective, cognitive, and evaluative development in children , leading to a rise in childhood behavioral problems, popularly referred to as “nature deficit disorder” . Several studies have concluded that exposure to vegetation and green space is essential to children’s cognitive development, can reduce attention deficit disorder, and reduce crime and “mental fatigue” or desperation in impoverished urban areas . From the Marxian perspective, black flower buckets the de-alienation of humans both from the fruits of our labor and from the natural or biophysical world depends on our active metabolism of nature through labor.
By physically laboring the soil, sowing seeds, cultivating, harvesting, and preparing food, urban agriculture mends individual rift by reengaging individuals with their own metabolism of the natural environment. Not only do experiences in the garden bring the urban farmer, gardener, or beekeeper into direct contact with the biophysical environment—soil, plants, water, sunshine, rain, worms, insects, birds—as prescribed by the behavioral scientists cited above, but also allows him or her to experience and metabolize the surrounding landscape, transforming it into a product that he or she can consume. The urban farmer’s labor thus sutures individual rift, reintegrating the human with nature as well as de-alienating the laborer from the fruit of his or her labor. In this case, labor’s fruit is more than metaphor, as it may indeed be a fruit, vegetable, honey, milk, eggs, or meat. Several public health and education studies have linked urban agriculture to enhanced natural science and nutritional knowledge, and improved mental and physical health . Recent immigrants to North American cities rely on urban agriculture as a means of alleviating boredom and putting their agrarian skills and knowledge to work. For Hmong women in Sacramento, urban gardening “structured their time, and provided a sense of accomplishment, as they grew their own produce, and supplied their children, grandchildren, and families with food,” countering the culture shock and feelings of dependence and uselessness they felt upon arrival to the US . A study by Airriess & Clawson on urban agriculture practiced by Vietnamese refugees in New Orleans reported similar findings. Such attempts to overcome individual rift by reengaging with the processes of food production and consumption lie at the center of the urban agriculture movement in the Global North. As I argue above, urban agriculture arises as a counter-movement in response to economic crisis and to the commodification of land and labor. Yet viewing urban agriculture in this way alone does not fully grasp urban agriculture’s multiple origins, functions, and forms.
Focusing on individual rift—particularly in the North where a longer history of wage labor has perhaps rendered alienation from manual labor and the biophysical environment more acute— helps to illuminate the important role that urban agriculture serves in late capitalist economies while differentiating its various forms. While guerrilla gardening and food justice initiatives may arise from an explicitly counter-hegemonic challenge to the capitalist food system as described in the previous section, the groundswell of interest in backyard and community gardening appears to be largely linked to efforts to lessen the impact of individual rift and is not necessarily radical. While individual rift is arguably much more widespread in the North than in the cities of the South where linkages to agrarian livelihoods remain intact, within a generation or two, urban dwellers in the South may also experience similar alienation from their food. The words of a young woman from Bamako poignantly illustrate this: “Why should we care about agriculture, about soil erosion? That’s the domain of rural peasants” . While I’m not arguing that everyone can or should grow his or her own food, my intention is to show how the practices associated with urban agriculture—tilling, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, composting—are a force of de-alienation. Urban agriculture, from this perspective, can help reestablish a conscious metabolic relationship between humans and our biophysical environment by reintegrating intellectual and manual labor. It is also important to emphasize that this dimension of rift is a necessary prerequisite to the ongoing expansion of capitalist modes of production. If, as Marx argued, nature is alienable from humans, we can easily make the link between ecological and human health; damage to the environment is therefore damage to one’s self. Moreover, complacency towards what we would otherwise perceive as self-destructive actions depends on individual rift; to perceive and experience environmental degradation as a solely external process rather than one simultaneously internal and external depends on this alienation.
Recognizing this form of rift and understanding the forces which cleave it is therefore an essential first step to mitigating it. It is precisely in these flat lands neighborhoods that the city’s food deserts can also be found. And it is here that food justice movements have taken root. Yet to better understand Oakland’s food deserts and to recognize the emancipatory potential of urban agriculture and other food justice initiatives that have emerged as a solution, it is helpful first to understand the forces that have hewn the urban landscape into a crude mosaic of parks and pollution, privilege and poverty, Whole Foods and whole food deserts. Few studies move beyond a geospatial or statistical inventory of food deserts to unearth these historical processes. In this chapter I focus on the structural role of capital in order to emphasize the extent to which the history of capital defines the urban environment. Driving down MacArthur or International Boulevards “in the cuts”, the rough and tumble street scapes of the Oakland flat lands, provides a glimpse into how capital’s dynamic cycles—its ebbs and flows—have shaped both the built environment and the social relations woven through it, leaving an almost entirely treeless and worn landscape of used car dealerships, taco trucks, liquor stores, dilapidated storefronts, and the occasional chain linked vacant lot. Understanding the historical and structural roots of this urban landscape is fundamental to understanding the individual and collective agency that adapts to or resists its development. Indeed, the history of the contemporary urban agriculture movement in Oakland really begins here. With this in mind, I tap existing histories of Oakland and urbanization in California, demographic and economic data, and current “grey literature” to broadly trace the historical geography of Oakland’s flatlands during the periods of industrialization and deindustrialization, roughly from the turn of the century to the “neoliberal turn” of the 1980s. I draw on theoretical insights from the growing field of urban political ecology to shed light on the structural processes that have restricted access to healthy food for residents of the flatlands, arguing that a combination of industrial location, residential development, city planning, french flower bucket and racist mortgage lending unevenly developed the city’s landscape and concentrated the impacts of capital devaluation within the flatlands, a process I refer to as “demarcated devaluation” and which ultimately created the city’s food deserts. Nevertheless, at the risk of being seen as an economic determinist, I want to focus on one process that is fundamental to the transformation of the urban landscape and the creation of food deserts: the devaluation of certain types of capital. It under girds the structural processes of uneven development and the social disruption that emerges in response. Nowhere is this process so readily apparent as in post-industrial cities such as Oakland. Cities are ground zero of humans’ transformative power, where the influx of capital is visibly inscribed on the landscape in the form of buildings and infrastructure, as roads, bridges, power lines, rail lines, sewers. During historical moments of capital over-accumulation following economic booms, surplus capital is invested in this kind of fixed or immobile capital, transforming the urban environment. During economic downturns, as capital retreats from urban industrial zones, the post-industrial city nevertheless retains its industrial character, albeit devalued, dilapidated, and scarred by pollution.
The built environment of the past inhibits future investment because it is simply cheaper to go elsewhere. Rents fall, unemployment rises. Both labor and fixed capital are devalued. Harvey writes, “The geographical landscape which fixed and immobile capital comprises is both a crowning glory of past capital development and a prison which inhibits the further progress of accumulation” . These zones left fallow inside the city by capital’s retreat belong to what Richard Walker has called “a lumpengeography of capital,” or “a permanent reserve of stagnant places” awaiting new investment once land and labor values have been sufficiently devalued.44 From this perspective, the contemporary cityscape is a map of previous cycles of capital accumulation and devaluation, a palimpsest of building, decay, and renewal. The walls of this prison of fixed capital are often clearly delineated by planning, policy, property taxes, and political boundaries. These buttresses and ramparts, whether or not they were crafted with intention, effectively demarcate and quarantine devaluation to prevent its impacts from bleeding over, both metaphorically and materially. As environmental justice literature reveals, this process of demarcated devaluation has been highly racialized historically through zoning, redlining, and neighborhood covenants . Human populations viscerally experience these ebbs and flows of capital. As countless cases in the era of deindustrialization illustrate, capital devaluation has historically been the harbinger of social upheaval in the form of migration, poverty, hunger, crime, and declining public health. Given the extent to which the urban landscape is shaped by capital and its crises of accumulation, urban social struggles against the socioeconomic upheaval that follows are interwoven with struggles for a more equitable environment. Perhaps less obvious to many mainstream environmentalists, struggles to protect or clean up the urban environment are equally as entwined within struggles for social justice; as Swyngedouw and Heynen point out, “processes of socio-ecological change are…never socially or ecologically neutral” . Understanding the food justice movement in Oakland and elsewhere therefore depends on understanding the structural forces, generally, and capital devaluation more specifically, that gave rise to the movement in the first place. Applying this analytical framework, I devote the remainder of this chapter to outlining Oakland’s 20th century history of industrialization and deindustrialization, demarcated devaluation, and the consequent creation of the city’s food deserts.In reference to her childhood home of Oakland, Gertrude Stein famously wrote, “there is no there there.” While these words have been used to belittle Oakland for the seventy years that have passed since their publication, they remain poignant when taken in their original context. Stein had returned to the city decades later and was unable to recognize the childhood home of her memories in the vast expanse of new housing sprawling eastwards from downtown . The transformative power that had effaced the “there” of Stein’s turn-of-thecentury childhood home continued to reshape Oakland as industrial and residential capital flowed and ebbed throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Advertising Oakland as a “city of homes,” speculators from the mid-19th century onwards hoped to cash in on its proximity to San Francisco’s bustling commercial center . The promise of the seemingly paradoxical union of Arcadia and Utopia that was the aesthetic hallmark of California development—pastoral landscapes embodied within an ordered, neighborhood logic —fueled a vibrant housing sector in Oakland, drawing the wealthy merchant class to the Oakland hills and foothills. Echoing the language of Mayor Horace Carpentier’s 1852 speech , a booster for housing in Oakland’s lower foothills in 1911 advertised “home sites from which [to] look down on the cities about the bay…far removed from the dirt and turmoil of the work-a-day world” . At the same time, completion of the transcontinental railroad and construction of its terminus in Oakland in 1869 accelerated the expansion of industry from San Francisco to the East Bay; the arrival of iron works, canneries, cotton and lumber mills, breweries, and carriage factories fueled further industrial agglomeration around the rail terminals in West Oakland and the estuary waterfront at the southern edge of downtown .