Further, their discursive distance from soilless forms of urban agriculture reflected the lack of emphasis that regional supporting organizations and planning initiatives put on these types of growing methods, as they continue to privilege soil-based ways of farming the city. This research hints at important connections between the way growing sites and organizations in San Diego County represent themselves, including their growing methods, primary topic of interest, and institutional affiliation. Our analysis suggests that soilless sites, which are largely for-profit, tend to focus their website content on the innovative methods they use to grow food in urban environments. In contrast, soil-based organizations tend to represent themselves as centered on community and food access. These broad patterns provide important insights into urban agriculture trends in the county and partly support common assumptions held about the goals and motivations of urban agriculture. However, closer examination tells a more nuanced story. Our results show that no single characteristic, whether the use of technology, institutional affiliation, or primary topic, predicted the way our growing sites and organizations represented themselves in narratives on their websites. There were some trends, but the relationship between growing method and the narrative presented is tenuous at best. Overall, two broad conclusions and future research paths can be drawn from the results of this research. First, a politics of technology that creates fixed connections between certain growing methods and values and uses this connection to assume the motivations of urban agriculture participants is misleading and lacks analytical rigor. If we pay attention to the various ways in which urban agriculture organizations represent themselves,drainage gutter it is clear that this connection between growing methods and values is tenuous. For instance, soilless urban agriculture is often associated with entrepreneurialism and therefore cast aside as profit-driven.
While the majority of our soilless sites in our population were for-profit, the link between growing method, for-profit status, and narrative topic was weak. Capital is an underlying reality of all of our sites, especially in the context of neoliberal governance in which even nonprofits are increasingly reliant on private sources of funding , including philanthropy and revenue-generating social enterprises. Entrepreneurialism, therefore, transcends the use of advanced technology and is more meaningfully connected to broader processes like neoliberalism . Future research should continue to unravel these simplistic constructions that constrain research findings and ignore potential tools for improving urban food landscapes. Second, it is important to acknowledge that the genuine motivations and agendas of actors may not match their public narratives and website content. It is therefore critical for researchers to examine the practices that underlie the narratives and self-reported motivations that we have explored and categorized in this chapter. This analysis will require researchers to embed themselves in local urban agriculture networks to observe urban agriculture in practice. Ethnography offers useful tools for this detailed analysis including in-depth interviews and participant observation that allows researchers to examine the relationship between discursive representations and practices of urban agriculture. This methodology will capture the nuanced, everyday interactions that may be hidden by the narratives presented on websites or even in survey data. Avoiding a politics of technology that interprets the connection between technology and capital to mean a singular profit-motive is imperative for gaining a better understanding of the urban agriculture movement. Soilless urban agriculture sites and organizations engage a plethora of environmental and social concerns. Simply equating technologically-advanced urban agriculture with entrepreneurialism, ignoring additional narratives, and forgoing additional critical inquiry creates blind spots in sustainable and equitable food movements.
Based on the narratives examined here, the two forms of agriculture often share values like improving food access, fostering sustainability, and empowering marginalized groups through education and training. We expect the lines to continue to blur in the future as soil based urban growing becomes more entrepreneurial and soilless growing becomes more prolific and accessible. Preliminary interviews already suggest that this is the case in San Diego County. For instance, UrbanLife Farms is planning construction of a new rooftop, hydroponic farm and will integrate it into their broader mission of education and providing job-training for youth in marginalized communities. Project New Village has also expressed an interest in pursuing these growing methods to further their mission of building community wealth and social capital in Southeastern San Diego. This research sought to ‘untangle’ the connections between growing method and narratives. This is an important step in trying to understand some of the common biases against soilless urban agriculture, many of which are rooted in ideological beliefs that are produced and reproduced through popular narratives. However, we recognize that the narratives advertised by urban agriculture sites and organizations on their websites do not accurately reflect the many values that are embedded in these sites or their practices and advocated by their members. This content analysis can only tell us how urban agriculture sites and organization represent themselves in public forums. Still, this analysis begins the task of unraveling a priori assumptions and examining the narratives that accompany urban agriculture practices. These narratives are important actants in urban agriculture actor-networks and are used by actors to strengthen support and attract funding. Deconstructing these narratives is an important step to unveiling co-optation and hollow branding strategies .
Future research should continue to examine the narratives that growing sites and organizations use to promote themselves and the agendas of their diverse actors involved in growing sites and organizations. Indeed, a whole network of people with different backgrounds, personal experiences, decision-making power, and motivations create and reinforce narratives around urban agriculture, not just the directors who likely inspire the content emphasized in mission statements and websites. Further, researchers should engage more detailed methods like ethnography to examine the practices and hidden power dynamics that underlie these narratives. Although many scholars are already embedding themselves in their local urban agriculture networks, participating and observing, to better understand motivations and power relations , few have critically explored the role of technology and considered the breadth of networks shaping urban agriculture. These networks extend beyond garden gates and warehouse walls into composting facilities, federal buildings, local media offices, ethnic markets, Whole Foods supermarkets, farm to table restaurants,plastic gutter and consumers’ kitchens. Future work should examine these networks in full, accounting for the multitude of actors, narratives, and practices driving the discursive and material realities of urban agriculture in the Global North. Tensions surrounding the use of advanced technology in urban agriculture are often rooted in competing understandings of social justice grounded in assumptions regarding the role of land, labor, and capital . These different conceptualizations of justice are particularly evident in debates around the benefits of soil-based and soilless urban agriculture. Such debates have recently pitted food scholars and advocates against each other at a variety of professional meetings including the recent Food Tank™ Summit in San Diego, California. In these contexts, where organizers typically seek to present a ‘balanced’ perspective by including multiple interest groups on panels, discussions of the future of urban agriculture often act as carriers for different yet simplified narratives of food justice, in which the urban food movement is envisioned at a metaphorical fork in the road with the choice of either a high-tech, entrepreneurial or a nature-based, grassroots future. Social justice, specifically food justice, plays an important role in these dichotomous and divisive arguments. Arguably, all forms of urban agriculture, regardless of their relationship to the soil, have the potential to promote or prevent social justice.
Therefore, it is necessary to examine how urban agriculture initiatives, with various degrees of technological intensity, define and do justice. This research seeks to evaluate the justice narratives and practices that shape three urban agriculture spaces with social missions in San Diego County. Urban agriculture thrives in this county and is increasingly diverse including soil-based and soilless growers – both of which are represented in our study sites. I compare these three spaces by focusing on land, labor, and capital and their relationship to distribution, participation, and recognition – three key aspects of justice. Specifically, I assess the outcomes and opportunities generated at each site that produce benefits for marginalized groups such as increased food access, improved self-sufficiency, job training, community engagement, participation in local food system planning and decision-making, and ownership of resources. At the same time, I examine the sociospatial contexts– geography, regional economies, demographics, and institutional environments – that contribute to sites’ ability to produce benefits for marginalized communities. Justice is a central concept in urban agriculture with ‘social justice’ often cited as a goal of urban food projects in the United States. In general, food justice is concerned with addressing exploitation, racism, and oppression within the food system. It is expressed to varying degrees under monikers such as food security, food justice, and food sovereignty – all of which rely on particular understandings of justice . Food security is undoubtedly the least radical of the three. It is a reformist strategy that focuses on market-based interventions – like increasing access to food retailers – and regulatory reform to ensure that individuals have access to food . Programs such as SNAP , food banking, and initiatives to increase access to supermarkets all fall under the purview of food security. The food movement, which seeks more transformational approaches to food systems, is often concerned with strategies like food justice and food sovereignty that address inequities beyond access to food and tend to focus on communities rather than individuals . Food justice is broadly defined as the idea that every person has the right to access affordable, healthful, and culturally appropriate food produced in an ethical and environmentally sound way . It is a progressive strategy that focuses on removing the disparities, especially those based on race, class, and gender, that underlie food system inequities . As such, food justice looks beyond food itself and begins to address the multiple ways in which cultural, social, economic and political inequality shapes our food system, including the production, distribution, and consumption of food. The localization of food production, which allows for greater connections and accountability, has been a common approach to reduce these disparities. Food sovereignty, arguably the most radical of the three , is defined as “the right of peoples and governments to choose the way food is produced and consumed in order to respect our livelihoods, as well as the policies that support this choice” . Here, the distribution of power, particularly power in planning and managing food systems, is key . This perspective, which has been embraced in the Global South, typically implies a rejection of capitalism and neoliberalism that are viewed as causing inequality and preventing communities from being in control of their own food ways. Often, this perspective translates into building alternative and self-sufficient food systems, including supporting community oriented projects and indigenous practices. Geographer David Harvey argues that “different socio-ecological circumstances imply quite different approaches to the question of what is just or not” . In the United States, the dominant perspective is distributive justice – the idea that outcomes such as jobs, health, and income must be fairly distributed among citizens . This approach to justice underlies concepts like food security, as well as food justice , although the two differ in their approach to fairness – the prior typically stressing equality and the latter emphasizing equity . Equality is a prolific theme in food access research where the argument is made that all people should have equal access or the right to food. However, focusing on equality of outcomes has been widely critiqued for its failure to account for the broader social contexts that produce injustice such as patterns of suburbanization , racial and economic segregation , white privilege , and individual mobility . Equity-based distributive justice is still concerned with outcomes; however, it provides more insights into the social context of injustice and considers the “historical antecedents of inequality” including “slavery, exploitation, and dispossession of the land, labor, and products of women, the poor, and people of color” . Opportunities such as access to resources like land and capital also become important in equity-based distribution.