(Community) Garden in The City Conspicuous Labor and Gentrification

Article
Economy and Space

EPA: Economy and Space
2021, Vol. 53(5) 1051–1075
(Community) garden in the ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0308518X20977872
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Fatmir Haskaj
University of California, Berkeley, USA; San Francisco State University,
USA
Abstract
Community gardens are fertile fields of complex political, economic and social relations, on both
a local and global level. From environmentalism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender
studies, transnational migration, commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers
an abundance of research opportunities and analytical resources. This article seeks to contribute
to the efforts to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment, forces that
are rooted in what Foucault identified as a set of sacred binaries which underpin a host of power
relations that are “given” and form the unquestioned framework of a given set of power relations.
This is therefore a project which is bent on a “theoretical desanctification of space” by a disorder-
ing of one set of several sanctified oppositions which can be found in the space of the community
garden. The article de-sanctifies space by exploring the historical context of the community
garden in New York and Oakland California and posits that the work of the gardener is
co-opted into a value regime by a process I call “conspicuous labor”. This process is similar to
Veblen’s conspicuous consumption except the value generated is not in modeling consumption
but rather in emulating class patterns and re-configuring the urban poor as a productive, passive
and pastoral.
Keywords
Community garden, conspicuous labor, gentrification, urban development, Veblen
“. . . everyone knows that property values go up in a community that has a well-kept garden,”
- Peter Marcuse (Fernandez and Burch, 2003)
Corresponding author:
Fatmir Haskaj, Department of Sociology, University of California, 410 Social Sciences Building, Berkeley, CA 94720-1980,
USA.
Email: haskaj@berkeley.edu
1052 EPA: Economy and Space 53(5)
Introduction
Community gardens are fertile fields (in both the literal and Bourdieuian sense) of complex
political, economic and social relations, on both a local and global level. From environmen-
talism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender studies, transnational migration,
commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers an abundance of research
opportunities. Along with its analytical richness is the political, economic and demographic
reality of a world population that is both growing and urbanizing.
But this richness has left this burgeoning field of study with a mixed and often contra-
dictory assessment. A plethora of scholarship argues gardens are a panacea of benefits, a
producer of social and political ills, or site- and context-dependent. In other words, gardens
are good, bad or indifferent. The first presents the garden as a source of empowerment
(Benz, 2016; Steinbrink, 2012) against a broad spectrum of negatively characterized forces,
such as too little government (neoliberalism) (Vilbert, 2016), too much government (McVey
et al., 2018), food insecurity (Baker, 2004; Gray et al., 2014; Murtagh, 2010), gender nor-
mativity (Ore, 2011; Parry et al., 2005), racism (Shinew et al., 2004) and even physical illness
(Armstrong, 2000). Alternatively, critics depict a general tendency of disempowerment and
impoverishment of the “urban underclass”1 (Myrdal, 1965) in the neoliberal city (Allen and
Guthman, 2006) that skirts the ultimate questions of capital and land redistribution (Borras,
2007; Holt-Gimenez and Wang, 2011). The last grouping, I think of them as the “it depends
crowd”, posits a context- and site-dependent phenomenon that contains multiple rational-
ities, processes and interests which can possess varying intentions and effects. Accordingly,
gardens should be understood in a broader “dialectical fashion” (McClintock, 2014) or
contextualized as either an individualistic or communitarian project (Eizenberg, 2013).
These lines of inquiry, while insightful, have not resulted in a conclusive assessment of the
garden as a social force. Rather than reiterate or reinforce this dualistic debate, this article
intervenes on the level of the gardener as a figure in and of herself and, in so doing, positions
labor and the creation of value as the central activity of the garden. By putting the gardener
at the center of this inquiry, labor, production, consumption and a host of social and
political forces become both apparent and traceable, despite the dizzying local manifesta-
tions and competing social visions and utopias of the garden (Guitart et al., 2012). Crucially,
this refocusing on labor(er) and value offers a positive critique that valorizes the urban
gardener as a productive force in itself, whose labor is simultaneously made invisible and
appropriated by a host of actors (real estate, municipal, entrepreneurial) operating on both
the material and symbolic level. But it also shows the way in which the highly visible and
ideologically laden work of the gardener is itself a part of this process. So, while the garden
remains the site of inquiry, what is revealed is a circuit of value, produced by the capture and
recirculation of this work, which I call conspicuous labor.
This article, then, seeks to challenge what Foucault identified as a set of sacred binaries
which underpin a host of power relations that are “given”. In this case, this binary is the
garden as a site of empowerment or disempowerment, revitalization or displacement and
gentrification. This is a project which is bent on a “theoretical desanctification of space”
(Foucault and Miskowiec, 1986) by a disordering of one set of several sanctified oppositions
which can be found in the space of the community garden. I hope to challenge, or at least
problematize, the relationship between what has been ignored, treated as trivial or at best
innocuous (the community garden as a space that is socially produced) and what has gar-
nered great attention (gentrification). I do so, not by rehearsing the ecological (Hartig and
Kahn, 2016; Hebda and Wagner, 2016; Martin et al., 2016), social (Hoover, 2016; Kondo
et al., 2015) or political (Crossan et al., 2016; Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014) arguments in
Haskaj 1053
favor of community gardens, which themselves have become a type of sanctified orthodoxy,
but rather by disturbing this orthodox reading to show how the most benign, benevolent
and altruistic element of urban culture is appropriated into the machinery of land specula-
tion and marginalization of the poor.
While the garden is often a “contested space” (Schmelzkopf, 1995) representing a variety
of utopias and social visions (Kurtz, 2001) of community, identity, race and class (Martinez,
2010), it is also a significant force of gentrification (McClintock, 2014; Rosol, 2012). Paying
attention to the garden/gardener’s double role as both site and sight, reveals the hard labor
of transforming a rubble-strewn city lot into a “planned paradise” (Stern et al., 2013), the
high visibility of which performs a revalorization of urban space.
Building upon and inverting Thorsten Veblen’s idea of conspicuous leisure, I argue that
the process of gardening and the gardener move from being and signaling rebellious grass-
roots resistance to an ordered, docile, suburban familiarity that is marked, interpreted and
represented by real estate, municipal and entrepreneurial agents as proof of a movement
from the urban planning tropes of “slum” to utopia. The symbolic inclusion of the reformed
and redeemed slum dweller, and the now revitalized and suburbanized former “slum” itself,
is the effect of conspicuous labor and it is central to the work of urban revalorization.
Yet, a simple and sweeping narrative of gardens causing gentrification would not capture
the complex, long and diverse history of urban gardening that is historically and geograph-
ically specific. Gardens have been tools of both resistance and domination. Human-built
landscapes have historically been a direct reflection of worldviews and used to legitimate or
subvert dominant power relations. One sweeping study of Vienna’s parks and gardens from
the baroque to the present reveals the strong relationship between landscapes and the pol-
itics of the moment (Rotenberg and Places, 1995). For instance, the “garden of order” in
seventeenth and mid-eighteenth-century Vienna legitimized Habsburg absolutism by repre-
senting the monarchy as a bulwark against chaos and disorder, while the “garden of liberty”
offered a counter narrative in which nature was self-ordering through universal and irrefut-
able laws. These unruly gardens were popular among intellectuals of the Enlightenment and
the emerging middle-class, who saw the sovereignty of nature as proof of their own sover-
eignty from the crown. Later periods are no exception. WWII gardens were concerned with
food and security, while the economic prosperity of the 1960s led to managerial optimiza-
tion and a general sense of individualism and privatization. For Rotenberg, each epoch’s
ideological and political struggles have been played out in the landscapes and gardens of
Vienna.
Taking Rotenberg’s insight as a starting point, this article focuses on a very specific
period and two locations; the post-Fordist period from 1970 until the 2000s, in New
York City and Oakland, California. This period and these places were characterized by a
trend from an initial disinvestment and “decline” to a later “reinvestment” and are often
held up as exemplars of gentrification. Community gardens form a central and crucial
component of this process by the symbolic inclusion “of the past in the now” by the con-
spicuous labor of the gardener (Cassirer, 1953: 173). In these cases, it is both a temporal past,
a preindustrial idealized agrarian lifestyle, free of the stratified, oppressive and exploitative
forces of post-Fordist American urban life, as well as a spatial past in which the city
regresses to an imagined bucolic, more ‘natural’ state.
The struggle, then, of the time period covered in this article, to use Rotenberg’s insight, is
between two contesting and ultimately inseparable tendencies during this period; a grass-
roots urban collectivism that emerged in the 1970s and a bourgeois suburbanism that has
been a long and deep tendency in urban planning (Wilson, 1994). The garden in the city
embodies the contest of urban classes and their visions, claims and uses of urban space, and
the conspicuous labor of the gardener reveals and produces “urbanism’s internal ever-
present anti-thesis that, in dialectical fashion, stands in productive tension with it, producing
interleaved dimensions of ‘urbanism–suburbanism’” (Walks, 2013: 1472). In the case of
post-Fordist New York and Oakland, the result of this dialectic is that the conspicuous
labor of the gardener was alienated and appropriated, becoming ultimately a source of
value for real estate interests and entrepreneurial agents.
Christopher Mele, in his history of the Lower East Side (2000: viii) documented a parallel
process in which the history, culture and work of a neighborhood and its denizens serve to
gentrify that neighborhood. For Mele, municipal policies such as increased policing, sur-
veillance, evicting squatters and rehabilitating parks oriented towards improving the
“quality-of-life” of long-term residents actively propelled redevelopment and eventual dis-
placement. Ironically, the disappearing community and the “social ills” of squatting, drugs,
political activism and protest, and “alternative” culture formed the central message of the
new marketing scheme that symbolically included the past in a sanitized, affluent present
This symbolic inclusion is predicated on a material exclusion. Mele argues that the LES’s
radical revolutionary history, it’s aesthetics and the “authenticity” of the people in the
neighborhood was central to the process of displacement and dispossession of the
working-class, ethnic and racial groups living in the neighborhood.
“The display of affluence depended on the existence of poverty, desire on the presence of
fear, the mainstream acceptance on a corporate fantasy of marginality” (p.viii). For Mele,
“real estate actors” and “state agents” controlled the symbolic narrative and political reality
of the neighborhood by representing targeted areas as risque but no longer risky. The LES’s
history as a center of political activism, bohemianism and community gardening was the
basis of a broad and profitable narrative of the “neighborhood’s alternative allure”. While
forms of grassroots social resistance, such as homesteading, squatting and community gar-
dening, “demonstrated the success of community reclamation”, ultimately, they were
“stopgap” measures in the face of the “real estate sector’s political demands” (Mele,
2000: 210).
I would take Mele’s astute observation further and note that the grassroots movements
were profoundly successful in “transforming the built environment [and] combat[ting] phys-
ical and social decay” (Mele, 2000) so that the neighborhood could be gentrified. The very
real hard material labor of homesteading, squatting, activism and community gardening
become not just a “stopgap” solution to “urban decline” but central to the process of
revitalization and revalorization. As the neighborhood was improved, communities were
built and gardens planted, the possibility of symbolically including, repackaging and selling
the increasingly familiar, sanitized and idealized space of the garden in the city became
possible. While squatters and homesteaders are difficult to coopt symbolically and materi-
ally, the gardener’s conspicuous labor can be symbolically included, and even materially
retained, in the new narratives and landscapes of urban “revitalization.” Many of the
gardens planted during the 1970s remain to this day. The same cannot be said for the
squatters.
Yet, conspicuous labor is always context-dependent. The community garden is also a
space in which we can see various forms of labor and how labor is valued, depending
upon who is doing it and where. A worker in a hard hat and vest is recognizable, as is
the doctor in a white coat. Their contribution to society is unquestioned. Yet, the urban
gardener is a far more obtuse figure and the value of her labor is often ignored, while being
silently appropriated. In order to tease out these tensions, we must look at the history of
community gardens in the twentieth century, showing how a radical egalitarian movement
was gradually coopted into dominant property relations. These narratives of urban
Haskaj 1055
development, and the crucial role of the community gardener as conspicuous laborer, reveal
that labor is both material and cultural, and that the work of the garden can be captured as
value by various actors. This is more than a rebranding by real estate agents, as the labor of
the gardener is material and real, but it is also deeply enmeshed with pernicious utopian
ideals that hard work and green spaces cure social ills. Simply put, gardeners grow plants
but also property values (Voicu and Been, 2008); and they do so because they invoke,
perform and produce what utopian thinkers since Thomas Moore (1505) have thought;
that greening is good (Batchelor, 1969).
Finally, I situate the community garden and gardener within the debates on gentrifica-
tion, showing how the ‘urban underclass’ (as a marginalized group defined by deindustri-
alization and structural poverty and inequality (Wilson, 1996: 175), notwithstanding the
term’s disciplining and alienating power (Wacquant, 2013: 1903)) play a significant role in
the urban process. They are important active agents of change, and sometimes against their
own interests. Nevertheless this is an empowering narrative, as opposed to the standard
debates which cast the urban poor as either non-productive, obsolete, an “uncreative class”
(Peck, 2005) or passive victims of large-scale structural shifts.
A brief history of community gardens

The tranquility of the urban garden hides a bloody, violent past and a contentious present.
Community gardens are synonymous with war; a war of armies and a war of classes. In its
earliest forms during the 19th century, the garden was a source of food and a way to offset
urban poverty, as a steady flow of rural labor found its way into the overcrowded slums of
growing industrial cities. During the early twentieth century, gardens were overtly linked to
war. Food production came under strain during the first and second world war, as farm
labor was pressed into military service. Governments heavily invested in the practice as a
way of offsetting food shortages, while invigorating patriotic and nationalist sensibilities as
“morale boosters”. The “Victory gardens, as they were called, had such high-profile pro-
ponents as President Woodrow Wilson, who declared that “food would win the war”
(Hayden-Smith, 2014: 12).
Post-industrial community gardens were rooted in anarcho-communist and environmen-
talist visions of the future. Squatting in empty buildings and transforming empty lots into
productive green fields was a form of activism and protest against what many viewed as the
destructive tendencies in the wake of the eclipse of the Fordist-Keynesian era. The appro-
priation and collectivization of abandoned, devalorized and devalued public and private
spaces presented an alternative to the portrayal, if not the reality, of decay, poverty and
abandonment of the American city by the 1980s.
Practices, such as racial covenants and redlining, prevented African-Americans,
Hispanics and poor whites from enjoying the generalized upward mobility produced by
the post-war boom and kept them rooted in place, as wealthier groups relocated to a rapidly
expanding suburbia (Crowder, 2000; Lee and Ferraro, 2007; Massey and Denton, 1993).
These groups found themselves isolated in a rapidly declining, environmentally degraded
and economically barren landscape of the post-industrial city.
New York, perhaps more than any other city, most clearly embodied this distinctly
American phenomenon in the popular imagination. While Europe continued to invest in
its cities during the 20th century, where the most affluent residents chose to live, the
American response was to abandon urbanization in favor of suburbanization and the auto-
mobile. The near bankruptcy of New York in 1975 and adamant refusal of the Ford admin-
istration to support a federal bailout embodied political hostility to the American city and
its strong union base. Ford responded to the crisis by proposing legislation that would
increase the likelihood of bankruptcy. Help eventually came from the United Federation
of Teachers (UFT), who salvaged the city by buying $150 million ($630 million in 2011
dollars) in municipal bonds with pension funds (Lichten, 1986).
New York’s fiscal crisis was an indicator of the structural transformation of the United
States economy from city-centered manufacturing and trade, to the technoburb in which
housing, as well as manufacturing and the newly dominant service and technology indus-
tries, migrated to suburban areas (Fishman, 1989). It also clearly sounded the alarm to
developers, speculators and the middle class, that the economic power of the State was
focused on development outside of the urban core, not within it, a process which had
begun soon after WWII with the massive publicly subsidized highway building project
that would make the suburbanization of America possible (Jackson, 1985). The result for
cities during this period was a decreasing tax base, coupled with increasing liabilities, pri-
marily in the form of social services such as education, health care, sanitation and infra-
structure maintenance, as the middle class fled, taking with them tax and spending dollars,
leaving behind poorer groups.
This racial and economic segregation served to intensify poverty and, coupled with the
practices of redlining and blockbusting, increased vacancy rates and the abandonment of
housing in the city (Massey and Denton, 1993; Thabit and Piven, 2003). The confluence of
government disinvestment, corporate withdrawal from the strongly unionized urban cores,
and “white flight”had a devastating effect upon American cities during this period
(Thompson, 1999). More than half of U.S. cities experienced population decline after
1950. By 1970, more than two-thirds were losing population at an increasing and alarming
rate (Rappaport, 2003). And for those cities that did not lose population overall, many
experienced “white flight”, in which wealthier and usually, but not always, white residents
were replaced by poorer residents of color. One study found that, for every black resident
that arrived, 2.7 whites fled (Boustan, 2010) and that these new urbanites were much poorer
than their predecessors (Grubb, 1982).
A similar tale unfolded across the continent, in a city that was once the symbol of man-
ifest destiny, the trope of progress and the promise of modernity: Oakland California. At the
terminus of the transcontinental railroad, it was a city originally conceived as an “industrial
garden” that would, by the 1960’s, become the center and symbol of black power politics
and the struggles around space and power. Evoking America’s slave-holding past, black
nationalists and intellectuals portrayed the “industrial garden” as a new “urban plantation”
and “black colony”, in which the promises of prosperity and equality were suffocated by the
“white noose” of suburbanization (Self, 2003: 211; Weaver, 1948).
If Oakland’s trajectory from progressive ideal to dystopian ghetto was more explicitly
couched in racial terms, it was because Oakland was, if only briefly, far more integrated than
most American cities and, hence, felt the sting of deindustrialization and residential segre-
gation more acutely (Rhomberg, 2004: 36, 82). It was also a city that had been designed with
the “garden city” in mind. The architectural fusion of machine, nature and humanity into
the “industrial garden” were, as planners Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumford envi-
sioned, designed to cure society of everything from disease to class conflict. These
“industrial gardens” were to harmonize society, not intensify its divisions and stratifications.
Much like the community gardening movement of the 1970s, Howard’s “commonsense
socialism” proposed a “joyous union” of town and country, public ownership of land
and “co-operative organization” that were direct antidotes to the Victorian factory town’s
belching smoke stacks, congestion, poverty and class conflict (Meacham, 1999: 57).
Therefore, Oakland’s halcyon promise of plentiful employment in a bucolic, village-like
Haskaj 1057
setting of neat Victorians with lush gardens, felt all the more tragic as, by the 1960s, West
Oakland, in particular, became the picture of the very Victorian industrial dystopia
of poverty, pollution and inequality so reviled by the reformers and planners of the
“garden city”.
Oakland’s early development at the beginning of the twentieth century as an “industrial
garden” played strongly upon its more rural and bucolic character to draw in wealthy San
Franciscans. Ironically, in the wake of Oakland’s success as a multi-racial wartime ship-
building and manufacturing hub, and then the massive economic and social upheaval that
struck in the post-war period, it was these very same ideas of the combination of the rural
and the urban into a perfect concoction that would draw upwardly mobile, mostly white
workers further out into suburban areas. Much like New York, San Francisco and Oakland
became increasingly segregated, impoverished and starved of public and private investment
and resources as it’s tax base vanished. And, also like its East Coast counterpart, this
devalorized space gave birth to radical movements that contested the vison of an exclusive
suburban America that had left many facing unfulfilled promises of equity and social
mobility.
The period from 1945 to the late 1970s marked a cataclysmic shift in demographics and
residential segregation, but also in the underdevelopment of the city and overdevelopment
of the suburbs, the erosion of a multiracial city in Oakland, but also a multiracial working
class and the beginnings of the tensions and struggles over community, identity, public
spending and space that would mark the remainder of the century. While, in New York,
Robert Moses was bulldozing neighborhoods to make way for the automobile to link
industry (the city) with garden (the suburb), and unintentionally producing the urban
garden in the space in between, in Oakland, the garden was already in the city, in the
form of the single-family home placed close to industry.
Yet, in both places, space had to be remade by those left out of America’s rush to the
suburbs. For blacks in post-war Oakland, the garden city was too reminiscent of the
“plantation”, as frustration mounted at the lack of progress after the civil rights movement.
For the Black Panthers and other black radicals, “the industrial garden of midcentury had
become Babylon - a false city that had to be remade to stave off collapse” (Self, 2003: 19).
In New York, likewise, the communities that could not trade their tenement apartments
for single-family suburban homes as had previous generations, built their own “garden city”
on the abandoned lots of the LES. In both New York and Oakland, a demographic shift
and residential reshuffling occurred, resulting in a smaller and poorer city. Between 1970
and 1980, New York lost over eight hundred thousand people, the majority of whom
belonged to upper income households (Marcuse, 1985). Empty lots appeared in the
Lower East Side, once the most densely populated neighborhood on earth (Barr and Ort,
2013). As wealthier residents moved to the surrounding suburbs, abandoned buildings
succumbed to vacancy, vandalism, fire, arson and demolition. It was in this apocalyptic
landscape that a movement would emerge. Residents, organizing around notions of soli-
darity and the community writ large, reclaimed and reshaped neighborhoods forgotten by
real estate interests. Squatters, homesteaders and artist’s collectives emerged, along with an
urban gardening movement that resulted from a combination of multiple perspectives, such
as environmentalism, new urbanism, social justice and communitarianism, to name but a
few of the tendencies that coalesced at this moment and time.
The oldest and, perhaps, the most well-known community garden to emerge during this
period was the Liz Christy garden (1973) on the corner of Houston and Bowery, in the heart
of what would become the downtown art scene. The lot was the first among many to be
appropriated by a group of urban gardeners who called themselves the “green guerillas”
(Lamborn and Weinberg, 1999). What was particularly notable about this garden was the
speed and effectiveness with which the group was able to obtain legal recognition of tem-
porary rights to the land. The city’s Department of Housing and Preservation and
Development agreed to “rent” the land for one dollar per year in 1974. Today, this area
constitutes one of the most exclusive and expensive zones of real estate in New York City. In
the 1970s, the Bowery was a skid row, composed mostly of single-room occupancy motels
(SRO’s), aging and neglected tenements and vacant lots. It stands to this day, surrounded by
gleaming luxury condominiums.
Not too far away, on the Lower East side, is the cautionary tale of Adam Purple’s
Garden. It was a 15,000-square-foot architectural and social monument composed of five
abandoned city lots that were transformed into a spiraling garden by an urban edenist,
activist and squatter named Adam Purple and his supporters. It began in 1975, two years
after the Christy Garden, but under the same conditions (Mendelsohn, 2009). However, it
ended rather differently. Despite Adam Purple’s garden drawing domestic and international
attention, being featured in National Geographic and becoming a centerpiece for urban
theorists and scholars, it succumbed to the bulldozer on January 8, 1986, as Adam
Purple watched from the window of his squatter apartment in an adjacent abandoned
building (McKinley, 1998; Mendelsohn, 2009).
From guerillas to gentrifiers

The Green Guerillas and Adam Purple were part of a now familiar wave of urban coloni-
zation by the artist/“pioneer”. These, often well-educated, white, politically progressive but
poor internal migrants, tended to settle in low-value areas of the city. Their social presence,
work and activism directly produced a series of material and symbolic shifts that contrib-
uted to the revalorization of urban space. One of the earliest studies of gentrification in
New York notes that, when there is space in a city for artists, “it often has the effect of
enhancing property values, and so it becomes a springboard for real estate development”
(Zukin, 1982: 111).
The artists moving into the old garment factories of lower Manhattan, beginning as early
as the late 1950s, embodied a wide range of social practices which become clearly marked as
belonging to a privileged elite (Shkuda, 2016). What begins as a bohemian enclave of alter-
native lifestyles is transformed into a model of urban living and consumption. The necessity
of “loft living” for the impoverished artist is turned into a “bourgeois chic”. The arts, as
Zukin notes, are on one level a symbolic force but also a consumer amenity for particular
classes. The rapid rise in property values in SoHo demonstrated this effect, as the aesthetics
of bohemianism were captured and repackaged as a downtown “allure.” Much like the
community gardeners a few blocks away on the LES, artists produced and contributed to
the revalorization of space, and SoHo would become unaffordable for the very artists who
had transformed it. “The structural forces of capitalism and the particularities of place” that
made urban space cheaper – deindustrialization – are also the same forces that create an
economy around cultural production and consumption, and which eventually make that
space expensive once again (Beauregard, 1990).
The meteoric rise of SoHo as a cultural and economic center is the familiar and caution-
ary tale of the late twentieth century. Today, the arts and gardens have a much more
strained (Colomb, 2012), as well as scripted (Evans, 2009), relationship with developers,
urban patricians and middle and upper-class consumers. However, the deliberate and
planned marketing, branding and construction of “creative cities” has not been a panacea
for all. The urban poor and working class, who did have a place in the industrial city as
Haskaj 1059
laborers, find themselves increasingly excluded from the new economy and the new city. As
artists and art, as both market and lifestyle, would come to define the revitalized post-
industrial city as a playground for the rich, well-heeled and educated, the poor and working
class would become its antithesis – a persistent problem that needed disciplining, institu-
tionalization and de-subsidizing. The welfare to workfare program, mass incarceration and
the privatization of public housing was the response to the “poor” while subsidies and space
were provided for the “creative class.”
In this case, gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods is enabled by the free, alienated
and conspicuous labor of the disenfranchised underclass, exhibiting the consciousness (eden-
ism, pastoralism) of the hegemonic, and formerly suburban, class in the revitalization of
empty lots with the community garden. The practice of the everyday gardener, tending to a
lush patch of greenery in a brick and mortar wasteland revalorizes that space, changing its
meaning by importing ‘nature’ (the garden) and expelling the post-industrial blight that
reminds us of a capitalist society that has intensified social stratification and increased
poverty, with a failed social contract and an uneven economy. Further, as the lot is trans-
formed by the labor of the gardener, the recognizability of the gardener is transformed as
well, from the allegedly idle, disenfranchised, unemployed member of the urban poor, to the
productive and leisurely hobbyist of the suburban dreamscape. The inner city, then, begins
to resemble the suburbs with their green spaces and weekend gardeners.
In the early models of gentrification posited by theorists, “urban pioneers” transform the
urban space through their patterns of production and consumption, i.e., public art, cafes,
galleries and fashion, just as the neighborhood itself is transformed and a long process of
devaluation is reversed. The artists who, in the late 1960s and 70 s moved into the aban-
doned lofts of SoHo, were seeking cheap space in order to make their art, essentially seeking
an economic space devoid of the profound process of rent extraction in the rentier economy.
Yet, their presence and the manner in which they live and work has come to symbolically
represent the most desirable ‘urban’ qualities of readily available and diverse opportunities
for consumption. The process, then, of attempting to escape the rentier economy draws the
rentiers into these devalorized spaces by the very non-productive (art and gardening are very
laborious and productive but not profitable) activities of the pioneer/artist and gardener.
Their free and conspicuous labor constructs a space that can be recognized and commod-
ified in the form of higher rents, land and housing costs and, eventually, what is commonly
called gentrification. This is the symbolic inclusion that Mele noted occurring on the LES in
the 1980s, but it is also more than the cooptation, descripting and representation of artists
and gardeners by outside actors. The labor of the gardener produces a very real material
transformation of space, while simultaneously drawing forth a legacy of tropes about pov-
erty, work and the redemption offered by the garden. The cycle of alienation is complete.
It is much like Marx’s analysis of the factory worker, in which:
the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power
independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an
object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labor’s realisation is its
objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realisation of labor
appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage;
appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (Marx, 2012: 69)
The artist/pioneer or gardener is eventually deprived of their work, the “improved” neigh-
borhood by increasing rent and property values as developers and speculators invest
in “transitioning,” “up and coming” and “hip” parts of the city. Yet, unlike the
wage-laborers of 19th century factories, the disenfranchised urbanite working for free in the
garden receives no recompense, even as the work is captured in the form of future property
valuations, as the dramatic rise in values in the 1980’s in the Lower East Side (LES) attest.
For example, New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy
found the LES of Manhattan, once the most densely populated place on earth and home to
waves of immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries, to be the only neighborhood in
Manhattan to experience a drop in real estate prices from 1974–1980 (28.5%) and
second only to the high poverty neighborhood of Concourse/Highbridge in the Bronx
(28.6%), while property values actually rose in Manhattan on the whole during this
period (þ28.6%) (Armstrong et al., 2011). However, during the revanchist period of the
1980’s, the LES experienced the highest property value gains of any neighborhood in
New York (þ262.2%), far outpacing that of New York City as a whole (þ152.2%). In
the “Loisaida” area of the LES, an area that underwent intense gentrification during the
1990’s and was the site of pitched battles between activists/squatters and police in Tomkins
Square Park, and the center of resistance to the Giuliani administration’s class-cleansing
policies, there existed an abundance of community gardens (Smith, 1996). This was the
neighborhood of the Guerilla Gardeners and Adam Purple. It was also the neighborhood
that saw an influx of artists and musicians pushed out of some of New York’s most exclusive
neighborhoods, such as Greenwich village in the 1960s and SoHo in the 1980s.
While the labor of the cultural producer (in this case, the gardener) is not objectified in a
specific commodity as in the factory, since there is no physical object that can be exchanged
in substantial quantities, it is rather the recognizability of the garden itself, the appearance
of a green neighborhood, with productive, i.e. working, if without remuneration, denizens,
visibly engaged in the idyllic and leisurely activity of gardening that is captured and
exchanged in the market as future value. These are the areas designated as ‘up and
coming’, ‘hip’, ‘edgy’ and ‘vibrant’ - all code for various socio-economic and racial catego-
ries that must be reconceptualized as non-threatening. Risk and aversion are overcome by
the promise of both material and cultural profit as values rise on the wave of reinvestment,
and consumption forms the basis of a new community that supplants the old.
This process depends on the signaling of a different class and community than that which
was, and often still is, present. The garden is part of a performance which signals to the
viewer that this neighborhood is ‘good’ and its people ‘diligent’. Thorsten Veblen, in his
seminal work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, noted the power of consumption in establish-
ing class practices and social hierarchy. For Veblen, the activities of labor, consumption and
leisure are social activities that are extensions of the division of labor in society. In a society
in which social hierarchy is based on wealth differences, visible behaviors (conspicuousness)
become of increasing importance as they communicate class position. These behaviors must
indicate freedom from the need to work; they must be leisurely, and form the basis of a
moral order which privileges the activities of the upper classes and degrades the activities of
the lower classes. Veblen writes:
Abstention from labour is not only an honorific or meritorious act, but it presently comes to be
a requisite of decency. The insistence on property as the basis of reputability is very naive and
very imperious during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention from labour is
the convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and
this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on leisure.
Nota notae est nota rei ipsius. According to well established laws of human nature, prescription
presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men’s habits of thought
as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling; while productive labour at
Haskaj 1061
the same time and by a like process becomes in a double sense intrinsically unworthy.
Prescription ends by making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but
morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy life. (21)
Why the community garden?

As well as being a rich site and offering multiple scales of analysis, the study of community
gardens positions the question of space and power as central themes, a framework consistent
with the “spatial turn”. This theoretical shift is inspired by Foucault, who writes, “A whole
history remains to be written of spaces - which would at the same time be the history of
powers (both of these terms in the plural)[original italics] - from the great strategies of
geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” (Soja (1989: 21). Spaces such as the community
garden reflect social relations, but are also the means by which social structures, hierarchies
and relations are constituted.
And, if the community garden does not appear as stark, severe and important as the
archipelago of prisons, schools and hospitals that form Foucault’s line of inquiry, it is only
because they are draped in the deceptively innocuous guise of leisure. But, let us recall that
neoclassical economics understood leisure as central to a modern economic system and class
structure and, hence, not a trivial matter to brush aside. It was argued that the emergence of
leisure as a wide-spread social activity marked rising affluence and its corollaries: free time
and consumerism. The twentieth century’s proliferation of museums, resorts and amuse-
ment theme parks catered to the “fun-seeking middle-class family with children” (Cross and
Walton, 2005: 122). Consumption is the mark of a developed economy with advanced
technology, high productivity and increasingly visible and dominant forms of entertainment
and consumption, and ultimately becomes a significant engine of the economy and culture
(Galbraith, 1958; Tawney, 1920; Veblen, 2001). Leisure, then, and the conspicuity of con-
sumption that has become its hallmark, is not outside the domain of power; rather, it is
central to the constitution of power in a late capitalist society, as leisure is an integral
component of the economy and culture.
One of the many recognizable forms of leisure is the garden. Yet, it is strangely amor-
phous and syncretic, and without turning to biblical tales of serpents and sin, we can assert
that the garden in the city is a contentious and conflictual space. The garden has a variety of
forms and functions in the city, from political mobilization and contestation to basic sur-
vival as food justice (Bassett, 1979). Gardening’s leisurely activity embodies simultaneously
the hard labor of the agrarian peasant and self-sufficient anarchist squatter, the landed
aristocrat and even the suburban lawn tender. This dialectical relation of work and leisure,
production and consumption, low class and high, economy and culture, fixes the garden
squarely in the center of questions surrounding work, class and the city. The community
garden is deeply imbricated in the complex swirl of activities forming a crucial component of
the trifecta of the modern economy; a “dialectical indissolubility of the three dimensions of
production, distribution and consumption” (Jameson, 1991: 211) that we may glimpse in the
sweaty brow of the urban gardener.
Space, then, and in this case the space of the community garden, is more than just a site
for understanding various social relations; it also produces them, both as production and
consumption. As production, the space of the garden is a material improvement. As con-
sumption, it is not fresh vegetables or fruits that are its primary yield; rather, its fruit is
symbolic. The space of the garden, its visual impact on the passerby, is a clear class signal; a
message that this area is “improving” and “safe”, and that these gardeners are working and
being productive.
Labor forms a key component of this process, both in the material form of labor power
to transform the built environment, and as a symbolic force that operates on the level of
ideas, perception and affect. The garden is a physical space but it is also a symbolic space
that resonates out into the social fabric of the community. The “work” of the garden is
multifaceted. It is personal and public, individual and social, as it involves persons but is by
definition a community endeavor. Gardens are physical spaces in which the city is
“improved”, as empty, trash-ridden lots are transformed into vibrant green Edens, but
they are also sites in which the individuals and communities are also improved. This process
is, therefore, deeply imbedded within a value system that privileges and values certain types
of space and certain types of people and communities over others, and, through this value
judgement, orients individual perception and collective policy.
Free-labor in the therapeutic garden

Several figures populate discourses surrounding urban renewal, gentrification and the post-
industrial economy. Some of the more often used monikers are the creative class (Florida,
2004), the knowledge worker (Drucker, 1959), the cognitariat (Hayden-Smith, 2014) and the
urban pioneer (Smith, 1996: xiv). All are harbingers of a virtual brave new world, centered
round technology, symbolism, affect and information, differing only in whether cognitive
capitalism will be liberatory or more deeply and completely subsuming and exploitative,
reaching even into emotions, mental states and the “soul” of the worker.
These “new” workers and the “new” market or consumer society are central to the
discussion of conspicuous labor in the community garden. The former is a nebulous class,
stripped of the antagonisms, struggle and conflict of the old industrial economy. Drucker
and Florida’s workers are skilled, highly educated and freed from the bonds of physical
work, steady long-term employment, and the drudgery of the old economic system. They are
the rootless and “mobile” (Martin-Brelot et al., 2010) denizens of the “gig economy”
(Milkman and Ott, 2014) and no longer burdened by the industrial logic, time or routines
of the old economy (Thompson, 1967), especially as they easily slip into the gap between
exploited worker and exploiting Western consumer, as the bulk of manufacturing is shifted
to the developing world.
The cognitariat combines “cognitive worker” and “proletariat,” reintroducing the idea of
labor and value back into the discussions of the new economy. A third figure also lurks in
the discussion of the city; the “artist”, who has long been marked as a purveyor of high
cultural capital in the revalorization of urban space, as cultural mediator and cultural
sommelier in the vast field of cultural production and consumption, selecting and signifying
immanent gentrification (Ley, 2003). However, the rosy image of these liberated workers
ignores the working poor, immigrant enclaves and, most recently, even the middle-class,
who, in the revalorization of the city, find themselves priced out and pushed out.
I would like to add a fourth, and neglected, figure to the tale of revalorization, the
community gardener, who is part of a larger urban class that, by definition, creates value
in the city through work and, yet, who is frequently ignored. This class finds itself excluded
in the new economy, and yet is part of the historic revalorization process of the city through
their free and conspicuous labor. As a powerful and pervasive component of late capitalism,
free labor has only been sketched by theorists studying the knowledge economy (Terranova,
2000).
Haskaj 1063
Building upon the work of Mauricio Lazzarato, Terranova sees a broad shift in late
capitalist societies that have transformed labor and its meaning from a Fordist material
labor (labor recognized as work) to a post-Fordist immaterial labor (labor that appears as
pleasurable and freely given and, therefore, not work) (Hardt and Virno, 1996). Her target is
the information economy or “netslaves” that embody the generalized condition of a new
type of worker, whose free “immaterial labor” in the “social factory” valorizes private
corporate domains.
The garden in the city is also another site in which the free conspicuous labor of the
proletarianized masses valorizes private domains (Debord, 1998). In this case, the aban-
doned urban spaces are rehabilitated, as are the proletariat, before being absorbed back into
the formal economic system as valuable real estate (Voicu and Been, 2008). As will be shown
later in this paper, subversive cultural strains are not only appropriated and commodified by
the market (most clearly evident in fashion and music), but are already enmeshed with an
earlier bourgeois logic that privileges the edenic over the urban and depends upon the
willing, self-directed, self-managed work of an urban proletariat who reshape the industrial
landscape into a welcoming suburban facsimile. In so doing, they do the work of power by
regularizing and, therefore, regulating social and political relations while revalorizing space
for capital.
The notion of work as a means of social and moral improvement is central to the man-
agement, discipline and regulation of the poor (Wacquant, 2009) and has a long history,
beginning with the progressive era of the 18th century and, perhaps, harkening even further
back to the Protestant Reformation (Abramovitz, 1996). The community garden serves as
such a balm in the discourses of urban blight, social welfare and the constructions of
poverty.
A recent study situates this discourse in the skid row of San Francisco. In her study of the
unhouseds in San Francisco, Teresa Gowan identifies three dominant discourses about the
underclass; sin-talk, sick-talk and system-talk. All three discourses frame poverty as a path-
ological state but ascribe different causes and cures. Sin-talk sees poverty as a moral failing,;
sick-talk as the product of some kind of pathological physical state, such as drug addiction
or mental illness; and system-talk situates poverty at a systemic level. Each construction, in
turn, is parallel by a particular response from the individuated punitive call for the broad
criminalization of poverty and mass incarceration of the poor to large- scale social engi-
neering. Moral failings are met with “exclusion and punishment”, and rarely “redemption”,;
pathologized conditions, such as addiction and mental illness, with “treatment”; and sys-
tematic ills, such as inequality, with “regulation” and “transformation” [all original italics]
(Gowan, 2010).
Public policy has embraced these constructions of poverty and, when the community
garden appears in these debates and discussions, it inevitably is framed as a panacea. Sin-
talk and sick-talk both blame individuals for their status in society and condition their
redemption on the conspicuous greening of the community and the productive labor of
the individual. Structural issues are also remedied by the community garden, as everything
from nutrition to underfunded schools, to broken homes and mass incarceration, can be
solved with a garden.
Community gardens do have a transformative capacity, but not in a morally redemptive
or therapeutic fashion (Gowan, 2010: 222). Instead, the transformation is of space (physical
and social) from that which has low value to high value, poverty to wealth, underclass to
upper class, productive labor to leisure, urban to suburban. In the same way that the
“conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentlemen
of leisure” (Veblen, 2001: 36), the conspicuous labor of the garden is a means of reputability
to the urban denizen. Yet, this process reifies the terrible price paid by the laboring garden-
ers, first in the gift of free, unremunerated labor, and, in the future, land value and rent
increases to come; in short, in the alienation of their labor in the urban regime of capital
accumulation.
Gardens are deceptively pretty: Edenism

It is, perhaps, this shift which indicates a transition in the role of the community garden
from a putatively benign edenism, grounded by the figure of the bourgeois humanist and an
idealization of nature (Marx, 2000), that can be transposed or superimposed onto the poor
with the simple activity of gardening, to a contest between classes in the current neoliberal
condition of increasingly concentrated wealth, power and property and the withering away
of public space (Banerjee, 2001). The centrality of this contest to the increasing stratification
and polarization of society is clearly demonstrated in the struggle over the use and posses-
sion of urban space, from the favelas of Brazil (Perlman, 1976) to the sidewalks of
New York (Susser, 2012). The garden in the city, then is not neutral, or merely a nice
way to spruce up a neighborhood, or uplift the underclass, it is a resource; one which
began as a form of self-empowerment and resistance but, more often than not, ends up
disempowering those that labor freely and conspicuously. The ways in which this occurs, of
course, depend on locality, or as sociologists like to say, the context or milieu. Some gardens
prevail, some disappear or are destroyed by development, but each shares a common ele-
ment; the punctum (Fried, 2005) of ‘nature’ in the metropolis (greening) and the constitution
of new subjectivities (gardener).
In a poor neighborhood, community gardens are a momentary boon or a herald of hope
and resistance to the post-Fordist conditions of underemployment and gentrification. As we
have seen repeatedly in recent decades, these poor neighborhoods don’t remain poor indef-
initely, and the garden becomes part of a process of “revitalization” and “reinvestment”,
predicated on the alienated, free, conspicuous labor of the gardener. Despite its altruistic
character, the garden in the city is a site of labor, which appears at first as the classical
notion of unalienated labor and a mode of resistance to the logic and forces of economic
stratification and residential displacement and segregation, but through the commodifica-
tion of culture becomes alienated; that is, exchangeable by increased land and rent values.
The relationship of the urban poor to the garden is characterized by an uneven distribution
of wealth that perpetuates poverty through a process of expropriation, softened, or reified,
by the pseudo-entrepreneurial charity of the community garden.
Gardens that are legal, or allowed, present the image of a benign urban policy, a gift from
the privileged and powerful. And, as Marcel Maus has shown, a gift is far from disinter-
ested. Rather, it can be a form of domination and obligation (Godelier, 1999: 12). Giving
can uplift but it can also subordinate. In the case of a scarce resource like land in a city,
giving:
seems to establish a difference and an inequality of status between donor and recipient, which
can, in certain instances become a hierarchy: if this hierarchy already exists, then the gift
expresses and legitimizes it. Two opposite movements are thus contained in a single act. The
gift decreases the distance between the protagonists because it is a form of sharing, and it
increases the social distance between them because one is now indebted to the other . . .. It can
be, simultaneously or successively, an act of generosity or of violence; in the latter case, however,
the violence is disguised as a disinterested gesture, since it is committed by means of and in the
form of sharing. (p.12)
Haskaj 1065
Feeding the poor, the “giving” of space and access to nature, is a generous communal act,
no doubt. Yet, the product of this labor is a bourgeoisiefied landscape that acts as an
ideological colonizing element, preparing the way for the eventual gentrification of the
neighborhood and displacement of the residents who labored in the garden by and through
their very own labor. Strangely, here we may draw upon a critique of the old industrial
society that supposedly is no longer relevant in the postindustrial age. Marx wrote in 1844 of
the English industrial working class as they labored in the factories:
the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which
he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less
belongs to him as his own . . . The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no
longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater his activity, the greater is the worker’s
lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater is this
product, the less is he himself. (Marx, 2012: 70)
In the community garden, we can see the same process unfold. For every garden produced,
every green plot planted, every block of urban “blight” undone through the free labor of the
community, so declines the relative wealth of the gardener as these spaces become ever more
valuable and targeted for speculation and development. Notwithstanding the deep ontolog-
ical and existential argument Marx is making – namely, that the essence of humanity is
work, and when that work is captured and accumulated by another, it becomes ‘alien’ or
hostile to the worker - the basic and very simple economic fact is this: a community garden
increases the value in a community and, therefore, the cost to live in that community. This is
not just symbolic inclusion, but material alienation produced by the conspicuous labor of the
gardener.
The process of displacement has been well documented, with the continuing debate cen-
tering on the ‘how’, and not the ‘if’. The general question is whether this shift is a top-down
phenomenon coming from power holders and brokers (Smith, 1979) or ‘natural’ demo-
graphic and economic transformation (Florida, 2004). What is left out in these debates
are the people in these communities who, through the gift of their labor, transform these
spaces. It is not the privileged, young, educated, creative class, or even the exploited cog-
nitariat. Instead, it is the “rehabilitated” or “redeemed” urban working poor who create and
inhabit the affective space of a bourgeois aesthetic in the green garden of the city. In so
doing, they reinforce their own subordination to the existing relations of power and wealth
by contributing to the revalorization of urban space by cleaning and greening it, making it
familiar and palatable to the aesthetic and political sensibilities of wealthier groups.
The garden as estranged labor

The uses of space in the city have changed as the socio-economic relations of labor have
changed. Just as pre-industrial era centered around vast swaths of land and unfree labor, the
industrial era focused on the factory and wage labor, then the contemporary economic
center is the urban core, where the leisure class (Veblen, 2001) and cognitariat have relocated
as the knowledge, or information, economy (Powell and Snellman, 2004) has replaced the
old manufacturing base. The shift from land in feudalism, to land as a space for machinery
to concentrate productive labor under industrialization, to land as a space for consumption
and information production and exchange - neatly ties up the trajectory of a developing
economic and ideological tendency that moves from the objectivism, or concrete value of
land and labor, to the constructivism of a consumer society, detached from the means and
mode of production. In other words, land and labor are not just the concrete physical asset
of productive capacity or ability, but become symbolic and cultural commodities as well.
While the various theories of value and labor are far too complicated and contentious to
cover in full in this article, it is sufficient to emphasize the symbolic role of labor.
Along with the death of the factory and its resurrection as the luxury loft comes the
dismemberment and now expulsion of the stranded and impoverished descendants of the old
working class who held on amidst disinvestment, abandonment and marginalization during
the period of post-Fordist deindustrialization that ravaged the American city. Greening
movements are more than simply civic activism or desire for Swiss chard. They symbolize
and embody the momentous transformation and restructuring of economic production and
class formation from peasant to worker, to the urban underclass. It is a shift from the
objective value of labor in the factory, to the subjective value of consumption in a new
market of culture (lifestyle), underpinned by rent-seeking speculators and investors in the
“revitalized” urban core.
While land permanence and tenure have been salient concerns for community gardeners
for some time, the renewed contest over space in the urban core is part of a larger concern
over public space, affordability and accessibility (Nemore, 1998). The contest over the most
basic and necessary of resources (land, and thereby shelter and food) have been elided under
the rubrics and rhetoric of revitalization, renewal, renaissance, reinvestment, improvement,
rejuvenation, reurbanization (Slater, 2009). Reinvestment in the urban core as a project of
‘improvement’ continues a process of shifting the rhetoric and debate away from the terrain
of social equity and justice to neoliberal economic programs of privatization and wealth
consolidation (Lees et al., 2010).
Considering the accelerated, global and historically unprecedented character of what
amounts to the massive displacement of the most vulnerable classes of people and redistri-
bution of land, and thereby wealth, upwards, the community garden regains its earlier
importance as a site of resistance to neoliberalism in the metropole (Davis, 2006). The
grassroots movements that have emerged in the post-war period and converted abandoned
urban space into various social visions and utopias are not simply a small interest group
attempting to pursue individual or small-scale entitlements against the needs of a growing
metropolis. These movements are part of the larger-scale and ongoing resistance to the
privatization of public assets and wealth and the continuing onslaught on the remains of
the welfare state (Gilbert, 2002; Raco, 2012).
Community garden in the gentrification debate

Community gardens have been treated as overwhelmingly positive phenomena by urban
theorists, who note self-reported measurable improvements in a community. They argue
that gardens increase neighborhood pride, improve aesthetic maintenance of properties and
shared spaces, reduce litter and increase opportunity for social networking and community
cohesion and organizing (Armstrong, 2000; Twiss et al., 2003). In California, one study
noted the increase in physical activity and health among gardeners in low-income commu-
nities (Twiss et al., 2003). Along with improvements in the quality of life, there is a signif-
icant increase in social capital, resulting in greater civic engagement, the expansion of social
networks in the community and the reduction of poverty (Hanna and Oh, 2000). We can all
agree that these measurable changes are beneficial to residents in the short-term, but I would
like to question whether these shifts benefit poorer communities in the long term.
Specifically, I would like to complicate the notion that urban/community gardens are strat-
egies for the improvement of existing communities, rather than the initial stage in a process
Haskaj 1067
of gentrification and thus dislocation that is both socio-cultural and political-economic

(Palen and London, 1984) in its origins. The community garden, or the urban edenist,
becomes an unwilling participant in the very process of “revitalization” that inevitably
leads to their own displacement, as in the case of Adam Purple. Therefore, we should
view the greening of urban spaces as a twofold process. First, it is the surrender of
unpaid labor to the built environment. Second, this unpaid labor is appropriated through
property relations and by real estate, municipal and entrepreneurial agents.
The positive impact of community gardens on a neighborhood and community are unde-
niable in the short term. However, the long-term impact of the surrender of free labor
towards the built environment which is not owned by the laborer reproduces the classic
condition of alienation. Therefore, one must question the nature and impact of this trans-
formation on the socio-economic and racial demographics of a neighborhood over time. In
other words, community gardens do improve communities, but for whom, exactly how, in
what way and for how long? Much work has already been done on the notion of gentrifi-
cation, noting both its governmental as well as socio-cultural origins and its impacts upon
the composition of residents (Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Ley, 2003; Rose, 1984). The role
of community gardens in the process of gentrification has, however, been neglected. Not
only has the garden not come under the critical lenses of analysis, but the most recent
scholarship on gentrification has been oriented towards its denial, erasure and abandonment
as a concept and clarion call for social justice (Slater, 2009).
‘Gentrification’ can become mired in debates about the definition of the word (Slater
et al., 2004). For the purposes of this article I use, as have many before me, Ruth Glass’s
classic and oft-quoted definition of the phenomenon:
One by one, many of the working-class neighborhoods of London have been invaded by the
middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two
down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expen-
sive residences . . . Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly, until
all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character
of the district is changed (Glass, 1964).
This passage quickly and succinctly describes a process which is clear to the lay reader but
has become obscured to the scholar. The recent debates around the definition produce an
obfuscation displacing Glass’s clear articulation with an at best apolitical and passive stance
toward the restructuring of urban space, and at worst a clear neoliberal project of urban
class cleansing. The most salient aspect of Glass’s definition in understanding gentrification
is that the process is not the result of progressive, ‘normal’ population shifts, in which a
wealthier more highly educated class supplants an older, less wealthy and less educated class
slowly over time. Rather, it involves the physical and material ‘improvement’ of the neigh-
borhood via capital investment and labor that leads to class displacement. As the final
sentence of the quote above illustrates, it is the social transformation that is the key to
understanding the process. Specifically, it is a complex and variable process, dependent
upon local conditions, that always has a similar result; “it refers, as its gentri-suffixes
attest, to nothing more or less than the class dimensions of neighborhood change in
short, not simply changes in the housing stock, but changes in housing class” (Slater
et al., 2004: 1144).
Even in the case of the “competing theoretical schools” of thought around gentrification,
what Chris Hamnett has called “production side” and “consumption side models,” both
agree that the fundamental character of the process is marked by displacement, social class
and capital improvement (Hamnett, 1991). If we look more closely at the “competing the-
oretical schools”, what we find is that, while the visible effects of the process are identical to
those described by Glass over half a century ago, the causes are contested. This long-lasting
debate can be extended in the current discussion to the putative public space of the com-
munity garden. Community gardens form a distinct and valuable multiplier for social forces
such as solidarity. Further, by focusing upon the role of community gardens in the process
of gentrification, an important dissonance between two competing arguments over of the
process of gentrification may be sutured.
If we are to take the dominant understanding of gentrification, which itself has increas-
ingly come under scrutiny, wealthier groups supplant less privileged groups through leverag-
ing resources such as economic and political capital in order to gain access, ownership and
control over space in the city. Yet, the concept of gentrification, as defined by Glass,
presumes the desirability of the urban space. This has not always been the case, particularly
if we think of the post-war period in the United States. The suburbanization of post WWII
America suggests the devaluation of the urban. Neil Smith has argued that this devaluation
of the urban landscape produces the opportunity for profit and, thereby, a magnet for
capital. It is thus part of a bust-and-boom cycle that depends on economic fluctuation
and crisis (Smith, 1979; 2002). Cities are, therefore, zones of economic opportunity, not
as in the industrialized society’s ability to concentrate labor and manufacturing, but as the
post-industrial opportunity to extract value through rents and development.
The displacement of London’s working class, as noted by Glass, could be substituted in
the American experience as the displacement of the working poor and minorities. In New
York City, the process has been most acute in historically African-American and Latino
neighborhoods - a fact that further complicates this notion by adding race, as well as class,
to the formula. Since Glass’ first articulation, theorists have tried to account for the phe-
nomenon by either a production-side or consumption-side explanation. The two theoretical
positions converge around the community garden, or rather the garden as an ‘object’, a
space in which the means and modes of production of the society are both preconceived and
produced (p.85). On the one hand, we have Neil Smith’s production-side account of the
process of gentrification, relying on the notion of the “rent gap” (Smith, 1979, 1987). Briefly,
when a land parcel’s capitalized ground rent from its current use is sufficiently below its
potential ground rent value if its uses were shifted (from low income homes to luxury
rentals), then capital is drawn in as speculative investment. This encourages a general
shift in the types of housing and results in displacement and rising rents.
If we were to consider the community garden momentarily in the rent-gap theory, then it
initially serves as a form of resistance to speculative investment by ‘underutilizing’ space and
preventing its circulation in the marketplace. Land removed from the market cannot gen-
erate direct profit for real estate speculators and, instead, generates a use value (food,
outdoor space) for the user. However, while the garden cannot, in some instances, be
inserted into the circulation of market forces if it resists appropriation (remains a commu-
nity garden), it does function as a cultural producer (as abstract labor) creating a familiar
symbolic system (suburbs, countryside) that valorizes surrounding space, indirectly func-
tioning as a market stimulant. This, in turn, alludes to the consumption-side theory of
gentrification.
David Ley notes that the embourgeoisement of inner cities relies upon shifting labor
markets that bring in new populations with new socio-cultural and economic sensibilities.
Using Bourdieu and his notion of the production of cultural fields, Ley furthers his cultural-
level investigation of gentrification as a hermeneutical possibility for exploring the
“restructuring of urban space in post-industrial cities, where the exaltation of representation
Haskaj 1069
over function is far from the ethos of the industrial city and its muscular modernism, glo-
rified in the efficiency and utilitarianism of mass production”. As Ley extends Bourdieu’s
theory of social fields, in which economic (entrepreneurs) and cultural capital (artists) dia-
lectically reinforce each other’s activities in the process of gentrification, he ventures that
“the origins of gentrification included the establishment of an urbane habitus that drew its
identity from a perspective rich in cultural capital but (initially) weak in economic capital.”
But these agents (artists) who are (initially) weak in economic capital are, indeed, members
of the dominant class, embodying their dispositions, tastes, practices and frequently racial
mark. For Ley, then, the artist functions as a colonizer, but one who is being perpetually
colonized and exploited by more dominant members of the class whom they represent (as a
cultural vanguard of the elite) or class which is prefigured. (Ley, 2003: 2529, 2538).
While there is clearly a symbiosis between culture and commodification in late capitalism,
the focus upon the symbolic domain or representation over function, while an important
and meaningful aperture into the role of capital, further reifies the underlying social and
economic relationships. The artist, the gardener, or the immigrant-family-run restaurant are
producing value and are all forgotten, if not deliberately erased, in the discussions of gen-
trification. By tracking the tension between cultural producers, such as artists, and their
tension with the entrepreneur who commodifies and markets cultural production, we forget
a question that has dogged labor and its dual nature as both abstract general labor (sym-
bolic and social) and concrete use-value (material, specific and oriented toward the pro-
ducer’s use), and its capture in the form of exchangeable commodities. While the gardener
or the artist is a cultural representative of the elite, and therefore functions as a transitory
stage in gentrification, they both are, at base, laborers constructing concrete objects that
serve as symbolic signposts and real material objects for gentrification. The artist produces
art, the gardener the garden. Both tasks are forms of physical, unpaid work (free labour)
that are not remunerated in the usual sense of a wage labor system. Simply put, neither is
paid for their work, but rather, both are expected to give their labor to a system that may or
may not reward them.
This “expectation” to give freely of their labor, is a tendency we can see across society in
various forms, such as the unpaid intern (Frenette, 2013; Perlin, 2012), journalism, blogging,
writing, and in one of the most exploitative and overlooked systems of free labor, the
University with its cadres of graduate students doing an increasingly larger share of the
work of the University, as they teach and research, functions that the paid professoriate
monopolized just a few decades ago (Bousquet, 2008). This dual existence as “culture” and
“worker” reveal what Marx called the dual nature of labor, which is on one level abstract,
on another level concrete.
Further, the dual nature of labor is treated by Ley and those theorists who see culture as
convertible to capital as two separate domains, when they are just two sides of the same
process; the creation of value, which is always “a purely social reality” (Marx and Fowkes,
1979). Whether it is a mural or a green space, the “establishment of an urban habitus”
depends upon free conspicuous labor, which is valorized in the “social reality” that con-
stitutes the habitus. The gardener creates and represents elements that allude to a habitus
that is grounded in a historic bourgeoisie, whose privileging of nature, leisure and rejection
of the “industrial city and its muscular modernism” (Ley, 2003: 2539) favors the edenism of
the 19th century, serving both to alleviate the anxieties and fears associated with the
industrial city, and to neutralize altogether the promiscuous heterogeneity of the deindus-
trialized city.
This appropriation would not be possible without the community garden as one among
several important signifiers of this new class, but which also acts as a magnet for this class as
it embodies, represents and calls to the bourgeois sensibility marked by the greening of
urban space. Despite the exultation of “urban living,” decidedly suburban preferences
and sensibilities (i.e., the garden) are sought as comforting. And in this deeply contradictory
positioning, in which the urban is literally bulldozed away in the name of revitalization and
replaced with a simulacrum of the city composed of endless consumer opportunities and a
socio-economically homogenized population, the estranged labor of the community, in the
form of the garden but also art, cuisine and even the very notion of community as a col-
lectivity, is subsumed, absorbed and erased.
A recent incarnation of this process can be seen at “The Logan” a new apartment devel-
opment By RAD Urban in Oakland. Rents can top $6,400, significantly above the median
rent in the area. The building promises numerous amenities for residents, such as monthly
curated events, a resident Ambassador, on-site coffee and tea service, housekeeping, on-
demand dry cleaning, dog walking, a car wash and a 25,000-ft rooftop garden maintained by
management. As a debate about gentrification grew to a fever pitch in the Bay Area, this six-
story, 204-unit luxury rental building first introduced itself to the community by presenting
the lot as a “demonstration farm” created and maintained by Top Leaf Farms, a California
licensed contractor, hired by the developers RAD Urban. For one year, the massive lot at
the busy intersection looked like a large community garden. While the garden’s flora may
have been organic, its emergence was not. It’s rapid appearance and subsequent disappear-
ance are a testament to the industrial efficiency of the developers’ overarching revenue
model – to integrate and capitalize on the garden in the city (RADUrban, 2020).
Conclusion
In this article, I have attempted to situate community gardens in relation to gentrification,
on one level, of the labor or the worker that is conspicuous and free, that is then appro-
priated not through ownership alone, but through the visibility of labor and its recogniz-
ability as a bourgeois aesthetic which, in turn, is monetized. And secondly, at the level of the
recognizable; the way in which the garden embodies a bourgeois aesthetic and serves as a
component in gentrification. This is not to say that all gardens are alike, nor that the
community garden in itself is a natural part of urban class consolidation and homogeniza-
tion. Instead, the idea of the community garden is, at its core, a radical phenomenon that
challenges the ideological core of private property, ‘free-markets’, land speculation and real
estate development, but one that has lost, in many cases but not all, its progressive char-
acter, as it is subsumed under the umbrella of neo-liberalism, and coopted as free and
conspicuous labor. This paper is an attempt to clearly differentiate the radicalism of com-
munity gardening from its anti-thesis, the private plot that brings special attention to self-
alienating acts of conspicuous labor. By focusing on the work of the gardener, we make
these invisible bodies and communities visible again and their valuable contributions to
society and, especially, their contributions to “the market” undeniably apparent.
Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Haskaj 1071
Note
1. use the term deliberately to invoke the duality of the urban gardener as both a disenfranchised and
menacing agent. For an in-depth discussion, see Herbert J Gans (1990).
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(Community) Garden in The City Conspicuous Labor and Gentrification

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(Community) Garden in The City Conspicuous Labor and Gentrification

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Economy and Space

- Peter Marcuse (Fernandez and Burch, 2003)

A brief history of community gardens

From guerillas to gentrifiers

Why the community garden?

Free-labor in the therapeutic garden

Gardens are deceptively pretty: Edenism

The garden as estranged labor

Community garden in the gentrification debate

of gentrification and thus dislocation that is both socio-cultural and political-economic

Declaration of conflicting interests

Foucault M and Miskowiec J (1986) Of other spaces. Diacritics 16(1): 22–27.

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