Colleen Hammelman

Colleen Hammelman
Greening Cities by
Growing Food
A Political Ecology Analysis of Urban
Agriculture in the Americas
Greening Cities by Growing Food
Colleen Hammelman
Greening Cities by Growing

Food
A Political Ecology Analysis of Urban
Agriculture in the Americas
Colleen Hammelman
Department of Geography & Earth Sciences
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, NC, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-88295-2 ISBN 978-3-030-88296-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9
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Acknowledgments
The research and writing for this book took place in a world facing increasing ineq-
uities, threats of global climate change, and growing authoritarian regimes. In this
world, food injustices are widespread. Inspiring people and communities are fight-
ing against those injustices through large and loud movements and quiet everyday
activities. Each day, through decisions, advocacy, and action to change the systems
creating inequities, individuals and groups are building more just and sustainable
food systems. I must begin by thanking these actors and their actions in creating a
better world for us all.
I also want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who opened up their grow-
ing spaces, plants, homes, and offices to me. This research could not have been
completed without many growers taking time to share their experiences and knowl-
edge with me, and I am forever changed by those experiences. Mil gracias y un
abrazo enorme to the many individuals that worked hard to make sure my time in
their cities was welcoming and productive – including Alexis Saenz-Montoya,
Cesar Buitrago, Nicolas Paz, and many others that I cannot name here due to confi-
dentiality concerns. Hopefully you all know how grateful I am for your generosity
and ongoing partnerships.
This book project could not have been accomplished without the ongoing sup-
port of numerous colleagues. This includes those that reviewed drafts and provided
guidance as the book came together including Deborah Thomas, Charles Z. Levkoe,
Kristin Reynolds, and Elizabeth Shoffner. This work was also supported by several
research assistants and writing partners, including Samantha Lee, Ysabelle Maria
Cruzat, Sophia Reini, and Evan White. Thank you to the many mentors and advisers
I have had throughout this research and my academic career including Allison
Hayes-Conroy, Melissa Gilbert, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Jeffrey Pilcher, and
Daniel Bender. Thank you also to the many friends and colleagues who have fos-
tered spaces of collaboration and knowledge sharing that energize my mind and
soul whenever we have the opportunity to spend time together.
Finally, I must express my sincere gratitude to my family for their unending sup-
port and love. In particular, my partner, Bill, who supported me unconditionally
throughout all of my endeavors and moves, and my two sons that supported their
v
vi Acknowledgments
mama with love and a contagious enthusiasm for traveling and eating. Thank you to
my parents, Mark and Leslie; brother, Arthur; and friends and extended family who
have always been supportive and willing to listen as I worked through ideas for this
research.
My traveling partner and oldest son in Rosario, Argentina, during one of the many trips
through urban agriculture projects we did together. (Photo by Author, 2018)
Contents
1 Introduction�� 1
Evolution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North and South 1
Examining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas
Through a Political Ecology Lens�� 4
Impacts of Global Political Economy on Urban Agriculture Practice�� 7
Research Sites�� 8
Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina�� 9
Toronto, Ontario, Canada�� 11
Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia�� 12
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States �� 14
Organization of the Book�� 15
References�� 17
2 Entanglements of Social Justice, Sustainability Governance,
and Land Tenure: A Literature Review �� 21
Expanding Scholarly Engagements with Urban Agriculture �� 21
Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability�� 23
The Role of Food Systems in Urban Sustainability Planning
and Policy�� 24
Social Justice in Urban Agriculture �� 27
Approaches to Food Justice �� 27
Pursuing Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Projects�� 29
Securing Land for Urban Agriculture�� 31
Constraining Land Access via Neoliberal Urban Land Policies�� 32
Conclusion �� 35
References�� 36
3 Promoting Market Gardens and (Re)producing Uneven
Development �� 41
Toward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable Urban Agriculture �� 42
Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects�� 46
Growing Organic Crops for the Market in Medellín �� 46
vii
viii Contents
Market Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in Rosario �� 48

Pursuing Community Economic Development in Toronto�� 50
Employment Strategies in Charlotte�� 51
Exclusions and Uneven Development�� 52
Contributing to the City Through Urban Agriculture
Entrepreneurialism? �� 56
References�� 57
4 “It Is Not Just About the Food”: Integrated Qualitative
Valuations of Urban Agriculture�� 59
Beyond Food Production �� 60
Providing Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering Community
Economies, Neighborhood Place-Making, and People and Land
Relationships�� 62
Community Economies�� 63
Social Connections and Place-Making�� 65
Connecting to Land, Histories, and Traditional Knowledge�� 68
Providing Environmental Value Through Food System Alternatives,
Human-Nature Connections, and Education�� 70
Ecosystem Services and Environmental Alternatives�� 70
Human and Environmental Health�� 74
Food and Agriculture Education Outcomes �� 75
Valuing Urban Agriculture’s Interrelated Qualitative Contributions �� 76
References�� 78
5 Stewarding the Environmental Commons�� 83
Theoretical Foundations in Public Space and Environmental Commons 84
Literature on Public Space and Environmental Commons in Urban
Agriculture �� 88
Productions of Lived Space in Urban Agriculture �� 90
Policy Approaches to Stewarding the Commons �� 91
Producing Contested Publics Through Lived Space�� 94
Shifting Representations of Growing as a Collective�� 96
Unsettling Public or Private Natures�� 100
References�� 101
6 A Way Forward�� 103
Challenges to Pursuing Social Justice via Neoliberal Sustainability
Policy �� 104
More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints�� 107
Pursuing Systemic Change�� 110
Embracing the Ever-Changing Urban Environment�� 111
References�� 113
Index�� 115
Chapter 1
Introduction
After nearly 5 years of walking through urban agricultural spaces throughout the
Americas, enjoying countless samples of food directly from the vines, smelling
compostable materials, and learning from growers, policymakers, and community
leaders, a first happened. I was stopped by a research participant, as I was listening
to him tell me and two undergraduate students about the medicinal properties and
genus of plants in his teaching garden, because a butterfly landed on my head. I had
had many interactions with animals, plants, soils, and people, but (beyond eating)
this was the closest physical manifestation of human-environment relationships I
had encountered. As we continued to talk, this urban agriculture advocate and
agronomist reflected on that moment: “I think that we need to change the image of
the farmer to a builder of a new landscape, creator of harmony and beauty because
all that is also there. It’s another kind beauty that’s in the plants, smells, in the ani-
mals, like the butterfly that landed on your head.” For this person, and many others
in this research, the socio-ecological relationships formed through urban agriculture
are critical to sustaining urban landscapes. This research and book seek to make
visible these relationships in order to better understand the complex assemblages in
which they are embedded.
volution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North

E
and South
Historical texts and more recent academic publications depict a long history of
urban agriculture worldwide, characterized by growth during times of economic
downturn combined with retraction in economic booms. More recently, urban agri-
culture is being incorporated into sustainable development policies that further
political economic goals. This chapter begins by briefly tracing this evolution.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Hammelman, Greening Cities by Growing Food,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_1
2 1 Introduction
Urban agriculture—the production, harvesting, and processing of crops or live-

stock in an urbanized area—has been practiced in cities around the world for mil-
lennia (Steel 2013). As early as the construction of Machu Picchu in the sixteenth
century, cities have established spaces for food production. In early cities, urban
agriculture emerged as necessary for addressing food insecurity and supporting the
livelihoods of working poor residents (Lovell 2010). Early allotments were strate-
gies for neighborhood and family resilience. This is evident as the practice increases
during times of economic and political crisis and in early perceptions in the Global
North that gardens were considered both something personal and private for upper
classes as well as areas of ill-repute tended by working-class laborers (Kettle 2014).
Barthel and Isendahl (2013) describe the loss of communal sites and ancient sys-
tems of local food production in Britain during the privatization and enclosure of
green space in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
More recently, Reynolds (2015) notes that urban agriculture provided an impor-
tant source of food for New York City residents during the world wars and the
Depression. Then in the 1950s–1960s, urban agriculture projects focused more on
community development and social and environmental organizing. Many of these
projects have been pursued to make city life more palatable, productive (a produc-
tive greening), and sustainable (WinklerPrins 2017). Additionally, in cities in the
global North and South, urban agriculture is viewed as a contributor to social and
ecological resilience. As Barthel and Isendahl (2013) point out:
Cities sequester food from the farthest reaches of the planet via a fragile global food system
where energy costs are escalating and marginal returns from fertilisers and pesticides are
diminishing, while environmental problems, such as water degradation, topsoil loss and
biodiversity loss, are accumulating at sites of food production. (pg. 2)
Thus, contemporary urban agriculture presents an opportunity to reconnect cities

with food production and protect urban green space.1
In recent decades, urban agriculture has experienced a resurgence. The UN
Development Programme estimates that more than 800 million urban agricultural
producers cultivate 15% of the world’s food (Mougeot 2016). Whether backyard
gardens and hoop houses, collectively organized community gardens, individual
allotments, rooftop gardens, greenhouses, beekeeping, or other innovations, urban
agriculture is practiced by a variety of stakeholders. Especially in times of economic
recession, people participate in urban agriculture to increase social capital, social
cohesion, nutrition education, public health, economic development, food security,
community resilience, and sustainability, as well as contest the industrial food sys-
tem (Certomà and Tornaghi 2015; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Hoover 2013;
Wakefield et al. 2007; among others).
Urban agriculture also aligns with several sustainable development goals seeking
to reduce injustice and inequity while fighting climate change. International
1
The significant literature identifying the quantitative contributions of urban agriculture is beyond
the scope of this book that focuses on more qualitative political, economic, and social features (see,
e.g., Haberman et al. 2014, MacRae et al. 2010, among others).
Evolution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North and South 3
researchers recognized the links between the food system and addressing climate
change in a 2019 report that called for reducing food waste, increasing plant-based
diets, and producing food in more sustainable, low greenhouse gas emission sys-
tems (IPCC 2019). While not specifically addressing urban ecosystem dynamics,
the report suggests that urban and peri-urban food production can be a strategy for
reducing the impacts of urbanization on climate change and the loss of land avail-
able for food production.
At a smaller scale, progressive cities around the world receive significant atten-
tion for their urban sustainability planning that frequently incorporates urban agri-
culture. Much of this planning, and urban agriculture projects more generally,
pursues social equity as a potential outcome of urban agriculture practiced by mar-
ginalized groups. For example, the 2016 Philadelphia (US) Greenworks Plan
includes urban agriculture in its vision of making healthy, affordable, and sustain-
able food available to all residents. Similar to other urban sustainability plans across
North America, this document describes urban agriculture as instrumental for not
only providing fresh produce to hungry communities but also animating community
spaces. In addition, groups promoting urban agriculture often highlight potential
contributions to countering the negative environmental and human impacts of the
industrial food system, addressing urban blight, and transforming political eco-
nomic systems in order to advance social justice (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Hoover
2013; Sbicca 2013). Others point to the gender dynamics of urban agriculture (and
food systems more broadly), noting that women farmers contribute approximately
40% of world food production with less access to land, financial and educational
services, inputs, and technology than their male counterparts (Sachs and Patel-
Campillo 2014). Attending to such relationships within agricultural systems could
unsettle traditional gender relations and a neoliberal emphasis on worker productiv-
ity, in favor of advocating for fair wages and employment conditions that promote a
better quality of life and food.
Despite these social justice and sustainability goals developed alongside advance-
ments in urban agriculture policy and practice in recent decades, urban agriculture
projects encounter many obstacles to implementation. In particular, urban agricul-
ture projects created by historically marginalized residents often face exclusion in
accessing land, resources (including financial capital), and political support
(Cabannes 2012; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Daftary-Steel et al. 2015; Glasser
2018; Hammelman 2019; Thibert 2012). It is also frequently governed by discon-
nected and contradictory municipal planning and policymaking (Lawson 2005). As
urban agriculture competes for land with other, higher-value, uses (such as housing
or commercial development), or contradicts policymakers’ visions of a modern city,
its producers face significant pressures to end or relocate their practice. Better
understanding these contestations in cities that are pursuing sustainability through
neoliberal agendas can shed important light on the ability of urban agriculture proj-
ects to achieve the environmental and social goals outlined above.
4 1 Introduction
xamining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas

E
Through a Political Ecology Lens
Theorizing in political ecology provides a foundation for this book, which investi-
gates the impact of global political economic processes on local urban agriculture
initiatives. The field of political ecology traces its roots to political economy
research on ecological processes (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987), but it has expanded
significantly in the past decades. Many political ecologists are grounded in critical
social theory and committed to in-depth, direct observation via qualitative and/or
mixed methods in order to better understand the entanglements of political and
environmental phenomena (Bridge et al. 2015). Early political ecologists consid-
ered co-constitutive relationships between society and natural resources including
seeking explanations for land degradation in social, economic, and political pro-
cesses (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Neumann 2005). Important for the research in
this book is the plurality of approaches put forth for a greater understanding of
marginality and environmental injustices (Blaikie 2012; McCarthy 2002; Muldavin
2008; Robbins 2012; Peet and Watts 2004). In the past decades, feminist and de-
colonial expansions of political ecology have brought greater attention to historical,
cultural, and linguistic forces; linkages between power relations, institutions, and
environmental outcomes; and the production of socio-natures (Biersack and
Greenberg 2006; Blaikie 2012; Forsyth 2003; Nygren and Rikoon 2008; Peet and
Watts 2004). For example, Elmhirst (2015), in surveying feminist political ecology,
notes the ways in which feminist scholarship in political ecology has brought atten-
tion to gendered resource access and control, gendered subjectivity and power,
material feminist theories of human/non-human nature relationships, and a feminist
ethics of care.
Important in my research are ideas of the urban metabolism and assemblages,
attention to urban socio-ecological relationships and practices of commoning, and
the role of space and place in constructing and experiencing urban agriculture.
Assemblage thinking often relies on theorizing by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to
consider the ways that materiality, representation, and subjectivity interweave over
space and time (Robbins and Marks 2010). These “tangled webs” arrange relational
actors in ways that construct and code space for particular purposes (Braun 2006,
pg. 644; Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020). Attending to assemblages high-
lights the flows, connections/divisions, and betweenness apparent in relations
among material, bodies, and representation (Dovey and Wood 2015). One form of
such assemblages identifies the urban metabolism through which assembled actors
circulate through and co-constitute cities (Robbins and Marks 2010). It recognizes
that cities are “dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simul-
taneously local and global, human and physical, cultural and organic” (Heynen
et al. 2006, pg. 1). In such an urban metabolism, reciprocal and reinforcing flows of
human and non-human labor support capital accumulation (Perkins 2007). Urban
political ecology scholarship articulates the urban metabolism as a “dynamic pro-
cess by which new sociospatial formations, intertwinings of materials and
Examining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas Through a Political Ecology Lens 5
collaborative enmeshing of social nature emerge and present themselves, and are
explicitly created through human labor and non-human processes simultaneously”
(Heynen 2014, pg. 599). In other words, the urban metabolism is the process by
which nature and labor are transformed through social, political, and economic sys-
tems into urban commodities critical for city survival (Shillington 2013).
Recognizing co-constituted urban socio-ecological relationships is critical for
bringing to light city-nature connections obscured by contemporary capitalist
processes.
WinklerPrins (2017) notes that urban agriculture can be approached as a healing
of the metabolic rift as it rescales nutrient cycles in the city, builds community and
social capital, and forms human-environment connections. “Urban agriculture is a
means of reconnecting people to nature that improves their individual health, but
also connecting them to work that makes people feel a productive part of society”
(WinklerPrins 2017, pg. 6). McClintock (2010) also discusses urban agriculture as
a way to mend the metabolic rift created by capitalist commodification of land,
food, and labor. Restoring soil fertility, reconnecting human and non-human natures,
and revaluing urban material via urban agriculture can address the negative out-
comes of this rift.
The emphasis on socio-ecological relationships in political ecology theory lends
itself well to understanding urban agriculture practice at multiple scales. Political
ecologists point to the co-constitution of nature and society. Given that nature and
society are inseparable, in order to understand social or ecological phenomenon, it
is critical to examine how they are essential to each other (Classens 2015). For
example, in examining home patios in Nicaragua, Shillington (2013) notes that
home space is embedded in social and socio-natural relations at multiple scales. The
informal cultivation of fruit trees in domestic spaces (re)produces social ecologies
through which marginalized households meet physical needs and appropriate urban
space. Classens (2015) also points out that urban gardens must “be conceived of as
socio-natural hybrids, comprised of both natural and social elements” (pg. 234).
Clarifying the ways that nature operates in urban agriculture enables a more nuanced
understanding of how capital impacts and is re-constituted and/or resisted in gar-
den spaces.
The constitution of urban socio-ecological formations also intertwines property
rights, land use, and the commons. Many political ecology scholars focus on how
socio-natures impact power dynamics in the commons and the practice of common-
ing to produce alternative urban futures (Ginn et al. 2018). They have long been
concerned with the social mediation of property rights that are overlapping and
contested (Turner 2017). Increasingly, political ecologists are also attending to prac-
tices of commoning. Understanding the social and political relationships that pro-
duce and regulate common natures is particularly relevant to this research on urban
agriculture (as discussed in Chap. 5).
Finally, political ecology is largely, although not exclusively, situated within
geography and its attention to space and place. Many geographers concerned with
space invoke Henri Lefebvre’s theorizations on the social production of perceived,
conceived, and lived space. Barron (2017) notes the ways in which capital
6 1 Introduction
accumulation, human agency, and material processes shape urban space every day.
Further, our knowledge about space is part of the processes of its (re)production and
interpretation (Djokić et al. 2017). Considering the constitution of space through
lived experience can bring light to the entangled socio-ecological assemblages
involved in that production at multiple scales (home, urban, rural, nation, etc.). For
example, Reis (2017) points to the impact of neoliberal globalization on the increas-
ing fluidity of capital, commodities, and labor between urban and rural contexts.
This fluidity is made visible through mixing farm and non-farm activities as liveli-
hood strategies for rural and urban households (Tornaghi and Dehaene 2019). Urban
gardens, in particular, have been studied as spaces reclaimed through labor, occupa-
tion, and the cultivation of natural systems (Barron 2017; Djokić et al. 2017). In this
way, urban agriculture creates place in varied spaces throughout cities. It is critical
to understand the influence of space and place when analyzing social processes of
food systems (Hinrichs 2007; Lyson 2014). In examining urban farms in Los
Angeles and Seattle, Mares and Peña (2010) point out how these reclamations con-
tinuously create cultural attachments to space or, in other words, make place. They
elaborate: “The struggles toward alternative use of space through place-making
practices that promote self-reliance, community, and autonomy constitute spatial
practices that are both counter-hegemonic and revealing of unplanned-for outcomes
and uses” (pg. 241). It is important to understand both the broader context in which
urban agriculture is embedded and the ways it shapes place and space.
This foundation in political ecology also supports the comparative nature of this
project. This book examines four cities spanning the global North and South. In
doing so, it follows the lead of other international comparative researchers system-
atically comparing similar phenomena across different sociocultural settings
(Hantrais 2009). Comparative research is important for understanding urban phe-
nomenon beyond local contexts, how cities participate in global political economic
systems, and relations reaching across space, yet actualized in place (Ward 2010).
In stretching across the global North and South, my research also responds to de-
colonial calls for theorizing from diverse contexts, understanding “ordinary” cities,
and considering multiple cities together (Robinson 2006; Roy 2011; WinklerPrins
2017). In this way, the global-local orientation of this book utilizes local cases to
identify shared and different patterns, commonalities, and differences between
groups and projects in order to shed light on global phenomena relating to sustain-
ability, neoliberalism, and policy mobilities. As found by others (such as
WinklerPrins 2017), while much literature on urban agriculture does not reach
across broad geographies of the global North and South, the practices occurring
across regions are increasingly converging. Worldwide, urban agriculture can be
found cropping up in vacant lots, institutional spaces, backyards, and organized
plots in parks and is motivated by goals for subsistence, community building, and
recreation. While the diversity of garden projects is great, common values of social-
ity, cultural connections, health, and economics thread through initiatives in all four
cities in my research.
Impacts of Global Political Economy on Urban Agriculture Practice 7
I mpacts of Global Political Economy on Urban

Agriculture Practice
In this book, I argue that examining differences and similarities between urban agri-
culture movements brings to light the global political economic processes—neolib-
eral sustainability agendas that rely on market solutions, economic quantification of
land use, and privatizing the management of environmental commons—that disrupt
efforts to pursue social justice via urban agriculture. My research highlighted terri-
torial assemblages that privilege certain types of urban agriculture—collectively
managed gardens that produce goods for the market—in ways that constrain achiev-
ing social justice objectives and maintain uneven development. This book traces
theoretical and empirical explanations for the impact of global political economic
structures (neoliberal urbanism and sustainability) on local efforts to promote social
and environmental goals through urban agriculture.
The following chapters engage with ideas of capitalism, neoliberal urbanism,
and the sustainability fix to understand how urban agriculture contributes to urban
imaginaries and is constrained by them. It pays particular attention to the prioritiza-
tion of economic strategies for solving sustainability and social goals, the devolu-
tion of responsibility for managing commons and social safety nets to individuals
and civil society, and efforts to resist urban regimes focused on private property,
enclosure, and capital accumulation at the expense of social justice. Contemporary
neoliberal urban policy pursues growth through capital-intensive development that
prioritizes the economic value of urban land. This value can be buttressed through
environmental projects that attract capital investments. As urban agriculture is prac-
ticed in this context, it is often either valued only for its (perhaps limited) contribu-
tions to the market or perceived as a temporary use that can attract neighborhood
investment. These goals, then, can spur concerns regarding gentrification and dis-
placement, particularly when urban agriculture projects are unable to withstand
development pressures and growers lose investments and access to resources (such
as food, green space, and social place).
It is difficult to achieve social justice goals in this framing as the contributions of
urban agriculture to social, cultural, political, and even environmental goals are
devalued. Most of these urban agriculture values—such as creating social connec-
tions, connecting to the land, and disconnecting from the corporate food regime—
are difficult to quantify in ways that prove their value in neoliberal urbanism regimes.
But, rather than bend these values to fit hegemonic political economic goals, many
growers in this research reported that their practice resisted these ideologies and
instead can produce new urban imaginaries. One way these imaginaries take shape
is through unsettling private property regimes and notions of public space. By nature
of their physical and material contributions to urban natures, urban agriculture prac-
titioners often felt their ability to claim rights to resources and the making of the city
expanded. However, landowners disputed these claims and were careful to institute
norms and rules that focused on the stewarding of common environmental resources
instead of private claims to resources and land (given that most growers do not own
8 1 Introduction
the land they cultivate). Importantly, these imaginaries of public or private space are
grounded in broader contexts of urban development and property rights such that
within-garden tensions arise regarding the extent to which spaces are open to the
general public (who may pilfer produce from plants) or should be enclosed. In these
debates, particularly when the market value of urban agriculture is emphasized,
notions of individualization and private property are reinforced. My research makes
visible the complex assemblage of urban agriculture that is produced through mate-
rial, social, and relational meaning and practice. This assemblage is co-constituted
with neoliberal urban sustainability regimes through their impacts on urban agricul-
ture as well as urban agriculture’s contributions and resistance to these regimes.
Research Sites
This book presents comparative research about urban agriculture initiatives in four
cities across the Americas—Rosario, Argentina; Toronto, Canada; Medellín,
Colombia; and Charlotte, United States (see Fig. 1.1). During 2015–2019, I talked
with 130 people across the four cities through semi-structured interviews, focus
groups, community meetings, and informal settings (such as garden tours and at
farmers’ markets). Those individuals represented agricultural producers, policy-
makers, and non-profit advocates. I also completed a discourse analysis of govern-
ment planning materials in each city and reviewed the growing body of academic
literature on urban agriculture. Each city presents a different context in which urban
agriculture is practiced. In the North American context in Toronto and Charlotte,
urban agriculture projects are more commonly practiced on government land (such
as allotment gardens provided by Parks & Recreation Department), while in the
South American context, in Rosario and Medellin, subsistence agriculture originat-
ing in informal neighborhoods can be more contested and uncertain.
The cities were selected based on their stages of urban agriculture momentum
and municipal support. Rosario and Toronto are home to long-standing urban agri-
culture movements with substantial government support, while Charlotte and
Medellín are more nascent and operate with less municipal intervention. Additionally,
I sought representation from diverse urban contexts. All four cities are growing yet
struggle with socio-spatial disparities and poverty (albeit at different levels). Some
of the cities are situated near water (Rosario and Toronto), in the mountains
(Medellín), and in temperate climates that support longer growing seasons (Rosario,
Medellín, and Charlotte) and are experiencing significant urbanization (Charlotte,
Medellín, and Toronto). Each city’s economy focuses on different sectors, and the
governments have different political leanings. While my research stretches across
the global North and South, the growing economies in Medellín and Rosario enable
sustainability and support that may not be evident in other parts of the global South.
Unfortunately, my research was unable to incorporate empirical examples from
other regions of the global South (such as Asia and Africa), although it is informed
by literature from those regions. While each case study is situated within its own
Research Sites 9
Fig. 1.1 Map of research site locations. (Source: Author and ESRI Topographic Basemap)
particular context, my research seeks to demonstrate cross-cutting themes that can

be instructive for urban agriculture initiatives in other places and spaces.
Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina
Rosario is located in a principal agricultural region (the Pampa Húmeda) along the
Paraná River in the province of Santa Fe on the eastern side of Argentina. As the
third largest city in the country, it is home to approximately 1.2 million people
10 1 Introduction
(INDEC 2010). It is a port city at the intersection of two railroad lines and several
major highways driving an agroexport economy responsible for more than 70% of
the country’s grains, subproducts, and oil exports (FAO 2015; Gorenstein 2005).
While the city (and country) has weathered cycles of economic crisis and high
unemployment rates, it tends to do better than the national average in terms of
access to basic needs in health, education, housing, and access to water and sanita-
tion (Almansi 2009). It is a destination for migrants from the interior of Argentina
and neighboring countries, often forced into cities due to industrial agriculture’s
land appropriation (in part related to Argentina’s heavy investment in genetically
modified soybeans as a commodity crop). Many minimally resourced migrants and
other lower-income Rosarinos reside in informal settlements (villas) on the out-
skirts of the city (Hardoy and Ruete 2013). The city also fights against a drug trade
that brings violence to these neighborhoods (Eventon 2013). Politically, Rosario is
remarkable for the continuity of its socialist municipal government since 1989. It
has experienced significant coherence in policy approaches for several decades
(Hardoy and Ruete 2013). The municipal government implements several participa-
tory planning exercises through which residents can give input into the planning and
management of the city.
Urban agricultural practice gained steam in the 1980s–1990s as more residents
of informal settlements took up the practice to supplement food budgets. By 1991,
these efforts were supported by ProHuerta, a program established by the National
Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) and the National Ministry of Agriculture
and Fishing, as part of the National Food Security Plan (CIPPEC 2012). As a
national program, ProHuerta supports small-scale, subsistence production in low-
income urban and peri-urban areas (INTA 2011). Following a nation-wide eco-
nomic crisis in 2001, urban agriculture practice expanded rapidly throughout
Rosario as residents turned to empty lots to grow food in the face of unemployment
and hunger (Bracalenti et al. 2012). At this time, the municipal government formed
its Urban Agriculture Program (PAU) to provide tools, seeds, and training to 20
gardening groups. By 2003, this program had expanded to supporting 800 commu-
nity gardens (Guénette 2010). As the economic crisis resolved and a consolidation
process began, the number of gardens throughout the city declined. In mid-2019,
nearly 250 families participated in six city-managed community gardens (parque
huertas) on 30 hectares of public land (FAO 2014; personal communication 2019;
see Fig. 1.2).
The municipal government also began a peri-urban initiative in 2011, the
Greenbelt Project, to support transition of conventional farming to agroecological
practices (Terrile 2011). As of October 2019, the Greenbelt Project engaged nine
producers cultivating a total of 73 hectares via agroecological methods with an
additional 142 hectares in transition (Latucca 2019). Both PAU and the Greenbelt
Project operate farmers’ markets (ferias) throughout the city every day through
which participants can sell their goods. It is estimated that an additional 2000 home
gardens are cultivated across the city (Latucca 2019).
Research Sites 11
Fig. 1.2 A community garden supported by the municipality in Rosario. (Photo by author 2018)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Toronto, in southern Ontario, is the largest economy and city in Canada. It has a
population of more than 5 million people and covers an area of 243 square miles on
the northern banks of Lake Ontario (Statistics Canada 2018). It is also one of the
most diverse cities in the world with more than 50% of its population originating by
birth from outside of Canada. Toronto serves as the commercial, financial, indus-
trial, and cultural center of Canada (Ochoa and Ramírez 2018). It is home to 8.2%
of Canada’s workforce, and the growing economy and population have resulted in
significantly increased housing prices and limited land available for urban
agriculture.
Toronto is also a leader in food policy in North America. The Toronto Food
Policy Council (TFPC) was founded in 1991 within the City’s Board of Health to
address food policy issues across city government. The TFPC supported writing and
adoption of the Toronto Food Strategy in 2010 and has long been a supporter of
urban agriculture. This is evident in the adoption of policy mechanisms and pro-
grams, such as the GrowTO Urban Agriculture Action Plan (2010) and the Toronto
Urban Agriculture Program, both of which seek to enable easy access to resources
for growing. A network of gardeners, Toronto Urban Growers, is also instrumental
for expanding and raising the profile of urban agriculture across the city. In 2020,
12 1 Introduction
there were more than 200 documented growing spaces representing a diversity of
practices, participants, and urban contributions (TUG 2020). In recognition of the
importance of this movement, in 2017 the Toronto mayor declared each September
15th as Urban Agriculture Day.
During my research there was strong momentum for establishing market gardens
on public lands and responding to the densification of the city by building more
rooftop gardens. While the urban agriculture movement was growing and gaining
international attention, it was constrained by limited access to cultivable land and
city regulations that did not recognize agriculture as a land use. Many innovations
in container gardening, indoor growing, and other alternative spaces (such as ship-
ping containers) worked to overcome these limitations (see Fig. 1.3).
Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia
Medellín is the capital city of the department of Antioquia in northwestern Colombia.

The city of more than 2.5 million people is located in the Aburrá Valley of the Andes
Mountains (Betancur 2007). It recorded the fastest-growing urban economy in Latin
America in 2014 and has gained international attention for its urban development
strategies, including hosting the UN World Habitat Urban Forum (Franz 2018).
These strategies focused infrastructure investments and social programming in the
most marginalized neighborhoods through an approach known as social urbanism.
Fig. 1.3 Community garden in downtown Toronto. (Photo by author 2017)

Research Sites 13
Economic elites in the city also concentrated capital in financial, services, construc-
tion, and food processing sectors in order to draw international investments.
Medellín absorbs significant numbers of migrants and internally displaced persons
from the northwest regions of Colombia, due to the decade-long civil war. Many of
such lower-resourced residents live in informal settlements sprawling up the val-
ley’s slopes on unstable terrain (Hernandez-Garcia 2013; Sotomayor 2016).
While Medellín has a mild climate supporting year-round growing, these infor-
mal, self-built neighborhoods high up the mountain slopes are at risk of mudslides
and present challenging terrain for establishing gardens. Yet, residents are organiz-
ing gardens to supplement food budgets, improve neighborhoods, and claim a right
to the city (see Fig. 1.4). My research focused mostly on community gardens in
neighborhoods on the eastern edge of the city, including one where women created
a space for 40 families to have garden plots in 2011. As emblematic of efforts in
other parts of the city, these gardens provided fresh food for consumption, exchange,
and sale at occasional markets in the center city. These gardeners originally received
government support (via a yearly lease) as a temporary land use preventing further
expansion of their informal neighborhood. During 2014–2017, the municipal gov-
ernment also incorporated urban gardens into a large-scale greenbelt project (El
Jardín Circunvalar de Medellín) that demarcated the city’s rural-urban border in
Comuna 8 (see Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020 for more information on this
project). My research also included growers (established and aspiring) in other
Fig. 1.4 An urban garden high up the hillsides of Medellín. (Photo by author 2017)
14 1 Introduction
informal neighborhoods who participated in community meetings for sharing

knowledge and seeds and seeking to build a network of urban growers.
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
Charlotte is the largest city in North Carolina, in the southeastern United States. The
Charlotte metropolitan region is home to more than 2.6 million people with a rap-
idly growing immigrant population upsetting traditional black-white binaries (US
Census 2019). Historically, Charlotte was an influential trading post and textile pro-
ducing region. Today, it is home to the second-largest banking sector in the United
States, which is driving overall population growth. It is one of the fastest-growing
cities in the United States, with many new residents drawn to employment opportu-
nities in high-income banking sectors and, relatedly, low-income service sectors
(such as construction, food service, and domestic labor). This has produced
increased housing prices and a lack of affordable housing (Nilsson et al. 2020).
Between 1990 and 2010, Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is located) recorded
an increase in its foreign-born population of 595% (Furuseth et al. 2015). By 2019,
Latinx residents represented more than 14% of the Charlotte population. Charlotte
has struggled with spatial inequality and segregation. A report in 2014 found that
Charlotte had the lowest rates of economic mobility of the 50 largest cities in the
United States (Chetty et al. 2014). Located in the Carolina Piedmont, it enjoys mild
weather and a long growing season.
As Charlotte has grown over the past four decades, it has expanded its borders
into farmland areas. This history makes fertile soils available in many neighbor-
hoods, but recent growth has also reduced access to land for urban agriculture.
Instead, some farms that are perceived as urban today have rural histories that
evolved as development came to their doorsteps. Those farmers are finding innova-
tive ways to adapt to their now more urban or suburban landscapes. Charlotte’s
suburban landscape also makes more backyard gardening available than in other
cities in my research.
Despite those trends, Charlotte has an increasingly active food movement and
many urban agriculture projects. My research documented more than 100 growing
spaces in various stages of development (decade-old, newly energized, and/or
recently abandoned) (see Fig. 1.5). The county Parks and Recreation Department
hosts 19 community gardens, many churches and schools manage gardens, and non-
profit organizations, particularly in lower-resourced neighborhoods, have organized
projects. The local government has also demonstrated a recent interest in expanding
the local food sector through investments in farmers’ markets and addressing lim-
ited food access in low-income neighborhoods. Yet, Charlotte’s inequality continues
to be demonstrated through a rapid increase in trendy restaurants and grocery store
wars, while food insecurity grew to nearly 15% in 2018.
Organization of the Book 15
Fig. 1.5 Indoor garden shop in Charlotte. (Photo by author 2019)
Organization of the Book
This book surveys relevant literature and examines key themes arising during nearly
5 years of research in the four cities described above. First, Chap. 2 considers the
extensive and growing body of literature on urban agriculture with a particular focus
on the relationship between urban agriculture and sustainability governance, social
justice, and land tenure. It argues that capitalist neoliberal urbanism ideologies
influence the ability of urban agriculture projects to achieve sustainability and social
justice goals, particularly given the emphasis on the potential economic value of
urban land uses.
Chapter 3 then builds on this literature to use an urban political ecology lens for
examining how the prioritization of urban agriculture’s market outcomes fosters
uneven development. Most projects encountered in this research, and especially
those supported by governments in Medellín and Rosario, extolled the economic
potential of urban agriculture. They focused on pursuing models and policies that
contributed to the economic development of growers, neighborhoods, and cities.
But, my research also found that such market-focused approaches excluded the
most marginalized residents seeking to grow plants in order to supplement food
budgets and constrained efforts to address structural economic inequities.
16 1 Introduction
Chapter 4 reports on the perceived value of urban agriculture from all of the
stakeholders encountered in my research. A key finding is that, while access to food
is an important outcome of urban agriculture, it is not necessarily a primary driver
for participating in the practice. Instead, growers were motivated by environmental,
political, social, and cultural goals. These included countering the industrial food
system and its degradation of environmental and social systems, fostering commu-
nity and social interaction, bolstering mental and physical health, and connecting to
agricultural histories and the land. Importantly, however, these urban agriculture
contributions to urban food landscapes were difficult to quantify in order to demon-
strate their legitimacy in neoliberal urban sustainability regimes.
Chapter 5 problematizes ideas of public space and environmental commons in
urban agriculture. Given the salient obstacles to securing land tenure, especially for
marginalized producers, urban agriculture presents challenges to our understanding
of the publicness of these urban spaces. Landowners often perceive growers as
stewarding environmental commons. Yet, growers that committed labor, made
investments in the soil, and created place attachments in gardens experienced the
gardens as more private spaces through which they could make claims to resources,
land, and a place in the city. Utilizing Lefebvre’s theories on lived space, this chap-
ter demonstrates the ways in which notions of public space and environmental com-
mons are unsettled through urban agriculture.
Finally, Chap. 6 concludes the book by synthesizing the key arguments devel-
oped throughout, presenting ideas for moving forward, and highlighting inspiring
urban agriculture projects encountered throughout my research. In particular, this
closing chapter considers the neoliberal urbanism strategies demonstrated through
sustainability governance and land tenure regimes that impact urban agriculture. It
also relies on compelling examples in my research of successes and failures in order
to provide suggestions for moving beyond those constraints. This includes engaging
and empowering more diverse stakeholders, better valuing non-economic outputs of
urban agriculture, and working within the temporary dynamics of complex urban
systems.
This book contributes to literature on urban agriculture, sustainability, and urban
geography through examining the ability of marginalized communities to compete
for land on which to grow produce in contribution to their food security, livelihoods,
communities, and environments. This book also contributes a qualitative approach
to understanding the perceived value of urban agriculture. Throughout my research,
stakeholders emphasized the qualitative values of urban agriculture that are not eas-
ily captured in statistical representations of the economic value of a given piece of
urban land (and perhaps should not be quantified in that way). As such, this book
seeks to add to understandings about the contributions urban agriculture projects
make to the urban metabolism beyond the food produced. I also use a political ecol-
ogy lens in order to fill gaps in literature regarding the local manifestations of global
policy in urban agriculture projects seeking to address both sustainability and social
justice objectives.
References 17
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Chapter 2
Entanglements of Social Justice,
Sustainability Governance, and Land
Tenure: A Literature Review
Expanding Scholarly Engagements with Urban Agriculture
Urban agriculture is a long-standing practice in cities worldwide and is character-

ized by cycles of interest and abandonment. In this research it is understood broadly
as the production, harvesting, and/or processing of crops or livestock in an urban-
ized area. This chapter reviews the extensive literature regarding urban agriculture
in both the global North and South. Examples and scholarship intentionally cover
wide geographies in order to bring light to larger systemic issues that manifest in
similar ways across divergent regions. To be clear, I do not argue that the experience
of urban agriculture is the same everywhere. But instead, that global political eco-
nomic systems can be seen influencing urban agricultural practice across a diversity
of geographies.
Over the past decades, interest in urban agriculture grew extensively. A 2009
study of gardening in the United States found that 36 million households were
growing food, while another 2012 survey identified more than 9000 community
gardens across the country (McClintock 2014). Today, urban agriculture takes on a
more permanent place in many cities as more diverse groups participate in it for a
wider variety of goals and with more local support (Birky and Strom 2013).
Scholarly literature examines varied urban agriculture projects around the world
from beekeeping in Japan and South Korea (Kohsaka et al. 2017), home gardens in
Brazil (Murrieta and WinklerPrins 2009), and allotment gardens in Greece
(Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017), to organized vacant lot cultivation in the United
States (Drake and Lawson 2014) and large-scale commercial hydroponics farms
and zero-acreage farming (Hochman et al. 2018; Specht et al. 2014). The edited
volume Global Urban Agriculture (WinklerPrins 2017) chronicled urban agricul-
ture projects and theory from six continents. From opening stories of indigenous
and immigrant communities growing food in (soon to be) urbanized areas during
the 1800s to contemporary sack gardening in the Kibera informal settlement in

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_2
22 2 Entanglements of Social Justice, Sustainability Governance, and Land Tenure…
Nairobi, Kenya, the chapters detailed the variety of urban cultivation occurring in
cities worldwide.
Scholarly literature also investigates a myriad of urban agriculture characteristics
and processes. Some research seeks to quantify the ecosystem services and food
production provided by urban agriculture (e.g., Altieri and Nicholls 2018; Camps-
Calvet et al. 2016; Orsini et al. 2014). Others attend to the motivations of gardeners
(Blecha and Davis 2014; Pourias et al. 2016; among others) or the impacts of garden
projects on civic consciousness (DeLind 2002; Ghose and Pettygrove 2014). For
example, Buchmann (2009) describes home gardens in Trinidad de Cuba before and
after the Cuban revolution and the economic and food crises promulgated through
US trade embargoes. She found that home gardens provided important socio-
ecological resilience through enabling growers to supplement ration cards and cul-
tivate and exchange particular plants as herbal remedies for illness. Many historical
accounts of urban agriculture highlight its importance for providing supplementary
food to families in poverty or during times of crisis alongside a decline during times
of economic growth when urban agriculture comes to be viewed as backward or out
of place in the contemporary city (Gibas and Boumová 2020; Lawson 2005;
Maxwell 1999; Morgan 2009). However, many of these tellings overlook kitchen
gardens that have consistently been the purview of working class and immigrant
families to both supplement food budgets and contest urban logics of land use and
who has the right to remake the city (Mares and Peña 2010).
Finally, a growing body of literature considers the political economy of urban
food production (and this is a launching point for this book). This approach investi-
gates whether urban agriculture projects reproduce neoliberal urbanisms or resist
them (Crossan et al. 2016; McClintock 2018; Pudup 2008). For example, McClintock
(2018) examines the contradictory relationship between urban agriculture and capi-
tal in neoliberal sustainable cities of the Global North. He points out that urban
agriculture is increasingly viewed as aligning with market logics through providing
a sustainability fix for powerholders seeking to balance economic and ecological
development goals. In this formulation, investment in urban agriculture can spur
development and gentrification. Similarly, Pudup (2008: 1229) argues that commu-
nity gardens in the United States are often “a response to pronounced and recurring
cycles of capitalist restructuring and their tendency to displace people and places
through investment processes governing industries and urban space.” Further, roll-
back neoliberalization led the way for community gardens to become a strategy to
remedy urban degradation and blight.
Within political ecology, in particular, urban agriculture has been approached as
a complex socio-nature that contributes to the urban metabolism; mobilizes people,
institutions, and policies in pursuit of social and environmental goals; and holds
potential for both resisting and reproducing neoliberal logics (Classens 2015;
Crossan et al. 2016; see also Chap. 1 for more discussion on political ecology). For
example, Gibas and Boumová (2020) argue that allotment gardens are examples of
socio-natural artifacts through which the urban is manifest. Specifically attending to
gardening in Prague from the socialist era through to contemporary neoliberal gov-
ernance, the authors interrogate power relationships that underlie uneven urban
Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability 23
geographies rooted in neoliberal governance. Further, political ecology perspectives

point to urban agriculture as a potential way to mend the metabolic rift through
which capitalism has divided nature and society (Bellwood-Howard and Nchanji
2017; McClintock 2010). This rift, driven by the commodification of land, food, and
labor, has separated humans from their integrative role in larger ecosystems. Yet,
urban agriculture has the potential to rebuild these relationships through bringing to
light the complex circulation of natures critical to sustaining urban life.
In my research, topics of sustainability governance, food justice, and land tenure
arose as critical for understanding political ecological processes in urban agricul-
ture. These topics represent important fields that influence approaches to urban agri-
culture, its feasibility and sustainability, and its broader impacts. Tenets of neoliberal
urbanism run throughout the case studies of urban agriculture in this research. In
particular, the privileging of capital accumulation, devolution of governance, and
primacy of private property all underlie hegemonic approaches to sustainability,
social injustice, and land tenure as well as their resistance. This chapter briefly sur-
veys urban agriculture literature focused on each of these topics before identifying
linkages across them that informed my research. This review seeks to lay a founda-
tion and context for the chapters that follow.
Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability
Policies and planning addressing food systems and urban agriculture often entangle
with city sustainability goals. As urban sustainability gains traction as a policy and
planning goal worldwide, cities are increasingly understood as the site of many
environmental and social challenges that impact far-flung environments (in relation
to energy use, pollution and waste, and food acquisition) (Banister 2008; Haarstad
and Oseland 2017; Portnoy 2003). Further, cities can be leaders in addressing cli-
mate change and ecological degradation through implementing sustainability action
plans and going beyond national and international regulations (Affolderbach and
Schulz 2016). Many of those actions align with neoliberal goals through promoting
the city as a sustainability entrepreneur and relying on public-private partnerships to
achieve sustainable development goals. For example, McPhearson et al. (2014) dis-
cuss sustainability planning in the Global North with particular attention paid to
ecosystem services and PlaNYC. PlaNYC is a legislation and planning effort in
New York City that sought to expand and enhance ecosystem services related to
stormwater, drinking water, food provisioning, and recreation. McPheason et al.
found that while PlaNYC is a regional/city initiative, it is also carried out in partner-
ship with community groups and non-profit organizations, particularly with the lat-
ter managing concerns related to food production and access. In this example,
sustainability governance relies on public-private partnerships often considered
characteristic of neoliberal urbanism.
Further, many cities worldwide utilize sustainability policy to position them-
selves as world-class global leaders. Multiple international awards, and resulting
investments, recognize these efforts. For example, Medellín, Colombia, developed

a Sustainable Medellín campaign in which it prioritized greening the built form,
held high-profile events in outdoor amphitheaters alongside a river running through
the city, and encouraged residents to ride their bikes or the metro instead of driving.
The city’s sustainability programs earned it international recognition. It won the Lee
Kwan Yew World City Prize in 2016 for its contributions to sustainable urbanism.
Urban sustainability programs and policy can also break down nature-society
divides by recognizing the complex exchanges, adaptations, and mutations among
the human and non-human agents that form cities (Affolderbach and Schulz 2016).
For example, Blok (2013) examines a large-scale urban sustainability project in
Denmark to demonstrate how urban ecology can be a site for reassembling nature,
technology, and society. In this example, architects and interested publics form and
resist particular urban natures.
Sustainability policymaking and projects take place within widespread, power-
laden processes that seek a balancing of economic, ecological, and social demands.
In this regard, some scholars identify a “sustainability fix” through which urban
governance strategies address capital and environmental needs while making struc-
tural inequalities invisible (Nciri and Levenda 2019; While et al. 2004). Such strate-
gies attract capital investments, foster continued economic growth, and build
private-public partnerships, without truly upsetting the capitalist logics that produce
environmental degradation. As discussed further below, within food systems and
urban agriculture, this also leads to critiques that much sustainability governance is
inadequate for addressing social justice concerns. Finally, these ideas and approaches
to sustainability move among cities in both the global North and South through
knowledge exchange and norms reproduced in translocal policy circuits (Haarstad
and Oseland 2017; McCann 2011). This is evident in my research as similar strate-
gies for meeting neoliberal sustainability goals through urban agriculture arise in
both Medellín and Toronto. Such policy and programmatic strategies “travel”
through a complex interchange of knowledge mobilization, resources, and
stakeholders.
he Role of Food Systems in Urban Sustainability Planning

T
and Policy
Historically, throughout much of the world, planning professionals and local gov-
ernments paid only limited, and disconnected, attention to food systems (Pothukuchi
and Kaufman 2000; Thibert 2012). Beyond questions of how food (and waste) is
transported in and through the city and concerns with food insecurity, food system
issues were perceived as a rural concern. Indeed, modern ideas of cities sought a
rejection of agricultural connections, deeming them obsolete to urban life (Barthel
and Isendahl 2013). Further, the urban imaginary often excluded notions of “nature.”
Instead, non-human natural elements (trees, animals, food production) were per-
ceived as existing in and better suited to rural environments. For example, in terms
Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability 25
of urban agriculture, Sanyé-Mengual et al. (2016) found that stakeholders in

Barcelona perceived urban agriculture as “false agriculture” (pg. 117) and a social,
not ecological, activity such that food production in the city was not perceived as
feasible.
Yet, in recent decades, global climate crises laid bare the interconnected ecolo-
gies of urban systems. City policymakers and planners increasingly recognize their
integrated role in environmental and food systems. More cities are developing com-
prehensive food strategies (Mansfield and Mendes 2013, who note, however, that
urban agriculture is often treated separately from other food system concerns in
such policies). Today, many cities in North America have some policies or programs
that are supportive of food systems, often managed through local planning depart-
ments (Cohen and Reynolds 2014). The call for more of this is grounded in argu-
ments that food systems greatly impact urban sustainability as they touch
transportation, energy use, management of organic waste, land permeability, and
other urban systems (Lovell 2010).
Sustainability plans also demonstrate a growing attention to food systems and
support for urban agriculture (Camps-Calvet et al. 2016). More initiatives to support
urban agriculture, including leasing land, supporting bee hives, and installing school
gardens, are increasingly supported by city planning departments. Urban agricul-
ture is viewed as critical to urban resilience due to its potential to meet economic
goals through contributing to household food budgets and enabling small business
creation; environmental goals through providing green space and reducing energy
needs, waste production, and storm water runoff; and social goals through reducing
food insecurity (Ackerman et al. 2014; Henriques and Campbell 2009). Urban agri-
culture presents an opportunity to innovate for green space governance as it is incor-
porated into various public and private spaces (Middle et al. 2014). Walker (2016)
highlights the sustainability plans in Vancouver and Detroit as examples that include
urban agriculture. In Philadelphia (US) the Greenworks Plan includes urban agri-
culture in its vision of making healthy, affordable, and sustainable food available to
all residents. Similar to other urban sustainability plans across North America, this
document describes urban agriculture as instrumental for not only providing fresh
produce to hungry communities but also animating community spaces. Through
including urban agriculture in its sustainability plan, the city elevated the practice to
an activity it recognizes and supports (Rosan and Pearsall 2017). Similarly, in
Medellín urban gardens were explicitly incorporated into a Greenbelt Project as a
strategy to stabilize soils on the hillsides in order to prevent landslides (Hammelman
and Saenz-Montoya 2020).
More broadly, RUAF (2014) argues that urban agriculture is an important strat-
egy for addressing climate change. Looking at examples around the world, they find
that urban agriculture can decrease city temperatures, reduce waste, and make urban
communities more resilient in the face of food price shocks driven by changing
climates. In order to successfully implement sustainability plans that rely on urban
agriculture for meeting environmental, economic, and social goals, municipal plan-
ning and community activist interventions are critical (Henriques and Campbell
2009; Lawson 2004). Pearson et al. (2010) suggest that cities and governments need
to conduct future research to decide how to best manage, incentivize, and legislate
urban agriculture at multiple scales.
In addition, groups promoting urban agriculture often highlight the potential to
counter the negative environmental and human impacts of the industrial food sys-
tem, address urban blight, and transform political economic systems in order to
advance social justice (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Hoover 2013). Okvat and Zautra
(2011: 385) described this: “There is no panacea to all problems, but community
gardening presents a promising method of parsimoniously enhancing the well-
being, and furthering the resilience capacity, of individuals, communities, and the
natural environment.” In this regard, and as discussed further below, much planning
and many urban agriculture projects pursue social equity as a potential outcome of
urban agriculture practiced by marginalized groups.
Yet, urban agriculture and greening strategies are constrained by their ad hoc
implementation and an urban political economy that privileges certain uses and
groups. Urban agriculture is not often considered the “highest and best use” of
urban land (Lovell 2010). Instead, it is seen as competing with higher value uses
such as housing and retail. As Rosan and Pearsall (2017: 82) note:
From the city’s perspective, the “highest and best use” of urban land may be new develop-
ment that expands the city’s property tax base rather than an urban garden or farm, which
may have significant community benefits and neighborhood spillover effects but does not
directly generate tax revenue.
As a result, many urban food producers utilize land that they do not own, and their
practices are viewed as a temporary use to be relocated or discontinued when greater
investment potential arises.
Urban agriculture is also frequently governed by disconnected and contradictory
municipal planning and policymaking. There are divides between those who plan,
build, and use urban spaces that limit the ability of urban planning to adequately
respond to the desires of diverse urban communities (Tornaghi and Van Dyck 2015).
This challenge was described in my research by an advocate for school gardens in
Toronto:
The Ministry of Education does not want to do food because you can see from their per-
spective it’s a bottomless pit. They do not want to be responsible for yet another piece of
healthy living. They have enough on their plates. Ha, ha – pun intended … So, again, the
barrier is that these things are siloed, that the Ministry of Agriculture is basically looking at
rural Ontario and not urban and the Ministry of Education is not looking at food at all or
frankly, not very much. The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change is good with
urban ag, but wouldn’t step on toes at the Ministry of Education…So, there’s all these little
pieces that people like me keep trying to fit together into a whole. …So, in terms of public
advocacy, the silos and the sort of difficulty in finding a home for school gardens – is it
Health, is it Environment, is it Education – that’s a sort of set of barriers and then sort of
stemming from that is, if the public sector is not finding money for it, then we’re reliant on
private foundations and corporations to demonstrate that they will support this in the
absence of that public funding.
For this advocate, overcoming the disconnected approach to food systems and urban
agriculture was a salient challenge.
Social Justice in Urban Agriculture 27
Further, as urban agriculture competes for land with other more high-value uses
(such as housing or commercial development) or contradicts policymakers’ visions
of a modern city, its producers face significant pressures to end or relocate their
practice. Cabannes (2012) notes that urban agriculture requires both political and
financial legitimacy, yet this is hard to obtain when growers lack land titles, are seen
as temporary, or are perceived as making a limited economic impact. This makes
such work (and its long-term contribution to environmental goals) much more pre-
carious and devalued. Such investments are instead viewed as part of the sustain-
ability fix through which urban natures contribute to ecological goals while
maintaining mechanisms of capital accumulation (Pudup 2008; Walker 2016).
McClintock (2018) points out how the visibility of urban agriculture (especially that
practiced by white and wealthy residents) can serve as a global selling point for
sustainable cities.
Anguelovski (2016), Wolch et al. (2014), and others also considered how creat-
ing green amenities such as urban agriculture can contribute to gentrification pro-
cesses (introducing terms such as greenlining, ecological gentrification, or the urban
green space paradox). These researchers are concerned that environmental invest-
ments that make neighborhoods more desirable also increase nearby housing prices
and force resident displacement. At the same time, urban agriculture projects cre-
ated by historically marginalized residents often face exclusion in accessing land,
resources (including financial capital), and political support (Cabannes 2012; Cohen
and Reynolds 2014; Daftary-Steel et al. 2015; Glasser 2018; Hammelman 2019;
Thibert 2012). Better understanding these contestations in cities pursuing sustain-
ability through neoliberal agendas can shed important light on the ability of urban
agriculture projects to achieve the environmental and social goals outlined above.
Social Justice in Urban Agriculture
Approaches to Food Justice
Many food systems activists and scholars interrogate the meaning, implementation,
and negotiation of food justice. Bradley and Herrera (2016) identify an original
notion of food justice which focused on struggles against racism, exploitation, and
oppression to enable access to fair, equitable, affordable, and culturally appropriate
food in low-income communities of color. They emphasize that ownership and gov-
ernance of these systems should be maintained by those communities. Building on
the work of Alkon and Agyeman (2011), Gottlieb and Joshi (2010), and many oth-
ers, Cadieux and Slocum (2015) further examine the doing of food justice. They
advocate for greater control of food production and consumption by those already
marginalized by mainstream agri-food logics and question the efficacy of solutions
that appeal to consumer purchasing. Instead, they argue for “creating innovative
ways to control, use, share, own, manage and conceive of land, and ecologies in
general, that place them outside the speculative market and the rationale of
extraction” (pg. 13, emphasis in original). Food justice scholars raise concern about
several aspects of food systems—the invisibility of labor in localization campaigns
(Allen 2010), food access and its relationship with neighborhood disinvestment
(Bradley and Galt 2014; Shannon 2014), connections to environmental and spatial
justice (Anguelovski 2013; Tornaghi 2017), and urban agriculture (as detailed below).
A constant in this scholarship and action is attention to power, ownership, and/or
space and place. For example, Curran and Gonzalez (2011, pgs. 209–210) argue
that food justice is “always already involving situated group power, constrained yet
meaningful group agency, group responsibility, and the messy promise of interracial
healing.” Others bring to light the broader systems in which food justice and urban
agriculture operate, noting that they are inseparable from racism, patriarchy, coloni-
zation, and capitalism (Passidomo 2014; Sachs and Patel-Campillo 2014). Political
ecology approaches also unpack the neoliberal logics that reproduce food injustice.
Agyeman and McEntee (2014) argue that the attention to hybridity, scale, and com-
modity relations in urban political ecology can lend itself to better focusing food
justice efforts on outcomes and processes, in addition to symptoms and causes
within the contemporary neoliberal system. For example, Premat (2009) examines
the workings of governmentality in Cuba’s urban agriculture movement. In this
case, sustainability and urban agriculture ideals are produced through often-
unrecognized interrelations between everyday individual actions and international
and national institutions that can utilize alternative sources of power.
Food justice ideals also transcend geographical and political boundaries as peo-
ple worldwide make sense of ideas like food sovereignty in their particular context
(Cadieux and Slocum 2015). In this regard, Smith II (2019) presents an intersec-
tional agriculture that celebrates resiliency and agency, critiques corporate and local
food movements, and recognizes sociohistorical systems of race, sexuality, class,
and gender inequalities. Others call attention to place-based relationships and chal-
lenge dominant approaches to land ownership and concentration (Brown et al. 2020;
Gilbert and Williams 2020; Tornaghi 2014). For example, Brown et al. (2020) dis-
cuss the exploitative histories of land ownership (and resistance) that ground peda-
gogies employed by the Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans. They argue: “if
there is going to be food justice (or any type of justice), then we must first learn the
histories of the land in order to build new relationships with the land” (pg. 247).
Given the systemic challenges to achieving food justice, many call on alternative
food movements to reflect and readjust in order to challenge the capitalist food sys-
tem that produces economic, educational, and cultural inequalities (Lyson 2014).
Passidomo (2014) points out that too much food movement attention to social jus-
tice has focused on access to the commodity of food, without enough consideration
of how power structures produce and reproduce landscapes of (in)access. Many
BIPOC urban farmers, food justice activists, and communities are embracing these
calls under an umbrella of food justice that interrogates the historical materialities
of an unjust food system through utilizing an emancipatory discourse and mobiliz-
ing activists to dismantle these systems (Smith II 2019).
Importantly, though, food system movements and actors are complex. Bradley
and Galt (2014) note that people perform particular identities and memberships as
Social Justice in Urban Agriculture 29
they (re)build cultural foodways that are embedded in both industrial food and
justice-oriented approaches. For example, White (2011) calls attention to ecofemi-
nism and Black women farmers in Detroit that rely on traditional gender roles to
form collaborations among oppressed communities to pursue self-determination.
“Through a strategy of engaging the environment [via food systems], communities
that have been polluted and abandoned show agency by rebuilding themselves while
restoring their environment” (White 2011, pg. 17). Finally, Tornaghi (2017) argues
that food justice alliances can critique neoliberal urbanism and challenge urban-
rural divides through urban agriculture practice that legitimizes urbanites control of
their own food production.
Pursuing Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Projects
Social justice is also central to many urban agriculture projects. To be clear, not all
urban agriculture activities pursue social justice goals, and not all research on urban
agriculture has a concern with social justice. But urban agriculture is increasingly
approached with a particular goal of resisting systemic oppression and neoliberal
urbanisms via food justice and food sovereignty frames. And such efforts are not
new. The Black Panthers, operating under a slogan of “survival pending revolution,”
included school gardening in their breakfast and other resistance programs as early
as 1969 (Curran and Gonzalez 2011). Much academic literature identifies urban
agriculture contributions to social justice such as providing opportunities for forg-
ing dynamic socio-ecological relationships, forming solidarities, building social
capital, reducing food insecurity, expressing identity and culture, claiming a right to
the city, and contesting capitalism (Bonacich and Alimahomed-Wilson 2011;
Freeman et al. 2012; Galt et al. 2014; Kingsley and Townsend 2006; and
Macias 2008).
As with food justice more broadly, urban agriculture provides an opportunity to
interrogate place-based manifestations of neoliberalism in the food system. Efforts
to promote social justice via urban agriculture respond to and are impacted by neo-
liberal urbanisms, particularly the commodification of food and land that has led to
industrialized agriculture, the privatizing of land for development, and the distanc-
ing of growers and eaters (Ghose and Pettygrove 2014; Lovell 2010; Tornaghi and
Van Dyck 2015). The geopolitical and globalized economy that relies on trade in
food across distant lands disconnects urban residents from the agricultural land-
scapes in which their food is produced (Lovell 2010; Tornaghi 2014). Further, the
commodification and consolidation of agricultural lands under today’s corporate,
industrial system have driven massive migration patterns and increased inequalities.
This is particularly clear in processes through which the dominant industrial agri-
culture system that feeds many urban dwellers drives small, family farmers world-
wide off their land and into cities. Industrial farming technologies (mechanization,
large-scale processing) have reduced the availability of farmland near urban areas
(Mendes et al. 2008). In turn, families rely on small, interstitial, pockets of
cultivable urban lands at risk of development and further displacement. These pro-
cesses further divide urban eaters and rural growers in ways that limit critique of
this status quo (Tornaghi and Van Dyck 2015).
For transnational migrant communities in particular, urban agriculture can pro-
vide important space and land to preserve cultural identities, create a sense of
belonging and home, and form community in new countries (Agustina and Beilin
2012; Galt et al. 2014; Johnston and Longhurst 2011). Mares and Peña (2010) iden-
tify efforts of diasporic people to rebuild kitchen gardens at the South Central Farm
in Los Angeles, noting that “these jardincitos are spiritual and political symbols of
a process involving nothing less than the re-territorialization of place as a home by
transnational communities” (pg. 246). Similarly, in my research, many migrants
engaged in growing food in order to maintain cultural connections with the country-
side and to claim a place in their new cities. Urban agriculture has the potential to
disrupt urban-rural dichotomies by reconciling production and reproduction
activities.
Several scholars also argue that urban agriculture is always political as it oper-
ates in contested spaces, transforms the urban fabric, and creates opportunities for
solidarities that lead to political action and self-determination (Certomà and
Tornaghi 2015; Galt et al. 2014; Kato et al. 2014; Tornaghi 2017; White 2011;
among others). Tornaghi (2017) points out the food injustices produced by urban
capitalism:
It should now be clearer that the capitalist city as we know it, with its land markets, develop-
ment and planning priorities, circulation of pollutants and nutrients, pockets of food deserts
and obesogenic environments…is deeply involved in the reproduction of food injustice.
(pg. 793)
In investigating gardening in post-Katrina New Orleans (United States), Kato et al.

(2014) point out the always political nature of contestations over urban space and
the political struggles that arise when gardening occurs in subversive spaces.
Gardeners engage in “place-making from below” (Certomà and Tornaghi 2015:
1124) through making visible ties to place and creating cultural energy through liv-
ing in place (DeLind 2002).
As food justice and urban agriculture approaches critique these systems, they
may also align with discussions on neoliberal sustainability governance. Urban
agriculture, as both a material production of urban goods and a land use, is caught
up in strategies for attracting capital investments and divesting responsibility to
individuals and civil society actors who then compete for scarce resources (Ghose
and Pettygrove 2014; Pudup 2008). Pudup (2008) makes clear how urban agricul-
ture responds to recurring cycles of capitalist restructuring that displaces people:
If we value the right to self-determination in respect to how we sustain and nourish our-
selves, and accord recognition to global food ethics and human rights, then we have to
consider the right to produce one’s own food–which includes the right to engage with
nature and to grow our own. These reflections inevitably invite considerations on the urban
environment, on private property rights and on the management of natural resources, which
pose a whole set of constraints towards people’s empowerment in the fulfilment of their
right to produce food. (pg. 787)
Securing Land for Urban Agriculture 31
At the same time, several scholars identify ways that urban agriculture projects
themselves perpetuate injustices. Particularly when it is practiced on behalf of oth-
ers and is inattentive to systems of oppression, urban agriculture projects have the
potential to reproduce inequality and systems of privilege (Passidomo 2014).
Hoover (2013) argues that urban agriculture advocates do not sufficiently consider
who is driving the growing wave of projects seeking to address food insecurity and
inaccess, urban blight, social capital, and environmental degradation. Similarly,
Passidomo (2014) argues that “food projects initiated and maintained by white
exogenous groups on behalf of communities of color risk exacerbating the very
systems of privilege and inequality they seek to ameliorate” (pg. 385). As discussed
above, others make clear the potential of urban agriculture to contribute to gentrifi-
cation and displacement (Sbicca 2020). Similar to concerns about ecological gentri-
fication overall (Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2012; Pearsall 2010), urban
agriculture advocates and researchers note how developers build on the amenities
and reputations of urban agriculture in ways that then displace that practice (and
residents). Finally, the reliance on volunteers, non-profit organizations, and external
funding can limit the ability of urban agriculture projects to achieve social jus-
tice goals.
As such, urban agriculture should not be presented uncritically as a solution to
multiple food systems challenges or understood mostly in utilitarian economic
terms that do not adequately characterize many marginalized producers’ experi-
ences (Slater 2001; Tornaghi 2014). Instead, to achieve social justice goals, proj-
ects, advocates, and other stakeholders must intentionally pursue them. Urban
agriculture is not inherently socially inclusive, but instead is embedded and prac-
ticed within larger systems of inequity (Macias 2008). To intentionally pursue social
justice and sustainability via urban agriculture, cities and groups must ensure equi-
table participation of marginalized groups; support for activities led by Black dias-
pora, indigenous, and people of color; facilitate community control of land; build
social capital; and better align planning objectives with those of community activ-
ists (Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Hoover 2013; Macias 2008; Reynolds 2015). Such
efforts can go beyond addressing symptoms of injustice (such as disparate food
access) to disrupt social and political structures but may be limited by a focus on
(and need for) building legitimacy for an activity that is often critiqued as an inef-
ficient use of city land or an ineffectual strategy for reducing hunger (Reynolds
2015). All of these contentions within urban agriculture and the wider political sys-
tems in which it is embedded are evident in the case studies presented in the chap-
ters that follow.
Securing Land for Urban Agriculture
Conflicts between neoliberal sustainability motivations and social justice goals are
particularly evident in everyday challenges to secure access to land. Questions about
land relationships are central to contestations in urban agriculture. First, a majority
of urban agriculture practitioners operate without secure land tenure (Lovell 2010;
Redwood 2008; Tornaghi 2017). Lovell (2010) points to limited access to land and a
lack of secure tenure as among the greatest constraints of urban agriculture, particu-
larly for marginalized groups that do not have resources to purchase land. Further, a
growing number of actors remaking urban space through growing food are relying
on interstitial spaces such as roadsides and rights of way. Galt et al. (2014) note that
a driving force in the move toward interstitial spaces is a global geography of agri-
culture that prioritizes large-scale horticultural production for world markets. And
the small pieces of land that many marginalized groups can occupy for growing are
shrinking as a result of urbanization processes that make land scarcer as well as
neoliberal property regimes that discount cultural- and place-based use connections
to land (Ubink et al. 2009). Mares and Peña (2010) describe these challenges for the
South Central Farm in Los Angeles and Marra Farm in Seattle, United States. They
note that farmers were being displaced because commercial/industrial uses of land
have resulted in its overvaluation, while the public land use benefits (ecological,
social, and economic) are consistently undervalued. Tornaghi (2017) further notes
that the urban agriculture projects she researched in Europe:
happen within the cracks of the system, in marginal urban spaces reclaimed from aggressive
urban development practices and policies; they strive within temporary land tenures with
little hope for expansion, and often rely on volunteerism, self-exploitation and grants issued
in a range of areas other than food (pg. 783).
Growers in both the global North and South depend on such interstitial spaces for
creating livelihoods, reducing food insecurity, and connecting to cultures, neighbor-
hoods, and cities. Thus, limited land tenure can greatly impact the ability of urban
agriculture to survive and achieve social justice goals.
Constraining Land Access via Neoliberal Urban Land Policies
(De)valuations of urban agriculture as a land use are embedded in questions about

legitimate uses of urban space. As noted above, in many cities, food systems and
urban agriculture are not systematically integrated into urban planning. This is
despite the growing ad hoc support for food systems as a result of their connection
to other urban systems such as health, transportation, waste management, etc. Urban
agriculture has historically been perceived as an incompatible urban land use, not
the highest and best use of land, and/or maintenance for future development (Huang
and Drescher 2015; Lovell 2010; Thibert 2012). Indeed, in some cities, such
decision-making has led to the decline of urban agriculture in favor of promoting
private-sector-led commercial urban development (Glasser 2018). For example,
Gibas and Boumová (2020) point out that allotment gardens in Prague were histori-
cally viewed as lacking aesthetic and function beyond supplementing food and rec-
reation. As a result, they are regarded as unfit for contemporary times. Similarly,
urban planners in some African cities argued for the removal of urban agriculture
based on notions of progressive and modern cities (Hamilton et al. 2014). When
Securing Land for Urban Agriculture 33
urban agriculture does exist, it often struggles to withstand competing pressures

(such as housing, open green space, or development) (Lovell 2010).
Despite these views, there are increasing calls for using vacant land in post-
industrial cities of the global North (such as Detroit, MI, or Philadelphia, PA, in the
United States) to promote urban agriculture as an economic justice strategy (Mogk
et al. 2010). It is argued that such efforts could help meet nutritional needs in disin-
vested communities while also reducing city expenses related to the maintenance of
vacant or tax delinquent property. Urban agriculture is also increasingly employed
as a reinvestment strategy in neighborhoods where economic margins are small,
barriers to entry (such as land costs) are low, and the opportunity to build symbolic
capital and attract new investments is high. In this way, “cultural mechanisms like
the popularity of local food work in tandem with political economy mechanisms
like the rent gap” (Sbicca 2019, pg. 30). As discussed above, urban agriculture is
also promoted as a strategy for providing urban green space. In the Global South,
farmers are increasingly growing in marginalized or threatened urban and peri-
urban land. In these spaces, there is often tension between land uses and livelihoods
(Lerner and Eakin 2011). Especially as cities continue to grow geographically, peri-
urban agriculture can be devalued as a land use when other uses such as industry or
housing can garner higher rents.
Devaluations of urban agriculture that create insecure land tenure present a myr-
iad of challenges for urban growers. First is the potential for displacement, which
may reduce willingness to invest labor and resources in the long-term productivity
of land (Ubink et al. 2009). For example, Cook et al. (2015) noted that Indian farm-
ers near the Yamuna River in Delhi were discouraged from investing in land from
which they could be removed at any time, especially as this land is increasingly
attracting developer attention in the rapidly densifying city. Displacement also risks
separating producers from the fruits of their labor, livelihoods, and survival strate-
gies. In the Delhi example, the majority of growers sell their products and risk los-
ing that lifeline when land access is revoked for development and infrastructure
purposes. Second, without secure tenure, growers may be prevented from growing
in ways they desire. For example, in my research, some peri-urban farmers in
Argentina that lease land were unable to implement agroecological approaches to
fertilization and pest management due to landowner prohibitions. At the same time,
gardeners utilizing public land in all of the cities in my research encountered restric-
tions against building structures to shade them from the sun, expanding their land
use (and thus productivity), and/or selling produce from their gardens.
Others noted the need to secure longer leases and change the mindset of some
landowners that urban agriculture is a temporary land use. One advocate in Toronto
explained:
We recognized that we had agricultural lands in our jurisdiction that we should try to con-
serve and the only way we could conserve them is if we treated agriculture as an appropriate
use for our land, not an interim use. So, that was kind of the first step. The second step was
offering longer term lease agreements. We had very short term, annual lease agreements
which – depending on what we wanted to do with the land – could end. So, it didn’t really
give a lot of incentive to the farmer that was leasing our land to invest financially.
The potential for displacement, devaluation, and a lack of independence all hamper
attempts to achieve social justice through urban agriculture.
In response to these challenges, researchers and advocates have called for incor-
porating land for urban agriculture into sustainability planning (Rosan and Pearsall
2017), creating land inventories to better identify land available for urban agricul-
ture and align it with sustainability goals (Huang and Drescher 2015; Mendes et al.
2008), and creating land banks and community development initiatives to help
groups secure long leases and/or raise funds to purchase land (Reynolds and Cohen
2016). Wooten and Ackerman (2012) also encourage supporting urban agriculture
through land use laws that secure access to and preservation of land for agriculture.
But these challenges also raise broader concerns with how urban land is con-
ceived and managed. In many cities, urban land is considered either the private
property of a landowner or public property held in trust by institutions (e.g., munici-
pal agencies). Such notions of property confer particular rights upon landowners,
especially in capitalist societies that equate property ownership with responsible
citizenship and economic entrepreneurship (Blomley 2003). These notions high-
light the economic value of land as a key marker of efficiency and the legitimate
pursuit of landowners. This was clear in Rosario, where one research participant
noted the extraordinary power of the real estate market. In this case, a 2016 ordi-
nance to set aside 800 hectares of peri-urban land for agriculture was eroded by
lobbying efforts by real estate groups. Instead, because these groups were able to
argue for the greater exchange value of classifying that land as industrial, the amount
of land available for agriculture continues to decrease.
Wekerle and Classens (2015) point out that when urban agriculture makes claims
for land and property in entrepreneurial neoliberal cities, it forms linkages between
local food production, global forces of real estate development, and transnational
circuits of capital. They elaborate: “Land wars taking place around the world remind
us that access to land to grow food is not only an issue of social justice, but is also
integral to global practices of capital accumulation through financial investment in
crop lands by processes of accumulation by dispossession” (pg. 1178). In turn, cul-
tural and social ties to land (often fostered through urban agriculture practice) are
deemed insufficient causes for maintaining certain land uses.
At the same time, urban agriculture has the potential to contest these hegemonic
land relations. Growers can pursue alternatives grounded in collaboration and shar-
ing economies. Wekerle and Classens (2015) note how urban food activists utilizing
privately owned land in Toronto actively challenge neoliberal discourse and mate-
rial relations to private property, particularly individualism, private ownership, and
speculative investment. Urban agriculture approaches to land ownership also dem-
onstrate that dominant perspectives lose sight of relationships that are always
actively negotiated by those who own the property and those who do not. As dem-
onstrated in Chap. 5, existing uses, ecological functions, and people-place relation-
ships formed through urban agriculture practice are not adequately represented in
dominant conceptions of property or related land tenure regimes.
Conclusion 35
Conclusion
This chapter seeks to provide the wider urban and political economic context in
which urban agriculture is practiced and contested in the global North and South.
Through examining interventions in urban sustainability governance, notions of food
justice, and connections to land policy, I identify several broad themes from critical
urban studies literature that influence urban agriculture. Namely, global tenets of
capitalism and neoliberal urbanism impact both the success of urban agriculture proj-
ects and their efforts toward creating more sustainable and equitable food systems.
The shift toward sustainability governance that devolves responsibility for social
welfare to civil society and volunteers impacts the potential and desired achieve-
ment of urban agriculture. When urban agriculture is proposed to address food
injustice (including hunger, restricted food access, and limited self-determination),
it can represent one of the many ways in which underfunded civil society actors
seek to provide social services and impact change at scales that were previously the
purview of government.
Further, the focus on economic growth as a key strategy for legitimizing urban
agriculture aligns with the capital accumulation goals of contemporary urban
regimes. Discussed as entrepreneurialism by Harvey (1989), city governments
focus efforts on increasing economic growth, investment, and employment, instead
of earlier emphases on provision of services, facilities, and other urban benefits.
Such a preoccupation with economic growth privileges the exchange value of urban
space over social and environmental goals (Barron 2017). A focus on the exchange
value of land use forces urban agriculture projects into interstitial spaces deemed
not (yet) attractive to capital (McClintock 2014). In this environment, urban agricul-
ture projects must demonstrate how they contribute to such economic goals in order
to withstand land pressures (even if their primary goals are not economic).
Finally, the primacy of private property and land ownership is evident in sustain-
ability planning that attends to public land access for urban agriculture and in chal-
lenges encountered in pursuing social justice objectives. Neoliberal urban policy
emphasizes capital-intensive development (such as festival marketplaces or dense
mixed-use skyscrapers) at the expense of uses for social services (such as public
housing or public space) (Barron 2017; Hackworth 2007). This is demonstrated in
sustainability planning that further privatizes green space in order to achieve market
objectives (see Chap. 3). Further, urban land access and use operate under logics of
private property that accrue to individuals, corporations, and the state. Such logics
often preclude community or shared uses such as community gardens.
Importantly, many urban agriculture projects seek to resist such logics through
creating different socio-ecological relationships. As Mares and Peña (2010) point
out in discussing urban farming in LA and Seattle (United States):
Against the surveillance grids, jacked-up ecological footprints, and fragmented echoes of
failed suburbia that define the post-Fordist cities of neo-liberal dreams, inner-city urban
forms are being reinvented and reshaped from the bottom up through the spreading
multitude of heterotopias, the diverse shifting mosaic of cultural forms that everywhere
transform space into place (pg. 253).
While community groups now claim more responsibility for achieving social wel-
fare goals, they also buttress citizenship, political consciousness, and community
building for resistance (Barron 2017; Levkoe 2006). The division between projects
that reproduce or resist neoliberalism is murky. Projects and people evolve in rela-
tion to mission-shift, local context, and people involved. Some projects may contest
neoliberalism at one point and reproduce it later or even at the same time. In the
remaining chapters of this book, examples will be presented that demonstrate this
fluidity and the determination that governance structures, individual growers, civil
society, and other actors possess to either impose neoliberal urbanism logics or
resist them. The following chapters build on this literature and integrate political
ecology and urban studies theories to better understand the contestations and contri-
butions of urban agriculture to urban food landscapes.
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Solutions
Chapter 3
Promoting Market Gardens and (Re)
producing Uneven Development
I think the other one, the really important one that people are struggling with, is that if
you’re a farmer, you’re trying to make a living, but you’re also in a low-income community,
you want to be able to give access to people to food. It’s really weird to be growing food in
a low-income community and then selling it for really high prices and not trying to do
something. So people are trying to figure out that piece, like what’s the balance of being
able to offer affordable food, but also to be viable, to be financially viable? – Urban agricul-
ture advocate in Toronto.
This chapter discusses urban agriculture efforts that seek to achieve the environ-
mental, social, and economic goals of neoliberal urban sustainability through
market-focused projects. Throughout the research sites, urban agriculture projects
pursued economic goals through focusing on growing food for sale. These projects
pursued not only sustainability goals but also economic development for low-
income residents by bringing them into the market. Such approaches can provide
economic benefits to marginalized communities, but a singular focus on such mar-
ket solutions also risks reproducing uneven development. Of course, pursuing urban
sustainability strategies that enable continued capital accumulation is not new.
Many scholars have studied such “sustainability fixes” that further neoliberalization
processes through commodifying and privatizing natures, including food and agri-
culture. But the tension, described in the quote above, between making affordable,
healthy food available in under-resourced neighborhoods and ensuring growers earn
a living wage through market-focused interventions was salient throughout my
research. Examining the market-based inclinations of urban agriculture projects in
both the global North and South sheds light on how neoliberal narratives of entre-
preneurship and the commodification of nature for public good flow through diverse
geographies with real impacts on the structure, goals, and success of urban agricul-
ture. This chapter contributes to existing literature examining the economic poten-
tial of urban agriculture, which is largely focused on North America, by adding case
studies from Latin America and providing a comparative analysis that highlights the
global political economic practices that impact these projects.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_3
42 3 Promoting Market Gardens and (Re)producing Uneven Development
oward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable

T
Urban Agriculture
In order to examine the market inclinations of the urban agriculture projects studied
in this research, it is critical to first understand the capitalist logics in which they are
embedded. This research is grounded in political ecology approaches that take into
account political economic processes, such as neoliberal urbanism, for understand-
ing ecological projects. Using such a lens to examine the market-oriented approaches
of urban agriculture projects in four cities across the Americas can be helpful for
understanding how nature operates to produce or foreclose socio-political change
and to bring to light the power, exclusions, and injustices (re)produced and resisted
(Classens 2015; Tornaghi 2014).
For the past several decades, city governments worldwide have pursued neolib-
eral strategies of capital accumulation that prioritize privatization, entrepreneurial-
ism, and devolution of social responsibilities to civil society. Many scholars note
that neoliberalization varies across global contexts such that providing a generalized
definition is overly simplistic, yet many examples include spatial forms of exclusion
(Newman 2013). It is, perhaps, best understood as a set of processes that shifts the
locus of wealth production and distribution from the state to the market in ways that
have profound impacts on urban space, sustainability, and urban agriculture (Barron
2017; Brand 2007). As a social, environmental, economic, and global project, neo-
liberal processes (re)negotiate “boundaries between the market, the state, and civil
society so that more areas of people’s lives are governed by an economic logic”
(Castree 2008: 143). Some scholars discuss neoliberalization as a process that liber-
ates individual entrepreneurial freedoms (Weissman 2015). Others focus on the
ways in which citizens and civic organizations are called upon to embrace neolib-
eral goals of institutional efficiency, without concomitant increases in resources and
power (Rosol 2010).
Importantly, capital accumulation, human agency, and material processes shape
urban space in ways that impact social life and productions of (in)justice. Through
neoliberal processes, state apparatuses pursue market-centric policies focused on
increasing land values and global investment under the guise of entrepreneurialism.
They also dismantle public programs and outsource social service provision to civil
society. Such efforts promote individualization, fragmentation, and competitive
social relations (Brand 2007). Additionally, neoliberal strategies seek to privatize
common resources, especially land and nature. As a result of circulating knowledge
and actors, neoliberal urbanism strategies are evident worldwide (Clement and
Kanai 2015; Robinson 2011). It is a global project through which the “invisible
hand” of the market is spatially expansive and environmentally exorbitant (Castree
2008). These processes do not occur without resistance, however. In theorizing
post-neoliberal social and political movements, Elwood et al. (2017) interrogate
what neoliberal projects bring into being regarding space, power, contestation, and
resulting possibilities for creating new worlds. Through tracing geohistorical rela-
tions of place, knowledge, and power and examining transnational efforts to
Toward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable Urban Agriculture 43
materialize complex post-neoliberal ideologies, they argue that new possibilities of

theory and action emerge.
Neoliberal urbanism strategies influence environmental management in cities
worldwide. In order to meet goals of “sustainable development,” urban agendas
have linked healthy environments with economic competitiveness. These linkages
emphasize building green city images in order to attract investment, tourists, and
middle-class professionals and demonstrate global responsibility through participa-
tion in international environmental programs (Brand 2007). In response, urban sus-
tainability programs are promoted internationally and through city networks as well
as measured by sustainable urban development indicators. In one example, Clement
and Kanai (2015) described the Detroit Future Cities initiative (United States) as an
ecological entrepreneurialism project through which the city symbolically and
materially reconstitutes disinvested neighborhoods of color as investment-ready
spaces. This initiative conjures imagery of “green and blue infrastructure,” “desir-
able landscapes,” and “flowering fields that clean contaminated soils” in order to
portray the neighborhoods as “investment-ready” while also making long histories
of uneven development, disinvestment, and spatial oppression invisible (pg. 281).
The privatization of common environmental resources, such as public parks, con-
tributes to these neoliberal urbanism goals through attracting investment and atten-
tion to environmental amenities while also governing acceptable uses of such
spaces. For example, Newman (2013) considers the neoliberal remaking of urban
commons in Paris through which management of urban parks produces particular
material and social space, defines it as normative, and renders it legible as a domain
of the state. Following these efforts in the Jardins d’Eole in Paris, responsibility was
then devolved to citizen association members to manage and define the space
through what he calls “vigilant citizenship.”
Neoliberal approaches to the environment have increasingly sought to commod-
itize urban natures. Natural objects are given commodity status through processes
of privatization, alienation, and valuation that then enable the exchange of goods
(Castree 2003). This produces a separation between commodity producers and
commodity consumers that occludes comprehensively seeing all parts involved in a
particular good. Commoditization also has material consequences for human-nature
relationships. Within food systems, solutions to social inequity are concomitantly
found within commodifying local agricultural production. As discussed further
below, literature on urban agriculture in North America and my comparative
research found that such commodification focuses on the exchange value of goods
cultivated in urban gardens at the expense of promoting urban agriculture for
self-consumption.
Put together, the commoditization of nature and urban entrepreneurialism con-
tribute to an “environmental fix” through which capital stakeholders utilize natures
to gain commercial advantage and solve crises of capitalism (Castree 2008). Such
fixes have included ideas and practices for conserving ecosystems through privati-
zation and marketization (e.g., wetland mitigation as a commercial opportunity);
making previously protected or state-controlled natural environments available for
market rationality and capital accumulation (for instance, the purchase of 15 million
hectares of land in Mozambique in order to capitalize on potential carbon credits

from planting trees); exploiting previously protected natures in order to increase
profit (e.g., the expansion of palm oil plantations for “carbon-neutral” biofuels); and
fixing internal state contradictions by devolving responsibility to private and civil
society interests such that citizens are encouraged to take responsibility for the
goods and bads that arise (Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012; Castree 2008; Fairhead
et al. 2012).
Within the food system, commoditization of agricultural goods is integral to
industrial food system logics that seek to maximize profit and make invisible the
resulting environmental destruction. In response, many food system alternatives
have arisen. But these alternatives face critiques of reproducing neoliberal logics. In
particular, efforts to create change through shifting market demand (e.g., vote with
your fork strategies) may prove inadequate as they do not attend to structural fail-
ings in protecting labor, the environment, and marginalized communities, further
devolve social safety net responsibilities to civil society, and limit collective imagi-
naries of what change is possible (Alkon 2014; Tornaghi and Certomà 2018;
McClintock 2014; Weissman 2015). This focus on individual choice, entrepreneur-
ialism, and self-improvement ignores systemic causes of marginalization in indus-
trial and alternative food systems (Mares and Alkon 2011). Stehlin and Tarr (2017)
point out the impacts of these processes: “But a politics of quality of life separated
from questions of racism, patriarchy, and class power tends to blunt its critique,
limit its possible alliances, and make it available to capture by the very interests that
profit from uneven geographical development” (pg. 1342).
Neoliberal urbanism processes influence urban agriculture approaches, discur-
sive framing and valuation, and capacity to change the food system. Barron (2017)
notes that community gardens tend to seek transformative change through the neo-
liberal lens of economic change (instead of politics). In this way, gardeners internal-
ize neoliberal logics, such as entrepreneurialism and self-reliance (Classens 2015).
McClintock (2014) further argues that “rather than resisting an unrestrained market,
they may be naively implicit in certain processes of neoliberalisation: by serving as
a flanking institution for the shadow state, contributing to neoliberal subject forma-
tion by emphasising personal responsibility, or by advocating market-and
consumption-based solutions” (pg. 158). Pursuing economic change through urban
agriculture can continue to privilege the market (and not the state or society) as the
site of possibility for change. For example, Weissman (2015) notes that urban agri-
culture projects in Brooklyn, NY (United States), focused on youth development are
important for providing jobs, but also serve to “disciplin[e] youth to be good neolib-
eral subjects, trained in the skills and modes of conduct required by the neoliberal
economy and its ‘cult of entrepreneurship’” (pg. 360). In these examples, while
there is some potential to provide economic benefit to under-resourced growers, the
emphasis on economic entrepreneurialism crowds out efforts to form leaders of
social struggle. At the same time, narratives of self-reliance have been critiqued as
emblematic of “roll out neoliberalism” and a process by which people self-govern
as neoliberal subjects (Drake 2014). Importantly, many organizations and groups
Toward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable Urban Agriculture 45
may reproduce these narratives in order to demonstrate their legitimacy as they

compete for volatile funding streams (Drake 2014; McClintock 2014; Reynolds 2015).
Neoliberal processes can also constrain urban agriculture when those projects
are materially and discursively presented as low-revenue social goods occurring in
non-private space (Barron 2017). Thus, urban agriculture is intertwined with ten-
sions in the overvaluation of urban land for (tax-revenue-generating) commercial or
industrial uses and the undervaluation of their economic, ecological, and cultural
contributions to the urban metabolism. Tensions further arise between the exchange
and use value of land for urban agriculture. Projects are perceived as contributing
little exchange value for capital accumulation, while the use value for social and
cultural life is undervalued (Barron 2017). At the same time, these processes reduce
invaluable and complex ecosystems to commodities, while the autonomous agency
of gardeners is perceived as spatially and politically marginal (Castree 2008;
Crossan et al. 2016; Heynen and Robbins 2005). Much theorizing on neoliberalism
in urban agriculture is focused in North America, but my research found that these
processes extend across broader political and geographic contexts. As policy and
politics circulate worldwide, they are invested and adapted in new ways that pro-
duce varying effects. Thus, my research sought a better understanding of how these
neoliberal processes flowed in and through urban agriculture projects across the
Western Hemisphere.
Importantly, the cooptation of urban agriculture projects by neoliberal forces
should not be understood as total. And not all projects that pursue economic goals
are necessarily neoliberal. Instead, the relationships between neoliberal cooptation
and social change are complex, heterogenous, and murky. Projects can be neoliberal
and counter to neoliberal processes at the same time such that the presence of neo-
liberal logics within a project should not foreclose other socio-political subjectivi-
ties (Crossan et al. 2016; Drake 2014; McClintock 2014; Weissman 2015). There
remains possibility within many of these projects (and in food activism more
broadly) for addressing inequities via market-based strategies (Alkon 2014).
Projects can empower (or provide feelings of empowerment) through shared gover-
nance and seeking more control of the food system (Barron 2017). They can reframe
approaches to economic empowerment (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). They can pro-
vide emancipatory political openings. They can both subvert food commoditization
through prioritizing it as a public good while also subsidizing capital accumulation
(McClintock 2014). They can reconnect farmer livelihoods to ecological and social
values (Bellwood-Howard and Nchanji 2017). In these ways, more agency should
be afforded to socio-natures for their ability to constrain neoliberalization and/or
structure alternatives (Classens 2015).
The urban agriculture projects presented in this book are embedded in neoliberal
cities, and thus many reproduce neoliberal logics in their orientation toward market-
based solutions to inequality. While they provide important contributions to eco-
nomic development in particular neighborhoods and communities, such an
orientation also makes invisible the systemic disinvestment that has hampered past
efforts at economic development and limits the social, political, and economic effi-
cacy of such projects.
Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects
In all of the cities examined in my research, there was an emphasis by planners,

policymakers, advocates, and non-profit organizations on furthering the potential
market capabilities of urban agriculture. This section describes projects in each city
that pursued such market-oriented goals. It demonstrates how much of the neolib-
eral urbanism agenda discussed above is embedded in the projects that promoted
entrepreneurialism as a solution for social inequity, sought to “green” the city, and/
or devolved responsibility for solving food insecurity to individuals and civil
society.
Growing Organic Crops for the Market in Medellín
In Medellín, a non-profit organization partnered with the local government to estab-

lish collective garden projects in under-resourced neighborhoods that can produce
organic goods for sale at markets in wealthier neighborhoods (see also Anguelovski
et al. 2018). This organization has a national reach through which they pursue
social, environmental, nutritional, technical, and economic goals via agricultural
projects. The organization seeks to install more vegetable gardens in the city’s
peripheral areas in order to improve food security, pursue economic and environ-
mental outcomes, and provide an entrée into neighborhoods where the government
does not have much presence (personal communication, 2017).
At the time of this research, it was implementing 22 projects that were on aver-
age 1500–2000 square meters each. Approximately 20% of gardeners in these proj-
ects produced goods for self-consumption, while 80% were geared toward
commercialization. In neighborhoods in Comuna 8 in the eastern hills of Medellín,
six gardens were supported. Each garden was managed as a collective of families
producing organic crops (instead of utilizing individual plots). According to research
participants, the organic goods from these gardens were sold at markets in wealthy
neighborhoods, such as El Poblado, for three times the cost of conventional pro-
duce. Gardeners also received training for processing their goods into soaps, sham-
poos, and other necessities. They expressed that the gardens provided many benefits,
especially the economic opportunities associated with organic production. One gar-
dener elaborated:
Looking for the organic option, which is an important aspect because organic products are
more expensive, you can sell it more expensive in a market and if people ask you why then
you can let them know it is an organic product. And that gives a better price.
The proceeds from selling produce and goods were perceived as critical for main-
taining the development of the gardens. The economic component of the gardens
was emphasized by an advocate of the program:
Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects 47
Why do we focus on the economic component? Because that is the reason why a person
wants to be a farmer. And the economic conditions that we provide for them and the
opportunities to have access to some money or to integrate into a bank-based system, or
to legalize it or to have other opportunities based on their income, is what generates
changes.
In this way, project advocates saw the economic development potential of gar-
dens as critical to engaging marginalized producers and creating neighborhood
change. Such economic accomplishments were also viewed as important for the
sustainability of gardens despite changing political climates. The mayor in office
at that time supported the urban agriculture projects in the Rural Peripheral Area
and a burgeoning Greenbelt Project (see Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020).
But there was concern that support would diminish if the economic poten-
tial waned.
Pursuing economic goals in the project did not occur without tension, however.
As described further below, some families left the gardens when it was clear not
enough income could be generated. Several other garden projects were also created
in informal settlements in the periphery of Medellín, but without the formal support
and management of organizations. These gardens are more likely to be managed as
allotments in which each family has their own plot and retains decision-making
power regarding what to grow and whether to consume or sell their produce. For
many of these gardeners, sale was not the primary motivation for gardening, but
instead simply an additional opportunity (see Chap. 4 for a discussion on additional
benefits). As one gardener described:
But they work in the community because they sow and for example my mom, who is the
person that I’ve seen working more frequently in that garden, she buys products from the
other people, and she goes and resells it. So it is an opportunity, it is not only for our basic
food basket but also for other people. And a financial aid for her, she gets some money from
it, so the gardener wins and also the one that resells the product.
The economic potential of these individual gardens is dependent on the exchange

of goods among families, not simply access to markets. As described below, ten-
sions arose between stakeholders involved in organizational programs and unaf-
filiated growers because access to resources required pursuit of market-based
economic goals. All of the families in the collective and individual gardens in this
research struggled with low wages from informal work or unemployment. Thus,
for the organizations involved, growing organic crops for the market is seen as an
income-generating strategy. Integrating these communities into the local market
is a key economic development strategy to which collective gardens contribute.
This narrative and strategic goal of economic development through urban agricul-
ture in marginalized communities is reiterated throughout the cases in my
research. This example from informal settlements in the Global South can dem-
onstrate how the privileging of the market pervades and is resisted in everyday
activities.
arket Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture

M
in Rosario
In Rosario, the market potential of both urban and peri-urban agriculture was also
emphasized as key to the success of institutional programs. Urban and peri-urban
agriculture is supported in Rosario through the municipal Programa de Agricultura
Urbana (PAU) and el Proyecto del Cinturón Verde (Greenbelt Project). PAU man-
ages six garden parks (parque huertas) covering 30 hectares of public land through
which gardeners, largely from informal settlements, grow produce in individual
plots relying on agroecology principles. The Greenbelt Project supports peri-urban
farmers with transitioning to agroecology. In October 2019, it included nine produc-
ers cultivating 73 hectares of land through agroecology principles, with another
142 hectares of land transitioning to agroecological methods (Latucca 2019). Some
Greenbelt farmers cultivate land passed down through family for generations, while
others, more likely to be Bolivian immigrants, rent land from larger landowners.
Participants in the PAU and Greenbelt projects sell their goods at farmers’ mar-
kets (ferias). PAU hosts gardeners in 12 markets located throughout the city, with at
least one market operating each day per week. Greenbelt producers sell their goods
at six other markets, 6 days per week, and in a permanent indoor market, El Mercado
del Patio, in the city center (see Fig. 3.1). These markets are described by advocates
and participants as crucial for promoting economic development and demonstrating
the productive potential of small-scale agroecological production. PAU emerged out
of widespread economic crisis in Argentina in 2001 and largely engages residents of
informal settlements with limited employment opportunities. It is part of the munic-
ipal Secretariat of Social Economy. As such, it emphasizes the ability of urban agri-
culture to bolster economic development. One PAU advocate noted that many early
participants wanted to produce goods for sale and further elaborated:
And so the idea was that people who were unemployed could produce vegetables and sell
them in the ferias. For the first time, the people of Rosario could have agroecological veg-
etables because at this time there were none. And that’s how it began.
PAU advocates also noted that in addition to providing some income for families,
the markets were valuable for demonstrating the economic contributions of margin-
alized residents.
The Greenbelt Project further emphasizes the economic dimension of peri-urban
agriculture through its focus on the productive capacity of its growers. The project
is incorporated into the Secretariat of Economic Development, Innovation, and
Employment and coordinates with other municipal secretariats. The project seeks to
improve the socio-economic conditions of small-scale peri-urban farmers through
strategies of agroecological production, strengthening social relationships, and but-
tressing commercialization of their goods. It supports commercialization by
enabling growers to access markets via hosting farmers markets and permanent
stalls and a proposed certification program that would make clear the higher quality
of agroecological goods in order to garner higher prices. The project also sets prices
Fig. 3.1 Produce stand in the Mercado del Patio in central Rosario. This market sells goods pro-
duced in the municipal Greenbelt Project and is staffed by growers and their families
for goods at the markets to better represent the value of their products. Project advo-
cates emphasize that such commercialization processes are critical to encouraging a
transition to agroecological practices and to provide security to producers. Peri-
urban and rural farmers throughout the region also expressed the importance of
having central city market access. Some members of the Greenbelt Project located
in the neighboring municipality of Soldini struggled to find buyers for their higher-
value and higher-cost goods in their smaller markets. Thus, some partnerships
developed within the Greenbelt Project allowed farmers in neighboring municipali-
ties to sell goods in Rosario markets.
Finally, while many garden projects operating outside the PAU and Greenbelt
framework emphasized self-consumption and other community health benefits
more than economic goals (see Chap. 4), several noted the need to provide eco-
nomic opportunity in order to engage young people in the gardens. As a result, one
garden began partnering with the province in order to hire young people to par-
ticipate. They further explained: “Well, until the kids were growing up and we saw
that they needed to work, they needed money and to see another way, to see how
they could find a place to work and keep participating in some way.” In this way,
while the garden’s primary goal was not economic, but, given the need to survive,
there was an imperative to provide economic opportunity for participants living in
marginalized neighborhoods. The attention to economic development, and market-

focused urban agriculture as a strategy to achieve it, was evident throughout the
projects in Rosario.
Pursuing Community Economic Development in Toronto
In Toronto, urban agriculture is acclaimed not only for its ability to feed people but
also for its economic contributions in low-income neighborhoods and families. To
this end, a key focus of urban agriculture advocacy at the time of my research was
creating and supporting more gardens producing food for sale in local farmers’
markets. These efforts were grounded in ideas of community economic develop-
ment. One advocate explained the goal of these efforts:
So, for the market garden it actually gives access to people to have another income. It’s just
like a mini farm, but not really like a big, big farm, but something for them where they can
work on the land, plant on the land, and to produce [crops] they can sell somewhere else.
So, that’s another added income to the family and the person really wants that.
Some fully commercial enterprises exist, while other gardens grow for both con-
sumption and market sales. Growers operating on municipal land were prohibited
from selling their goods. According to research participants, historically, there has
not been much municipal support for farming as an urban industry. One commercial
urban farmer questioned whether farming was accepted as a commercial enterprise,
as opposed to just tolerated.
At the same time, a coordinated effort was underway to allow commercialization
of goods produced at gardens on city- or province-owned land. The Community
Economic and Entrepreneurial Development (CEED) gardens project sought to
establish market gardens in rights of way owned by the provincial power company.
Initially, a collaborative of civil society organizations was working to build four
small-scale market gardens in under-resourced neighborhoods. The impetus for
these gardens was to directly connect gardening to economic development strate-
gies in under-resourced neighborhoods. Instead of only providing food for food-
insecure families, these gardens can provide income, skills in budgeting and account
management, and linkages with other businesses (such as catering). This project
also sought to pilot changes to city ordinances to make farming as a commercial
enterprise more accepted and accessible. One garden advocate noted:
But in terms of trying to tackle something like an urban farm or a CEED garden was to take
it as a next step to be able to influence policies and to see how you’re trying to tie in broader
issues like lack of economic opportunities or just an economic development of neighbor-
hood economy in a sense, but also take it to a little bit more of a systemic level discussion
piece where you’re looking at a more sustainable form of addressing food security, which
means also tying in the decision makers at some of the different levels of the government.
Importantly, these strategies were not seen as finding a new way to generate large
profits, but instead as community economic development (hence the CEED name).
In this way, they complicate the critiques of neoliberalism in urban agriculture pre-
sented above. The gardens are small scale and allow part-time participation in order
to generate some income. Through a focus on community economic development,
growers and advocates pursue self-determination through market mechanisms.
Thus, they may be perceived as both resisting the systems that marginalize low-
income growers and also inculcating neoliberal ideas focused on the primacy of
market solutions. CEED gardens were initially perceived as demonstrative of small
entrepreneurship projects developed through creating a process whereby such ini-
tiatives can be operated on public land (Hammelman 2019). While these projects
faced many bureaucratic obstacles that increased the time and expense of creating
CEED gardens, a promising pilot project was started in north Toronto in 2020.
Finally, alongside generating support for commercial urban agriculture as an
accepted activity, advocates more broadly noted the need to break down economic
systems in which only the wealthy can afford local, organic, and specialty crops.
Employment Strategies in Charlotte
In Charlotte, where the predominance of agricultural communities in and near the

city is more recent and the urban agriculture movement is more nascent, there are
fewer examples of urban agriculture projects geared directly at earning an income
for growers. Instead, there was a broader narrative focused on building a local and
urban farming economy through integrating local farms into the city’s economy,
supporting farmers’ markets, establishing a Voluntary Agriculture District, and
training young urban residents for agricultural and related trade careers. Similar to
Toronto, but divergent from Medellín and Rosario, community gardeners on public
parks and recreation lands in Charlotte are prohibited from selling their goods.
Efforts to recognize urban agriculture as an industry that contributes to the eco-
nomic growth of the city involved, in part, efforts to establish a Voluntary Agriculture
District (VAD). A VAD is a designation in North Carolina state statute that supports
conservation of existing farmland and its productive use, preserves rural heritages
and economies, and establishes a Voluntary Agricultural Review Board to oversee
farmland protections. The Charlotte region and the state of North Carolina have
experienced significant urbanization in the past decades with a resulting loss of
farms and farmlands. The USDA reports that North Carolina lost 6500 farms
between 2007 and 2018 (Cockman 2019). Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is
located), in particular, lost over a third of its farms and over half of its farm acreage
between 1997 and 2012 (KKP 2018). Small local farmers in the Charlotte region
note that the city’s expansion has resulted in farmland being purchased by develop-
ers to build residential areas, new highway construction cutting through farms, and
changing regional environments overall. Importantly, this decline also represents a
precipitous drop in family farms across the state that have been replaced by large,
corporate-owned farms. Advocates of establishing a VAD argue that it could protect
farms against these processes while strengthening the local farm economy. There
has also been a growing effort to expand and support farmers’ markets in order to
bolster the local farm economy (KKP 2018).
Beyond preserving commercial agriculture, the economic potential of urban
agriculture in Charlotte is often highlighted as a vocation for young people.
Hydroponics systems, school gardens, and horticulture programs seek to train
young people for careers in agriculture, pesticide application, food production, and
marketing. One urban agriculture educator explained:
The amazing thing about this program is it produces a lot of product. That product can then
be used to teach business classes and come in and analyze expenses and revenue. Marketing
classes, you can design brands around the products, literally package up products and get
real, firsthand experience with customer service and brand development.
Other programs have also worked with school children to process and market salad
dressing from garden products, while Food Corps programs provided a fertile train-
ing ground for young people.
Yet, some advocates argued that in city discussions, food system contributions to
the economy are not part of the conversation. They noted that there was a need to
further lift up agriculture (in urban and rural areas) as a possible skill and career.
While some of these programs are focused on increasing access to experiential sci-
ence and business afterschool programs, many promote agriculture as a career path
targeted at young people from under-resourced neighborhoods and families. This
can present challenges because, as discussed above, it may simply be tracking these
young people into low-paying careers. Similar to findings by Weissman (2015),
these efforts discipline young people from neighborhoods experiencing disinvest-
ment into being “appropriate” contributors to the neoliberal economy while also
seeing the generation of market demand as needed to preserve local farms.
Exclusions and Uneven Development
All of the examples in this chapter discursively pursue social justice goals (particu-
larly those of social and economic equity), but also maintain the primacy of the
market in achieving urbanist goals. While the focus on the economic development
potential of urban agriculture can be perceived as part of addressing social justice
concerns, literature on neoliberal urbanism and alternative food movements indi-
cates that the relationship is more complex. To be clear, this chapter does not sug-
gest that urban agriculture projects should not pursue economic goals. In fact, they
are important avenues for bringing jobs and income to communities. Literature
about urban agriculture in North America points the potential for economic empow-
erment, subverting commoditization, and addressing food insecurity (McClintock
2014; Reynolds and Cohen 2016; Smit et al. 1996). Similarly, in parts of the Global
South, researchers have investigated linkages between urban agriculture and liveli-
hoods (Bellwood-Howard and Nchanji 2017). Yet, little literature considers the
complex relationships between urban agriculture and economic goals in Latin
Exclusions and Uneven Development 53
American cities and from a comparative perspective in order to demonstrate how

they are embedded in global political economic systems. Further, contrary to some
of the program goals identified in my research, the limited literature that does con-
sider economic impacts in Latin America (such as Dielman 2017) finds that its
importance for employment and income generation remains limited. By taking a
comparative approach in this research, and including case studies from Latin
America, it becomes clear that in order to achieve social justice goals, economic
approaches should be considered as only one part of a larger strategy. The examples
in my research make clear that a singular focus on producing for the market as well
as embedding such projects in urbanism goals of marketing the sustainable city can
exclude the most marginalized producers and make invisible systemic challenges to
social justice. In this way, uneven development is reproduced.
In Medellín, exclusions became evident in tensions between gardeners partici-
pating in market garden programs and those that desired to grow for subsistence.
Long-standing gardeners that cultivated individual plots in a neighborhood space
found they were unable to participate in non-profit projects because they refused to
grow as a collective in order to meet market demands. These women invested in
their gardens for several years, grew food to meet family subsistence needs, and
exchanged goods with neighbors in relationships that fostered community building.
Yet, holding to these goals meant that these gardeners, who were seeking more
autonomy to grow in individual plots, were unable to avail themselves of municipal
and non-profit resources being invested in their neighborhoods. It also demonstrates
the commitment by the Greenbelt Project to pursue economic development by fos-
tering entrepreneurialism and relying on the market to provide income for under-
resourced families, instead of giving residents more autonomy and the ability to
offset expenses via non-market relationships.
The market focus in Medellín also dictated what goods were produced. One gar-
dener involved in a project with the non-profit organization described above noted
that they only grew organic foods for the markets in wealthier neighborhoods. She
explained:
The only requirement is that it has to be organic because that’s the image we are selling. It
has to be organic because in El Presidente [a farmers’ market in a wealthy neighborhood]
they buy our products and they don’t say anything to us.
Yet, the food insecure gardeners do not consume the food they are producing. While
they earn some income from the gardens, they continue to struggle to meet daily
needs, including purchasing sufficient food for their families. This demonstrates, as
Anguelovski et al. (2018) also noted, that the collective, market-oriented urban agri-
culture projects promoted by the city in the Greenbelt instead primarily served to
insert marginalized residents into a more formalized market while also promoting
its sustainability efforts.
In Toronto, the focus on market goals was also a part of branding and growing
the city through environmental projects. It was argued by some that the shift toward
promoting market gardens and high-volume producers in broader city rhetoric put
questions of equity and anti-oppression politics on the back burner. One advocate
elaborated:
How can we support that [promoting economic potential] and keep a focus on social justice
as opposed to making money? That’s what ends up taking over is like, oh, it’s great to have
urban agriculture accepted into the mainstream except that what that means is that it’s
market-driven and that we haven’t looked clearly enough at the problems of capitalism and
the problems of the market for disenfranchised and marginalized folks. So, we end up
reproducing a system that we, in theory, are trying to undercut.
These concerns and exclusions also raise questions, as seen across the cities in my
research, regarding whether enough income can be generated from market gardens
to be a successful economic development strategy for low-income families.
In both Rosario and Toronto, despite economic goals, it was unclear whether
urban agriculture projects could garner enough income to support a family. Projects
encountered challenges in asking for a fair price so that growers could earn a living.
In Rosario, community gardeners disconnected from municipal programs ques-
tioned how much income could be generated through participating in the weekly
farmers’ markets.
Everyone that comes and participates [in our garden] has their own space, but the idea is
that it is just for consumption. Not that we’re against them selling it, just that it’s not sus-
tainable. Gardening doesn’t leave an income, you have to be dedicated, for sure, but if you
want an income that gives people some dignity, it’s not enough.
While in Toronto, one grower spoke directly to these challenges:

There isn’t a special grant specifically for small-scale farmers. So, a lot of people that get
involved – to be honest – they have good intentions and they want to do well, but then get
sucked into a system that a lot of farmers are struggling financially to be able to farm. It
takes a lot of hours and devotion and if, at the end of the year, you looked at, “Oh my gosh,
all I paid myself was $2.00 an hour.”
Several advocates in Toronto also noted the obstacles encountered in pursuing eco-
nomic goals:
But, there’s a lot of challenges around it because it almost seems to be a lot of the bourgeois
folks are able to have the time or afford to be able to spend on it. So, it becomes a little bit
more challenging for folks who are on the lower economic scale to be able to do it either
because they’re working a couple of different jobs or they just don’t have the time to do that.
So, it becomes a little bit harder for them.
In Medellín, the collective market gardens also struggled to keep growers engaged
because not enough income could be earned from participation. One garden that
began with 25 people eventually shrunk to only four when growers found that they
could not sufficiently meet their needs through growing collectively for the market.
The challenges of addressing economic inequity through entrepreneurial proj-
ects and the market then become clearer. In response, some organizations and advo-
cates look to place urban agriculture within conversations of neighborhood
investment. In Toronto, one grower noted that urban agriculture exists within a
larger inequitable food and economic system, and thus there is a need for a broader
community economic development strategy:
Exclusions and Uneven Development 55
So, how can the farm also be part of the conversations around the economic development of
the community as well, right? …We need to create a real just food system whereby food is
accessible and affordable, culturally appropriate, for all members of society and not just
certain people.
A grower in Rosario agreed that attention to the larger economic system is important:
What I think is good, is when you get real. You say, can you really live off of this? Is it real
or not? Because if you lie to yourself and say yes, I’m doing this, but then you also have
another job that is what really sustains you to eat every day, I think it’s a lie. I think you have
to be clear and transparent and say no, we can get this amount of money from this and it’s
enough to pay the electricity. The rest of what I have, I need to get from somewhere else.
But well, I think there is some kind of discourse that you can live off of an organic garden
and that’s really a lie because there’s this whole other system that works behind it in a
totally different way and there’s a lot of focus on this.
In this example, and similar to others in my research, growers called attention to

economic systems that constrain the ability of urban agriculture to meet employ-
ment and food security goals.
In Charlotte, a focus on employment opportunities in agriculture also occludes
the limited opportunities for employment and wealth building in this industry. As
described above, farms and farmland in the Charlotte region face pressures from
urbanization such that fewer opportunities exist to pursue those careers.
Additionally, real wages for farmers have been declining across the country, while
many farming families turn to off-farm labor in order to make ends meet. Thus, as
discussed in other cities, it is not clear that career pathways in urban agriculture
can provide a living wage. Instead, literature in North America has found that there
are few good-paying jobs in this sector. Many urban agriculture positions are low
or unpaid internships for young people or simply don’t produce enough income to
be a sole source of employment. Rosan and Pearsall (2017) found that new grow-
ers in Philadelphia (United States) encountered a steep learning curve, grueling
work, and limited long-term economic prospects. As such, several organizations
focused on transferrable skills learned in urban agriculture instead of viewing it as
a career pathway. One grower in Charlotte also advocated for framing urban agri-
culture projects as community wealth building strategies instead of simple paths
for individual growers to participate in existing markets. Such a framing, for his
project, enabled a multi-tiered approach that focused not just on generating income
through market production but also improving health and social relationships and
solving long-term community needs. Finally, an advocate of school gardens found
more traction in involving students in afterschool programs focused on business
skills instead of horticulture. Teaching students to market and sell agricultural
goods provided more legitimacy and attracted more attention than a focus on
agriculture.
These examples demonstrate that, while there is the potential to create economic
opportunities through urban agriculture, without grounding it in broader strategies
to build community wealth, counter exclusionary markets, and integrate with other
social values, the contribution to community economic development is likely quite
limited. In the four cities of my research, this complexity revealed the ways that a
market-led approach to addressing economic inequity through urban agriculture can

preclude possibilities for systemic solutions to historical disinvestment in neighbor-
hoods and industries.
ontributing to the City Through Urban

C
Agriculture Entrepreneurialism?
Across the four cities in my research, there was a focus on the market possibilities
of urban agriculture. For many, a strategy for addressing poverty and marginaliza-
tion is growing and selling food. Market-focused urban agriculture also aligns with
neoliberal urbanism processes that privilege entrepreneurialism and market strate-
gies for pursuing economic development and sustainability. This was evident
throughout many projects described in this chapter, as market-focused urban agri-
culture projects were presented as a strategy for improving economic outcomes for
individuals and families living in poverty as well as meeting environmental and
economic urbanism goals.
Yet, real questions remain about whether urban agriculture projects designed in
this way can in fact raise families out of poverty and address food insecurity. Instead,
in the cities in this research from the global North and South, it was not evident that
urban agriculture projects can provide a sufficient wage for growers. In today’s
urban and industrial food systems worldwide, the income generated from either
urban agriculture projects or agri-food careers is often limited. The global corporate
food regime stretches across the global North and South with impacts for urban
agriculture as an economic development strategy (McMichael 2009). For example,
farming as a profession in Argentina, Canada, Colombia, and the United States has
faced lower wages and margins and greater risks for exploitation such that fewer
and fewer young people view it as a viable career. Advocates of agroecology in
Rosario noted that the emphasis on growing GMO soybeans for export in the region
surrounding Rosario drove many farmers and their families off the land. Yet, policy
mobilities help circulate narratives of urban agriculture as a market-based solution
to poverty. This is demonstrated in my research when, despite specific context-
based manifestations, similar goals and narratives were integrated into projects in
all four cities.
Several research participants also noted the ways in which the singular focus on
the market potential of individual projects takes attention away from systemic solu-
tions to economic development. Instead, they called for a focus on neighborhood
and community investment beyond being able to take crops to market. This also
raises the potential of urban agriculture to contribute to non-economic needs. Many
participants highlighted values of urban agriculture outside of the market and the
potential for different relationships with urban agriculture and food systems more
broadly. One urban agriculture practitioner in Charlotte emphasized the importance
of growing for consumption: “you may never get rich from gardening but you’ll
References 57
never go hungry” (Queen’s Garden 2020). A peri-urban farmer practicing agroecol-

ogy in Rosario also discussed the broader human-environment connections engen-
dered through growing:
It’s important to take agroecology as an ideal. We take it as an ideal because we believe that
social questions are very strongly linked to agroecology. It goes beyond the product that we
make, it transcends it. Because, with the people at the feria, we transcend the product that
we make and we link it to a social question because we link agroecology directly with the
common good. When [we] say the common good, we aren’t talking about money, it goes
beyond money. We’re referring to humans. We’re referring to all species, plants and ani-
mals. We’re referring to the environment, water, we’re referring to the land.
Building on these ideas, the next chapter turns to the many other values of urban
agriculture discussed in both the literature and my research.
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Chapter 4
“It Is Not Just About the Food”: Integrated
Qualitative Valuations of Urban
Agriculture
One of the gardeners I met described in detail the multiple impacts of her urban agri-
culture practice. Ana1 migrated from a rural province in northeastern Argentina to
one of its largest cities, Rosario, in 1990. Like many rural-to-urban migrants around
the world, she came from a farming background, but arrived in Rosario with very few
economic resources. Initially, she lived in an informal settlement, where she did not
know anyone and worked very hard to just survive each day. There was no stable
work (as there often is not for new migrants to the city), but she knew how to culti-
vate the land and found that working the land resulted in getting food, so she did that.
Shortly after arriving in Rosario, she met an agricultural engineer who had been
involved in urban agriculture with the municipality. He gave her some seeds. In late
summer he returned, and they gathered with neighbors to share a meal with the food
born of those seeds. Thus began a relationship through which that engineer and the
municipality continued to return with seeds that Ana distributed among neighbors
who all began establishing gardens. In less than a year, the gardeners collectively
built a structure to store seeds and tools and to gather together. The municipality
supported this effort by installing a roof. And by the end of the season, enough veg-
etables had been grown by the nine families involved to sell their produce to others.
With the support of the local government, the gardeners sold their produce at a
nearby social club, providing economic benefit beyond only food for the families.
Over time the gardeners learned to preserve and package their produce. They
also used the vegetables to make beet and carrot jam. They learned how to make
ointments and other home remedies with flowers and medicinal plans. Today, Ana
manages a large community garden in Rosario supported by the municipality
through which dozens of families grow food for their families or to sell in city-
supported markets. But beyond economic gains, Ana and her neighbors learned how
to survive in the city, how to exchange knowledge, and how to grow their lives in
new places. When I spoke to her, she discussed how municipal staff that supported
the garden she runs also taught her a range of other skills, such as how to use taxis,
look people in the face, and walk tall. She described her garden as part of a social
economy where urban orchards provide a diversity of flowers, vegetables, and
friends with an ear to lend. In this way, she clearly articulated the many
All names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.

1

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_4
60 4 “It Is Not Just About the Food”: Integrated Qualitative Valuations of Urban…
interconnected values of urban agriculture beyond just the food—a sentiment that
was emblematic of many other gardeners that I encountered.
All research participants were asked what value urban agriculture provides for
the city. This chapter synthesizes answers to that question focusing on the most
frequently cited values of urban agriculture. Despite the wide range of values cited,
there was remarkable similarity across the research sites. In responding to calls for
theorizing from multiple ordinary cities (Robinson 2006), this chapter attends to
points of commonality in cases across varied geographies in order to demonstrate
how ordinary urban agriculture practices are converging (or not).
Beyond Food Production
The multifunctionality of urban agriculture described in this story from Rosario was
evident throughout the different cities in my research as well as in the growing aca-
demic and grey literature.2 Throughout this chapter, I argue that a strength of urban
agriculture is the intertwined contributions it makes to socio-ecological systems.
Much literature has sought to measure the food production potential of urban agri-
culture for cities (MacRae et al. 2010; Orsini et al. 2014; among others). Urban
agriculture practitioners noted that cultivating plants provided an important supple-
ment to family food supplies. For example, one grower in Charlotte profiled in a
series of oral histories (Queen’s Garden 2020) noted that his grandmother always
had a backyard garden in their neighborhood without easy access to grocery stores
or fresh produce. This garden (producing both fresh and canned goods) was an
important part of the food his family ate and contributed to his more recent con-
struction of a community garden in his neighborhood.
However, for this grower, and many throughout this research, food is only one
part of their urban agriculture experience:
A garden is more than just the provision of healthy food and vegetables. It’s actually the
provision of food as a means of improving health and the social determinants of health. It’s
also about capturing and creating economic development opportunity, that creates commu-
nity around solving a long-term community need. And it’s also a community wealth build-
ing strategy and it’s a multi-tiered approach that brings all of the [communities] together. To
focus on solving a long-term community need and to do it from a collective community
impact perspective. That in and of itself is the crux of what this gardening effort is all about.
(Queen’s Garden 2020)
Similarly, in Rosario, urban agriculture advocates noted that many growers from mar-
ginalized communities consume the food they produce and that, since they were
established during a time of severe economic crisis, early goals were focused on
ensuring hungry residents had something to eat. However, these goals have shifted
2
Multifunctionality refers to the multiple functions (economic development, social capital cre-
ation, neighborhood revitalization, etc.) served by urban agriculture (Lovell 2010; Poulsen
et al. 2017).
Beyond Food Production 61
over time to focus more on the economic capabilities of urban agriculture (see Chap.
3) and the social and environmental benefits derived from the practice.
In Toronto, urban agriculture advocates noted that while gardens can provide
some supplemental food for families facing food insecurity, gardens alone cannot
solve those problems. One advocate argued that “Food is almost a sidebar in urban
agriculture projects. Beyond the food, it supports children growing up and learning
about where their food is from.” Another non-profit manager of an urban agriculture
project further elaborated:
Our research is now showing that gardens – the primary purpose is not meeting food secu-
rity – but it’s to combat social isolation. It’s to combat feelings of helplessness. It’s to bring
community together and to join in, to then collaborate for more rights or more power people
want to receive. So, basically, it’s a tool to reach out to get to know the community we serve
and to know how to help them better.
In Toronto, city government’s involvement in community gardens recognizes

their social and environmental values. This is evident in the incorporation of
urban agriculture into formal documents such as the Environmental Plan (2000)
and the Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Energy Action Plan (2007),
among others.
These sentiments were further elaborated in Medellín where most of the growers
faced food insecurity and viewed their gardens as an important source of food. But
for them, urban agriculture also does much more. One urban agriculture advocate
discussed his motivations:
For me, lettuce is not the goal, it’s the means. For me, sowing is not the goal; it’s the means
to accomplish all what is generated as a consequence of that… The ultimate goal is social
cohesion.
Thus, while everyone I talked with appreciated having greater access to fresh food
(one aspect that is quantifiable in terms of pounds produced and/or economic out-
puts), many participants reported that the food itself was only one part of the story.
As further described throughout this chapter, the urban agriculture functions identi-
fied by research participants were multiple and interconnected. The most frequently
cited values focused on politically contesting the industrial food system, improving
the environment, claiming neighborhood space or contributing to community, con-
necting to the land and ancestors, bolstering social interaction, improving mental
and physical health, and nutrition education.
This perspective of multifunctionality is also mirrored in the academic and gray
literature where the number of publications focused on non-food benefits of urban
agriculture far outstrips those focused on food production. Several authors question
the ability of urban agriculture to address food insecurity (Thibert 2012). Many
articles and books on urban agriculture begin with a few paragraphs extolling the
multiple benefits of the practice. Some focus on organizing communities to counter
the industrial food system and other urban challenges (Angotti 2015; Hoover 2013;
Levkoe 2006; Levkoe and Offeh-Gyimah 2020; Macias 2008; Mares and Peña
2010; Pourias et al. 2016). Others focus on environmental benefits and the creation
of closed life cycles (Angotti 2015; Colasanti et al. 2012; De Zeeuw et al. 2011;
Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017; Wooten and Ackerman 2012) and on the health
benefits for humans evident in increased social capital, nutrition, exercise, and men-
tal health improvements (Audate et al. 2019; Birky and Strom 2013; Cohen and
Reynolds 2014; Colasanti et al. 2012; Orsini et al. 2014; Partalidou and Anthopoulou
2017; Teig et al. 2009). Some attend to the education possibilities of urban agricul-
ture (Cohen and Reynolds 2014). Other literature focuses on the urban agriculture
benefits for social cohesion and connections to nature, land, and place (Birky and
Strom 2013; Mares and Peña 2010; Pourias et al. 2016; Teig et al. 2009; Thibert 2012).
Galt et al. (2014) note the interrelationship of these goals as gardeners are “trans-
forming selves and relationships, social and socio-ecological, at multiple levels”
(pg. 133). Pourias et al. (2016) found that all of the gardeners in their research noted
multiple functions:
This attests to the fact that they are far more than just a place of production. Even if their
harvests have an expected benefit and are an important motivation for the gardeners, the
gardens have many other functions, without which the gardeners would perhaps not partici-
pate. (pg. 270)
At the same time, others connect urban agriculture benefits to goals of urbanization
and community revitalization (Daftary-Steel et al. 2015; Hoover 2013). For exam-
ple, Glasser (2018) examines narratives of productivity for vacant land, creating
jobs, and addressing food access. Yet, Sbicca (2019) questions the ability of urban
agriculture to truly meet such urban development goals given that perceived prop-
erty value is derived from profit potential, not the less quantifiable benefits dis-
cussed above. Classens (2015; with reference to Lawson 2005) similarly notes that
the prevailing narratives of urban gardens as contributing to nature, education, and
self-help reproduce the marginal positioning of gardens as unviable for scalable
food production and/or social change. In this regard, some scholars point out the
potential drawbacks of urban agriculture noting that there are many unexplored
controversial and unjust dynamics embedded in the movement (Tornaghi 2014) and
that the potential health and environmental risks need to be further examined and
managed (de Zeeuw et al. 2011).
roviding Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering

P
Community Economies, Neighborhood Place-Making,
and People and Land Relationships
Research participants identified multiple values provided by urban agriculture that

were connected to social, economic, and cultural benefits. These values included
fostering relationships among people and land, neighborhood place-making, and
(relatedly) building social capital. Urban gardening supports the formation of mean-
ingful relationships as people collectively build shared histories, lived space, and
experiences (Barthel et al. 2015; Okvat and Zautra 2011; McClintock 2014;
Partalidou and Anthopoulou 2017). Urban agriculture can reconnect urban residents
Providing Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering Community Economies… 63
with food production systems, land histories, and communities. Researching allot-
ment gardens in Dublin, Kettle (2014) emphasized that these practices respond to
disconnections created in modern urban capitalism. In particular, urban growing
enables (re)connecting to land, traditional knowledge, and other people in ways that
can provide a sense of belonging in the city. This includes fostering economic rela-
tionships based on social relations that pursue community development instead of a
sole focus on market involvement (such as bartering, gift-giving, and building com-
munity economies).
Further, urban agriculture can contribute to neighborhood place-making when
the spaces are used to sustain socio-ecological knowledge, re-imagine “nature” in
the city, and catalyze community development (Barthel et al. 2015; Kim 2016;
Certomà and Tornaghi 2015; Pourias et al. 2016). For example, Teig et al. (2009)
examined community gardens in Denver, Colorado (United States) and found that
they were important for residents to feel that they are part of a community or neigh-
borhood, develop mutual trust, and create a space for civic engagement. For migrant
communities in particular, urban agriculture provides a place to preserve cultural
identity and form new connections (Agustina and Beilin 2012). Urban agriculture
has also been discussed as a strategy for self-determination in economically
depressed African American communities (White 2011). Urban agriculture can be
important for building social capital when it supports residents in connecting across
racial, income, language, and/or generational divides and fosters pride in a place
(Audate et al. 2019; Kim 2016, Kingsley and Townsend 2006; Vitiello and Wolf-
Powers 2014). In my research, participants emphasized the value urban agriculture
provides for forming community economies, bolstering neighborhood place-
making, and fostering relationships between people and land.
Community Economies
Beyond the employment and market-led economic impacts of urban agriculture dis-
cussed in Chap. 3, some participants discussed the ways that growing supplemented
food budgets and, thus, helped their family economics. As indicated in Chap. 3,
previous studies indicate that the broader economic potential of urban agriculture
(including its ability to increase land value) is less proven, while the financial or
employment opportunities derived from the practice may be insufficient for sup-
porting a family (Houston 2005; Pourias et al. 2016; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers
2014). Yet, for many, the ability to supplement income, diminish food costs, and
foster social capital that leads to new economic opportunities is salient. For exam-
ple, Vitiello and Wolf-Powers (2014) argue that some of the most important eco-
nomic outcomes of urban agriculture are unrelated to farming jobs. Instead they can
be viewed as social enterprises that create connections and build social capital. As
such, scholars call for going beyond the quantification of economic benefits to bet-
ter understand the diverse ways that urban agriculture can produce value for fami-
lies (Slater 2001).
The community-based economic value for households was particularly evident

in Medellín where growers living in informal settlements grow and/or exchange
foods that they otherwise would be unable to purchase in stores. Sprawling up the
city’s hillsides are informal settlements inhabited by low-income residents, many of
which were displaced from the countryside due to the decades-long civil war. The
self-built neighborhoods climb up difficult mountain terrain where there are limited
public services, infrastructure, and employment opportunities (BID 2009; Calderon
2012; Fadnes and Horst 2009). Many women I spoke to turned to urban agriculture
in response to experiences of poverty, food insecurity, and a disconnect from the
land. In addition to collecting leftover and discarded food from markets, begging for
food, and limiting meals and food types, they grow fresh produce and herbs within
the limited space constraints of their always-evolving neighborhoods (Hammelman
2017). Some grow in the interstitial space next to their home, in organized allotment
gardens, or in community gardens (as described in Chap. 3).
The gardeners frequently discussed the important economic values that enabled
access to food and goods they otherwise couldn’t afford. Some participants noted
that they did not buy any vegetables beyond what they grew or exchanged with
neighbors and that the quality and variety of produce consumed are greater than
before they had a garden. This also reduced expenses for transportation to salvage
or purchase food from other sources. Additionally, if a family grew more than they
consumed, many reported exchanging with neighbors, local stores, or the food bank
in order to obtain goods they can’t grow such as sugar, cooking oil, or household
items (e.g., toothpaste, shampoo). Some gardeners were also learning how to make
soaps, shampoo, and other goods to continue to offset family expenses. In this case,
the economic value of urban agriculture contributed to several community needs
beyond participation in a market.
The economic contributions of urban gardens were also evident in Rosario where
many growers live in marginalized neighborhoods and struggle to make ends meet.
They reported the importance of getting food through growing, and, for those that
chose to participate, income generated from participating in municipal farmers’
markets was important. One grower described the value of this practice for her fam-
ily’s food budget:
You are not buying the vegetable, you are not buying some vegetables such as zucchini,
sweet potatoes, because you have it there. And then all the other vegetables. And in all cases
there is a crisis so heavy and if you have to barter you can exchange vegetables for flour, for
sugar, for soap.
Other garden managers in Rosario discussed this practice as the ecology of low-
income communities in which residents use all that they have in order to cobble
together enough to support their families.
In Toronto, urban agriculture advocates from civil society organizations noted
the importance of being able to access fresh, organic vegetables and herbs, particu-
larly culturally relevant foods, as a result of growing food. Especially given the high
costs of living in the city (in terms of rent, transportation, etc.), they reported that
people are turning toward growing food to cut costs. One community garden
manager reported that the average community garden in Toronto (approximately

3,000 square feet) can produce up to 9,000 lbs of food per growing season. That can
equate to as much as $7,500 in food savings. For migrant communities cultivating
specific foods that can be hard to find or expensive, this savings is even greater. One
advocate elaborated:
When you say cultural food, that is something that is really expensive and community gar-
dens are one way for people to access their cultural food that mostly they find expensive in
the market or sometimes they cannot find in the market. So, that is one of the importance of
a community garden.
In Charlotte, growers and urban agriculture advocates similarly noted that growing
food can provide some savings. However, many were careful to indicate that while
growing can supplement food budgets, it is rarely a solution to food insecurity on its
own. In all of the cities, the ability to supplement food budgets, exchange produce
for other goods, and cultivate relationships in their neighborhoods was a critical
value afforded by participating in urban agriculture.
Social Connections and Place-Making
The significant social and cultural contributions of urban agriculture to urban life
were particularly illustrated through the story of Toronto’s vibrant urban agriculture
movement. As described in Chap. 1, Toronto is a sprawling city home to a dynamic
urban agriculture movement. Toronto Urban Growers (TUG) reported more than
200 growing spaces ranging from rooftops and large-scale commercial farms to
small allotment gardens on Parks, Forestry and Recreation land and school gardens.
Urban agriculture received important support from the Toronto Food Policy Council
in its 2010 Toronto Food Strategy and the 2012 GrowTO Urban Agriculture
Action Plan.
The social value of urban agriculture was demonstrated through resident strug-
gles to maintain growing space in one low-income downtown neighborhood that is
home to a large public housing project. This neighborhood, originally designed
according to Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” ideals, was reportedly the location of
the first community garden in Toronto. Over time, ad hoc resident actions (along-
side support from public housing authorities during participatory budgeting exer-
cises) built many gardens around the low-rise public housing buildings to supplement
food budgets, improve health, and foster social relationships among immigrants,
their histories, and the land (Hammelman 2019). According to an urban agriculture
advocate, as many as one in ten families tended gardens in this neighborhood.
The neighborhood recently experienced significant public-private investment to
rebuild housing to meet greater density, mixed-use, and mixed-income planning
goals. While the new investments include important neighborhood amenities,
including new residential buildings, a swimming pool, and a large neighborhood
park, many residents and urban agriculture advocates lamented the loss of growing
space in a city where accessing land for urban agriculture is a consistent challenge.
As residents, churches, health centers, non-profit organizations, and advocates
fought for the inclusion of urban agriculture in redevelopment plans, they frequently
invoked a range of social benefits. A developer that eventually incorporated rooftop
gardens into its designs remarked that food served as the “glue” for social cohesion
in the neighborhood (Cohen 2015). Residents advocated for park space to serve as
a location for community gathering including a garden. Local non-profit organiza-
tions also created community gardens and pop-up gardens in the neighborhood with
the recognition of the social value they provided. One garden manager described
these values:
So, this is the way some people – if they have a mental health issue, it also reduces their
stress. It increases their socialization, and also brings people together more in equal ways.
Each garden has a different style to growing food. So, in the garden, they learn from each
other, because our garden is multicultural, and we are working together.
This advocate and others were concerned about the diminished capacity to form
such socio-ecological relationships with the substantial loss of garden space in the
neighborhood as a result of the revitalization.
The sentiment that urban agriculture contributes to combating social isolation
and forming new relationships was also expressed in other neighborhoods and gar-
den projects in Toronto. One advocate elaborated:
Maximizing potential lands by turning something into a green space where people could
meet, where people could plant their own [garden], where people could build a community,
and people could have food security, that is a vision that is something in the future and I
would say that, urban ag, it is something that we are visioning with.
Indeed, one urban agriculture advocate noted that yard-sharing projects, in which a
homeowner opens their backyard to a grower that doesn’t have access to space,
struggled to find participants because gardeners wanted the sociality of a garden.
Others emphasized the potential of intergenerational and multi-cultural relation-
ships formed through bringing people together in meaningful ways, such as garden
projects and harvest festivals. As gardens become a “second home” or “safe space”
for families, newcomers, and other residents, they also began to serve a place-
making role for building community in and outside of the garden. Participants in
Toronto reported that gardens often evolved into spaces where people gathered for
conversations related to food systems and community development that can spur
future claims for rights and power.
Social and cultural connections forged through urban agriculture were also evi-
dent in Charlotte. The city has a more nascent urban agriculture movement with
approximately 75 school, church, allotment, and community gardens. In one com-
munity garden in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, seniors were supported in
planting, tending, and harvesting their garden plots by high school students. Both
groups benefited from this intergenerational interaction through sharing knowledge,
energy, and experiences. In gardens such as this, but also the many school gardens
throughout city, Parks and Recreation allotment gardens, and urban farms engaging
diverse volunteers, “organic” interactions were formed between people and the
land. As one garden leader and educator told me, community gardens create an
agora, a commons, a place to imperfectly solve problems together. They are “a story
of people and the land.”
Urban agriculture projects in Charlotte were also discussed as places for building
and forming community. One research participant described the impetus for build-
ing a garden in a particular neighborhood because that neighborhood lacked a phys-
ical center or gathering space and identity. The garden was perceived as being able
to fill that role. Others reflected on how the gardens served as community gathering
spots and places of peace. They also discussed the importance of luncheons, tomato
sandwich parties, and other events for fostering social cohesion. These activities can
form bridges across difference and improve communities as a whole. One partici-
pant reflected: “You have to be about cultivating people.” At the same time, other
advocates pointed out that food can be a uniter and that it can bring people together
around common goals.
In both Medellín and Rosario, social cohesion and bringing community together
to address family and neighborhood challenges were also discussed as values
produced by urban agriculture. In Medellín, several neighborhoods struggled with
gang activity. The gardens were described as a productive activity for young people
and a place in which mothers strategized collectively to protect their families. In
Rosario, gardens were also presented as spaces to counter neighborhood violence
and provide productive activities for residents. One grower described this objective:
“The idea is to strengthen those connections in the commons. And that the kids, the
kids and the parents, the community exists.” In both of these cases, having a physi-
cal presence of the collective and productive spaces of urban agriculture was per-
ceived as a strategy for displacing unwanted neighborhood activity.
Finally, for gardeners in all four cities, the social capital formed through the gar-
dens enabled discussing bigger neighborhood concerns, seeking redress for injus-
tices, and/or devising new initiatives for neighborhood revitalization. Many reported
that building gardens enabled broader efforts at community building, resident orga-
nizing, claiming a right to the city, and countering the negative impacts of industrial
agriculture. In Medellín, growers often represented groups with little political
power. They were described in public rhetoric as outsiders that only cause problems
in the city. As a result, growing gardens created a visible manifestation of their posi-
tive contributions. Residents tapped into the pride they felt from building their gar-
dens to organize neighbors in addressing gang activity, fighting against forced
relocation in the city, and claiming rights. One grower further described the political
benefits of gardening:
For example, I believe we are strong because of the garden… It has helped us to fight and
make ourselves stronger. In the way that we are able to struggle with them because they
haven’t been able to find an answer and let us know what would happen to us and the pro-
posal was, are you going to move us from here? But you need to provide us with space
where we could grow vegetables because we’re not going to make it in a building. So that
has been one of our most important struggles.
For this grower, the success of their gardens provided a foundation upon which they
could fight against forced relocation. Advocates in Toronto also discussed how
participating in urban agriculture can give residents more sense of community

engagement through which further organizing can take place.
In Charlotte, gardens were advocated for as a means to build social capital, while
in Rosario, gardeners described in detail the growth they experienced. One grower
in Rosario explained:
They taught me that I can look people in the face. My tears were not due to just wanting to
cry but that I was alone. I couldn’t look like that. I was ashamed. And all the time I walked
with my head slouched. And so the engineer, and his team, taught me how to walk. That’s
why I always say that they gave me the fishing rod, not the fish. And there, I was becom-
ing wiser.
The emphasis on social capital is particularly relevant in disinvested neighborhoods

where urban agriculture is perceived as a mechanism to connect across class, race,
and generations in ways that produce broader social benefits. In this way, the rela-
tionships produced through urban agriculture are perceived to have valuable impacts
on neighborhoods and groups. Similarly, for some in Charlotte, participating in
community gardens enabled new approaches to problem solving and building rela-
tionships. Gardens supported tapping into long histories of growing while also cre-
ating a common space for people to talk and problem solve together.
Importantly, however, those communities are not formed without tension.
Instead, they can be mirrors of divisions that exist outside the garden space. One
garden manager in Charlotte noted that conflicts arose based on different ideas of
what garden maintenance should occur: “what we see here playing out are the
dynamics in our culture of rules, adherence to rules, how flexible you should be,
what you should choose to have battles over, and so on.” For him, those conflicts
were mirrors of societal tensions. Thus, while urban agriculture has the potential to
bolster socio-ecological relationships and improve neighborhoods, it also has the
potential to reproduce the power dynamics in which those relationships are embed-
ded (as discussed in Chap. 2).
Connecting to Land, Histories, and Traditional Knowledge
Many growers and advocates in my research discussed the ways urban agriculture
helped forge connections to land, histories, and ancestral knowledge through grow-
ing and sharing certain foods in particular ways. In Medellín, many gardeners held
vast agricultural knowledge and histories from the countryside from where they
were forcibly displaced. Thus, the cultural benefits of reconnecting to memories of
the countryside and family they lost cannot be overstated. One grower described her
experience:
Through these gardens we mitigate a little bit the hunger, despair, sadness of some people
who had to flee their lands, leaving the most precious, leaving even their loved ones buried
there. Now we are very happy because, for example, I acquired some good ideas from there
like I learned to do chimichurri, I learned a little bit to do the picante, I learned to prepare
sweet pickles, and then water and crackers, several things that we have prepared from the
plant because it is true we don’t have enough to plant a large extension of banana and yucca,
but it is enough to grow some plants of banana and yucca, and all this is produced for us. So
in that way, we are able to cope with the sadness and memories that we have from our fields,
and at the same time we have a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the field, we eat in a
healthy way.
Other growers in Medellín noted how community members came together to share
food grown from the gardens. During one community meeting held toward the end
of my research in Medellín, I gathered with growers and residents from multiple
neighborhoods around the cooking and sharing of a sancocho or a festival lunch
with a large stew at its center. During this event, participants reflected on the impor-
tance of being able to share food in this way (whether grown in their gardens or not)
in order to create a sense of solidarity and shared purpose (Hammelman et al. 2019).
In these and more regular gatherings among growers, they not only meet basic needs
of hunger but also provide cultural connections with memories of similar gatherings
and working the field in the countryside.
Advocates in Toronto also discussed the multicultural sharing of knowledge (and
food) among migrant communities. In gardens, one can find growers of different
generations, world regions, and languages that share their knowledge of growing
techniques and particular plants. One non-profit advocate further explained:
For a lot of people, it’s also interesting because it’s also becoming very multicultural in
terms of what is grown on these lands and what we taste as well. So, I remember in one of
the gardens they try to grow produce from other countries and then folks are like, “Well,
what is it?” “I don’t know how to harvest it because I don’t know what it is.” But then that
learning opportunity is there as well so I think to have ethnic crops being grown, there
seems to be a lot of interest in growing that.
Another urban agriculture advocate in Toronto similarly noted how these processes
have been important to sustaining the production of world crops.
In Rosario, growers discussed how agroecological production in urban and peri-
urban farms represents a way of life. For some, it was not seen as a job but instead
as an orientation to living. Similar to growers in Medellín, many in Rosario have
long family histories in agriculture, and thus there was an impetus to maintain their
ancestral knowledge. One of these growers explained these cultural benefits:
The orientation that we have in our seed production is toward local knowledge. The people
from the countryside, the small-scale producers, they are the ones that make sure the region
is fed. They are the ones that make sure that there are seeds for the next harvest. They take
care of their own seeds. They know about the seed’s maturity, when is the best time to cut
it, when is the best time to dry it, when is the best time to clean it and when is the best time
to package it and under what conditions it should be done and how to label it so the variety
isn’t lost.
For this grower, fostering this knowledge sharing into the future was a key value of
urban agriculture.
Finally, growers and advocates in Charlotte similarly pointed out the cultural
benefits of growing as connected to preserving a way of life and human-environment
connections. Growers discussed the commitments to the environment, community,
and religion that motivated their practice. A grower from one of the oldest commu-
nity gardens in the city, located in a now gentrifying neighborhood, expressed that
many of the growers in her garden feel closer to God when putting their hands in the
dirt and serving as caretakers of the earth. There are many church gardens in
Charlotte in which parishioners are motivated by a religious calling to care for the
earth and community. Other urban agriculture growers described memories of
planting and harvesting with their parents or grandparents while growing up. They
viewed their current practice as continuing that tradition and contributing to a better
way of life. Importantly, the social, cultural, and economic values described in this
section are interrelated. Being able to connect to shared histories of land can foster
solidarity, shared organizing, and social and economic capital. Through exchanging
produce, seeds, ideas, and stories, new connections to place are made in ways that
can improve neighborhoods. The intertwining of urban agriculture contributions in
this way was valued by all participants but was also reflected on as a challenge for
demonstrating the importance of the practice in neoliberal capitalist urban systems.
roviding Environmental Value Through Food System

P
Alternatives, Human-Nature Connections, and Education
Throughout the four cities in this research, and often in the literature, urban agricul-
ture’s environmental successes were described as key for urban landscapes. These
environmental goals varied in their contributions to ecosystem services, urban green
space, and countering the negative effects of industrial food production, but also
included contributions to human and environmental health as well as food and agri-
culture education.
Ecosystem Services and Environmental Alternatives
In academic literature on urban agriculture, many scholars have considered urban

agriculture’s contributions to ecosystem services, including reducing the urban heat
island effect, stormwater runoff, energy use, and waste creation as well as increas-
ing habitat for pollinators and wildlife and sequestering nitrogen and carbon
(Ackerman et al. 2014; Clinton et al. 2018; La Rosa et al. 2014; Lin et al. 2015;
McPhearson et al. 2014; Okvat and Zautra 2011; and Orsini et al. 2014). These
environmental contributions, alongside increasing environmental knowledge, can
build urban resilience (Camps-Calvet et al. 2016). Further, Lin et al. (2015) found
spillover services related to energy, resources, and organisms beyond the garden
itself, while Clinton et al. (2018) noted the importance of built environments to
address climate change and unsustainable development.
Scholarly literature also attends to environmental benefits that increase the liva-
bility of cities, in part through improving or creating urban green space, regulating
climates, and increasing access to natural systems and fresh food (Clinton et al.
2018; La Rosa et al. 2014; Reynolds and Cohen 2016). For example, Middle et al.
Providing Environmental Value Through Food System Alternatives, Human-Nature… 71
(2014) point to the benefits of green space created through garden parks in Perth,
Australia. In addition to providing more natural systems, urban agriculture engages
residents in producing greater environmental value. Rosan and Pearsall (2017) simi-
larly found that many urban growers in Philadelphia, United States, perceived urban
agriculture as offering vital environmental benefits and challenging existing food
systems. Urban agriculture practice is discussed in the literature as a counter to
industrial approaches to food when projects operate in collaboration with natural
systems instead of relying on large-scale chemical inputs. This also has the potential
to enable growers and consumers to reconnect to the land that feeds them and to
cultural histories, support community self-determination, and counter contempo-
rary capitalist logics (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Hoover 2013; Reynolds and
Cohen 2016).
Importantly, urban agriculture does not automatically produce these environ-
mental benefits, but must be managed intentionally to do so. Much literature notes
potential environmental challenges from urban agriculture. Dalla Marta et al. (2019)
identified the competition for water in urban areas as a challenge (e.g., between
agriculture, industry, domestic needs, etc.). Urban agriculture can also require addi-
tional maintenance and infrastructure while increasing the presence of agricultural
pollutants, mosquito breeding, and disease transmission (Clinton et al. 2018; Lin
et al. 2015).
In my research, growers and advocates in all four cities discussed urban agricul-
ture’s contribution to urban systems through environment-focused outcomes. The
agroecology approach to urban and peri-urban agriculture in Rosario is particularly
illustrative as it brings together the many environmental values discussed in the lit-
erature. As described in Chap. 1, Rosario is located in the fertile pampa húmeda
region in eastern Argentina. The region is known for its vast areas of industrially
produced soybean and wheat that are transported to other parts of the country and
around the world via the ports of Greater Rosario and Buenos Aires. Within this
context, municipal actors promote agroecology in its urban (Programa de Agricultura
Urbana, PAU) and peri-urban (Proyecto del Cinturón Verde, Greenbelt Project) pro-
grams as an alternative to industrial agriculture. Agroecology is understood as an
approach to agriculture grounded in the ecological knowledge of local farmers
(Altieri and Nicholls 2018). It relies on natural systems instead of chemical inputs
to produce agricultural goods and pursue food sovereignty. Importantly, in Latin
America (and elsewhere), it is approached as a science, practice, and socio-political
movement (Toledo 2011).
The agroecological framing of urban and peri-urban agriculture in Rosario
focused on the varied environmental impacts of its practice, and this is embedded in
discourse about municipal programs. For example, during a tour of Greenbelt farms,
participants spotted an owl resting in one of the fields. In response, a tour leader
emphasized that seeing such animal life signaled the importance of agroecology for
preserving a biodiversity not only of crops but also of animals. During this tour, we
also visited an agroecological peri-urban farm that was surrounded by informal
settlements, conventional farms, and a women’s prison. Through a partnership with
Rosario’s Greenbelt program, this farmer had not only converted his land to
agroecological production but also began extolling the environmental values of

agroecology in public fora and in markets where he sells his produce. He especially
highlighted human-environment relationships and reflected:
We take [agroecology] as an ideal because we believe that social questions are very strongly
linked to agroecology. It goes beyond the product that we make, it transcends it. Because
with the people at the feria, we transcend the product that we make and we link it to a social
question because we link agroecology directly with the common good. When [we say] the
common good, we aren’t talking about money, it goes beyond money. We’re referring to
humans. We’re referring to all species, plants and animals. We’re referring to the environ-
ment, water, we’re referring to the land.
For this grower, a key value that urban and peri-urban agriculture provided was
promoting the environment as a common good that must be sustained. These narra-
tives are also careful to identify human-environment connections. One advocate in
Rosario described how these connections were important from the beginning of
municipal support for urban agriculture:
From the start it was ecological because we didn’t just want to take care of the animal life
but also people and land. Ecological agriculture is not dependent. Here people can make
their own compost, biopreparations, seedlings, and they can have semillas libres [seeds free
of chemicals]. So, we give freedom and not dependency. That’s why the idea of ecological
agriculture has been around since the beginning.
Such framings of human-environment relationships also seek to change the image

and responsibilities of farmers away from the application of chemical inputs and
mechanical harvesting. Instead, farmers are understood as “creators of harmony and
beauty” among the plants and animals of agricultural landscapes (urban agriculture
advocate, 2019).
Other advocates and growers in Rosario also repeatedly described the positive
impacts of their practice on increasing biodiversity and reducing environmental tox-
ins. This is particularly evident in presenting the agroecology programs as counter
to industrial agriculture. One advocate described the differences:
[Agroecological] production is more efficient from every point of view because industrial
agriculture is subsidized by petroleum. And also if we were to measure from the ecological
point of view, industrial agriculture is totally inefficient. Our way of doing things is much
more efficient because we also recycle and we don’t waste energy. There’s also human
participation. Industrial agriculture is almost completely dehumanized, almost no people
participate. It’s mechanical and there’s no human labor.
Many other growers described these benefits as the most important added value
provided by urban agriculture in Rosario.
The emphasis on connecting with nature and growing in harmony with ecological
processes was also expressed by gardeners in other cities. In Medellín (and also in
Rosario), several growers had “recovered” lands that were previously dumping
grounds for garbage3. One community garden manager remarked that through build-
ing the garden on a site that used to be a dumping ground, they were improving the
3
These growers (and others throughout my research) reflected on the potential dangers of growing
on contaminated urban lands and pursued strategies to protect against those dangers (e.g., growing
in raised beds, etc).
environment. In these examples, the vegetable gardens were able to utilize previously
marginalized spaces while also cleaning up neglected neighborhood environments.
In Toronto, several advocates and growers discussed the ways in which urban
agriculture connects urban residents with natural systems and inculcates an environ-
mental ethic. One grower explained: “We are really looking at growing on our door-
step… so we understand five acres is [only] five acres, but how can we support
community members to look at the whole community as a garden.” Others in
Toronto fostered their urban agriculture projects as pollinator spaces and ways to
protect trees and green space in an otherwise concrete-filled built environment. One
advocate of rooftop gardens described these environmental impacts:
Here [pollinators] get a full diversity and a buffet table of different plants and food. And
they’re not covered in chemicals and pesticides and all that. So, teaching people that, teach-
ing people to take on seeing the role of pollinators is really important.
Finally, some growers in Toronto noted the ability of urban agriculture to remove
chemicals from polluted urban spaces. Before planting near a school, one non-profit
organization tested the soil for contamination and found that, despite earlier reme-
diation programs, lead was still present. Additional remediation action was taken in
order to make the soil safe for growing and for children to play. In this case, it was
the garden that acted as a catalyst for testing and cleaning the soil.
In Charlotte, several growers emphasized the environmental values of urban
agriculture as evident in its protection of green space, adaptation to climate change,
and countering the effects of industrial agriculture. One grower described this: “You
can plant things that promote healing instead of grass. Today’s food system doesn’t
produce food from the earth.” Thus, through his garden and markets, he teaches
many different ways to grow organic food (in pots, water, raised beds, etc.). Many
growers were driven by an environmental ethic of seeking to connect with and con-
serve the environment. They described urban agriculture as promoting environmen-
tal ethics through creating “organic interactions” among flowers, crops, and people
(particularly youth). One advocate in Charlotte simply stated: “It is life.”
For growers in all four cities, their practice also represented a strategy for chang-
ing food systems. One advocate in Medellín felt that making organic food available
(via gardens, farmers’ markets, or local markets) was a way to intervene on indi-
vidual eating habits. In Toronto, advocates felt that growing was a political act as it
had the potential to promote food sovereignty and food justice. One urban agricul-
ture advocate from a civil society organization further explained:
We should shift the focus from the big, bad food system to a more resident-controlled food
system, which is what we need to help fight climate change right now. I think also just hav-
ing food cultivation front and center in Toronto and cities is a way to reconnect people with
land and what they consume and put them in control of what they want to eat, what they
consume and to give people that power of saying no to certain food systems and saying yes
to others, to plant that seed of an idea in people.
In Rosario, growers, scientists, and advocates similarly described how the practice
can provide independence from industrial and capitalist food systems and create
demand for different relationships with food, the environment, and the economy,
while in Charlotte, growing projects were seen as a way to bring light to exploitative
histories and processes of agriculture and urban development. In this way, growers
and advocates in all four cities emphasized environmental outcomes, embedded in
socio-ecological relationships, as a key value added to urban food landscapes by
urban agriculture.
Human and Environmental Health
Several research participants across the four cities discussed how working to improve
the environment through growing gardens also improved human health. The benefits
emphasized included the physical impacts of consuming fresh, organic foods; par-
ticipating in a form of exercise; and mental benefits of reducing emotional stress and
connecting with natural systems. First, many reported that they felt healthier or that
others experienced better nutrition outcomes because their urban agriculture prac-
tice afforded more access to healthier foods. For example, in Toronto, one non-profit
community garden leader discussed the impacts for young people:
So, if you don’t have a taste for fresh garden foods, you’re not gonna be likely to want to
learn to grow them or appreciate them when you have that opportunity. So, that’s our kind
of core focus is helping to develop that taste at a young age because those flavors you would
not have kids eating them off a plate like kale, parsley, like chives, like these crazy things
that they will eat down to the nubs in your garden because they’re so flavorful.
In Rosario, many growers also discussed the perceived negative health impacts of
consuming foods produced with genetically modified organisms, chemical fertiliz-
ers, and pesticides (Hammelman et al. 2021). One peri-urban grower commented:
One [value] that is fundamental is health. We’re living in a contaminated environment and
our bodies are constantly being contaminated, it’s important to eat these foods to be able to
clean ourselves, purify ourselves.
In this way, many research participants noted that they and their communities were
healthier because they consumed the foods they grew without chemicals and/or
because they found a plant-based lifestyle improved their health outcomes.
At the same time, many gardeners discussed the medicinal values of urban grow-
ing. Many, especially in Rosario and Medellín, grew herbs specifically to address
ailments. One grower in Rosario noted the importance of having access to these
herbs: “Then that served for ulcers, injuries, and those things. We would heal each
other. We would get hurt with something but then we would get healed. We had the
remedy right there.” Another garden in Rosario was integrated into a hospital land-
scape and municipal urban agriculture programming included trainings on the
medicinal uses of certain plants (such as for teas to alleviate colds). In other cities,
urban agriculture programs similarly incorporated cooking and nutrition classes.
Some participants also argued that the physical activity of urban agriculture pro-
moted better health outcomes. One Toronto garden manager indicated that for many
growers in his program, Saturday workdays may be the only physical activity they
participate in each week. In this way, this garden was seen as contributing to the
social determinants of health.
In addition to physical health, many growers and advocates reported feeling
improvements in mental health from participating in urban agriculture projects. As
noted above, growers in Medellín said that spending time in their gardens reduced
despair and helped to cope with the sadness of being displaced from the country-
side. Another grower remarked: “When we feel sick, we are together, talking, work-
ing in our garden.” They felt that spending time in the garden was part of the remedy
for anxiety. Similarly, gardeners and advocates in Toronto described growing as
therapeutic, calming, and a means of stress release. In Rosario, one garden space
hosts patients from a psychiatric hospital where they work on motor skills and men-
tal health: “Whoever it is, a family, a group, the idea of what they tell us is that these
meetings mean a lot to them, being able to be with the earth, having this contact and
from there, it even has the possibility of resolving problems related to diet and
medicine.” While these valuations were not systematically studied or quantified (as
they might be in a health-focused study), the physical and mental health values were
stressed by a majority of participants throughout my research.
Food and Agriculture Education Outcomes
Many participants in my research also argued for the potential of urban agriculture
to contribute to environmental education. Several programs focused on sharing
knowledge about growing food, nutrition, culture, and community. This included
programs that work specifically with schools (whether training university students
in plant biology and social work or elementary and secondary school kids in hydro-
ponics and marketing), while others focused on public and multi-cultural education.
One garden manager in Toronto explained this value in detail:
Your question about what’s the value provided by urban agriculture, I think food production
obviously but food production is I think a small – I mean it’s a fraction of that piece. I think
food education is a huge piece. I think that food education becomes not just a piece by which
people learn but also which connects to other people who learn and that people form com-
munities based on the learning and bring people to the classroom. Teachers connect to stu-
dents. Students become teachers. Students connect to other students and they learn from each
other….Because as more people learn about different vegetables, if you know nothing about
Lal Saag, which is a really popular red spinach vegetable in the Bengali population, once you
learn how to grow it really easily, then it’s really easy to grow, and you can supplement some
of your diet. It’s iron, iron and fiber, iron and vitamins. So, now that you’ve learned about
that from a different community member or community group – because you know how to
grow it and eat it – that actually helps – you’re actually participating in your nutrition.
To further these goals, many garden programs in all four cities intentionally include
public education and outreach through workshops on growing and processing pro-
duce as well as opportunities to learn about the food system as a whole.
Many programs also focused on the ways in which urban agriculture can educate
young people to be stewards of the environment and their own health. They argued
for the need to reconnect young people with food systems, the environment, and
agricultural heritages. One researcher in Rosario discussed the importance of these
initiatives:
I think we have to place our bets on educating children. Because that’s an important socio-
logical challenge since working the earth is devalorized. Farming is not valued as much as
other jobs. And this can only be changed by starting in early childhood, teaching children
how important it is that someone is producing health foods, working the earth, how impor-
tant it is to society.
Many research participants worried that the modern urban experience provided a
disconnect between consumers (including children) and their food systems (e.g., the
impression that the life of food starts in grocery stores). Participating in urban agri-
culture projects was perceived as a way to counter that disconnect.
Similarly, in Charlotte many programs focused on the ability of urban agriculture
to introduce children to environmental systems through experiential learning. One
school garden leader noted:
But we’ve found that it’s really encouraged young people there to become engaged in learn-
ing because there’s a tangible result that’s not a test score. They’ve done something, and
they can see it. They produce things, and they can see it. And for people who already have
learning challenges, which many of them do, it’s really been transformational.
In this way, urban agriculture provides education opportunities related not only to
nutrition and food but also to STEM, marketing, and business.
The participants in my research demonstrated that many advocates and growers
were motivated by environmental goals. Most research participants also highlighted
that these multiple environmental values were intertwined. Creating agricultural
education opportunities can further environmental benefits and increase social capi-
tal. Providing opportunities to forge socio-ecological relationships can maintain
cultural traditions and memories while also improving mental health outcomes. The
majority of participants emphasized these integrated qualitative benefits as key
aspects of their urban agriculture practice and its value to the urban metabolism.
aluing Urban Agriculture’s Interrelated

V
Qualitative Contributions
The stories in this chapter demonstrate that from Argentina to Canada, and many
places in between, communities of gardeners and policymakers are implementing
urban agriculture projects that contribute socio-ecological values that go beyond
simply producing food. As one urban gardener and educator in Charlotte
explained:
It is a story of people and the land. If you ask most of these gardeners why they are here,
they will say to produce food; but pretty quickly they will also tell you that they see their
friends here. Community gardens must be doing more for a space than producing food if
they are, as many fear, a harbinger of gentrification.
Valuing Urban Agriculture’s Interrelated Qualitative Contributions 77
Many involved in urban agriculture perceive significant interconnected benefits

arising from contributions to urban environments, household budgets, social rela-
tionships, cultural and political connections, physical and mental health, and educa-
tion. Growers and urban agriculture advocates that I spoke with emphasized
multifunctionality in countering the negative effects of the industrial food system on
people, nature, and communities; (re)connecting people and land in ways that build
social capital and solidarities; and improving economic, health, and education
outcomes.
As Ana’s story that starts this chapter demonstrates, many of these values were
cited within individual projects. Many saw the potential to connect to many benefits
as a particular strength of urban agriculture. One urban agriculture advocate in
Toronto explained:
I think the way that urban agriculture connects to a lot of different issues gives it strength.
So the fact that you can come into it as an environmentalist, you can come into it as some-
one who grew up with a strong culture of food that you’re missing, as a way to integrate
people, or whatever.
For this advocate, the multifunctionality of urban agriculture is important for

appealing to diverse people and groups but also for filling multiple needs within a city.
Importantly, however, most individual urban agriculture projects cannot accom-
plish all of these goals. Instead they focus only on some aspects and must do so
intentionally in order to achieve those objectives. As such, the same urban agricul-
ture advocate in Toronto quoted above cautioned:
But people sometimes think that one urban agriculture program can do everything, and
that’s not the case. Urban agriculture, as a field, can accomplish all of these things, but we
really need to think very carefully about what they’re trying to accomplish and one can’t do
everything.
There also remain many challenges to pursuing the benefits described in this chap-
ter. While gardening has the potential to create savings for family budgets, it rarely
fulfills all needs for food consumption (in part because food insecurity is rarely
caused simply by a lack of access to food). Community gardens have the ability to
create community and form social relationships, but they also exist within in larger
social contexts, such that tensions can arise and uneven power relationships can be
reproduced. Reynolds and Cohen (2016) similarly emphasized the racial and class
dynamics that underlie urban inequities and can be reproduced in urban agriculture
if they are left unattended. While there are many potential values for urban ecosys-
tems, urban agriculture also utilizes potentially scarce resources (such as water) and
can increase environmental pests. Urban agriculture has the ability to improve land
use and neighborhood outcomes when it is practiced on vacant land in disinvested
neighborhoods, but by itself it does not frequently produce high tax revenue for cit-
ies and, instead, can spur further development that displaces residents and other
uses (Angotti 2015). Therefore, and as discussed in Chap. 2, Tornaghi (2014) and
others call attention to the power, exclusion, injustice, and inequity that are poten-
tially embedded in urban agriculture practice.
Finally, most of the values described in this chapter are hard to quantify in
ways that account for the complex interplay of contributions described.
Quantification was desired in some spaces in order to make the value of urban
agriculture more translatable to capitalist urban logics (particularly related to land
use provisions). But, the pursuit of quantifying contributions to ecosystem ser-
vices, economic development, or social capital risks simplifying the connections
between these values. The discussion about pursuing food justice via urban agri-
culture in Chap. 2 made clear that achieving such goals requires an understanding
of the complexity of food insecurity and marginalization produced through neo-
liberal, sustainable urbanism systems. Thus, the solutions must be equally com-
plex. Further, for some (such as Djokić et al. 2017), introducing such unquantifiable
values into urban landscapes is, in and of itself, an act of resistance as it forces the
production of new kinds of space and urban imaginaries. This chapter demon-
strates the many ways in which urban agriculture contributes to creating more
sustainable and equitable urban landscapes. But, more must be done to recognize
these less quantifiable, complex, and intangible values produced by urban
agriculture.
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Chapter 5
Stewarding the Environmental Commons
There have been challenges with the perceptions that community gardens are an exclusive
use of park space. However, we ensure that community gardens have a minimal impact on
other park uses because they are located in “dead open spaces” or underutilized areas of
parks (e.g., turf in peripheral park areas). Our implementation process …is intended to
build consensus amongst park users and to identify park areas/garden designs that do not
interfere with other park uses. This can help to make gardening experiences accessible to
more people, and to promote a greater sense of stewardship, rather than ownership, of park
space. (Garden project manager in Toronto)
This chapter examines the varied perceptions of urban agriculture projects as an

environmental commons, private property cultivated by rights-holders, or some-
thing in between. As the quote above indicates, by nature of their work, gardeners
may perceive a sense of ownership over garden space, while landowners and project
managers may instead view gardeners as stewarding an environmental commons.
Public space and commons are understood in this chapter as spaces or resources that
are managed to promote the public good, as opposed to being owned and used
exclusively for an individual or small group of individuals. Some research partici-
pants pointed to land ownership as a key determinant of the publicness of a project,
while others claimed rights to space as a result of their labors. In other words, for
some growers and advocates, if they were cultivating on public land or as a collec-
tive on land they did not own, then the space and resources were considered shared
or public. Yet for others, the act of growing on the land, and related investments,
implied ownership and enabled claims to those resources. This tension was evident
in each of the cities in my research.
The desire to cultivate an environmental commons as part of wider urban change
goals was palpable in projects in all four cities and was guided by multiple objec-
tives (whether they were seeking environmental, social, and/or economic improve-
ments). environmental commons As discussed in previous chapters, urban
agriculture can be viewed as part of a sustainability fix through which gardens are
included in environmental planning that makes the city or certain neighborhoods
more attractive for capital investment. From this perspective, relying on gardeners
to collectively maintain the commons creates value (either until a more lucrative

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_5
84 5 Stewarding the Environmental Commons
land use can be found or to meet sustainability goals). On the other hand, growers
view their gardens as contributions to the urban metabolism that counter marginal-
izing political economic processes and enable claims to a right to the city. Both of
these positions, and tensions between them, unsettle strict understandings of public
or private space in urban agriculture.
In synthesizing these debates, this chapter considers how commons are created
and disrupted through urban agriculture materiality, practice, representation, and
policy. First, I review literature on public space and commons, especially as applied
to urban agriculture, and examine the role of public policy approaches by which
governments seek to engage growers in maintaining environmental commons with-
out enabling rights claims. Next, I present claims to land made by participants in my
research based on material productions or ownership as well as everyday practices
of place-making. I highlight representations of commons or public space based on
collective or allotment management approaches and tensions that arise accordingly.
In the end, I argue that the complex assemblages of urban agriculture operate in and
through commons in ways that are constrained by neoliberal policy but also create
opportunity for solidarity movements.
heoretical Foundations in Public Space

T
and Environmental Commons
Urban space that is cultivated by the public as groups or individuals on land they do
not own can be perceived as part of public space and environmental commons.
There are, at times, both overlaps and divergences in literature regarding public
space and commons. This section summarizes academic literature that addresses the
definition, production, and use of public space and environmental commons with
particular attention paid to the ways that everyday representations, practice, and
policy form spaces and natures inhabited and maintained by the public.
Public space and environmental commons can be understood both as physical
spaces and resources to which publics have varying responsibility and access and as
a way of thinking and being in social worlds. Publicness is fluid, emergent, variable,
and networked, as it is invoked through collective habitus, imaginaries, struggle,
and discourses (Qian 2018; Staeheli et al. 2009; Vigneswaran et al. 2017).
Vigneswaran et al. (2017: 498) elaborate:
To understand public space is to understand the diverse and contested ways in which a
variety of actors seek to shape places and their possibilities, and how such struggles “make
spaces public” in a dual sense, by making them both the site of particular forms of being
together as well as making them the target of public action and politics.
Public places and spaces are where tensions arising from close interaction among
diverse human and non-human bodies are played out each day (Amin 2008; Bodnar
2015). Whether in a public park, sidewalk, outdoor shopping district, or community
garden, each day people practice democratic politics, (de)construct commons,
define publics, care for urban natures, and claim a right to the city in public com-
mons. Many link public space to public participation, but note that this participation
does not just occur (Aptekar 2015). Instead it must be constituted through everyday
material dynamics, policies, and social interactions (Amin 2008). This has the
promise to cultivate civic-mindedness as the encounter of strangers in open urban
spaces—cafes, parks, streets, etc.—can produce public awareness. But this is not
assured, as these spaces can also be territorialized by particular groups via design,
surveillance, and privatization and/or involve little interpersonal contact (Amin
2002; Aptekar 2015). Many community gardens can be considered public spaces of
interaction with the unfamiliar that unsettle categories and foster deliberation
(Aptekar 2015).
Commons have been identified as property that belongs to everybody (and hence
nobody), while, more recently, commoning focuses on collective community own-
ership and management of resources and/or land (Eizenberg 2012). Commoning
occurs through enclosing or maintaining resources or bringing spaces and resources
into common management (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). These spaces and resources
are produced through negotiations over rights to occupy and utilize them and require
collaboration, cooperation, and communication in order to meet social and political
needs. Through claiming public spaces and resources as commons, people partici-
pate in commoning (including through growing food) in order to claim a greater say
in how they are used and who benefits from the land (Klein 2001). Many political
ecologists have studied the utilization of common property as a counter to regimes
of enclosure and individualization and increasingly focus on the practice of com-
moning (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). Such approaches are concerned with divergent
material interests and power and recognize commoning as grounded in ever-
changing social relations (Turner 2017).
Within such readings, definitions of public space or commons have, at times,
centered around accessibility or the ways space and resources are not private prop-
erty. Yet, there are very few, if any, spaces in which all people have truly unrestricted
access (Atkinson 2003; Staeheli et al. 2009). The growing prevalence of privately
owned public spaces supports accessibility for some (such as consumers) at certain
times, while private owners remain as the rights-holders (Németh and Schmidt
2011). Blomley (2004, 2006) argues that common property and public space coun-
ter private property in that they are imagined as spaces of shared citizenship from
which there is a right to not be excluded from use (so long as you are part of that
group). Such commons can be formed through collective use, occupation, and
place-making over time. Yet, claims to private property rights are also invoked in
fights over space in which individual property rights often take precedence over
community ownership formed through self-determination and labor on the land
(Barraclough 2009). Such ability to invoke property rights is, however, embedded in
the social production of space, class, and race such that not everyone has an equal
ability to claim a right to space. Barraclough (2009), in examining two social move-
ments in Los Angeles (United States), found disparities between the ability of
wealthy homeowners to claim access to open space and that of low-income, racial-
ized growers from the South Central Farm, who critiqued hegemonic models of
property in favor of community ownership and self-determination. This example,

and my research, can also problematize how claims to “public” space are invoked
differently when those making the claims already have (or don’t have) a dispropor-
tionate claim to “private” resources and power. The contestation of the full publici-
zation of space is also grounded in different imaginaries of public space
(Mitchell 2017).
While public space and commons have often been considered by divergent litera-
tures, the emphasis in both on the collective approaches to producing socio-natures
is instructive for my research. The co-constitution of socio-natural relationships and
materialities that occurs in public space and environmental commons can be help-
fully understood through Henri Lefebvre’s theories of urban space (1991, 1996,
2003) in its intersection with complex assemblage thinking (see Chap. 1 for more
discussion of assemblages). Lefebvre calls attention to the interlocking of material
space, representations of space, and lived space such that public space is produced
through physical environments, knowledge, and embodied interactions (Eizenberg
2012). For example, Eizenberg (2012) demonstrates how gardens protect material
space; build collective, practical knowledge that enables reproducing sustainable
discursive frames; and celebrate various cultures through lived space. In this way,
public space and environmental commons are produced by complex assemblages of
material natures, bodies, representation, and policy operating through everyday
forms, uses, and rhythms (Qian 2018). Consistent with my research, some seek to
problematize the public-private dichotomy and instead recognize a continuum and
overlapping or layered publics. Importantly, public and private spaces intermingle
in ways that make fluid the division between each (Blomley 2006). The interface
between public and private spaces can be viewed as a socio-spatial assemblage that
unsettles categories through the performance of identities, forming and contesting
boundaries, and exposure to or retreat from the public gaze (Dovey and Wood 2015).
Complex relationships between property and people can blur these public-private
boundaries.
At times, publicly accessible space is created through private means and advanc-
ing private interest (such as the commercialization of pedestrian precincts), while,
at others, public space is enclosed in order to serve public goods (such as women’s
only beaches). Such blurring of private and public produces different results and can
demonstrate urban priorities (Németh and Schmidt 2011; Schmelzkopf 2002;
Staeheli et al. 2009). Thörn (2011), in examining the policing of homelessness in
Sweden, elaborates: “Here, clearly, safety, security, and the effort to provide a calm
and untroubled public environment for latté sippers trumped the idea of creating
public dialogue concerning access to urban space by fringe groups” (pg. 999).
Rights to property—whether land or resources—can also operate in overlapping
and intersecting ways (Blomley 2004). Some political ecologists call attention to
the relational, and hence political, characteristics of property claims. They are
embedded in livelihoods, derive from social legacies of tenure and value, and are
continuously contested (Turner 2017). Eizenberg (2012) argues that re-envisioning
commons, in part through gardens, beyond the public-private dichotomy can enable
alternative frameworks for social relations and practices.
Bodies form publics (and micropublics) through lived space, everyday social
contacts, and encounters (Amin 2002). Such encounters can form democratic pub-
lics and collectivities, but they can also be unpleasant and frightening, resulting in
the construction of borders. Bodnar (2015: 2095) explains:
Uncertainty, while it can be seen as threatening or disorienting also means possibility; one
can transgress the thin sociability of public space, engage with others, care for them, as
vendors keep track of their often marginalized regulars at the market place, and become part
of a concerted political action.
As such, social practices and relations are part of producing environmental com-
mons. Further, the presence of certain bodies in space can raise questions about the
intended users and force confrontation with societal exclusions (Mitchell 2017). For
example, Egerer and Fairbairn (2018) found that tensions about resource use and
access to environmental commons in gardens in northern California (United States)
were grounded in the social reproduction of the city’s racial dimensions of urban-
ization. Public space is constructed in ways that educate citizens, promote public
participation and social interactions, and banish behavior perceived as uncivilized,
inappropriate, or antisocial. At the same time, the materialities of space and com-
mons are codified and circulated through social struggle and varied urban imaginar-
ies (Mitchell 2017). The labors and agencies (the oeuvre) of bodies are critical for
producing or constraining public commons and the material dimensions of social
life (Qian 2018).
Lefebvre’s (1991) representational space focuses on knowledge about space and
its production (Eizenberg 2012). Representations of common spaces and resources
as “public,” under the purview of local government stewardship, or as part of public-
private partnerships are important for the material, everyday realities of those spaces
and resources. Approaches to managing public space and written (and unwritten)
rules reflect public or private norms. For instance, growers identified in the literature
and in my research questioned the meanings associated with producing gardens as
collectively managed or individual allotments and the related claims that emerge for
having a say in decision-making about the gardens, neighborhoods, and cities (as
described further below). Staeheli et al. (2009) also point out that regimes of public-
ity and property can reinforce or break down social norms of inclusion and exclu-
sion such that participating in the public realm is not always straightforward for
all groups.
In terms of policy and planning, city stakeholders have sought to manage public
spaces in order to foster the sociality and civic engagement that results from encoun-
ters among strangers (Amin 2008). For city leaders, positive public space symbol-
izes urban well-being and achievement and can be sites for building civic culture.
The ordering of public space and/or commons management is a tactic of territorial-
ization, social regulation, and delegation (Amin 2008). City decision-makers claim
territories for particular uses when managing them as public spaces (including a
reliance on surveillance and control to code acceptable uses), while the interaction
of bodies can order or disrupt these objectives. Entanglements of informal practices
and institutions, as well as political (dis)commoning tendencies, co-produce urban
commons (Pikner et al. 2020). Terzi and Tonnelat (2017) call for more analysis of
processes of publicization in order to attend to the democratic social processes
required to maintain the accessibility of urban space. Further, commons exist within
broader systems of power such that capitalist urban development, gentrification, and
other socio-spatial processes structure the claiming and enclosure of resources and
are reproduced through within-commons relations (Egerer and Fairbairn 2018).
Lefebvre points out that capitalism encroaches on urban space by seeking to turn
public assets private (Bastia 2018). As such, fights for spatial justice can be embed-
ded in resisting such appropriations and rebuilding urban commons (Follmann and
Viehoff 2015). In particular, movements for creating commons as spaces of libera-
tion, even when they exist within other sites of enclosure, have been identified as a
key strategy for making value visible where others have diminished it (Woods 2009;
Ramírez 2019). In my research and the literature, there remains, then, a tension
regarding the ability to claim power in social spaces and how that is collectively or
individually manifested.
iterature on Public Space and Environmental Commons

L
in Urban Agriculture
Several scholars of urban agriculture have engaged with ideas of public space and
commons. This literature argues that urban agriculture can support or constrain
commoning through producing collective socio-ecological relationships and a sense
of place, resisting neoliberal property regimes and/or participating in boundary-
making, and pursuing divergent urban imaginaries. Community garden literature
has understood space as contested, controlled, and neoliberalizing (Eizenberg
2012). For others, urban agriculture is an example of urban commoning (Chatterton
2010; Follmann and Viehoff 2015). The collective inputs of time, soil, sun, and
labor demonstrate the commons-in-the-making characteristics of gardens (Ginn and
Ascensão 2018). It is also perceived as a collective claiming of rights to urban land,
resources, and priorities (such as building an ecological city).
The improvisational claiming and management of resources in urban gardens are
part of co-constituting collective socio-ecological subjectivities in an era of indi-
vidualism and anthropocentrism (Ginn and Ascensão 2018). The small life territo-
ries formed through gardening can foster a sense of place, social connections, new
imaginaries, and a sense of home through which people collectively fight for self-
determined productions of space (Djokić et al. 2017). As an example of public
space, urban agriculture projects have been identified as places in which strangers
can interact and discursively negotiate (Amin 2002). These processes of negotiating
and enacting shared resources are malleable as they bring together activism, care,
and institutional urbanisms (Pikner et al. 2020).
Growers invest meaning into space in ways that contribute to an ecological sense
of place (Pikner et al. 2020). Nonetheless, especially in allotment gardens, growers
often view their garden as private property for which they have autonomy to grow
as they wish as long as it does not impact others. Some growers argue that they earn
exclusive right to the space as a result of labor or financial investments. These ques-
tions of impact are not always straightforward, however, as tensions can arise
regarding the perceived cleanliness and aesthetic appeal of different gardening
methods. In this way, the gardens are perceived as a “managed commons” instead
of a common resource (Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Outsiders may similarly place
ownership/management responsibilities on gardeners when they view inadequacies
in garden maintenance as individual failings.
Framings of urban agriculture as a commons also focus on resistance to neolib-
eral property regimes (Blomley 2005; Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Through the act
of cultivating collectively, urban gardeners make claims of collective ownership,
enact shared property, and participate in place-making (Blomley 2004; Pikner et al.
2020). Gardens can be sites of resistance where people claim a right to public space
and participate in decision-making. Schmelzkopf (2002), in examining a very pub-
lic fight over gardens in New York City (United States), noted that the visibility of
public garden spaces is important for cementing their place in the urban landscape.
In New York City, the gardens were viewed as geographic hubs for congregating
and forming allegiances around social concerns. Importantly, resistance is not
always strictly understood as alternative since claims to land may be individualized
and align with neoliberal ideas. Yet, for growers in my research (and in the litera-
ture, such as Ramírez 2019), these individualized claims still represented resistance
because they were being made by people not traditionally afforded property rights
(such as migrant communities).
Land ownership matters in determining the public or private nature of gardening
commons. The lack of land tenure can restrict a sense of ownership, with many
growers in the literature and my research noting the salient and constant concern
about the future of spaces owned by outside actors (such as the city) (Aptekar 2015).
In studying gardens in Lisbon as subaltern commons-in-the-making, Ginn and
Ascensão (2018) found that the government evicted marginalized groups growing
on interstitial spaces under the guise of ensuring access of all to that space. At the
same time, the government implemented its own gardening projects in order to dis-
cipline methods of, and users engaged in, commons management. The authors
reflected: “One form of commons (implemented following a model; run according
to the rules of the bureaucracy) ascends over another form of commons (historically
embedded; bottom-up)” (Ginn and Ascensão 2018: 17). Finally, some landowners
are reluctant to lease space to gardeners or to allow gardeners to use the space as
they see fit (see Chap. 3 for more details on this occurrence in my research). Rosan
and Pearsall (2017) found that a landowner in Philadelphia (United States) was
unwilling to provide land to a gardener for fear of future questions regarding owner-
ship. The landowner was reported as stating: “You let these people cultivate the
ground and after a while they will get to thinking they have a natural right there”
(pg. 31).
The more private nature of gardens can also be read in their boundary-making.
As physical borders (such as fences) and social norms are constructed, they signal
to others that not all people and uses have unfettered access. At the same time,
enclosing resources such as gardens can be interpreted as necessary to sustaining
those commons. For example, Colding and Barthel (2013) argue that allotment gar-
dens are key for forming links between people and ecosystems because within their
longer-term leases, association rules, and collective monitoring, gardeners are better
able to pass on socio-ecological memory. Thus, gardeners must navigate ways to
protect gardens from misuse while also fostering public participation in commoning.
Importantly, garden spaces are not always open, inclusive, and homogenous.
Individual growers within the same agricultural space may imagine their space vari-
ously as private property, commons green space, simply a farm, and/or a community
space. These imaginaries drive different normative frameworks, boundaries, delib-
erations, and physical manifestations (Aptekar 2015). Further, within-garden rela-
tionships can reproduce urban logics and micro-politics (such as racial othering and
enclosure) in ways that generate tensions (Ernwein 2014). For example, Egerer and
Fairbairn (2018) found that tensions regarding water use and land management and
values (including whether to erect fences around individual plots or to allow neigh-
bors to spend time in the garden) reflected broader narratives of urban property
rights. They argue that “the beneficiaries of gardens are not random, but are filtered
through sociopolitical and racial sieves that regulate access to garden communities
and environmental commons” (pg. 68). Thus, it is important to understand how “the
public” is defined and included in garden projects and to collectively consider gar-
dener responsibilities toward such a public (Follmann and Viehoff 2015).
Many of these notions of public or private space and common resources arose
and/or were points of tension in my research. While the vast majority of growers did
not own the land they cultivated, the growing spaces surveyed across the four cities
varied widely in their collective nature. In Medellín, some gardens were adamantly
managed as allotments, while others were required to form collectives in order to
use the land. In Rosario, most municipal garden programs are allotments or indi-
vidual farmers that own or lease their land, while several gardens organized by com-
munity organizations are collectively managed. In both Toronto and Charlotte,
allotment gardens can be found in municipal Parks and Recreation lands and in
some projects managed by organizations and churches. There are also many gardens
in both cities that are managed collectively with shared responsibility, decision-
making, and produce. As discussed in the remaining sections of this chapter, in all
of these cases, questions of publicness and commoning arose.
Productions of Lived Space in Urban Agriculture
My research on urban agriculture in Rosario, Toronto, Medellín, and Charlotte dem-

onstrated the slipperiness of public-private framings of space and resources. As
found by others, urban gardens are variously conceived as private space cultivated
by rights-holders, public maintenance of environmental commons, or something in
between. This section builds on political ecology and urban studies theories of
Productions of Lived Space in Urban Agriculture 91
public space and commons to consider how policy, lived materialities and practice,
and representations of space unsettle and re-envision the commons. In doing so, it
looks to Eizenberg’s (2012) use of Lefebvre’s moments of material, lived, and rep-
resentational space to understand community gardens in New York City. She argues
that the intersection of efforts to protect and control material space with mecha-
nisms of cooperation and communication produces alternative knowledge and expe-
riences of space in ways that change its meaning and value. In my research, this was
evident in the different framings of urban agriculture as stewarding of the environ-
mental commons or as a site of labor and place-making through which new rights
are formed.
Policy Approaches to Stewarding the Commons
As described in the literature, public space and commons are produced through
public policy and official perceptions of space. Government approaches to com-
mons shape who can use them and for what purpose. Governments are also often the
landowners for urban agriculture projects. As such, it is critical to consider their
approaches to the public or private nature of urban agriculture commons and how
that impacts the everyday lived experience of growing in cities. In many examples
in my research, a tension arose in the desire to engage residents in managing envi-
ronmental commons on public lands without supporting growers’ claims to those
resources. As described above, landowners can have a significant role in determin-
ing if gardens are spaces through which growers manage public environmental
resources and space or whether the investments made by gardeners create rights to
make decisions about how spaces and resources are used and by whom.
In government-supported programs in all four cities, urban agriculture was seen
as a means for managing public commons (such as park space and environmental
resources) as well as for building community. This aligns with neoliberal urbanism
regimes that devolve responsibility for social concerns to individuals and civil soci-
ety (as discussed in Chap. 2). In Medellín, the local government approached envi-
ronmental projects—such as the Greenbelt and urban gardens—as a means of
achieving urban sustainability and development goals. The city sought to grow its
world reputation through investments in environmental projects and supported
urban agriculture as a means to further those goals (Hammelman and Saenz-
Montoya 2020). Policy priorities had important implications for garden operations.
The government-supported projects in a new Greenbelt were to be carried out as
collectives managed by non-profit organizations. Such structures foster a steward-
ing of the environment while foreclosing potential rights claims derived from work-
ing the land. These projects used collectives and non-profit management to produce
organic goods for sale at farmers’ markets in wealthy neighborhoods. They were
also publicized with signage extolling the government’s investments, alongside
messages throughout the Greenbelt project proclaiming the values of stewarding the
environment (see Fig. 5.1). The growers in Greenbelt gardens were residents of
Fig. 5.1 Signage describing an urban garden built as part of the Greenbelt project in Medellín.
The sign includes logos for non-profit organizations and the municipal government. It reads: Here
an agroecological community garden will grow. Support the work of your community. Avoid
throwing garbage and rubbish. (Photo by Author July 2017)
informal settlements, most of whom were displaced from the Colombian country-
side. Since many of those involved had squatted on land in self-constructed neigh-
borhoods, their ability to formally claim a right to land and a place in the city was
limited. The Greenbelt project and associated gardens further precluded those rights
claims by positioning growers as only stewards of common environmental resources.
Other urban agriculture projects in Medellín were seen as a strategy for prevent-
ing the growth of informal settlements, since growers were positioned on the edge
of neighborhoods and were prohibited from constructing any structures on the land.
These guidelines were intended to prevent the further sprawl of informal settle-
ments since the only approved land use was urban agriculture and, eventually,
fences were constructed around them. Thus, from a policy perspective, these urban
agriculture projects were viewed as public approaches to managing the commons.
However, growers and residents increasingly saw encroachments on the use of pub-
lic space more broadly which they feared would translate into limits to their access
to public space (for instance, restrictions on public music or theater or limiting the
size of bags that can be carried on public transport). This produced tensions that
called into question who and what uses have access to public space.
In Rosario, municipal urban agriculture programs sought to formalize the prac-

tice as an accepted land use in order to protect projects that originated through
informal squatting on land. During the 2001 economic crisis, many people occupied
unused lands to grow food. Once the economy began to recover, more land use ten-
sions arose in these spaces. In response, the municipal government identified avail-
able lands that would not compete for other land uses—such as housing—and
established garden parks in those locations accordingly. The garden parks are orga-
nized as allotments. The growers that were incorporated into the garden parks
largely represented low-income residents and migrants that are marginalized by
poverty and exclusions from the formal labor market. This land use policy approach
supported multiple goals. First, it provided more stable land tenure for growers to
maintain environmental commons. One advocate explained:
We have to keep working toward this and the land, the water, the air, as our Indigenous
populations say, are not things that are given, they are common goods. And the land has to
be available to be worked.
It also ensured that urban agriculture practice would not compete with potential
higher-value land uses. The municipal government and researchers surveyed neigh-
borhoods to determine locations for garden parks that would not interfere with other
land uses. Developing urban agriculture in these spaces also prevented residents
from establishing their homes in unstable areas—such as floodplains or along train
tracks. Thus, the practice of urban agriculture was instrumental for stewarding the
land against unauthorized use. While the growers had autonomy in what they grew
and whether they chose to sell or consume their products, they were prevented from
making formal claims to that land.
In Toronto and Charlotte, where many urban agriculture projects are situated in
municipal Parks and Recreation land, policy approaches also sought to enable grow-
ers to maintain environmental commons without making claims to the space. The
growers in my research from Toronto and Charlotte represent diverse groups. In
Toronto, many growers, especially those with plots in Parks and Recreation gar-
dens, are middle-class residents participating in gardening for leisure. However, this
research also included many migrant and/or low-income growers connected to civil
society organizations in order to supplement food budgets. In Charlotte, the major-
ity of growers represented middle-class groups seeking to connect to the land, build
community, contest the food system, or participate in a hobby. While these different
backgrounds may present different desires for claiming rights to public space or
environmental commons, the emphasis on stewardship remained evident in
both cities.
For example, in Toronto, one advocate situated within the municipal government
described a process of establishing community gardens in park space. This process
included consultation with various stakeholders in order to build consensus and
identify areas and designs for community gardens that would not interfere with
other park uses. For this advocate, such an approach was important for promoting
“a greater sense of stewardship, rather than ownership, of park space.” They also
addressed concerns about the efficacy of gardeners in managing commons (e.g.,
complaints about individual plot appearance) through establishing procedures and

guidelines that make clear maintenance standards and community stewardship
models. A garden advocate further explained:
Allotment gardens are faced with the issue of demand exceeding supply, and yet some plots
allocated to individuals still go un-used and un-tended. Some sites have been subject to
complaints about plot appearance, and declining state of good repair of allotment garden
infrastructure. In 2012, development of procedures and guidelines began to address some of
these issues, such as the development of maintenance standards and a community steward-
ship model to enhance community involvement in maintenance and monitoring.
In these examples, the public-private nature of gardens becomes muddled when

public policy approaches seek growers who will merely steward the commons,
while, through the practice, materiality, and representation of garden projects, grow-
ers often begin to claim rights to space and resources.
Producing Contested Publics Through Lived Space
The practice and materiality of urban growing can facilitate claims to public space
and commons. Invoking Lefebvre, Eizenberg (2012) argues that gardens are lived
space through which emotional and cultural values and meanings, place attachment
and identities, and a sense of ownership and control are developed. This lived space
and its extension to claiming a right to the city were evident in Toronto, Medellín,
and Rosario.1
One of the most common methods of growing in Toronto is in allotment gardens
managed by the municipal government (through Parks and Recreation, Toronto
Community Housing, and other large landowners). Historically, gardeners have
been able to maintain their plots for many years, thus making significant invest-
ments into the ecological and social health of common land and resources. Garden
managers discussed the contributions growers make in building up soil quality and
improving urban environments as well as sharing ecological knowledge and cul-
tures. One large landholder in the city began to recognize the ability of agricultural
practice to conserve lands and so began offering longer-term leases to growers (for
a small fee). Other municipal landowners began to lament the long tenure of allot-
ment gardeners, and some research participants noted that Parks and Recreation was
considering limiting tenure to 2 years. One advocate explained this potential:
The thing though is right now the city’s community garden program, I don’t know if they’re
gonna go ahead with this because they got a lot of pushback from garden organizers, but
they were moving towards the model of a new – if you have a plot in a community garden
1
This section focuses on these three cities because desires to claim ownership were not frequently
discussed by research participants in Charlotte. This is likely because the more suburban landscape
in Charlotte means that those who wish to have their own land to grow are more likely to be able
to do so in their backyard. Further, most of the garden projects in Charlotte rely on more communal
decision-making than in the other three cities.
you can only have it for two years, with a rotation system, because the demand is very high.
And so they thought that this would be a way to address that scarcity, and to get people to
stop thinking about “I have a plot of land,” and to think of it almost as more of a recreational
program. As well as using a soccer field for an hour once a week as opposed to “This is my
patch of land,” which was shot down entirely by most of the community garden organizers
as being totally unfair and really bad for the community process.
Another garden manager and advocate critiqued this recent push by municipal
authorities to limit the tenure of growers in allotment gardens.
If these people love this outdoor space and they stay there 20 years, then great. Why try to
move them, they are doing something, they are performing a city service. Even just, invest-
ing in your soil, building up the humus layer, how much more water you are retaining. I feel
like in Europe it is much more common to rent like your home, they have a different
relationship there when you get your allotment and you are going to stay. It’s a North
American private property ideology that we are so married to.
For this advocate, the contributions made by the practice of urban agriculture should
entitle growers to certain rights for maintaining their investments. Another advocate
similarly explained the material importance of allowing people to maintain their
individual plots:
I’ve been told that – at least on the part of parks – so they’re moving in the direction of
wanting to invest more into community instead of individual plots. Yeah, and they say that
because they say, “Oh, people will keep these plots for years and they don’t give them up.”
Well, they’re feeding their families. Do you expect them to give that up?
Thus, the material production of the garden is an important aspect of gardens’ lived
space and contributes to demands to maintain access. In other gardens, particularly
those associated with non-profit organizations (that were organized both as collec-
tives and allotments), this lived experience changed the growing spaces by granting
marginalized individuals (such as recent immigrants) access to spaces where they
aren’t normally invited, introducing agriculture as an appropriate land use for con-
servation purposes, and bolstering the questioning of private property ideologies.
For these growers, the lived space of the garden was forged through the practice of
growing and sharing produce and knowledge in ways that muddied the perceived
publicness of the land and resources.
In Medellín, where growers cultivated land in informal settlements (and thus
were often squatting on land while in their homes), they also viewed growing as a
way to claim rights to space in their neighborhood. One grower described how the
practice of building gardens supports claiming rights to the space and resources:
For example, there are certain territories where people want to send you away, for example,
[in another informal settlement neighborhood]; they fought for that territory. They arrived,
settled and claimed that territory as theirs and made some gardens so they could continue to
produce food. The gardens were finished or the fact that you get there and make a garden,
that’s a way to claim a territory as yours.
For many of these growers, who are identified with groups that are often marginal-
ized in public rhetoric as not contributing to the city, they also found that participat-
ing in urban agriculture demonstrates their contributions. They reported that tourists
began passing through neighborhoods on their way to eco-parks and admired the
gardens. Their gardening was important for demonstrating their place in the city to
others. But such claiming of a right to the city is not fully settled through growing.
Many growers noted that they were squatting on land or that they had leased it from
a foundation or the municipality. Thus, they were constantly fearful that the land
(and thus the perceived rights that come with it, not to mention the food resources)
would be taken from them.
Finally, in Rosario, the material and embodied experience of growing food was
important for maintaining undeveloped land and gaining legitimacy for urban agri-
culture as a land use. For some municipal growers, their ability to take care of and
preserve unoccupied lands through growing is a way of demonstrating that it is pos-
sible and valuable to maintain urban commons. One agronomist described this per-
spective: “We talk about this like this, we were winning over territory with people.
Face to face. And they told this strongly. Because we were doing something impos-
sible with urban agriculture.” For them, the ability of migrants from the interior of
Argentina to maintain commons and culture through growing food from their home
regions, despite their marginalization and precarious living experience in Rosario,
was a powerful outcome of urban agriculture practice.
In all of these cities, the practices (labor and occupying space) and materialities
(soil investments, maintaining heritage crops, producing food for families) of urban
agriculture were a critical component in claiming a right to public space and
resources. This experience of lived space fomented an understanding of gardens as
more private spaces, conflicting with policymaker goals of stewarding the environ-
mental commons. As found in the literature discussed above, urban agriculture
practice can produce collective socio-ecological relationships with other growers
and places that disrupt notions of public or private space.
Shifting Representations of Growing as a Collective
In addition to the lived and perceived space produced through practice and policy,
the representation of gardens as private or public space, or somewhere in between,
plays an important role in the value and meaning ascribed to urban agriculture.
Gardens can be perceived as a site for exchanging feelings, knowledge, values,
seeds, and plants in ways that counter neoliberal rationales (Eizenberg 2012). They
can be a place for organizing to claim a (collective or individual) place in the city.
Socio-spatial collectives can be formed through dialogue and action among strang-
ers (Ernwein 2014). Through experiences of informal learning and meaning-
making, new representations of gardens as part of neighborhoods, communities, and
the city are forged. “The production of the commons is a collective action that chal-
lenges the hegemonic social order and follows instead an alternative logic of jus-
tice” (Eizenberg 2012: 779).
Yet, within-garden enclosures (such as fences around individual plots) can also
disrupt representations of gardens as non-commodified commons and public space
(Egerer and Fairbairn 2018). Discursive representations of gardens alongside physi-

cal barriers can bring to light tensions over whether a space is public, for whom and
what. In my research, this was particularly evident in determinations of manage-
ment structure—whether a garden should be managed collectively and produce
shared among growers, as an allotment in which growers make decisions over their
own plots, or a combination of the two. In many cases, the management structure
evolved over time. It was also associated with success or failure in achieving goals
of enhancing access, building community, addressing food insecurity, and maintain-
ing public goods. The discussions surrounding these decisions demonstrate an
uneasiness with determining a strictly public or private nature of urban agriculture.
In Medellín, two different garden management approaches arose over the years,
particularly as investments in urban agriculture evolved. One early garden managed
by internally displaced persons in an informal neighborhood in the eastern hills of
the city began with 40 families that each had a plot of 60 × 30 m. The land was
leased from the mayor’s office, and growers had authority to decide what to plant,
how, and when. Most grew food for personal consumption and exchanged any
excess with neighbors or a nearby food bank. The main rule was that growers could
not build any structures in the garden, but otherwise they operated with great
autonomy.
In more recent years, the local government invested more significantly in other
informal neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city through its Greenbelt Project
(see Hammelman and Saenz-Montoya 2020 for more information). This project was
organized and managed through a non-profit organization with the goal of produc-
ing organic goods for local markets. The management structure required growers to
form collectives in order to participate in the program. Each garden was required to
have at least three or four growers or families that were self-organized as a collec-
tive, in which joint decisions are made regarding which areas of the garden need
more work, when and how to invest contributions, and the overall development of
the garden. This requirement of collective management produced tensions with the
more autonomous gardeners above who did not want to organize as a collective.
One grower described their objections to collective management approaches:
So each of them has space, it is not like other spaces that have a communal garden and all
the people work on that… we weren’t part of this [Greenbelt] project because we were
individual gardeners. We would be in a debate because of this, when we began as gardeners
in front of the mayor’s office, we started as individual gardeners, 40 people but working
individually, each person works in his or her plot, gets a product, we support each other but
that’s all. So if we want to get into [the Greenbelt project], we need to have a group in one
garden, at least four gardeners and that’s precisely what we refuse to do. We don’t want to
lose our individuality as gardeners, and since we don’t depend on that, we decided to
become self-consumers and also self-sustained, so the idea is, if you are coming to support
us then that means that’s all. We are 40 gardeners, but if someone is getting a little bit of
something, that person is going to get it in an individual way. It doesn’t have to do with
anything else, that’s a huge battle with other entities because they want us to unify, generate
a group and that is precisely what we refuse to do.
These growers felt that while they are part of a community of gardeners, having the
autonomy of individual garden plots (and an associated ability to make decisions
and claims) was critical. Over the years, they were also successful in maintaining
garden participation, while the collective gardens struggled to keep large numbers
of participants. One collective garden manager noted that they began with 25 people
but had dwindled to only 5 active participants at the time of my research.
In Toronto, urban agriculture advocates and garden managers, especially those
serving low-income and migrant communities, also discussed decision-making
regarding management structure. Several gardens evolved into offering both com-
munal sections and individual plots. This developed in part because of a perceived
reluctance of growers to participate in communal growing. In those cases, the com-
munal parts of the garden could offer a starting place to learn how to grow or to
engage in a more limited way for those with fewer resources or time. It was also a
way to grant access for those that simply want to be able to spend time in the space,
thus adding to the public nature of the garden. These gardens were more likely to
attract growers of diverse ages and expertise. Individual plots were more likely to be
requested and maintained by long-term growers who knew how to cultivate large
yields from the space and had more time to devote. These growers represent diverse
groups, some were retired migrants growing for extended families, and they repre-
sented both lower- and middle-class residents and were spread throughout the city.
For many of these growers, the gardens represented more individual space through
which they held autonomy and a claim on the resources produced.
Some noted, however, that a focus on individual plots can limit participation to
only those who can fully commit to their gardens (and pay fees for the plot) and
contributes to long waiting lists. As described above, it was reported that Parks and
Recreation was considering moving away from supporting individual allotments in
order to limit the amount of time a person can have a plot and to shift their support
to new communal gardens. One urban agriculture advocate explained how this man-
agement approach might impact participation:
They’re moving away from the sense of “ownership” of a plot because that supposedly
conflicts with the public nature of parks. It’s weird for me, because years ago I advocated
for communal gardens with people who insisted that the only way to engage gardeners
(particularly immigrant and racialized gardeners) was to give them their own plots. For me,
communal gardens were great for engaging people who were marginalized in a variety of
ways, but they take a phenomenal amount of organizing resources and are not a sustainable
model for volunteers. So Parks recognizes the challenge of finding community groups with
enough organizing capacity to run a garden, yet that’s the model they want to impose?
Thus tensions arose regarding which management structures can best invite more
people into public space and maintain common resources without giving them too
much sense of ownership over public land or resources.
In Rosario, most of the contemporary municipal gardens were managed as allot-
ments within a communal space. One advocate explained that the focus on allot-
ments evolved over time. Initially they began with collective gardens, but after
3 years, gardeners asked for individual plots. One urban agriculture advocate
reflected on that evolution:
For us it felt like a failure at first but then we realized that it was actually a very practical
thing because each person is able to work the way that they want to at the time that they are
Unsettling Public or Private Natures 99
able to. That’s because there are a lot of people here who have temporary work so some-
times they couldn’t [work] in the morning or in the afternoon, so each person has their own
plot…There still is community work, but each person is responsible for their own space.
Growers can then choose whether or not to participate in municipal markets to sell
their goods or to keep them for self-consumption. This urban agriculture advocate
finds that the gardens are both collective and individual. While each person or fam-
ily has their own plot for which they hold responsibility, there are still decision-
making, socialization, and work that are completed collectively. This experience of
collectivity in gardens with individual plots was also reported in the other cities. In
this way, the garden moves between public and private spheres throughout gardener
experiences. Notably, many of the gardens I visited in Rosario that were organized
by non-government organizations were collectives, and growers were not relying on
the gardens as a source of income. They espoused proudly collective ideals in which
work and produce were shared and the space was considered accessible to the
wider public.
Finally, several growers in Charlotte similarly presented different ideas as to
whether gardens should be managed collectively or as individual plots. Several
expressed critiques of collectively managed gardens. They noted that the motivation
may be to organize a cooperative project, but in reality, it often ends up being a
couple of people with the desire and means that run the garden while also trying to
find volunteers. One advocate noted that this arises from the personal involvement
required in growing. “It’s like you’re becoming part of an ecosystem, and that’s hard
to do in the way that we generally approach volunteerism.” Other managers of col-
lective gardens heard concerns from growers about not having their own space and
not receiving enough produce. Yet, for those who choose cooperative approaches,
the focus was on more than just the produce. It was also about creating community
and maintaining a commons-based approach to projects (as also found by Follmann
and Viehoff 2015).
These different approaches to garden management, and tensions that arise
therein, demonstrate that the private or public nature of gardens is slippery. If all
gardeners have individual allotments by which they plant and grow their own food
without interacting with others, is that truly a public space? And if not, does such
work then affirm the rights of those gardeners to the fruits of their labor and a place
in their community? In answering these questions, the representation of the gardens
as collective or individual is important for demonstrating their value to urbanism
goals. For many in positions of power, the ability of gardens to provide food for an
individual or to provide a site of socialization is not a sufficient return on their
investment. Instead, they perceive more value in representing the gardens as collec-
tives that contribute to stewarding the environmental commons, produce goods for
the market, and raise the sustainability profile of the city.
Unsettling Public or Private Natures
Examining the public and private nature of urban agriculture spaces and resources
across the four research sites revealed important dynamics of relational, material,
lived, and representational space that is mediated by neoliberal urbanist policy ide-
ologies. Urban agriculture is a complex assemblage formed through material (seeds,
water, plants, soil) and practice (labor, investments, socializing); the lived experi-
ence of being in and creating places imbued with cultural value and meaning; and
representations of collective practice, claims to land and resources, and contribu-
tions to urbanism goals. For example, gardeners in all four cities argued that they
developed rights to grow as desired and to environmental resources as a result of
their physical investments into urban lands. Additionally, through urban agriculture
practice, growers contributed cultural and embodied knowledge to particular places
and cities at large. For some, these contributions to city materialities and meanings
represented their civic contributions through which they could claim further rights
to participate in decision-making about territory and the city. As found in other cit-
ies, threats to these gardens were then perceived as threats to material needs for
survival and cultural values. In this way, urban gardens may be experienced more as
private spaces.
However, the degree to which such material, practice, lived experience, and rep-
resentations contributed to public or private natures varied across the research sites
and were dependent on relationships, wider context, and policy approaches. For
example, in all four cities, municipal land owners enforced rules regarding keeping
garden spaces clean and not erecting structures. In some cases, especially in
Medellín and Toronto, these landowners were careful to represent gardeners as
stewards of environmental resources and spaces. In doing so, they sought to make
clear that the gardens are indeed spaces for pursuing public, not solely private,
goals. However, the growers themselves in Medellín, Rosario, and Toronto argued
that through investing in the soil and their communities, they were better able to
claim rights to those spaces. Landowners’ representations of urban agriculture as a
strategy for maintaining environmental commons and contributing to sustainability
goals could be seen as aligning with neoliberal strategies that devolve responsibility
to individuals and civil society, yet without affording them any of the property rights
prized by neoliberal urbanism ideologies. But these arguments are disrupted through
the lived space of gardens. Further, gardens are not homogenous spaces discon-
nected from the lived realities outside the garden gates.
Several urban agriculture scholars point to the commoning evident in urban agri-
culture as a strategy for resisting hegemonic regimes of enclosure and individualiza-
tion. In this way, they create potential for forming solidary movements that seek to
disrupt capitalist urbanisms. Yet, in much of my research, the collective possibilities
of urban agriculture are not where avenues for resistance were found. Instead, more
tension arose in the desire of growers to have individual plots and be able to claim
rights to resources despite not being property owners. Importantly, organizing gar-
dens as individual allotments did not foreclose opportunities of collective
References 101
engagements. As demonstrated in debates regarding collective or individual organi-

zation of gardens in Medellín, even when organized as individual plots, growers still
engaged in sharing of produce and knowledge, socialization, and collectively claim-
ing a right to their city. For residents who are often excluded from property regimes
(such as those living in poverty and/or informal settlements), the simple act of hav-
ing autonomy to invest in and claim land is an act of resistance (see also Ramírez
2019). Thus, urban agriculture has the potential to produce alternative conceptions
of space grounded in both collective and individual value.
The urban agriculture projects in Rosario, Medellín, Toronto, and Charlotte
made clear that the publicness of urban socio-natures is fluid. It can be invoked col-
lectively through imaginaries and material struggles. Yet, it can be constrained by
individual interpretations of space, land ownership, funding, and policies that deter-
mine how the resources can be used and by whom. For some, the need to obtain
funding, land, or investments has impacted their ability to act as collectives or grow
individually (see also St Clair et al. 2020). Given the uncertain land tenure of most
growers, those who can claim property rights are often in the position of determin-
ing the parameters of practice and discourse. Yet, for many in my research, the act
of gardening unsettled whether the space, land, and resources were public or private
and the related rights to participate in the making of the city.
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Chapter 6
A Way Forward
City governments worldwide continue to look at sustainability through a neoliberal

lens that prioritizes projects and policies that best contribute to environmental goals
while also increasing capital accumulation. Under an umbrella of sustainable urban-
ism, approaches to addressing ecological concerns have been integrated into strate-
gies of economic development that emphasize central city redevelopment and the
creative class (Long and Rice 2019). Increasingly, urban agriculture is part of these
strategies as such projects are viewed as urban amenities that attract investment.
Investigating sustainable urbanism approaches through the ordinary, everyday moti-
vations and interactions of urban agricultural practitioners and advocates in four
cities in the global North and South demonstrates these neoliberal impulses as well
as the ways that they devalue non-economic outputs and constrain social justice
achievements. It is important to understand these phenomena from an everyday
scale because such experiences and collective experimentation shape urban imagi-
naries and socio-ecological futures (Bunnell et al. 2018). This book thus sought to
tell the story of urban agriculture movements across varied geographies in order to
make clear the multitude of urban impacts derived from this practice and the ways
these initiatives are embedded in, reproduce, and resist neoliberal urbanisms as they
relate to land use, social justice, and environmental commons.
This conclusion briefly returns to these ideas while sharing stories from growers
whose hard work, optimism, and knowledge inspire a way forward for creating
more just and sustainable cities through urban agriculture and broader food sys-
tems. During 4 years of research, I was fortunate to be welcomed into urban agricul-
ture spaces (whether urban farms, rooftops, community and allotment gardens,
teaching gardens, or bee hives) in Rosario, Medellín, Toronto, Charlotte, and many
other cities. As growers and advocates shared their social, spiritual, physical, politi-
cal, and economic connections to plants, land, animals, and each other, it was made
clear that many maintain a strong commitment to growing food and pursuing social
justice despite the challenges described in this book. Additionally, while my research
was completed over many years, the writing took place during the turbulence of
economic, social, and health crises in 2020. During this year, many people staying
at home to prevent the spread of COVID-19 turned once again to growing food. In
the United States, National Public Radio reported in May 2020 that pandemic “vic-
tory” gardens were on the rise as seed suppliers reported such an increase in demand
that nurseries were running short on plants and seeds (Mayer 2020). As described

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9_6
104 6 A Way Forward
throughout this book, those gardens are reported to contribute much more than food
during supply shortages, including serving as a form of connection in a world of
zoom meetings and stay-at-home orders. The remainder of this chapter continues to
share stories from my research that suggest ways forward for fostering urban agri-
culture movements that can better create and sustain more equitable urban
socio-natures.
hallenges to Pursuing Social Justice via Neoliberal

C
Sustainability Policy
Political ecology theorizing encourages scholars to look toward political economic

structures—such as capitalism, neoliberal urbanism, and sustainability regimes—to
understand human-environment relations. Utilizing such a frame to understand the
successes and struggles of urban agriculture movements in several countries brought
to light constraints these systems create through solely valuing the economic poten-
tial of urban agriculture as a land use while devaluing its non-economic contribu-
tions to the urban metabolism.
One urban agriculture initiative that stood out in this regard is located on multi-
ple acres of farmland and greenhouses in North Toronto surrounded by public and
low-income housing. This farm distributes organic produce at a sliding scale, serves
as a community gathering space through hosting public events and workshops
throughout the year, and provides educational opportunities for children in nearby
schools, internships for young people, and senior programming to address social
isolation. It was founded by a collaborative with a core focus on addressing food
insecurity and catalyzing social change.
As a result of its social change mission, this urban agriculture project seeks to
bring to light systemic challenges to achieving social equity through a non-profit
farm. Through its anti-oppression and food system-focused educational and public
programs, it brings attention to social equity concerns in the city. Yet, it is con-
strained by a neoliberal system that does not fully value its contributions and
devolves responsibility to civil society without making available the resources
needed to survive. As a result, this urban farm struggles to obtain sustainable fund-
ing in order to maintain adequate staffing. One farm advocate elaborated:
So, that’s also part of the challenge especially with the funding climate right now where a
lot of funders are moving out of core funding and one of the things we’ve been thinking
about is what are the long-term implications overall for community-based organizations
who depend on these funds… I guess I’ll say for the farm we have opportunities to generate
a bit of our own income.
Yet, that income is limited such that the farm managers struggle to obtain a living
wage. One manager discussed this challenge:
It’s a different kind of self-exploitation whereas I own my own business but I’m poor. Do
you know what I mean? So, I think it’s also opening up that bigger issue around how do we
Challenges to Pursuing Social Justice via Neoliberal Sustainability Policy 105
change the system so that the food that is grown – think about it - your grocery stores, they
get government subsidies. They get government support too and then on top of it they pay
people low wages. A lot of the farms…we’re trying to pay people fair wages.
For this stakeholder, the reliance on civil society to address food insecurity and cre-
ate living wage jobs was difficult in a funding environment in which private and
public funders were unwilling to pay for core expenses. Instead, they saw the gov-
ernment subsidies provided to grocery stores as creating an uneven playing field.
Further, they sought to bring attention to the non-economic contributions the farm
provides to the urban metabolism.
Chapters 3 and 4 also demonstrated these challenges in which the predominant
focus on the economic valuation of urban agriculture devalues other outputs. Instead
of focusing exclusively on economic development—which can be limited—advo-
cates throughout my research argued that more support was needed to further the
social, political, cultural, and environmental contributions of urban agriculture
while also calling attention to systemic constraints. An advocate for this farm in
Toronto further explained:
How can we get more city champions to really push this conversation forward from where
it is at now? I think it’s important and it’s key and I think it’s about time that the politicians
started realizing that urban ag is not a hobby. Urban ag plays a key role in food systems and
we need to see that and we need to nurture that and we need to support that so that it is
channeled in the right ways to get food to the people that really need it the most.
For this grower, and many others, it is time to more clearly recognize and compen-
sate the multitude of unquantifiable contributions urban agriculture makes to the
urban metabolism.
Additionally, relying on political ecology frameworks supports investigating
how approaches to stewarding public space and environmental commons are dis-
rupted when the socio-natures created through labor and materials necessary for
maintaining gardens further claims to space, resources, and decision-making. In this
regard, Chap. 5 describes the production of lived and representational space in
urban agriculture. Tensions arise when landowners (public and private) view grow-
ers as stewarding public space and resources while growers experience their labor,
investments, and place-making as enabling claims to the land and the city. Growers
in all four cities reported that they felt more included in the work of creating the city
as a result of their urban agricultural practice. These claims also make clear the
contributions urban agriculture makes beyond merely producing food or fostering
urban economic development.
In all of these examples, neoliberal urbanism approaches to sustainability
embrace urban agriculture as a strategy for building capital while devaluing its con-
tributions to environmental goals; to cultural connections between people, place,
and land; and to resisting social inequities. Such devaluing makes it difficult for
urban agriculture projects to survive longer term, which is especially evident in a
lack of land tenure, and to foster alternative urban imaginaries grounded in social
justice. Stakeholders throughout this research described concrete examples of how
this devaluing made their work harder or unsustainable. One community garden
manager in Toronto indicated that the government had recently stopped collecting
106 6 A Way Forward
yard waste and garbage from the garden, creating a “logistical nightmare.” They
reflected: “I’m surprised we’re having this much resistance from big stakeholders
because it’s something…It’s not a bad thing. We animate empty Hydro field
space, right?”
Other growers in Toronto discussed challenges with funding, access to land,
water, and other resources, complying with local land uses, and vandalism. Many of
these challenges were viewed as stemming from a lack of support from landowners,
lawmakers, and other stakeholders. Two urban agriculture advocates elaborated:
We’ve had gardeners who aren’t allowed to grow stuff on their balconies because… it was
junk, [landowners] don’t get it. So in terms of land access, I think one of the things that we
want to work on is raising the awareness with landholders that there actually are benefits
and there are good processes you can go through that give access to land.
It’s challenging to get resources for small-scale, sustainable urban and peri-urban farming
because of the scale - it’s not considered significant enough in terms of job creation, impact
on climate change or food security (at least at the provincial level). While it’s true that urban
farming may not generate the big numbers, there are other benefits that come from working
at a relatively smaller scale - such as flexibility and adaptability to local needs. This is the
scale that often supports the most marginalized people, the ones who fall through the
cracks. Also getting institutions to recognize that what they consider small-scale impacts
may mean a great deal to individuals - having access to fresh, culturally appropriate food;
showing their children how to grow it or having a few extra dollars in the pocket to pay for
better quality of life.
For the second advocate, raising awareness of the multitude of values ascribed to
urban agriculture is important for overcoming material constraints to the practice.
In Medellín and Rosario, growers and advocates also noted that limited access to
cultivatable land and resources, as well as vandalism (dumping trash in garden sites,
pilfering plants), were salient challenges. For many, this was perceived to be a result
of the devaluation and limited visibility of urban agriculture. One advocate in
Rosario described this perspective:
I think urban agriculture still lacks visibility. Urban agriculture is something that we need
to have. Even though we’re the only city in Argentina where there is a public policy about
urban agriculture and we are, of course, very happy that these policies exist, all of the ben-
efits of urban agriculture still aren’t fully understood…Urban agriculture needs to be trans-
versal. It should be present in all policies: social policies, healthcare and culture because it
rescues foods.
In Charlotte, advocates similarly expressed that the lack of public and institutional
support for urban agriculture is a challenge:
People don’t care if they lose urban agriculture and farming. Most white people see it as an
interim land use until development comes along. They don’t care if farms are gone, they can
still get [food] from California or Chile.
In response, advocates across the research sites emphasized the need to better value
the multiple contributions of urban agriculture in order to protect their investments
in the urban metabolism. For some, this also demonstrated a need to upset larger
systems of urban valuation (such as neoliberal capitalism).
More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints 107
Alongside recognizing the multifunctional value of urban agriculture, many in

Rosario and Charlotte highlighted the need for understanding the hard work and
investment required to be successful. One advocate in Rosario reflected on these
challenges:
The parque huertas (garden parks) are places that were deserted, places with trash and now
they’re transformed into gardens, but this initial work is hard. The first two years, people
who don’t know a lot about agriculture need to learn if they want to become farmers… It
takes some time when the land was being used for industrial agriculture, the land is like an
addict that you take away their drugs. So it takes some time to recuperate.
Similarly in Charlotte, there was quite a bit of skepticism reported about the poten-
tial impact of urban agriculture. Several stakeholders provided examples of people
starting urban gardens without realizing the hard work needed to sustain them. One
garden manager elaborated on this mindset:
One of the things that community gardens do really effectively is remind people that grow-
ing food isn’t just a slam dunk and that if you imagine delicious local food, it will just
appear. There are these things called weeds, and there are these things called bugs. There’s
this thing called timing. The complexities of being a good farmer.
For this garden manager and several others, the investment needed to be successful
in urban agriculture is a barrier to engaging in the practice with social justice moti-
vations. Instead, they argue that only those with resources can participate. These
challenges, alongside the devolution of social responsibilities to civil society orga-
nizations, have led to tensions between non-profit organizations seeking financial
investment from small pots of money. In Charlotte, where there is more limited
municipal support for urban agriculture, there were many more reports of conflicts
between organizations working in the food movement. These stories demonstrate
the challenges encountered as a result of the neoliberal urbanism context in which
they are embedded. Political economic approaches that focus on capital accumula-
tion as a strategy for achieving sustainability goals (while devaluing non-economic
outcomes) create tangible, everyday challenges to urban growing.
More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints
Despite these challenges, there is growing momentum in all of the cities in this
research to support and expand urban agriculture and to address social inequity in
those initiatives. Several strategies for achieving these goals and upsetting norms
were discussed. One frequently discussed need was to engage and value more
diverse viewpoints in urban agriculture movements. This was particularly salient in
Charlotte as a city that experiences significant racial and economic segregation and
uneven development (and in light of the influential protests against police brutality
and racial oppression in 2020–2021). Several growers lamented that in public rheto-
ric and funding opportunities, leaders and projects in communities of color are often
108 6 A Way Forward
left behind. Yet, these are the places where some of the longest-lasting and more
impactful projects can be found.
One of the first community gardens established in Charlotte that is still active
today celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2021. It is located in a gentrifying neighbor-
hood known for challenges with drug violence when the garden began. Managed by
African-American women who have lived in the neighborhood since long before the
garden’s founding, it is primarily cultivated by 20–30 seniors living nearby. The
collective also eventually expanded to include seven gardens throughout Charlotte
and now hosts regular garden events with cook-offs and awards given to the best
garden each year. The reported primary values provided by this garden were encour-
aging people to eat healthier (one grower brought bread and mayonnaise with her to
the garden in order to cut fresh tomatoes to make sandwiches and eat directly at a
picnic table), forming intergenerational bonds (a boy scout troop regularly helped
maintain the garden, built planter boxes, worked on the greenhouse/shed, and helped
plant and harvest), and providing social space (one gardener often brought snow
cones for groups working in the garden and neighborhood kids). The garden moved
once in order to acquire more space, and a garden manager reported that despite
signs that the neighborhood is gentrifying, they were optimistic the garden won’t be
displaced. Instead it was understood to be a valuable project that provides green
space in a neighborhood where it was rapidly disappearing.
Importantly, however, the managers of this and related gardens were not often at
the table for decision-making regarding the food movement and urban development
in Charlotte. They sustained the garden through donations collected from a variety
of places. Growers connected with this garden and others throughout the city
reflected on the unequal ways in which decisions are made in Charlotte that impact
what is valued and how resources are distributed. One urban agriculture advocate
(not directly affiliated with the garden described above) noted the importance of
recognizing these challenges:
That is the hell of it all in terms of justice because we won’t achieve it until we, white
people, get – peel off enough layers because we’ve all – we have got layer after layer after
layer of privilege and white supremacy that we don’t even begin to acknowledge. I mean
every single day, there is something that I believe we could all put on the list of well, I see
that this way now, maybe tomorrow I can get down a little deeper and the next day and the
next day. But never will we get all the way to what [Black, Indigenous, and people of color]
really feel, which means we have to just do what they say do, whether it’s right or wrong,
we need to just do it with them. If they say that’s what we need, we need to say, okay, well
I’ll stand here with you and do it.
The sense that achieving social justice goals in food systems required valuing the
knowledge and experience of diverse groups was echoed throughout my research.
These perspectives align with ideas of food sovereignty in which multiple ways
of knowing are valued such that all people have more say over how their food is
produced, distributed, and consumed. One grower and teacher in Rosario explained:
We have to be in equal conditions because knowledge is knowledge. There’s no scientific
knowledge about everything, there is knowledge of how to change the reality of certain
conditions. And sometimes campesino knowledge isn’t kept in mind and it’s lost. The
More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints 109
knowledge is eroded. And we are fighting so that this campesino knowledge is in the same
condition to be able to make wider knowledge. Because, it’s true that there is a lot of
research that erodes knowledge.
For this person, one way toward achieving food justice is valuing diverse knowl-
edges, not just those that emerge from academic settings.
In Toronto, several urban agriculture advocates similarly argued that many peo-
ple most impacted by inequality in food systems are not often included as experts
and actors in devising solutions. Instead, many participants in food system conver-
sations are from affluent communities. One advocate discussed the need to change
that dynamic:
So, a lot of that is we need garden programs for [marginalized residents], for them to be able
to share what they already know and for them to interact with the food system in a way that
they just normally aren’t invited to really. So, it’s like for them to be able to take in some of
that power and to take that space…. The root cause isn’t just that someone doesn’t have
a garden.
Further, decision-making related to urban planning can omit or ignore the voices of
marginalized communities. In the revitalization plans of a low-income neighbor-
hood and social housing project, residents regularly attended community consulta-
tions to ask that their growing spaces be maintained in the new design (Hammelman
2019). Yet, the final designs included much fewer spaces for growing in order to
meet density demands. In this case, while residents did participate in planning con-
versations, their demands were still not met.
In addition to decision-making, some advocates also reported the important eco-
logical contributions made by diverse growers. One advocate in Charlotte noted the
multitude of plants and growing styles brought to community gardens by migrants.
But no, so we got all kinds out here, and the garden itself – all these metaphors – it’s a quilt.
I mean, as you walk from place to place, you see somebody gardening like their grand-
mother’s ex-slave garden, and next to them, someone from Jamaica, and next to them is
someone from Rajasthan, and next to them is somebody doing something completely dif-
ferent and they’re from Puerto Rico. She had maize corn – indigenous corn – that was
25-feet tall. It was towering over the garden. So, it’s a delightful place.
For this advocate, the diversity of growers contributes to feelings of delight in the
garden and to the urban fabric. A grower in Rosario similarly reflected on the impor-
tance of urban agriculture for sustaining indigenous plants:
Because it’s always like the people that come from the interior part of the country, from the
countryside, they bring a plant that they used to grow there. A fruit, oregano, lettuce… a
variety from there, with a colored seed. And even though they just have a plant in their
house, in their little land, in their precarious living space, it’s powerful.
In examples throughout my research, growers and advocates noted the need for
more clear and transparent processes regarding land use, funding, and other plan-
ning decisions. Many people argued that valuing the expertise and experience of
growers from marginalized backgrounds was one step toward ensuring that they
have more power in their food systems and cities.
110 6 A Way Forward
Pursuing Systemic Change
Another strategy for change described by research participants focused on the mul-
tiple ways in which social equity can be pursued. Participants focused particularly
on the need to pursue systemic change in order to have more widespread and lasting
impacts. This was particularly evident in Rosario where urban agriculture enjoys
more public policy support.
Several of the growers, scientists, and advocates involved with the municipal
urban agriculture program in Rosario (PAU) had been engaged in the practice
(whether in Rosario or other parts of the country) for decades. Some held deep eco-
logical knowledge as a result of a lifetime of growing food in the interior of
Argentina and connections to generational histories. These growers migrated to
Rosario for a variety of reasons but found it challenging to survive in the city where
their knowledge was devalued. They also widely critiqued industrial agriculture in
Argentina, which they viewed as degrading the environment, making people sick,
and severing cultural connections to the land. Such growers expressed that their
urban agriculture practice sought to remedy those negative outcomes of industrial
agriculture at the everyday human level. But, they also sought to create more sys-
temic change. Through teaching others, supporting each other, and raising the pro-
file of urban agriculture, they hoped to change the systems such that more people
could pursue food sovereignty. One advocate reflected:
There can’t be change in a society like Argentina’s unless it’s in its structure. How did
Argentina’s agriculture history form? It’s a country that feeds the world. And so, how can it
be that people that are feeding the world are dying from hunger? The problem is in the
distribution. It’s not well-distributed. And society’s access to understanding that they need
to claim and demand their rights. Human beings need to claim their rights. It’s an environ-
mental, social and even legal problem. Yes, we find out that people are coming out strong
with a demand for food sovereignty, there’s still a lot left to build. Being sovereign is what
we want, but the actual construction of that sovereignty is hard.
Several advocates in Toronto also debated whether urban agriculture furthered

incremental or systemic change. While urban agriculture was often discussed in
strategies of food access for under-resourced neighborhoods, others questioned its
ability to make a dent in those challenges. At the same time, strategies to address
food insecurity through food banks and tax credits to grocery stores that partici-
pate in food recovery programs were perceived as insufficient. One advocate elab-
orated: “It’s not just about saying to Campbell’s Soup, ‘If you have extra, you give
it to the food banks and you’ll get a tax credit.’ This is ridiculous. There’s got to
be a better way and that’s not the way. We actually have to deal with poverty.”
Several other growers, supporters, and decision-makers across the four cities dis-
cussed the need to see urban agriculture and food as part of larger systems that
produce social inequity. For many, while the everyday contributions to families
are important, these larger systems must also be disrupted in order to really
address social inequity.
Embracing the Ever-Changing Urban Environment 111
Embracing the Ever-Changing Urban Environment
Finally, the urban agriculture projects encountered throughout my research fre-

quently adapted to the changing dynamics of their environments. Cities and neigh-
borhoods are always changing. Places experience waves of investment and
disinvestment, residents move in and out, leadership changes, and city and grower
priorities evolve. There is often a sense that urban agriculture projects must be sus-
tained in their current state into perpetuity in order to be successful. But my research
made clear that different measures of success can be valuable.
In Medellín, residents in a newer informal settlement in the north of the city
began a community garden during my research. There was debate between the
Medellín government and its northern neighbor regarding which municipality had
responsibility for the neighborhood. As such, it received very limited infrastructure
investments. Many residents struggled with food insecurity. Food banks and other
social service agencies would periodically bring carts of food to the neighborhood,
but, in those instances, residents reported waiting hours to receive a small bag of
food. A group of residents began planting in land near a church in order to make
more fresh produce available for their families and to claim a collective space in the
neighborhood. The nature and ownership of the space evolved over time, as the
leaders found they needed to negotiate use of the space with local gang leaders.
During some of my visits, the growers reported success with tomato plants as they
worked to improve the soil. In other visits, less progress had been made. Importantly,
however, during the visits in which plant growth and resources to invest were less
forthcoming, the garden was not understood as a failure. Instead it was part of an
ongoing process that produces different values along the way.
In Toronto, the temporary nature of using urban space was embraced in some
projects. There were new innovations of building hydroponics systems in shipping
containers, growing plants in milk crates that could be relocated if needed, and
using movable containers for pop-up gardens that would allow intermittent involve-
ment throughout the year (see Fig. 6.1). Other commercial enterprises seek to
respond to evolving consumer demands related to organic products or on-demand,
ready-made meals. A stakeholder in one such enterprise explained:
So, we’re definitely niche, but we’re trying to be nimble and responsive for our market so
that we can keep just creating a space for ourselves and that’s a big priority and that’s an
ongoing challenge while still trying to be a farm.
These initiatives embraced the need to pivot in response to policy or land use
changes, new and less neighborhood investment, market logics, and consumer and
resident demand.
In Charlotte, several advocates noted that gardens ebb and flow alongside the
evolution of cities. For some, this provides opportunities for learning. One advocate
reflected:
When a garden collapses, it often moves, and those lessons move with it. But you need
ongoing support, and political support comes and goes, so gardens need to be organized
within and pay attention to the outside as well.
112 6 A Way Forward
Fig. 6.1 Growing in milk crates on the site of a former gas station in downtown Toronto. (Photo
by author 2017)
In this regard, it is important to recognize the dynamism of the cities in which urban
agriculture is located and to embrace similar evolution within the gardens. One
agricultural scientist in Argentina further described the factors that may impact a
garden’s success from year to year:
I think in relation to the success, the most important thing about this program is having
accompanied the dynamics that have come out, the different political dynamics, the differ-
ent social moments and I’d even say the different times of year. For example, if we’re in a
school for a year, you can do a garden project in four months, talking about sovereignty,
develop these concepts, have the plant in your hand, harvest it and eat it and the next year
not do anything. So, there’s that possibility of one year doing a lot and the next nothing, and
we don’t see it as a failure, rather we understand it’s a question of people’s time, the school’s
time, the possibilities, the changes that come. If this principal left, this year the kids aren’t
having recess outside because of dengue, and just understanding all of these different
dynamics, even political ones, even micro ones, like that could be going on at the school, all
the way up to national politics.
For this advocate, and many growers, success can be defined in more micro and
short-term effects. One grower in Toronto noted that she was proud of the food
grown and relationships built, remarking simply: “We grow food for people.”
In order to achieve these goals of growing food for people, the environment, and
cities in a socially just way, it is important to recognize the multi-faceted contribu-
tions of urban agriculture, the diverse knowledges that inform the practice, the need
for systems-level change, and the temporary and dynamic nature of urban environ-
ments. Throughout this book, urban agriculture projects in four cities in the global
References 113
North and South have been described as socio-natures. These socio-natures are con-
stituted as complex assemblages of soil, plants, and water; human labor and connec-
tion; land value and policy priorities; and cultural, social, and political representations.
As assemblages do (Guthman 2019), these elements move in and through each
other at different times, scales, and places to contribute varyingly to the urban
metabolism. Thus, in order to create more just and sustainable urban food systems,
urban agriculture must be understood as a valuable, always-evolving piece of
the puzzle.
References
Bunnell T, Gillen J, Ho ELE (2018) The prospect of elsewhere: engaging the future through aspira-
tions in Asia. Ann Am Assoc Geogr 108(1):35–51
Guthman J (2019) Wilted: pathogens, chemicals, and the fragile future of the strawberry industry.
University of California Press
Hammelman C (2019) Challenges to supporting urban agriculture through food system gover-
nance in Toronto. Environ Urban 31(2):481–496
Long J, Rice JL (2019) From sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism. Urban Stud 56(5):992–1008
Mayer P (2020) Pandemic gardens satisfy a hunger for more than just good tomatoes. National
Public Radio. Mar 9. Web. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/852441460/pandemic-gardens-
satisfy-a-hunger-for-more-than-just-good-tomatoes
Index
A F
Agroecology, 48, 56, 57, 71, 72 Farmland conservation, 51
Alkon, A.H., 3, 26, 27, 44, 45, 71 Food justice, 23, 27–30, 35, 73, 78, 109
Allotment gardens, 8, 21, 22, 32, 63–66, 88, Food security, 2, 10, 16, 46, 50, 55,
90, 94, 95, 103 61, 66, 106
Amin, A., 84, 85, 87, 88 Food sovereignty, 28, 29, 71, 73,
Assemblage theory, 4, 84 108, 110
B G
Blomley, N., 34, 85, 86, 89 Greenbelt project in Medellín/Jardin
Circunvalor de Medellín, 13, 92
Greenbelt project in Rosario/Proyecto del
C Cinturón Verde, 48, 71
Charlotte, United States, 14
Claiming territory, 93
Classens, M., 5, 22, 34, 42, 44, 45, 62 H
Collective gardens, 46, 47, 98, 99 Heynen, N., 4, 45
Collective organizing, 2, 95–99
Commodification of nature, 41
Community Economic and Entrepreneurial I
Development (CEED) gardens, Industrial food system, 2, 3, 16, 26, 44,
Toronto, 50, 51 56, 61, 77
Community economies, 62–70
L
E Land tenure, 15, 16, 21–36, 89, 93,
Ecosystem services, 22, 23, 70–74, 78 101, 105
Eizenberg, E., 85–87, 91, 94, 96 Land use policy, 93
Environmental commons, 7, 16, 83–101, Lefebvre, H., 5, 16, 86–88, 91, 94
103, 105 Levkoe, C.Z., 36, 61
Environmental education, 75 Lived space, 5, 16, 62, 86, 87, 90–100

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88296-9
116 Index
M Reynolds, K., 2, 3, 25, 27, 31, 34, 45, 52,

Market gardens, 12, 41–57 62, 70, 77
McClintock, N., 5, 21–23, 27, 35, 44, Right to the city, 13, 29, 67, 84, 85, 94, 96
45, 52, 62 Robinson, J., 6, 42, 60
Medellín, Colombia, 8, 12, 13, 24 Rosario, Argentina, 8–10, 56, 59, 71, 96, 110
Multifunctionality of urban agriculture, 60, 77
S
N Sbicca, J., 3, 31, 33, 62
Neighborhood revitalization, 60, 67 Social capital, 2, 5, 29, 31, 62, 63, 67,
Neoliberalization, 22, 41, 42, 45 68, 76–78
Neoliberal sustainability, 7, 24, 30, Social integration, 32
31, 104–107 Socio-natures, 4, 5, 45, 86, 101, 104,
Neoliberal urbanism, 7, 15, 16, 23, 29, 35, 36, 105, 113
42–44, 46, 52, 56, 91, 100, 104, Sustainability fix, 7, 22, 24, 27, 41, 83
105, 107
Nutrition education, 2, 61
T
Tornaghi, C., 2, 6, 26, 28–32, 42, 44,
O 62, 63, 77
Ordinary cities, 60 Toronto, Canada, 8, 11, 12
P U
PAU, 10, 48, 49, 71, 110 Uneven development, 7, 15, 41–57, 107
Place-making, 6, 30, 62–70, 84, 85, Urban green space, 2, 27, 33, 70
89, 91, 105 Urban metabolism, 4, 5, 16, 22, 45, 76, 84,
Political ecology, 4–6, 16, 22, 23, 28, 36, 42, 104–106, 113
90, 104, 105 Urban political ecology, 4, 15, 28, 42–45
Private property regimes, 7
Privatization of environmental resources, 41
Public-private dichotomy, 86 V
Public space, 7, 16, 35, 83–94, 96, 98, 99, 105 Value of urban agriculture, 8, 16, 64, 65, 67,
69, 78, 107
R
Ramírez, M., 11, 88, 89, 101 W
Representational space, 87, 91, 100, 105 White, M., 29, 30, 63

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Greening Cities by Growing

ISBN 978-3-030-88295-2 ISBN 978-3-030-88296-9 (eBook)

Market Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in Rosario ���� 48

 volution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Urban agriculture—the production, harvesting, and processing of crops or live-

Thus, contemporary urban agriculture presents an opportunity to reconnect cities

 xamining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas

I mpacts of Global Political Economy on Urban

particular context, my research seeks to demonstrate cross-cutting themes that can

Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia

Medellín is the capital city of the department of Antioquia in northwestern Colombia.

Fig. 1.3 Community garden in downtown Toronto. (Photo by author 2017)

informal neighborhoods who participated in community meetings for sharing

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Fig. 1.5 Indoor garden shop in Charlotte. (Photo by author 2019)

Expanding Scholarly Engagements with Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is a long-standing practice in cities worldwide and is character-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

geographies rooted in neoliberal governance. Further, political ecology perspectives

Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability

investments, recognize these efforts. For example, Medellín, Colombia, developed

 he Role of Food Systems in Urban Sustainability Planning

of urban agriculture, Sanyé-Mengual et al. (2016) found that stakeholders in

Social Justice in Urban Agriculture

Approaches to Food Justice

Pursuing Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Projects

In investigating gardening in post-Katrina New Orleans (United States), Kato et al.

Securing Land for Urban Agriculture

Constraining Land Access via Neoliberal Urban Land Policies

(De)valuations of urban agriculture as a land use are embedded in questions about

urban agriculture does exist, it often struggles to withstand competing pressures

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 41

 oward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable

materialize complex post-neoliberal ideologies, they argue that new possibilities of

hectares of land in Mozambique in order to capitalize on potential carbon credits

may reproduce these narratives in order to demonstrate their legitimacy as they

Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects

In all of the cities examined in my research, there was an emphasis by planners,

Growing Organic Crops for the Market in Medellín

In Medellín, a non-profit organization partnered with the local government to estab-

The economic potential of these individual gardens is dependent on the exchange

 arket Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture

marginalized neighborhoods. The attention to economic development, and market-

Pursuing Community Economic Development in Toronto

Employment Strategies in Charlotte

In Charlotte, where the predominance of agricultural communities in and near the

Exclusions and Uneven Development

American cities and from a comparative perspective in order to demonstrate how

While in Toronto, one grower spoke directly to these challenges:

In this example, and similar to others in my research, growers called attention to

market-led approach to addressing economic inequity through urban agriculture can

 ontributing to the City Through Urban

never go hungry” (Queen’s Garden 2020). A peri-urban farmer practicing agroecol-

All names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 59

Beyond Food Production

In Toronto, city government’s involvement in community gardens recognizes

 roviding Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering

Research participants identified multiple values provided by urban agriculture that

Market Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in Rosario �� 48

volution of Urban Agricultural Practice in the Global North

xamining Urban Agriculture Practice in the Americas

I mpacts of Global Political Economy on Urban

Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Expanding Scholarly Engagements with Urban Agriculture

Urban Agriculture’s Contributions to Urban Sustainability

he Role of Food Systems in Urban Sustainability Planning

Social Justice in Urban Agriculture

Approaches to Food Justice

Pursuing Social Justice in Urban Agriculture Projects

Securing Land for Urban Agriculture

Constraining Land Access via Neoliberal Urban Land Policies

oward an Urban Political Ecology of Sustainable

Market-Oriented Urban Agriculture Projects

Growing Organic Crops for the Market in Medellín

arket Potential of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture

Pursuing Community Economic Development in Toronto

Employment Strategies in Charlotte

Exclusions and Uneven Development

ontributing to the City Through Urban

Beyond Food Production

roviding Social and Cultural Value Through Fostering

Social Connections and Place-Making

Connecting to Land, Histories, and Traditional Knowledge

roviding Environmental Value Through Food System

Ecosystem Services and Environmental Alternatives

Human and Environmental Health

Food and Agriculture Education Outcomes

aluing Urban Agriculture’s Interrelated

heoretical Foundations in Public Space

iterature on Public Space and Environmental Commons

Productions of Lived Space in Urban Agriculture

Policy Approaches to Stewarding the Commons

Producing Contested Publics Through Lived Space

Shifting Representations of Growing as a Collective

Unsettling Public or Private Natures

hallenges to Pursuing Social Justice via Neoliberal

More Seats at the Table: Engaging Diverse Viewpoints

Pursuing Systemic Change

Embracing the Ever-Changing Urban Environment