This recent resistance to gentrification in both Oakland and San Francisco has drawn inspiration from a rich social movement history in the region. Racial housing justice activism harkens back to the fights against racist urban renewal projects starting with the Fillmore Redevelopment/Western Addition when African Americans saw the destruction of homes and businesses built post-WWII . Since the 50s local movements have provided national leadership in the anti-urban renewal, anti- Vietnam War, anti-nuclear, back to the land and environmentalist, student free speech, Third World Liberation, and ethnic and racial rights and self-determination movements. Contemporary movements, such as Occupy Oakland and anti-tech organizing are held as exemplars of new anti-authoritarian organizing. With its current position as the city with the fastest growing property values and highest rent in the nation , San Francisco has also been labeled by gardeners and local politicians as a leader in creating a city friendly to both urban farming and development. In Oakland, facing a rapidly gentrifying population and shifting use of previously devalorized industrial landscapes, urban gardeners have held more tightly to the importance of self-determination based organizing taught there first by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s . In San Jose, garden projects, frequently funded through Silicon Valley grants and business connections, connect with the needs of diverse ethnic and racial communities. San Jose’s historical importance in the Chicano/a movement of the 1960s bleeds into the work of gardeners today concerned with creating spaces for empowering gardeners in Mexican and Central American immigrant communities.
This dissertation contributes to the efforts to analyze how alternative food movements and contemporary social movements,hydroponic vertical garden more broadly, are discursively and materially engaged in shaping the urban landscape. I seek to explain the character of urban gardeners’ relationships to politics of land access and property and investigate the trajectory of social movement strategy. Through this study it is clear that during a moment of extremely competitive land markets and urban growth, gardeners are making significant gains in carving out space for the priorities of urban agricultural communities. This dissertation describes the nature and limitations of these gains. In this dissertation my approach puts at its center the ideas, words, and stories of urban gardeners and garden advocates. Drawing from the fields of critical activist ethnography, participatory and action-based research, and engaged sociology, I grapple with the question of how to “write and reflect not about or even for but with movements” . I write from the position of a former community garden organizer with a continued commitment participating in self-critical urban food politics, and urban politics more broadly. My critical approach originates from a desire to continue to dialogue with and participate in movement conversations on these topics, to see where and how we can move. This approach also forefronts the question of how we produce knowledge about movements. Centering the experiences, discussions, and debates of movement actors acknowledges these activists as knowledge producers worth serious consideration, for in the work of social change arises critique, analysis, and controversy about the struggle . The methods that inform this dissertation include key-participant semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and archival and historical research. I interviewed forty-two gardeners and garden advocates and received data from an additional five surveys in an initial and unsuccessful attempt to conduct a regional survey. In addition to semi-formal interviews, I also spoke with and gardened with many individuals during garden workdays, gardener protest events, and educational events hosted by various organizations.
To understand institutional perspectives, I interviewed municipal staff in Oakland, San Francisco, Alameda, and San Jose. Furthermore, significant information was gained through engagement with historical and contemporary written work including blogs, project websites, newspaper articles, correspondence and online discussions, notes from events and meetings, flyers, internal municipal agency memos, minutes for city council meetings, city planning documents, and press releases. In Chapter 2, I contextualize the new wave of urban agriculture in the history of food gardening in the U.S., focusing the reader’s attention on the questions of land access and tenure that have been omnipresent for garden advocates since the 1890s. I use the literature on historical gardening movements and projects, drawing out the processes of urban governance and property in which gardeners operate. Urban gardens have been categorized as an interim use, a temporary use of ‘vacant’ land to address the crises or social ills of a given moment by both planners and garden advocates . Starting in the 1970s, both in the Bay Area and nationally, gardening became a tool of social movements engaged in re-envisioning urban land use, decision-making, and sustainability, and has increasingly problematized gardening’s marginal position in the city . I situate today’s movement’s demands on the land in a historical context of interim, temporary urban food production spaces. In Chapter 3, I turn to the contemporary movement contexts in which gardeners operate. The rise of alternative food movements has garnered attention from scholars interested in documenting and affirming movements, evaluating the use potentials of particular alternatives, and analyzing either specific expressions or the characteristics, discourses, and practices of agrifood movements at large . In this chapter I examine the trajectory of commitments to justice through three iterations of contemporary food organizing: community food security, food justice, and food sovereignty.
Understanding the articulations and debates over justice contributes to an analysis of gardeners as engaged in creating experiments in utopias that fail to completely engage with the spatial imaginary or consequences or their experimentations. Then in Chapter 4, I examine the practices and enactments of property of gardening contemporary organized garden projects across the Bay region, what I term landing. Through analysis of the tenure strategies, political engagements, and social movement commitments of particular garden projects, I demonstrate the variation and key tensions arising in urban agricultural communities. Gardeners articulate an overwhelming claim that contemporary urban agriculture is here to stay, but this is tempered by evidence that gardeners are still willing to inhabit the position of an interstitial and transient land use. While gardeners can and should be read as creating enactments of property relations beyond and in resistance to public-private dichotomies, there is also a significant thread of garden enactment that reassert the authority of the owner. In Chapter 5, I discuss three discursive strategies of landing utilized by gardeners: commoning, community management of land, and resiliency. While commoning and community land management discourses have both been used to both oppose capitalist urban development and propose alternatives, resiliency has had a more contentious development. Some gardeners posit that resiliency models can be developed where gardens and gardens can be flexible enough to move from site to site, developing ecological and social transformation where they move. While many movement actors are opposed the idea that development should displace gardens,vertical vegetable tower little advocacy is occurring to the framing of resiliency to not include these prodevelopment trajectories. The chapter concludes with a discussion of this unfortunate eschewing of the potentials in collective undertakings of decisions of closure. In Chapter 6, I turn my attention to the question of changing urban governance structures through work with garden advocates. In the three largest municipalities in the Bay Area, advocates have worked to change zoning regulations and the programmatic foci of city departments resulting in a landscape of greater acceptance of gardening. While these changes are significant in creating gains for certain garden organizations, overall changes in city policy should be read as embracing entrepreneurialism, increasing the use of public-private partnerships to address urban problems, and encouraging politics supportive of development. Through an analysis of patterns of neoliberal urbanization in conjuncture with movement wins, this chapter asks if gardeners have accepted a limited politics of possibility in reimagining urban governance. By examining the history of collective gardening’s place in the US history, the conceptions of justice in contemporary food movements, Bay Area gardeners’ enactments of property and urban governance, and the new terrain of urban agriculture in the three dominant Bay Area municipalities, I bring together an interdisciplinary approach to understand how gardeners construct landscapes of possibility and possibilities for landscapes. In a contemporary moment when global social movements are working collectively to challenge capitalist hegemony, the Left is questioning the strategic development of state-based democratic socialist institutions, and young activists are increasingly turning to tangible political projects like urban gardens it is essential to understand the terrain of land and property politics these urban agriculturalists chose to cultivate.
It has taken many forms including school gardens, community gardens, relief gardens, job-training gardens, horticultural therapy gardens, and market gardens. Unlike European gardens, which were more institutionalized and supported by the state, US gardening has occurred with state support only in waves . At the end of each wave, urban gardening has largely been erased from the urban landscape when gardeners lost access to the land. Bassett identified seven periods of urban gardening movements in the United States: the Potato Patches , School Gardens , Garden City Plots , Liberty Gardens , Relief Gardens , Victory Gardens , and Community Gardens . During each period, gardeners or garden advocates utilized several strategies of land access that allowed them to pursue their gardening goals. Throughout most of the history of urban gardening in the US, gardens were viewed primarily as an interim land use or a component of the private yard. Indeed, for most policy makers, planners, and social reformers, gardens were considered to occupy vacant space that would soon be put to a higher use when the need for the garden subsided or the value of the land rose. Since the 1970s, gardeners have begun to advocate for more long-term or permanent access to city space for gardening, yet urban agriculture has remained squarely rooted as “interim use” in US cities. This chapter explores the history of organized garden projects as a form of temporary and interim land use. Gardening has been allowed or encouraged for short periods of time on vacant urban land with the expectation gardens will be removed . Through both municipal and private owners priorities gardening is defined as an inferior long-term land use. In this first half of this chapter, I will explore the history of urban gardening in the US from the 1890s to 1980s with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. I will describe the strategies and relationships gardeners have developed to gain access to land. I will end the chapter with a description of the rise of contemporary urban agriculture since the 1990s in the Bay Area. This chapter seeks to develop a history exploring the relationship between the objectives of successive waves of urban gardening and the land tenure and property relations that dominate their work.Pre-colonial agriculture occurred in and near many indigenous villages. These histories are very important in considering the past of urban agriculture and continue to be cited in food movements today as activists emphasize “decolonizing food systems” . Hank Herrera, long time East Bay food justice and urban gardening advocate, begins events by honoring and remembering that the land people gather on and garden on in the Bay Area is Ohlone/Costanoan peoples land that has been colonized and occupied for over two centuries. Bringing pieces of Ohlone spiritual and community practices to the work of East Bay urban gardening connects the movement to pre and post-colonial histories and commitments. Herrera’s commitment is representative of a broader thread present in urban agriculture communities across the bay that see urban gardening as part of decolonial practice. The history I will tell here is centered on the colonial period onward and experiences of largely non-first nations gardeners. Historians argue that US urban gardens have their roots in the town commons of New England and plazas of New Mexico . These early communal lands fulfilled many functions including cultivation or animal grazing and were planned components of the urban development of cities like Boston and Santa Fe. Unlike these early commons, urban gardens most frequently have not been included in plans for urban development, but instead have been responses to urban or social problems and located on vacant, “unused”, and largely borrowed lands .