Global Urban Agriculture

Antoinette WinklerPrins

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780647340
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

There has been growing attention paid to urban agriculture worldwide because of its role in making cities more environmentaly sustainable while also contributing to enhanced food access and social justice. This edited volume brings together current research and case studies concerning urban agriculture from both the Global North and the Global South. Its objective is to help bridge the long-standing divide between discussion of urban agriculture in the Global North and the Global South and to demonstrate that today there are greater areas of overlap than there are differences both theoretically and substantively, and that research in either area can help inform research in the other. The book covers the nature of urban agriculture and how it supports livelihoods, provides ecosystem services, and community development. It also considers urban agriculture and social capital, networks, and agro-biodiversity conservation. Concepts such as sustainability, resilience, adaptation and community, and the value of urban agriculture as a recreational resource are explored. It also examines, quite fundamentally, why people farm in the city and how urban agriculture can contribute to more sustainable cities in both the Global North and the Global South. Key Features: · One of the first volumes to bring together evidence from urban agriculture in the Global North and the Global South· Explores the contribution of urban agriculture to livelihoods, ecosystems and conservation· Numerous case studies examine a very diverse range of urban agriculture systems

1 Defining and Theorizing Global Urban Agriculture

Antoinette M.G.A. WinklerPrins^*

Johns Hopkins University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

^*E-mail: [email protected]

Urban agriculture (UA) is sprouting up in empty spaces of post-industrial landscapes throughout the industrialized world – in vacant lots, road medians, parks – reminiscent of the patchwork of vegetable gardens and livestock enclosures that are part of the urban streetscape in much of the Global South.

(McClintock, 2010, p. 191)

1.1 Introduction

Time has come to rethink and theorize urban agriculture (UA) at a global scale as its importance continues to rise in a world that is becoming ever more urban, and perhaps more importantly, a world in which the differences between the Global North (GN) and the Global South (GS) regarding the practice and motivations for urban agriculture are lessening. The objective of this volume is to bring together research that focuses on productive cultivation in urban spaces from around the world and to place these empirics in a theoretical context to provide cohesion. The motivation for compiling this book and titling it as I have come from years of research on home gardens and urban agriculture in the Global South (e.g. WinklerPrins, 2002, 2006; Murrieta and WinklerPrins, 2003; WinklerPrins and de Souza, 2005, 2009, 2010; Gallaher et al., 2013a, 2013b, 2015) while also advising students on the topic (Egger, 2007; Gallaher, 2012; White, 2014). Years ago, while working with my Amazonian collaborator on our home-garden project, she asked what I grew in mine. Although I do indeed cultivate some vegetables and fruits, this launched us into a conversation about how most home gardens in the Global North contain plants primarily for landscaping (aesthetic) purposes. This baffled her, as it seemed a waste of potential utilitarian plants. This exchange provided me with thoughts and insights about the role of plants about us. This, combined with an awareness of the surging movement in urban agriculture in the Global North through teaching on sustainable food systems at American universities, has propelled me to interrogate the divide between the GN and the GS. In reading about these practices in the various places, I sensed differences in the cited literature, semantics, and the approach between case materials from the GS and the GN, with literatures rarely crossing over. Yet the trends in practice that are occurring point to a seeming convergence in practice. On the one hand, for example, urban agriculture in Detroit, Michigan (e.g. White, 2011; Colasanti et al., 2012; Safransky, 2014) and other rust-belt cities of the USA has become a survival strategy for the disenfranchised and marginalized left behind in that city’s tumultuous de-industrialization and is, in many ways, becoming similar to the self-help survival strategies witnessed in many cities of the GS (Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010; Opitz et al., 2016). On the other hand, as wealth has increased in the GS, middle-income women are gardening in the cities of Senegal (White, 2015; Chapter 11, this volume) for reasons that have less to do with their immediate need for food and is more in line with gardening as a recreational and time-filling activity, reminiscent of urban gardening in the GN.

Despite the seeming convergence in practice, the literatures on UA in the GN and GS remain impressively separated, with researchers working on case material in the GS and rarely referencing work on the GN, and vice versa. The moment is here to think about UA at a global scale and focus on shared experience. My intention with this volume is to move towards greater interaction and engagement across this divide, as this will enrich both focus areas of inquiry. I refer here to urban theorist Ananya Roy and her invocation of the term ‘worlding’, which refers to ‘alternative modernities that produce multiple urban sites and experiences and can speak to and inform one’s analysis of other places’ (Roy, 2011, p. 828).

In addition to the increasing convergence of motivations and practice, there is the potential for convergence in theorizing UA as well, and this book makes an attempt to do so, both in some of the individual chapters and in toto. This can be done by engaging with a broadly defined urban political ecology, especially its attention to UA as a way of healing the metabolic rift, as well as attention to the idea of ‘urban assemblage’ and new ideas from critical urban studies. The food relocalization movement in the GN has focused its attention on UA as a way of reconnecting people and their food sources, as well as the numerous environmental benefits such as UA’s role in greening the city and contributing to urban sustainability. The livelihoods framework and its attention to the five capitals that the poor have access to – physical, natural, human, financial and social – is also a helpful way of framing empirical studies. More on the theoretical approaches used in this volume is elaborated below.

Geographer Tom Bassett (1981) was quite prescient when he stated in his conclusions on the history of community gardening in America that ‘what unites these groups [those that instigated gardening efforts] is their collective effort to make living in the city a more palatable experience’. This indeed remains the case, whether we are talking about self-help community organizations, development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or formal governmental and international institutions in the GN or GS. The ‘palatable experience’ I see emerging as a unifying theme in global UA, and by extension a convergence of theory and practice, is the very active rethinking of the role and purpose, and even conceptualization of nature in the city, and of efforts to ‘green’ the city, not just to improve aesthetics and people’s quality of life, but because a green city is a more sustainable city. UA contributes to a greening of the city by converting this green to productive spaces that nourish the city in more than aesthetic ways and also provide necessary ecosystem services.

1.2 Defining Urban Agriculture (UA)

Defining urban agriculture is not an easy task. Many definitions exist, and I settle here on a variation derived from Pearson et al. (2010, p. 7) which itself is an amalgam of other sources. For the purpose of this volume, urban agriculture is the production, processing and marketing of food and related products in urban and peri-urban areas, usually through intensive cultivation and for consumption in the same urban or peri-urban area. The existing literature covers a wide range of practice that some call ‘gardening’ and some call ‘agriculture’. Gardening usually connotes leisure, aesthetics and recreation, small scale, and in some parts of the world is women’s domain. In contrast, farming typically connotes production for subsistence or commercial purposes. It refers to a livelihood, a way of life, and is usually practised on a relatively larger scale than gardening. In many parts of the world, farming is associated with men and is considered a male domain. The reality is that, in practice, much of what we have traditionally talked about in UA is gardening, but it has taken on elements of farming and there is semantic fluidity between the two. Neither term is entirely satisfactory for encompassing what actually occurs, and therefore I suggest that instead of using the terms ‘gardening’ and/or ‘farming’ that we refer to this suite of activities as ‘urban cultivation’ and refer to the people who practise it as ‘urban cultivators’. This is difficult to do given the deep embeddedness of the term ‘urban agriculture’, which is why in this volume there will be a mix.

Urban cultivation encompasses plants being grown for some utility, but also includes activities that involve animals. This may range from home gardeners keeping or enabling bee foraging in their yards through the planting of appropriate flowers to the keeping (legally or not) of chickens or other fowl, to the maintenance of cows (usually for milk) or even horses and other animals. Although more common in the GS, the keeping of poultry as part of the home-garden system is gaining traction in many cities in the GN as the health benefits of free-range and locally produced eggs and meat have become clear. Activists in cities large and small in the GN are working on the legal issues of keeping poultry, while those in the GS work to keep such activities from becoming illegal.

One of the characteristics of urban cultivation is its great diversity of practice. Nathan McClintock provides us with an excellent typology of urban agriculture (2014, p. 150) and I borrow from his work, as modified by Gray et al. (2014 and Chapter 3, this volume) to summarize the various forms of UA in Table 1.1. Pearson et al. (2010) also provide a very helpful organization of UA typology, and they add to McClintock and Gray et al.’s typologies a discussion of the scale of the UA production (micro, meso and macro). I have incorporated their elements into Table 1.1 as well. The range of UA practice ranges from individual household gardens, organized allotment and community gardens, and the use of interstitial spaces (Galt et al., 2014) such as berms and public rights of way to macro-scale urban (hydroponic) farming on the ground or on rooftops, and even in the vertical dimension (Despommier, 2010). Used spaces range from the officially public to the intimately private.

Table 1.1. Range of urban cultivation. (Based on McClintock, 2014, as modified by Gray, 2015; also Pearson et al., 2010.)

In the GN, the focus of UA research has been on how it empowers local communities and how it contributes to the relocalization of a food system that has become disconnected from the community. It is usually conceptualized as something organic that arises from the bottom up, from the community. It is often enveloped in the discourse of social justice that gives voice to marginalized people and empowers them to take control of their lives and communities. UA in the GN is often seen as a solution to many urban challenges, including addressing social woes and efforts to ‘green’ the city.

In contrast, in the GS the focus of UA research has been on how it assists the transition to urban subjects for newly arrived rural migrants and provides food security for those new arrivals, however marginal it may be. It is usually conceptualized as something that is a necessary process on the way to more ‘modern’ ways of urban living, including the purchasing of food in supermarkets. In the long run it should be eliminated. It is usually enveloped in developmentalist discourse and undergirded with top-down efforts to ‘aid’ locals (often by NGOs). UA in the GS is often seen as a necessary problem that needs to be dealt with as a city urbanizes.

Additionally, UA is seen as part of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) (Jarosz, 2008) which capture ‘a wide array of new linkages between agricultural production and food consumption that differ from “conventional” processes and routes’ (Galt et al., 2014, p. 134). Many UA practices are part of these networks, although in many places around the world, especially in the GS, they are seen as much more ‘conventional’ than in the GN. Additionally, aspects of a broadly defined UA are encompassed by what Galt et al. (2014) termed ‘SIFS’, or Subversive and Interstitial Food Spaces, a phrase that is meant to point to the fact that many activities encompassed by UA subvert the usual use of spaces and places, and are meant to challenge this normative use.

The essential similarity between UA in the GS and GN is that it increases social capital – that food production is important, but not as important as what comes with the process of cultivation. Research to date, very difficult to do, is that the amount of total food produced via UA is not enough to feed the cities of the world, no more than about 15–20% (Pearson et al., 2010; Ackerman et al., 2014; Thebo et al., 2014). But as the shift in discourse in the GN, from UA being for recreational purposes to its greater role in urban sustainability and resilience, there is a convergence with what is closer to the focus of UA in the GS, where UA is a form of social resilience. The overarching unity, and its strength as a social movement, is that UA is a series of processes through which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Defining and Theorizing Global Urban Agriculture
• 2 A View from the South: Bringing Critical Planning Theory to Urban Agriculture
• 3 North American Urban Agriculture: Barriers and Benefits
• 4 A Survey of Urban Community Gardeners in the USA
• 5 Gardens in the City: Community, Politics and Place in San Diego, California
• 6 ‘Growing food is work’: The Labour Challenges of Urban Agriculture in Houston, Texas
• 7 The Marketing of Vegetables in a Northern Ghanaian City: Implications and Trajectories
• 8 Hunger for Justice: Building Sustainable and Equitable Communities in Massachusetts
• 9 Sustainability’s Incomplete Circles: Towards a Just Food Politics in Austin, Texas and Havana, Cuba
• 10 A Political Ecology of Community Gardens in Australia: From Local Issues to Global Lessons
• 11 Urban Agriculture as Adaptive Capacity: An Example from Senegal
• 12 Intersection and Material Flow in Open-space Urban Farms in Tanzania
• 13 Relying on Urban Gardens for Survival within the Building of a Modern City in Colombia
• 14 Regreening Kibera: How Urban Agriculture Changed the Physical and Social Environment of a Large Slum in Kenya
• 15 Farm Fresh in the City: Urban Grassroots Food Distribution Networks in Finland
• 16 The Appropriation of Space through ‘Communist Swarms’: A Socio-spatial Examination of Urban Apiculture in Washington, DC
• 17 Urban Agriculture and the Reassembly of the City: Lessons from Wuhan, China
• 18 The Contribution of Smallholder Irrigated Urban Agriculture Towards Household Food Security in Harare, Zimbabwe
• 19 Community Gardens as Urban Social–Ecological Refuges in the Global North
• 20 Global Urban Agriculture into the Future: Urban Cultivation as Accepted Practice
• Index
• Back Cover