Beyond the Kale

Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City

Kristin Reynolds, Nevin Cohen, Nik Heynen, Mathew Coleman, Sapana Doshi

• Editorial: University of Georgia Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820349480
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Human Geography

Urban agriculture is increasingly considered an important part of creating just and sustainable cities. Yet the benefits that many people attribute to urban agriculture—fresh food, green space, educational opportunities—can mask structural inequities, thereby making political transformation harder to achieve. Realizing social and environmental justice requires moving beyond food production to address deeper issues such as structural racism, gender inequity, and economic disparities. Beyond the Kale argues that urban agricultural projects focused explicitly on dismantling oppressive systems have the greatest potential to achieve substantive social change.

Through in-depth interviews and public forums with some of New York City's most prominent urban agriculture activists and supporters, Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen illustrate how some urban farmers and gardeners not only grow healthy food for their communities but also use their activities and spaces to disrupt the dynamics of power and privilege that perpetuate inequity. Addressing a significant gap in the urban agriculture literature, Beyond the Kale prioritizes the voices of people of color and women—activists and leaders whose strategies have often been underrepresented within the urban agriculture movement—and it examines the roles of scholarship in advancing social justice initiatives.

CHAPTER 1

Seeing Beyond the Kale

In the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Yonnette Fleming of Hattie Carthan Community Garden begins one of her food justice workshops with a tribute to the late Ms. Carthan, a Bed-Stuy neighborhood environmentalist and activist after whom the garden is named. The garden’s trees provide a welcome respite from the rising city heat on this late-summer day. As the participants settle in, Fleming calls attention to the many other gardeners and community members who have participated in the garden’s evolution since its founding in the late 1970s, recounting its history and its importance in this particular community.

Following personal introductions and a discussion about food accessibility in the neighborhood, “Farmer Yon,” as Fleming often refers to herself, helps the participants understand various forms of oppression and the ways these forces shape food and agricultural systems. Discussions cover topics such as how racism, patriarchy, and policies rooted in mainstream economic paradigms lead to limited food access, health disparities, and diminished levels of local control in low-income communities and communities of color—in Bed-Stuy and around the world. Fleming calls on participants to think about how these structures may have affected their own lives and what they might do to confront them. She is accepting of individuals’ personal circumstances, yet unrelenting in her drive to help them move beyond the type of thinking that perpetuates power imbalances at the individual and societal levels, and to help them experience how agriculture can be at once about food, environment, and liberation.

In addition to Fleming’s food justice training sessions, she and other members of Hattie Carthan Community Garden lead regular events that similarly extend the understanding of gardening beyond an activity focused on food. Summer weekends feature two on-site farmers’ markets, one of which is held at the “Herban Farm,” a second, smaller site that Fleming and other community members have recently transformed from a vacant lot into a vibrant green space. Seasonal events throughout the year celebrate the heritage of the African Diaspora and feature dishes that Fleming (who is originally from Guyana but has lived in the neighborhood for many years) and other community members have prepared using eggs and produce from the garden and farm. Fleming also leads regular women-only discussions about health and spiritual wellness, along with women-centric events designed to foster leadership and personal empowerment among participants. Beyond the more obvious themes of these events—food access, urban green space, safe spaces for women—the gatherings also focus on community resilience and, particularly through Fleming’s leadership, ways that racial justice and women’s empowerment can be cultivated through food production, herbalism, community-based markets, education programs for youth of color, and policy advocacy growing out of urban farms. Fleming speaks regularly about how various forms of oppression play out with respect to food and the environment, and she explains, “I’m interested in understanding how women can become true advocates for flora and fauna and justice in the world.”

By calling herself a farmer and helping to maintain Hattie Carthan Community Garden as a public green space, Yonnette Fleming underscores the significance of growing food in the city, particularly in historically low-income neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, where fresh food can be prohibitively expensive or hard to find. She also reclaims the identity of a farmer, as a person of color and a woman, despite the association of agriculture with exploitation among many people of color and despite the stereotype of US farmers as white and male. By growing food, working to break down oppressive social and political systems, and celebrating connections between people and the land, Fleming exemplifies the potential power of longtime neighborhood residents to create change in their own communities.

Advocates of urban agriculture often see city farming as a way to advance social justice, and while this presumption is fraught with paradoxes, particularly with respect to race, class, gender, sexual preference, and community control, activists like Yonnette Fleming demonstrate how farm and garden programs can create food and environmental systems that are more just at their core. In such systems, fresh, healthy, culturally acceptable food is accessible, and environmental and public health risks and benefits are equitably distributed among all communities. In addition, people of color and working-class people are meaningfully involved in food and environmental decision making—and are recognized for their leadership—and governance structures reflect members’ articulated social justice values (e.g., see Bullard 1993; Cole and Foster 2001; Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009; Pellow 2000; Schlosberg 2004).

Beyond the Kale examines these aspects of urban agriculture in New York City, as well as the work of people of color and women activists to attain specific social justice goals. It is not a book about the overarching benefits of urban agriculture; many others have covered this topic. Rather, it is about how urban agriculture groups led by people of color and women should, can, and do reflect more socially just systems, and about the processes through which these goals can be achieved.

Urban Agriculture and Social Justice

Urban agriculture, the act of growing crops and raising livestock in cities and their peripheries, is common worldwide but has expanded greatly in the Global North within the past two decades. In the United States, backyard and community gardens have been joined by aquaponic systems (which integrate fish and vegetable production) and rooftop farms, which have redefined growing spaces and helped maximize urban food production, often in unlikely places. As they have for decades, neighborhood residents have organized to clean up vacant lots, but gardeners have also practiced phytoremediation—cultivating plants to remove soil toxicity—and local youth have learned about ecological systems, healthy eating, and leadership skills from working at urban farms. The scope of urban agriculture continues to grow.

Urban agriculture has also become popular among a wider range of city residents, expanding from longtime neighborhood gardeners and people growing food primarily to meet their dietary needs to include so-called locavores intent on eating food grown close to their homes, entrepreneurs capitalizing on consumer interest in supporting smaller-scale farms, and postcollege “hipsters” steeped in do-it-yourself culture. Networks of backyard farms, along with farmers’ markets and low-cost community-supported agriculture (CSA) models selling food grown within the city, have expanded opportunities for residents to benefit from urban agriculture, even if they do not garden or farm themselves; similarly, value-added products from salsas to pickles made with urban-grown produce have spawned professional training programs, small-business incubators, and community-based economic development projects linked to urban gardens and farms. Media coverage of these activities has helped fuel their popularity, though at times such coverage has favored initiatives led by young, middle-class white people over those led by people of color who have been growing food for decades—like many of the gardeners at Hattie Carthan, including Farmer Yon.

As urban agriculture has expanded, so too has recognition that farming and gardening projects produce multiple benefits, and many studies have documented these benefits in cities throughout the United States and the world (e.g., Draper and Freedman 2010; Blair 2009; Golden 2013; Bellows, Brown, and Smit 2003; Brown and Carter 2002; K. H. Brown et al. 2002; Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; Smit, Ratta, and Nasr 1996).

Joining those who support urban agriculture for more ideological reasons, landscape architects, designers, and urban planners have examined physical aspects of urban agriculture, exploring both the possibilities of creating interconnected, productive spaces within city landscapes (Viljoen, Bohn, and Howe 2005) and a number of architectural, design, and planning innovations to integrate farms and gardens into the cityscape (Gorgolewski, Komisar, and Nasr 2011). In a similar vein, government reports and policy papers on urban agriculture have highlighted its potential to foster self-help (through self-provisioning of healthy food, for example) and to encourage community development—though they have just as often defined it narrowly in terms of neighborhood beautification, greening, and increased property values, sidestepping concerns about gentrification and control of public space. Research and policy papers have added to the growing understanding of urban agriculture as a beneficial part of the city, though not always with full consideration of the broader social and political contexts within which farms and gardens are situated.

Many discussions of the benefits of urban agriculture have focused on the ability of farms and gardens to provide fresh, affordable, and culturally appropriate food in low-income communities lacking conventional food retailers. However, some have also recognized urban agriculture as a way to increase green spaces in neighborhoods with few parks, to foster relationships among neighbors of different ethnicities and ages, to improve neighborhood safety by bringing people and activities to neglected spaces, and to help cultivate leadership and job-related skills among youth and adults (Draper and Freedman 2010; Blair 2009; Golden 2013; Bellows et al. 2000; Brown and Carter 2002; K. H. Brown et al. 2002; Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; Smit, Ratta, and Nasr 1996). Studies have found that farmers’ markets and microenterprises associated with farm and garden sites are ways for participants to contribute to community economic development and supplement individual and household incomes (e.g., Feenstra, McGrew, and Campbell 1999). Observers have also highlighted the racial and ethnic diversity of urban farmers and gardeners in the United States, suggesting that urban agriculture is a way to bring people from different cultures together (e.g., Hynes 1996; von Hassell 2002).

These and other positive effects that farms and gardens can have on public health, community development, and the environment underscore the fact that urban agriculture reaches far beyond gardens as places for food production or neighborhood beautification. This conventional understanding has led to a broadening of networks, policy initiatives, and funding to support it: Farm and garden enthusiasts have engaged in informal collaborations to exchange information and share supplies. Municipal officials have crafted supportive policy statements, created governmental advisory bodies, and taken actions such as amending zoning ordinances to recognize farms and gardens as legal uses of urban space. City governments have adopted policies granting permission to keep small-scale livestock and have amended building codes to allow for rooftop greenhouses, and both municipal and state governments have created tax incentives for commercial urban farming. Private foundations have expanded or created new funding sources for urban agriculture and related activities, and nonprofit organizations and some university-based extension services have stepped up technical assistance and education (see Cohen, Reynolds, and Sanghvi 2012; Surls et al. 2015; Reynolds 2011).

As the benefits of urban agriculture have become more broadly recognized, public consciousness about food access and public health disparities has also deepened, leading to policy initiatives and public discussions about the intersection of socioeconomic status, food, and health. For instance, First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign was created in 2010 to encourage healthy eating and active lifestyles in response to the finding that nearly 40 percent of the children in African American and Hispanic communities were overweight or obese, a higher percentage than for other racial and ethnic groups (Let’s Move 2014). Government agencies and food policy councils throughout the United States have increasingly recognized the connections between access to healthy food and diet-related health issues. At a broader scale, debates about major cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program) in the 2014 Farm Bill elevated public awareness about the links between food access and poverty. This growing awareness of food system inequities has joined decades-old analyses of environmental injustice experienced by low-income communities and communities of color, which gave rise to the environmental justice movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹ Though long recognized by the people and communities who bear the brunt of their negative effects, food and environmental inequities are increasingly part of public and political debates.

Heightened awareness of food system and environmental inequities, along with the growing recognition of urban agriculture’s multiple benefits, has led some supporters to see it as a solution to an array of urban problems. When the benefits of urban agriculture are tied to broader issues like urban sustainability, public health, and economic development, for example, increasing the number of farms and gardens can seem like a win-win opportunity for individuals, communities, policy makers, and cities writ large. The dominant narrative, which sees farming and gardening as part of building more socially just and sustainable cities because they provide food and green space, create jobs, and build community, often obscures the underlying social and political structures—such as racism, classism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity—that give rise to the very inequities that supporters hope to address.

Understanding agriculture as a multifunctional and beneficial use of urban space has often glossed over the historical and contemporary processes that have led to food system and environmental inequities. Residential redlining, government disinvestment, and property abandonment, especially beginning in the mid-twentieth century, have concentrated poverty within many neighborhoods of color, discouraged food retailers from locating in low-income communities, and left vacant lots in low-income neighborhoods throughout the United States. Visions of urban agriculture as a way for communities to manage the effects of economic inequities have been fostered by neoliberal political ideology in the US government, which emphasizes community self-help and market-based solutions to societal problems along with a withdrawal of government services and support for basic human needs. Unavoidably situated within this wider context, urban agriculture can be a release valve for pressures on local and national governments to address deeper societal injustices like racialized poverty, educational disparities, and political disenfranchisement that are at the core of many urban problems (e.g., see McClintock 2013; Weissman 2015a, 2015b). These paradoxes give pause to a common assertion that urban farming and gardening build systems that are socially just.

Supporters have often framed urban agriculture in an overly positive light in an effort to bolster its legitimacy in the eyes of potential critics. In doing so, however, they have paid scant attention to the structures that create inequities or to any possibility of deleterious, if unintended, social or political effects. Recently, however, scholars and activists have begun to question the presumption that farms and gardens have only positive or liberatory functions. Pudup (2008), for example, has proposed that community gardens (which she identifies as “organized garden projects”) have been used to cultivate “citizen-subjects” who may act either in step with or in opposition to the neoliberal state. Others have asked whether urban agriculture picks up where the state leaves off in terms of ensuring social welfare, allowing neoliberalism and market-based solutions to flourish (Heynen, Kurtz, and Trauger 2012; Weissman 2015a, 2015b; Tornaghi 2014). Still others have argued that for urban agriculture to lead to structural change, it must simultaneously be “radical” in approach and engage with the mainstream capitalist market system (McClintock 2013). Scholars and activists have also observed what many would consider unjust race and class dynamics in urban agriculture systems (Cadji 2013; Cohen, Reynolds, and Sanghvi 2012; McClintock 2013; Metcalf and Widener 2011; Crouch 2012; Markham 2014; Meenar and Hoover 2012) and have argued that urban agriculture can mask deeper structural inequities (Colasanti, Hamm, and Litjens 2012; Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Yakini 2013; DeLind 2015).

Thus, beneath the surface of public enthusiasm for urban agriculture lie some fundamentally different understandings of the origins of inequity and social injustice, along with some ideas about how these issues should be addressed. While we generally agree with the recent analyses of urban agriculture in the context of neoliberal political and economic systems, we believe that dwelling on the neoliberal question is not needed in the interest of supporting the work of grassroots groups to address food, environmental, and economic inequity. Rather, examining the structural roots of inequity and contributing to an action-oriented dialogue about how urban agriculture can be (and is being) used to create socially just urban systems are the main goals of this book.

Race, Class, and Urban Agriculture

In addition to debates about whether farming and gardening help solve urban social justice problems in a broader sense, the representation of these activities in public forums presents an inaccurate impression of who is involved in urban agriculture today and how the representation of urban agriculture might connect to advancing racial and economic equity—the goals of many social justice advocates. Urban farming and gardening have long been survival strategies for low-income city residents, many of them people of color, including those with roots in the Global South (e.g., see Hayden-Smith 2014; L. Lawson 2005; Smit, Ratta, and Nasr 1996). However, in the United States, books, magazines, and social media often paint a picture of young white people as the most innovative farmers and gardeners in the post–World War II era, despite the many people of color who have been growing food in their neighborhoods and hometowns for decades and even generations.

For example, as described in chapter 2, urban agriculture has evolved over the course of New York City’s history, sometimes practiced as a subsistence strategy among residents living in poverty, and at other times used to spur community revitalization and development. Since the 1960s and 1970s, community gardening in particular has been concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color (Eizenberg 2013, 2008), and community members such as Hattie Carthan in Bed-Stuy have often led in developing gardens on these sites (see the NYCCGC website). Yet community gardening in the New York of the 1960s and 1970s has often been depicted as a process of “urban homesteading” in which gardeners, usually young, middle-class whites, were modern-day “pioneers.” At best, this narrative ignores the fact that the neighborhoods in which these “pioneers” and “homesteaders” were creating gardens were well-established communities, often communities of color. Worse, it reproduces colonialist mentalities in which imported white culture should be used to “tame” indigenous peoples.

More recently, mainstream media reports have focused on white-led initiatives as drivers of the contemporary urban agriculture movement. News articles have identified a number of mostly young white farmers in New York City as the “new class of growers” (see Stein 2010), for instance, and have described some of Detroit’s white urban farmers as twenty-first-century “pioneers” moving to the economically devastated city to “fight blight” by establishing new urban farms (see “Detroit Foodies” 2013; Midgett 2014). Media pieces on high-tech projects such as rooftop farms and other entrepreneurial urban agriculture initiatives that seek to capitalize on the fashion of growing farm-to-table cuisine have also tended to focus on young, middle-class white people. These and similar pieces have presented urban agriculture as an innovative way to reclaim vacant land, start new businesses, or challenge the industrial food system, yet with scant attention to the race and class dimensions of the movement or of the problems that farming and gardening purportedly solve. Often absent from this narrative is the fact that people of color in New York, Detroit, and many other cities have long gardened and farmed to address the effects of inequity in their own communities.

Recent attention to entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects led by young, middle-class whites may stem in part from the notion popularized by theorist Richard Florida (2002) that members of the so-called creative class—formally educated, young, affluent, and preponderantly white urbanites—are the economic engines of cities. Municipal governments, planners, and real estate developers adhering to this concept have sought to attract members of this creative class to economically depressed neighborhoods as a way to increase property values and tax revenues and ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Seeing Beyond the Kale
• Chapter 2 New York City’s Urban Agriculture System
• Chapter 3 Growing More than Just Food
• Chapter 4 Embodying Socially Just Systems
• Chapter 5 Cultivating Policy
• Chapter 6 Addressing Uneven Power and Privilege
• Chapter 7 Rethinking Scholarship to Advance Social Justice
• Chapter 8 Taking a Collective Step Beyond the Kale
• Appendix 1 Research Methods
• Appendix 2 Elements of New York City’s Urban Agriculture System
• Appendix 3 Urban Agriculture and Community Groups Highlighted in This Book
• Appendix 4 Select Population Characteristics of New York City and Community Districts
• Appendix 5 Urban Agriculture Activities of Select New York City Organizations and Agencies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index