Civic engagement advances the idea of creating “public commons” through urban agriculture, an idea related to ecological economics and explored in David Bollier’s book Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. A commons “integrates economic production, social cooperation, personal participation, and ethical idealism into a single package;” it is a paradigm of “self-help and collective gain” and an “alternate self-governance structure for resource management and ‘living well’” . The commons paradigm espouses a political philosophy grounded in grassroots civic activism and proposes different “foundational premises for a new political economy” based on social connections and rediscovering “people’s knowledge” of natural systems in their local contexts . However, we must consider who is able to participate in creating such a space . Who participates, in both policy and urban farming as an activity, is a crucial factor in determining whether outcomes will subvert or reinforce existing power, privilege and structural inequities. As Ramírez states, “While recreating neglected urban spaces into ‘productive’ spaces to grow food is inspiring and beneficial on one level, the prevalence of white bodies inhabiting garden spaces reifies uneven geographies and catalyzes gentrifying forces” . It is the role of inclusive policy processes and watchdog citizen activists to counteract this retrogressive tendency of UA projects. One example of grassroots political action,vertical grow towers working around rather than through institutional channels of policy making, is the Catatumbo Collective’s people-to-people reparations project.
Developed by three immigrant women spearheading an urban agriculture organization in Chicago, the people-to-people reparations map locates minority-run farming projects on a map of the United States, providing a brief description of the project and their specific needs, and then a link or contact info so that visitors can donate directly to the project. They are motivated to publicize agricultural history from a minority person’s perspective and provide a means of public accountability through their mapping project, supporting “those who have borne the brunt of labor exploitation, land theft, and discriminatory agricultural policy” . This project has already led to funding for several farmers’ projects, as well as land gifts to create several minority-owned farms. While the founders recognize the need to continue litigation and action through formal policy channels, they honor the urgency of needing to “start right away” by facilitating “transfers of wealth.” They are also contributing to a more updated database of farmers of color, often underrepresented in USDA farm censuses. There is room for more participatory action research linking researchers to citizens and civic engagement projects . This will allow for data to be shared and transferred more easily, and for the network of UA and food justice participants to strengthen through ties to research institutions and each other. Researchers have an important role to play in addressing data gaps and strengthening the network of urban farmers who have clearly identified needs and are ready to work towards appropriate, measurable solutions.According to the literature, access to urban-produced foods is directly tied to the economic realities of urban farming operations.
Daftary-Steel, Herrera, and Porter make a compelling case for building coalitions to provide the necessary political and financial support to fund UA, as well as tackling the “root causes” of food insecurity through social services. From what limited studies exist, it seems clear that economic viability of urban farms is dependent on income far beyond sales capacity of the urban farm.It is important to communicate to policy makers that urban farms are producing a lot more than pounds of food; they are also “distributing” social goods, creating a “commons”, and providing a connection to nature, community, and education , and these in turn are part of improving community food security. The primary benefits of UA organizations are often education , social integration, economic opportunity, and local environmental quality improvements. Producing enough food to transition a community from “food insecure” to “food secure” is not necessarily going to happen through urban farming alone; however, supplementing food intake with locally produced, healthy fruits and vegetables is an important step in building food security and community health. As such, researchers and UA practitioners may consider generating more robust data on the health, environmental and social benefits of UA to promote among policy makers the idea of UA as a public good, worthy of public investment in the same vein as schools, transportation and education. This is especially true in U.S. cities without strong policies supporting the existence of UA, and with high land values and development pressures.
It is important to acknowledge that urban agriculture is not the only solution to food insecurity and food access and should not be the only forum of support/intervention from policymakers. In fact, in some cases “the emphasis on ‘grow your own’ reinforces self-help and government austerity arguments, absolving government of the responsibility to address the structural and institutional causes of food insecurity” . UA is part of the solutions portfolio to improve food justice and food access, but must be complemented and reinforced by other governance efforts to provide affordable, healthy food through neighborhood groceries, food hubs, cooperative markets, culinary and nutrition education programs, farm to school programs or other means of addressing structural causes of food insecurity . Civic engagement, critical scholarship from multidisciplinary perspectives, and alliances between housing, transportation, and food policy are all necessary components of a UA landscape that improves access and meets the needs of both producers and consumers. In conducting this literature review, using a combination of academic and gray literature, we recognize a significant gap between scholarship and practice. Urban agriculture is not a panacea that will automatically produce all the social, environmental, and economic “goods” attributed in the literature at large without proper structuring or policy frameworks in place. A more realistic, and holistic picture of urban agriculture can be advanced by further rigorous evaluation of what particular organizations are choosing to focus on, how much food they are producing currently , how they are distributing their food, and where they need support. It is not just about whether urban farms have the potential to feed food insecure people, but whether they actually do, depending on locally specific modes of distribution, channels of access, and policy climates. Key ideas from the literature about how to enable socially just, economically viable urban agriculture include a focus on food sovereignty, public investment and/or land rights, “agrihood” developments, and attention to disparate neighborhood race and class dynamics when siting UA operations. Researchers can address key data gaps including the actual tracking and consumption of urban-produced food. We can answer lingering questions including: where does the food go, how much is accessed vs. wasted, what are consumer preferences around accessing urban produced foods, and where do institutions need to fill in gaps in access and/or distribution channels? Results of this literature investigation are next applied to our ongoing study of urban agriculture in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area,container vertical farming characterized by a high amount of urban agriculture activities , yet undergoing rapid gentrification with persistent high levels of food insecurity and income inequality. Despite growing evidence of the diverse health, education, and environmental benefits of urban agriculture, these vibrant spaces of civic engagement remain undervalued by city policy makers and planners in the United States. Because urban farming takes on many different forms and functions, with intended outcomes that may or may not include yield and profits , thriving urban farms and gardens are under constant threat of conversion to housing or other competing, higher-value land uses due to rising land values, and other city priorities.
This land use challenge and threat to urban farm land tenure is especially characteristic of U.S. cities like San Francisco, one of the most expensive land and housing markets in the country. Under the current urban agriculture paradigm in the U.S., food justice scholars and advocates either try to quantify and highlight the multiple benefits of UA or pursue a critical theoretical approach, arguing that urban agriculture can yield unfavorable results if pursued without an equity lens, especially in cities with intense development pressures and gentrification concerns . A productivist focus is problematic, because, while urban agriculture can be an important component of community food security, its other social and ecological benefits are just as, and sometimes more, significant . In this article, we suggest that the current debates around “urban agriculture” in the U.S. often lead to an unhelpful comparison with rural farms regarding yield, productivity, economic viability, and ability to feed urban populations, most notably in the policy arena. Defined in these ways, the radical, transformative potential of urban food production spaces and their preservation often gets lost or pushed to the side in city planning decisions in metropolitan regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area, where the threat of displacement is ubiquitous given high levels of economic inequality and extreme lack of affordable land. In order to facilitate what scholars such as Anderson et al. 2018a refers to as the “agroecological transition,” already underway in many urban food ecosystems around the globe , we argue that applying an agroecological approach to inquiry and research into the diversity of sites, goals, and ways in which food is produced in cities can help enumerate the synergistic effects of urban food producers. This in turn encourages the realization of the transformative potential of urban farming, and an articulation of its value meriting protected space in urban regions. Urban agroecology is an evolving concept that includes the social-ecological and political dimensions as well as the science of ecologically sustainable food production . UAE provides a more holistic framework than urban agriculture to assess how well urban food initiatives produce food and promote environmental literacy, community engagement, and ecosystem services. This paper presents a case study of 35 urban farms in San Francisco’s East Bay in which we investigated key questions related to mission, production , labor, financing, land tenure, and educational programming. Our results reveal a rich and diverse East Bay agroecosystem engaged in varying capacities to fundamentally transform the use of urban space and the regional food system by engaging the public in efforts to stabilize, improve, and sustainably scale urban food production and distribution. Yet, as in other cities across the country, they face numerous threats to their existence, including land tenure, labor costs, development pressure, and other factors that threaten wider adoption of agroecological principles. We begin by comparing the concepts of UA and UAE in scholarship and practice, bringing in relevant literature and intellectual histories of each term and clarifying how we apply the term “agroecology” to our analysis. We pay particular attention to the important nonecological factors that the literature has identified as vital to agroecology, but seldomly documents . We then present findings from a survey of 35 diverse urban farm operations in the East Bay. We discuss the results, showing how an agroecological method of inquiry amplifies important aspects of urban food production spaces and identifies gaps in national urban agriculture policy circles. We conclude by positing unique characteristics of urban agroecology in need of further studies and action to create equitable, resilient and protected urban food systems.Agricultural policy in the United States is primarily concerned with yield, markets, monetary exchange, and rural development. The United States Department of Agriculture defines agricultural activities as those taking place on farms. Farms are defined as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year” . Urban agriculture has been proliferating across the country in the last decade on both public and private lands, as both for-profit and nonprofit entities, with diverse goals, missions and practices largely centered on food justice priorities and re-localizing the food system. Yet U.S. agriculture policy has been struggling to keep up. In 2016, the USDA published an Urban Agriculture Toolkit, which aims to provide aspiring farmers with the resources to start an urban farm including an overview of the startup costs, strategies for accessing land and capital, assessing soil quality and water availability, production and marketing, and safety and security .