While squatting and the politicized aims of land reclamation remain in common, gardens have become an important part of oppositional spatial politics of radical urban movements not necessarily interested in long-term gardening. Today organized garden projects engaged in occupations may have momentary, short-term, or long-term aspirations of access to garden space. Guerilla gardening continues to be an important frame for numerous garden activists employed and engaged in non-profit supported gardens. One such gardener describes his desire for new kinds of subjectivities of responsible city residents: “the city had planted crabapples here, and they plant plums that don’t fruit. We went in and we cut them during the winter, we cut the tree and grafted it… Yeah, so now all these trees that are in the front here, they used to be crabapples and now they fruit Fujis. But people did that in San Francisco and it’s called ‘misdemeanor vandalism’… So we want to, I guess, elevate the vandalism, and say ‘Ok well if this is vandalism, then, we need more rebels, we need more vandals, because this is the type of vandalism that we want’” . Other activists discussed their first experiences with getting their hands dirty by gardening the land outside the homes in the city owned space on the other side of the sidewalk and engaging neighbors in conversations about growing food in these spaces.
Squatting vacant lots is a popular strategy to gain land access despite the rapid turn-over of properties due to increased development. Squatting is most popular in Oakland,pot with drainage holes where at several locations where I interviewed respondents who were involved in squats. Typically, neighbors or particularly motivated activists see a vacant lot that may be enclosed with a fence and lock. The land may have been vacant for a few years or decades. For example, on one site in Oakland, the garden was located on a lot where a house burnt down over fifty years ago. Many gardeners look up the property with the County Assessor to determine if there are back taxes that haven’t been paid, indicating an absent landlord. Gardeners know they may not have long term access to this space but feel their contribution to the community, the land, and their lives are worth the short term access. For these squatters, the need for healthy food and engaging spaces for youth expression outweigh the boundaries of private property, the lock on a fence or the ideology that says they are breaking and entering another’s property. Gardeners express the need to value the land for its uses to the community above the economic motivations of landlords. Temporary uses of vacant spaces, the neighborhood organizing necessary to transforming these into used, vibrant spaces, and the resistance to their closure when the city or landlord eventually reclaims the land are as important to these gardeners as the horticultural practices they engage in.
In San Francisco and Oakland there is significant overlap between urban gardening and occupy activists. This has brought a new approach to even temporary occupations of potential garden space. For many activists, gardens prefigure the ways land can be valued in non-capitalist markets. But the act of occupying the land can be equally important in shifting cultural approaches to property and land. Several gardeners, who have been involved in momentary occupations of land, cite that their actions are intended to disrupt norms of development. For one gardener of a momentary project: “[The garden] was successful insofar as it challenged this idea of private property being the be-all-end-all of how urban space is divided and designed… and inspired and educated a lot of people around how to garden… and to questions the access to the land that was around them” . Another gardener described the questions she would like people to ask themselves: “I think an occupation is an exercise of one’s entitlement to place and home and to have a voice… We have every right to do it sort of mentality, you know? That asks questions of a lot of the basic assumptions that we make about who makes the rules and what are their rights and what role we have in questioning those roles and those systems” .
For a third gardener, an occupation and garden creation was important in his personal reframing of possibility in the current capitalist context of cities: “we were certain that if we actually picked a fight about land we were sure we were going to be crushed, so when we stayed through the night, stayed through the week, through three weeks, we were like what’s going on… We were able to achieve something we didn’t think was possible” . Many of the claims of occupiers engaged in garden projects are similar to those of occupations in general, i.e. , to the degree that their actions gain attention by reclaiming land, oppositional activities force the public to consider the questions: What should urban space be used for? And who should decide? The case of the Hayes Valley Farm, which became the Gezi Garden, provides an important example of a garden project that turned into an occupation and the controversy that occupations bring up within urban gardening communities. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Central Freeway was damaged and torn down on the 2.2 acre site to later become the farm. In January 2010, after two decades of slow clean-up with the land laying vacant, the Hayes Valley Farm opened. Leading up to the opening of the farm, the ownership of the land had changed hands from Cal Trans to the former Redevelopment Agency, and then to the City of San Francisco’s Office of Housing, and the two parcels had been slotted for future development. In 2009 Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city’s office of Office of Economic and Workforce Development partnered with gardeners from the Urban Permaculture Institute to determine if an urban farm or garden could succeed on the site . In 2010, with a $52,950 grant from the OEWD, the Hayes Valley Farm was started as an interim use project to last between three and eighteen years . In June 2013, the farm closed its doors and the developers Avalon Bay Communities, a national development company, and Build Inc., a small San Francisco based real estate development company, bought one of the parcels for $9 million and made plans to start construction on a housing project .While the leadership team embraced the interim use quality of the project as an opportunity ,large pot with drainage some garden volunteers and other Bay Area activists did not and questioned why the lot should be sold. A protest was organized, “Liberate the Land”, where organizers claimed, “We are being called to defend the land we grow on. While 36,000 housing units are left empty in San Francisco, property owners and developers plan to build condominiums and high-end housing structures at the cost of displacing urban farms and gardens. We can out-grow the old power structures!” This occurred shortly after the Turkish Taksim Gezi Park mass protests objecting to the development of one of the few green spaces left and open to the public in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district. Protesters in San Francisco drew inspiration from the masses coming out to protest the development and the repression of free speech of original protestors. The Hayes Valley Farm was occupied and named Gezi Garden in solidarity with the Turkish activist efforts. Protestors spoke to the necessity of defending urban green space as open space for people to gather and connect with the soil. They spoke of the value of urban land for something other than development. The value of these parcels lay in their use and the ecological contributions to the city. The occupation lasted two weeks, when the gardeners and three tree sitters were forcibly removed from the site. The occupation sparked a powerful and sometimes quite contentious debate within urban agriculture communities across the bay region.
The debate revolved around whether the occupation benefited urban gardening and its prospects in San Francisco. For those opposed, the occupation represented a naïve and short-sighted action aimed at agitating instead of growing food. One garden advocate argued: “I don’t think the people who squatted Hayes Valley after the actual organizers left had a sense of how we were going to get from where they were and where we are as a society to where they wanted us to be which is a society without private property…Their feeling was the land is for the people but that’s not how we’ve set up society… I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon” . For another, the opposition to private property and idea that urban residents should reclaim control of urban green space was even more problematic: “They took it for granted – felt like it was their right to be there. That can’t happen. It’s a privilege to be able garden. The time that it’s there is a gift. That’s the classic example of why land owners don’t want to do this” . As this quote indicates, a major anxiety for many gardeners after the occupation was if this action, or similar ones like Occupy the Farm outside of Berkeley, would scare landlords or municipal agencies out of wanting to work with gardeners. In an opinion piece in the SF Bay Guardian blog, Erin Dage, echoed a question many gardeners brought up in interviews “might it [the Gezi Garden occupation] actually make property owners less likely to allow community-based temporary uses on land awaiting development?” . Pastor Megan Rohrer of the St. Paulus Lutheran Church, the landlord of the former Free Farm, was the project sponsor of the community garden project, which was demolished less than a year after the Gezi Garden occupation in order to make way for new housing . Rohrer, who was very supportive of both their garden project and the important issues that the occupy protestors were raising, still worried “that what happened with Hayes Valley Farm may happen with my garden. I just want everything to end smoothly and peacefully” . Other gardeners appreciated the work of the occupiers, claiming the conversations about development and the evictions of gardens is something the urban agriculture community needs to face directly. Whether or not urban agriculturalists agree that gardeners have an entitlement to urban space, many see the fast paced development market and politics in the region as a threat to their growing projects. A few garden projects have drawn inspiration from People’s Park as an occupation that lasted decades, eventually gaining significant institutional support and legitimacy. As the result of a multi-year process including a nationally recognized land occupation and protest of the planned development of the property, a university community partnership and participatory research project and garden, Occupy the Farm, Students for Engaged and Active Learning, and the Gill Tract Farm Coalition was born. Starting in the late 1990s, when the University of California Berkeley decided to sell development rights to a tract of land that had previous laid fallow in Albany, adjacent to Berkeley family student housing, UC students, neighbors, and urban garden advocates led by Peter Rosset and others at Food First organized to resist the development and advocate for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture training center 1997.OTF continues to highlight the UC’s shift towards increasing privatization while little support is given to projects that support local agriculture, food security, or serving the local ecological and human communities. For example, OTF activists protested the December 2013 hiring of Robert Lalanne as the first ever “vice chancellor for real estate” for UC Berkeley. On October 1, 2014 members of OTF, the student group running the new community garden, SEAL, and the Cal Progressive Coalition occupied the office of Capital Projects holding a sit-in until Chancellor Dirks met with the occupiers and provided several important documents about the Gill Tract development, both of which activists were promised in May but never saw materialize . Soon OTF activists have also developed a connection with the MST, organizing events that connect food and land sovereignty work in the global south to the struggle for the Gill Tract Farm. OTF has organized a learning exchange between Gill Tract and MST activists for 2015.