Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, community development, and connections to broader social change efforts. The literature suggests, however, caution in automatically conflating urban agriculture’s social benefits with the goals of food justice. Urban agriculture may reinforce and deepen societal inequities by benefitting better resourced organizations and the propertied class and contributing to the displacement of lower-income households. The precariousness of land access for urban agriculture is another limitation, particularly for disadvantaged communities. Planners have recently begun to pay increased attention to urban agriculture but should more explicitly support the goals of food justice in t...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01944363.2017.1322914

The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

Geographies of food banks have focused predominantly on issues of neoliberal political-economy and food insecurity. In this paper, we trace alternative understandings of food banking – as spaces of care, and as liminal spaces of encounter capable of incubating political and ethical values, practices and subjectivities that challenge neoliberal austerity. Our aim is to develop a conceptual approach to voluntary welfare capable both of holding in tension the ambivalent and contradictory dynamics of care and welfare in the meantime(s), and of underlining some of the more hopeful and progressive possibilities that can arise in and through such spaces of care.

/pdf/the-geographies-of-food-banks-in-the-meantime-3jy0qij8z5.pdf

The geographies of food banks in the meantime

Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values a...

/pdf/cultivating-a-sustainability-capital-urban-agriculture-1vprt0vvs7.pdf

Cultivating (a) Sustainability Capital: Urban Agriculture, Ecogentrification, and the Uneven Valorization of Social Reproduction

For more than a decade, co-working spaces have proliferated in cities worldwide. The paper discusses co-working as a critical urban practice because these spaces give support to the rising number o...

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‘Freelance isn’t free.’ Co-working as a critical urban practice to cope with informality in creative labour markets:

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=usp_fac

Socio-spatial differentiation in the Sustainable City: A mixed-methods assessment of residential gardens in metropolitan Portland, Oregon, USA

A growing body of literature conceptualizes urban agriculture and community gardens as spaces of democratic citizenship and radical political practice. Urban community gardens are lauded as spaces through which residents can alleviate food insecurity and claim rights to the city. However, discussions of citizenship practice more broadly challenge the notion that citizen participation is inherently transformative or empowering, particularly in the context of neoliberal economic restructuring. This paper investigates urban community gardens as spaces of citizenship through a case study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It examines the impacts of community gardens on citizenship practice and the effects of volunteerism on the development of community gardens. It explores how grassroots community gardens simultaneously contest and reinforce local neoliberal policies. This research contributes empirically and theoretically to scholarship on urban food movements, neoliberal urbanization, collaborative governance, and citizenship practice.

/pdf/urban-community-gardens-as-spaces-of-citizenship-4epsn43k71.pdf

Urban Community Gardens as Spaces of Citizenship

Actors and networks in urban community garden development

Rising levels of urban food insecurity and diet-related disease have led to many inquiries into the urban food environment and its relation to health. Community-based food activism and urban agricu...

From “Rust Belt” to “Fresh Coast”: Remaking the City through Food Justice and Urban Agriculture

GIScience research has enhanced citizen engagement through advancements in web-based geospatial techniques and qualitative GIS methodologies, which provide opportunities for new forms of knowledge production. This paper draws on two interrelated approaches to demonstrate the ways qualitative GIS and Web 2.0 can provide nuanced analysis and foster collaborations to advance, in particular, food justice goals, which include developing equity in access to quality nutritious foods. First, the authors create a multicriteria food environment index utilizing GIS-based multicriteria modeling to represent food environments as constituted by multiple food sources and access dimensions. This enables visualization of food environment quality and indicates that food environment quality varies within a single neighborhood. Second, they utilize web GIS technologies to capture and visualize volunteered geographic information about urban food environments, demonstrating the importance of citizen perspectives to developing more nuanced understandings of these environments.

Community-Engaged GIS for Urban Food Justice Research

This paper develops a theoretical and conceptual framework for research on urban geographies of food and dietary health. This framework conceptualizes urban dietary health inequities as produced relationally through multiscalar social, political, economic, and biological processes intersecting in place-specific ways. It synthesizes perspectives from spatial analytical food access research, relational health geographies, political ecologies, and critical geographic information science (GIS). Recognizing the importance of relational, dynamic conceptions of both spatial context and human health, it suggests extending current approaches by integrating critical GIS methodologies for producing alternative spatial representations and political ecology's theorization of urban spaces as produced through the intersection of multiscalar social and ecological processes. Reflecting political ecological and critical GIS perspectives, it also emphasizes that (spatial) knowledge production processes materially impact urban environments and human health.

Margaret Pettygrove

Papers

Urban Community Gardens as Spaces of Citizenship

Actors and networks in urban community garden development

From “Rust Belt” to “Fresh Coast”: Remaking the City through Food Justice and Urban Agriculture

Community-Engaged GIS for Urban Food Justice Research

Mapping Urban Geographies of Food and Dietary Health: A Synthesized Framework