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How does culture influence the political and economic processes shaping cities? Socially rich but unprofitable land uses, such as community gardens, create a trade-off between maintaining local character and increasing exchange value. To understand how less profitable land uses can prevail in development conflicts, I examined documents and interviewed advocates for Seattle's P-Patch program, which has secured virtual permanence for its publicly owned garden sites. My historical analysis shows that the P-Patch advocates, endowed with significant cultural capital, appealed to notions of Seattle's place character and leveraged the city's legal-policy infrastructure to institutionalize community gardens within Seattle's urban planning framework. The gardens serve a wide constituency, including many low-income and minority residents, but as neighborhood amenities signifying urban sustainability, they also contribute to gentrification. My findings suggest that residents can leverage culture and local character to protect use value, but equity is far from inherent to this process and therefore requires deliberate consideration.

Urban sustainability is most often measured using a series of social, economic, and ecological indicators. Assessment methods for urban sustainability typically factor in the ecological dimensions of greenspace, such as biodiversity maintenance, stormwater management, and/or air quality—yet indicator schemas that consider only the ecological dimensions largely overlook the social benefits of some types of urban greenspace, particularly community gardens and orchards. This article makes the case that the process of community formation and strengthening that occurs in shared growing spaces is an important element of urban sustainability in its own right. Based on 55 interviews of community garden advocates, policy-makers, and development professionals involved in urban agriculture planning, this article traces the widespread understanding among practitioners that shared growing spaces strengthen social as well as environmental sustainability, though the social benefits are often difficult to measure. The latter concern was most frequently expressed by urban agriculture advocates who, after involvement in the political process, perceived the need for such metrics in order to communicate persuasively with planners and policy makers. The social values of shared growing spaces, at once self-evident to garden advocates and difficult for them to demonstrate with quantitative data, may be theorized by drawing on insights from sociology: A truly sustainable city requires community coalescence among diverse citizens, and such community is fostered particularly well in shared growing spaces.

Using 71 planned supermarket interventions in food deserts, this study assesses the interplay between regional geography, management models, policy drivers, financing, and timing. We find that community engagement and cooperative management models are important factors to opening and sustaining a new store, contributing to subsequent improvements in the foodscape, built environment, and diet‐related health. Findings show that none of the nonprofit or community‐driven stores have closed whereas nearly half of the commercial‐driven and one third of government‐driven cases resulted in canceled plans or closed stores. Our research suggests community engagement is a critical component of effective policies for healthy food access. Future studies may wish to include measurements of community engagement with their case studies to better situate explanatory findings.