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.
GIS has emerged as an elitist, anti-democratic technology by virtue of its technological complexity and cost. The question of democratizing this technology has been addressed in the GIS and Society literature. This paper addresses the thorny issue of uneven access to GIS and the associated social power it confers. Following the principle that effective access to information leads to better government as well as to community empowerment, this paper explores the issues of providing equitable access to GIS at the grass-roots level. The paper discusses a university/community partnership with the distressed, inner city neighborhood of Metcalfe Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this project, the members of an innercity neighborhood organization were given training in GIS for accessing public information, creating new databases from their own surveys, and analyzing these databases, with the purpose of making them able and active adjuncts to the conduct of city management and the formation of public policy. The paper evaluates the successes and failures of the project. It also explores the nature of GIS usage in this resource poor community organization between 1993±2000.
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