Cultivating Just Planning and Legal Institutions: A Critical Assessment of the South Central Farm Struggle in Los Angeles

Abstract

The South Central Farm (SCF) in Los Angeles was a 14-acre urban farm in one of the highest concentrations of impoverished residents in the county. It was destroyed in July 2006. This article analyzes its epic as a landscape of resistance to discriminatory legal and planning practices. It then presents its creation and maintenance as an issue of environmental justice, and argues that there was a substantive rationale on the basis of environmental justice and planning ethics that should have provided sufficient grounds for the city to prevent its dismantling. Based on qualitative case study methodology, the study contributes to the formulation of creation and preservation rationales for community gardens and other "commons" threatened by eventual dismantlement in capitalist societies.

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

“…Some gardens function as places of cultural learning and sharing, where African-American and Latino residents, for example, and/or new immigrants and refugees can use urban agriculture as a way to build intergenerational connections and share culturally specifi c agricultural and culinary knowledge (Airriess & Clawson, 1994 ;Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014 ;Meek et al, 2017 ;Saldivar-Tanaka & Krasny, 2004 ;White, 2011 ). Farmers at South Central Farm in Los Angeles (CA), many of them indigenous people from Mexico, recreated community traditions of agriculture and heirloom seeds (Broad, 2013 ;Irazábal & Punja, 2009 ;Mares & Peña, 2010 ). The farm provided an alternative to gangs and drugs for local youth and a place where the elderly could contribute meaningfully to their community.…”

“…Active participants often become more aware of the complexities of power and the intersections between food and various other social, economic, and environmental issues (Barron, 2016 ). Gardeners at the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, for example, drew on organizing skills in the garden to become advocates for social justice in city decision making (Irazábal & Punja, 2009 ). Detroit's Black Community Food Security Network uses urban agriculture as a strategy to pursue its core values of justice and African self-determination, as it describes on its website.…”

Indicators of Land Insecurity for Urban Farms: Institutional Affiliation, Investment, and Location

“…In the 1990s, the city of New York bulldozed hundreds of gardens in vacant lots that had been developed by community members [10]. In Los Angeles, the razing of the South Central Farm in 2006 was well publicized [21]. When urban farms are well-established and provide valuable Secure tenure farms: When urban farms are able to pay for their own irrigation, and they are affiliated with a school, they are more likely to have secure tenure status.…”

“…Resources and programming are often concentrated in more affluent communities. In the Los Angeles region in 2003, only "10 of the more than 60 official community gardens were located in underprivileged areas" [21].…”

An Agrarian Imaginary in Urban Life: Cultivating Virtues and Vices Through a Conflicted History

“…In this scenario, residents cultivate abandoned or vacant lands without official approval, such as guerrilla gardening in New York City (Schmelzkopf 1995;Staeheli et al 2002) or grass-roots developments in Detroit (Colasanti et al 2012;White 2011). A third category could be included, those with contested authorized status, a key factor leading to the dispute between the South Central Farm and the City of Los Angeles (Barraclough 2009;Irazabal and Punja 2009).…”