Sowing Seeds of Displacement: Gentrification and Food Justice in Oakland, CA

Abstract

Green gentrification is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low‐income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire to serve long‐term residents, activists embody a hip green aesthetic that is palatable to affluent whites and can be appropriated by urban boosters to promote the neighborhood. We use this process as a lens to theorize links between food and green gentrification, highlighting the importance of food to cities’ efforts to brand themselves as ripe for redevelopment, and understand green gentrification as a racialized process tied to cultural foodways. We also attend to the practical stakes for food justice activism, arguing that a clear understanding of green gentrification and food justice activists’ unwitting role in it can help the latter to attempt to mitigate their culpability and seek to develop broad inclusive strategies for locally led development without displacement.

‘Gentrification is not improving my health’: a mixed-method investigation of chronic health conditions in rapidly changing urban neighborhoods in Austin, Texas

“…While some scholars believe that local government adopts tree planting program to propagate gentrification (Alkon & Cadji, 2020 ; Anguelovski et al 2019b , 2019a ), residents felt gentrification reduces the numbers of urban trees which are meant to serve as a natural filter of some environmental pollutants and prevent direct reach of ultraviolet ray from the sun which may have an impact on the skin. One elderly participant gave a scenario where the city government is making efforts to overtake a green patch with the study area and convert it to residential or business land use.…”

Collaborative Concession in Food Movement Networks: The Uneven Relations of Resource Mobilization

“…Many interests compete for land in cities, especially in the context of gentrification [40]. This puts food movements in the difficult position of assessing how to both produce food and develop new spaces of consumption in line with values that often run counter to the pressures of capitalist urbanization to maximize profit [41,42]. In practice, organizations must strategize ways to access land for their work.…”

“How do we measure justice?”: missions and metrics in urban agriculture

“…Nonetheless, even UA organizations with deep commitments to racial justice and equity may contribute, however inadvertently, to neoliberal social processes (McClintock 2014). For example, UA may lead to the revalorization of unused land (Sbicca 2019) and urban "greening" is strongly associated with gentrification (Alkon and Cadji 2018). As a consequence, recent scholarship highlights the importance of "radical allyship" in which "food justice activists develop strong relationships with long-term community members, and together, they work to avoid the latter's displacement" (Alkon et al 2019, p. 798).…”