Think regionally, act locally?: gardening, cycling, and the horizon of urban spatial politics

Abstract

In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and "urban pioneers" alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates' overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.

Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

“…Several scholars have described how such viscosity has rendered alternative food spaces as White spaces (Alkon & McCullen, 2011;Slocum, 2007), where community gardens, for example, become exclusionary, despite their presumed ability to bring a diversity of people together (Bosco & Joassart-Marcelli, 2017;Drake, 2014). Even well-intentioned activists working under a banner of "food justice" or "reclaiming the commons" can unintentionally contribute to dispossession and displacement of people of color (McClintock, 2018;Stehlin & Tarr, 2017). Even well-intentioned activists working under a banner of "food justice" or "reclaiming the commons" can unintentionally contribute to dispossession and displacement of people of color (McClintock, 2018;Stehlin & Tarr, 2017).…”

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

“…Gentrification can be defined as the 'racial and class reconfiguration of urban, working-class and communities of color that have suffered from a history of disinvestment and abandonment' (Phillips et al, nd). In a sense, place can function as a 'localist trap' (Born and Purcell, 2006) for food justice activists, subverting their gaze away from the larger structural forces that shape on-the-ground realities, and creating a rift between place-based work and a broader urban left pursuing economic and racial justice and a 'right to the city' (Stehlin and Tarr, 2016). In a sense, place can function as a 'localist trap' (Born and Purcell, 2006) for food justice activists, subverting their gaze away from the larger structural forces that shape on-the-ground realities, and creating a rift between place-based work and a broader urban left pursuing economic and racial justice and a 'right to the city' (Stehlin and Tarr, 2016).…”

“…Within the food justice literature, scholars have largely depicted individual farms and gardens as spaces of resistance to gentrification, from which communities can remain in place and even push back against the onslaught of urban neoliberalization (Glowa, 2017;Kressen and Brendt, 2017;Meyers, forthcoming,). Others have taken a more critical approach to the relationship between urban agriculture and development (Heynen et al, 2006;McClintock, 2013;Stehlin and Tarr, 2016), but our study is the first to frame this in terms of green gentrification. It also extends this work by examining more entrepreneurial modes of food justice activism, such as a farmers' market and a cooperatively owned café, rather than the community gardens featured in this previous scholarship about alternative food and urban development.…”

The labor between farm and table: Cultivating an urban political ecology of agrifood for the 21st century

“…UPE can build upon this work to offer a more holistic understanding of the global political economy of food by investigating how human labor transforms nature at each “link” in the food supply chain and how transformations in production processes, in turn, continually reshape labor and nature. Metabolism, in particular, helps us see how nature's labor (e.g., photosynthesis and fermentation) is harnessed by capitalists for the purpose of accumulation (Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, ) and by urban dwellers reclaiming a right to the city (Agyeman & McEntee, ; Eizenberg, ; McClintock, , ; Sbicca, ; Shillington, ; Stehlin & Tarr, ). UPE asks, “who produces what kind of social‐ecological configuration and for whom?” (Heynen et al, , p. 2).…”

“…More broadly, promoting localization as inherently more ecologically sustainable and socially just conflates spatial relations with social relations (Born & Purcell, 2006;DuPuis & Goodman, 2005). As urban gardeners and ethical foodies shape and are shaped by the city through their performance of "an idealized form of local life," the scale of their action is mismatched with the regional and global restructuring that is largely responsible for spatial injustice (Pottinger, 2013;Stehlin & Tarr, 2016). These critiques of "unreflexive localism" (DuPuis & Goodman, 2005) or the "local trap" (Born & Purcell, 2006) parallel broader debates within critical geography around place-based political responses to globalization (Harris, 2010;Harvey, 1996;Massey, 1994).…”