community food economies

Community gardens are of increasing interest to scholars, policymakers, and community organizations but there has been little systematic study of community garden management at a broad scale. This study complements case study research by revealing shared experiences of community garden management across different contexts. In partnership with the American Community Gardening Association, we developed an online questionnaire.

As community gardens expand across the U.S., Extension professionals can support them not only in horticultural education but also in planning and organization. Knowledge of community garden management is helpful in this regard. Existing research focuses on outcomes and criteria for successful gardens, but is less clear about how community gardens work. We use ethnographic methods to examine community garden management in New Jersey. Spatial and social contexts shape key issues such as water access, participation, and horticultural techniques.

Community food system thinking requires attention to the interrelationships that shape the needs, resources, and opportunities within a physical and social context. A comprehensive community food security strategy starts by clarifying the needs and existing resources within a community and developing a suite of strategies—food policy councils, farmers markets, educational programs, urban gardens, and so forth—that will address issues of access, affordability, cultural appropriateness, and ongoing sustainability (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; Winne 2008; Raja, Born, and Russell 2008).

This book examines a diverse range of community food initiatives in light of their everyday practices, innovations, and contestations.

Community food initiatives (CFIs) bring people together to reconfigure their relations with food, place, and one another. Such initiatives are driven by the specific needs, values, and concerns of people in different places who take collective action to re-design and challenge systems of food provisioning. They span the rural and urban, consumption and production, alternative and mainstream, charity, mutual aid, and (social) entrepreneurship.

This entry introduces the concept of food commons in the context of scholarship and activism on commons, commoning, and food systems transformation. I then draw out some key tensions and issues that have surfaced in research on food commons related to questions of materiality, scale, and urban-rural relations. I close with recommendations for approaches that future research can take to address these issues.

Calls to transform food systems along more ethical and sustainable lines are mounting alongside debates about what constitutes transformative change and strategies needed to achieve it. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have argued that transforming food systems requires transforming the governance of food systems, as dominant “productivist” approaches to governance have narrowly invested in corporate priorities while marginalizing the many small-scale food workers that animate our food system.

Reframing both the city as commons and food as commons changes how we think about urban food governance. Food is currently governed as both a privately owned and traded commodity and a public good that should be healthy, safe, and accessible to everyone. This public/private or state/market binary is insufficient for governing the diverse ways in which people provision food; it can also stand in the way of achieving more just and sustainable food systems.

Food sharing and food commons have both been raised as possible solutions to unsustainable and unjust urban food systems. This paper draws upon ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and New York to examine self-organizing in community food initiatives that are to varying degrees creating urban food commons by opening up urban space and its fruits to community use, sharing, and governance.

As ecologically and socially oriented food initiatives proliferate, the significance of these initiatives with respect to conventional food systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the transformative potential of alternative food networks (AFNs) by drawing on insights from recent research on food and embodiment, diverse food economies, and more-than-human food geographies.