| Participatory Cartographies for Social Change The rise of new device-based geospatial technologies has created space for a variety of different actors to participate in mapping the world. Participation can take place at many stages, from project design and data collection to map production and distribution. This chapter explores the potentials of these new technologies for different sorts of participation in social change. |
| Locating the traditional economy in Port Vila, Vanuatu: Disaster relief and agrobiodiversity Alternative economic indicators are becoming policy in Vanuatu, particularly focusing on what national policy calls traditional economy. Although this acknowledges livelihoods and customary land in rural areas, urban places receive less attention. This article advances an argument that cities are also home to traditional economies. We draw on concepts of diverse economies and translocality to examine how economic practices typically associated with community activities on customary land are also found in cities where households lack direct access to customary resources. Empirical data come from the authors' fieldwork and participation in community-based organisations in Port Vila, Vanuatu, from 2017 to 2020. The case study presents surveys of agrobiodiversity in 27 urban backyards and livelihood practices of 24 households; and accounts of co-authors' participation in community-based disaster to distribute disaster relief supplies from urban to rural, create urban markets for rural crops and build urban resilience following Ambae Island's Manaro volcano eruptions and COVID-19-related unemployment. This study demonstrates how traditional economies are part of everyday urban life. |
| Visualising and analyzing diverse economies with GIS: A resource for performative research This chapter explores how geographic information systems (GIS) can be used in diverse economies research by first tracing how debates about GIS methods and associated epistemologies have changed since the 1980s. Although initially seen as a tool limited to quantitative spatial analysis, GIS has since expanded in scope to support and extend a variety of interpretivist modes of knowledge. Participatory, qualitative, and critical GIS emerged as some diverse ways to use GIS and spatial data. Scholars using a diverse economies approach participated in this expansion of the scope of GIS. Increasingly, the potential for GIS in diverse economies research is becoming more evident. This chapter discusses three ways that GIS can align with this framework. Previous literature is reviewed on how GIS has been used to visualize and analyze economic diversity and the commons. Original research is then presented to show how GIS can reveal historical layers of economic diversity. |
| Network Analysis of Local Food in California: A Study of Farmers’ Markets in Los Angeles and their Farm Supply Chains This paper examines the geography of local food through a spatial analysis of farms and farmers’ markets. It draws on two themes in the geo-graphical literature on local food, which focus on territorial and prox-imity definitions on one hand and on relationality on the other. Through GIS analysis, this paper explores spatial patterns of ninety-one farmers’ markets in Los Angeles County, California, USA; spatial patterns of 282 farms that supplied a sample of thirty-three markets; and intra-urban patterns of those supply chains. The results show an uneven geography of farms across California that supplied the sampled markets, but also show that farms travel just as far to markets in working-class neighborhoods as to wealthier neighborhoods. Conclusions explain how integrating territorial and relational conceptions of local food provide insights into the complex spatiality of production and consumption, and how local food can be understood as an interdependence between places. |
| Surplus Labor and Subjectivity in Urban Agriculture: Embodied Work, Contested Work This article examines unpaid work within urban agriculture sites. It focuses on the extra work—the surplus labor—that is performed to sustain these sites and how this work relates to subject formation. Land access and subjectivities are widely discussed in the urban agriculture literature, particularly in the Global North, but recent research has also identified the continual supply of labor as a crucial issue as well. However, work dynamics of urban agriculture have seldom been the object of analysis, and little is known about the relationship between unpaid urban agriculture work and subjectivity. I argue that surplus labor is useful for analysis because of the surplus value that is produced through urban agriculture. I draw on the theoretical framework of diverse economies to examine surplus labor through an antiessentialist form of class analysis. A case study from New Jersey, USA, is based on two years of participant observation and forty-eight interviews in twenty cities. The case study reveals how surplus labor is performed, the techniques used to appropriate and distribute surplus labor, the subject formation that occurs through this surplus labor, and models of surplus food distribution that emerge from the juncture of surplus and subjectivity. Conclusions point to contested work practices and the embodied experience of surplus production as keys to subject formation. More broadly, it sheds light on the processes through which surplus labor is performed in unpaid informal forms of enterprise and the role that subject formation plays in that labor. |
| Developing a Vacant Property Inventory through Productive Partnerships: A University, NGO, and Municipal Planning Collaboration in Trenton, New Jersey This paper analyzes the development of an inventory of vacant buildings and land in Trenton, New Jersey that resulted from a research partnership between the Rutgers University Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability; Isles, Inc. a Trenton-based non-governmental organization; and the City of Trenton. Participatory research design between university and NGO staff led to a smartphone GIS survey tool that functioned through web and desktop GIS. University students and community residents collected data through a smartphone GIS application and visually inspected almost every property within the city’s boundaries. Although many vacant land inventories have successfully used secondary data, this project required fieldwork to identify vacant properties because data were unavailable through secondary data. The survey was developed collaboratively with the NGO for their use and modification of it in future work, and to understand locally-specific visual markers of vacancy. The data informed the City of Trenton’s vacant property management policy, and served as a foundation for a variety of Isles’ community development programs. While smartphone applications may improve NGO access to GIS, the need for web and desktop GIS to complete data collection and analysis requires expertise and time that pose additional challenges |
| Foregrounding community-building in community food security: A case study of the New Brunswick Community Farmers Market and Esperanza Garden 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). Given that every community has its own political, socioeconomic, and environmental context, the starting point often involves engaging stakeholders—public agencies, nonprofit service providers, and advocacy (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000). In practice, however, developing a multifaceted project can be difficult 142 production because of the challenges of communication, negotiation among multiple stakeholders, and the appropriate direction of resources. Particularly when the networks involve institutions and stakeholders who seek to assist a community , the balance between community capacity building and neoliberal or paternalistic engagement requires careful and open discussion of power in decision-making for program development and evolution (Drake 2014; Harris 2009). |
| Best practices in community garden management to address participation, water access, and outreach 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. Extension professionals can more effectively support community gardens by tailoring their advice to these contexts. |
| From beets in the Bronx to chard in Chicago: The discourse and practice of growing food in the American city |
| Urban greening supported by GIS: from data collection to policy implementation While the multiple benefits of urban greening are known, implementing green projects in post-industrial urban centers—where economic development, community revitalization and job creation are prioritized—requires accurate data that are relevant to local advocates and decision-makers. Municipal tax rolls are often used to identify vacant properties but are not necessarily up-to-date or do not contain detailed attributes about vacant properties. The Rutgers University Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES) partnered with the City of Trenton and Isles, Inc., a local non-governmental organization (NGO), to conduct a unique smart-phone based city-wide property survey that captured property data not available in the city's tax rolls. Spatial analysis of data was completed and compared to a baseline vacant property survey. Having current and accurate data has empowered Trenton to develop a strategy to redevelop their unproductive tax base, and has given an NGO the tools needed to draft a Master Plan Revision to institutionalize the need for green redevelopment. This paper discusses data collection and analysis methodology and recommendations to “green” the City of Trenton. |
| Results of a U.S. and Canada community garden survey: Shared challenges in garden management amid diverse geographical and organizational contexts 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. Results from 445 community garden organizations across the US and Canada reveal common themes as well as differences that are particularly significant across different organizational sizes. The findings suggest that organizers see multiple benefits, and respondents confirmed recent expansion of gardening efforts. Analysis then focuses on challenges, which are closely related to garden management. We address garden losses as well as challenges to routine operation. Key challenges included funding, participation, land, and materials. We developed a typology based on organization size, to reveal distinctions between small organizations (serving 1 garden), medium-sized organizations (2–3 gardens), large organizations (4–30 gardens) and very large organizations (31 or more gardens). These categories shed light on different needs for funding, land, material, and participation. Together, this analysis suggests that community gardens can be linked through the work it takes to sustain them rather than specific causes or outcomes. Community gardens can be better integrated into local food systems through analysis of how people involved with this work navigate these shared processes. |
| Governmentality in urban food production? Following “community” from intentions to outcomes Community-produced spaces such as community gardens are attracting widespread scholarly interest for the potential of not only food production, but also for social, environmental, and educational benefits. Yet community gardens have also been scrutinized as sites of governmentality that produce neoliberal subjects. In this article, six case studies are analyzed as representative of three ways to organize and manage gardens—grassroots, externally-organized, and active nonprofit management. I use performativity theory to examine how definitions and enactments of community can be used to include, exclude, or bridge difference. The analysis highlights some of the specific moments in garden organizing and management that influence participation or resistance to community-oriented urban food production. |
| Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the U.S. Highlights
•Community gardens are often seen as temporary uses of vacant land.
•Gardeners see them as important parts of neighborhoods and cities.
•Local governments and organizations historically planned gardens to be temporary.
•Increasingly, gardeners reproduce those dominant narratives as well.
•Rethinking these transformations can lead to better policy toward vacant land.
Abstract
Community gardens have gained attention and support in recent years because of a range of expected benefits and outcomes, and they are one of many examples of transformations of vacant land into green space. While the improvements to vacant or underutilized land are lauded, the practice of community gardening is underpinned by the assumption that it is a temporary practice on temporarily-available land. This assumption, which is at times implicit and at others explicit, maintains that support for community gardens—technical assistance and especially access to land—can be temporary. Through a genealogy of community garden advocacy in the U.S., we find that a dominant narrative of community gardening as a means to an end has been continuously reproduced for more than a century in large part by government agencies and philanthropic organizations. In recent decades, community gardeners have become key actors in advocacy, and although they portray gardening as a meaningful part of everyday city life, they also reproduce that narrative of temporariness by promoting it as a means to address various issues. We argue that this tension between means and ends—especially coming from community gardeners—is problematic. It is a challenge for community gardeners and the many other producers of green space on supposedly vacant land because their means-oriented discourse takes precedence in the public imagination; it perpetuates the notion that the land is ultimately still vacant. |
