For these social justice scholars, the universal ideal can be abandoned without being completely lost. Harvey calls for strategic employment of ideals appealing to better processes that are contextualized in concrete geographic, historical and institutional terms . For DuPuis et al, a reflexive approach allows activists to “speculate on some possible practices and processes that might lead to better local food systems” . Food sovereignty actors increasingly have sought justice through translocal connections, pointing to reflexive politics committed to valuing equity, autonomy, and difference. For gardeners who engage with the food sovereignty movement, the land access strategies they engage are conceptually and practically connected to global land struggles against capitalist agricultural and urbanization processes. Urban agriculturalists in the Bay Area connect local struggles for community management of land to broader injustices of urban land decisions and development driven by finance capitalism. The Occupy the Farm organizing discussed in the introduction is an example of this work, yet the urban agriculture movement is not universally committed to food sovereignty. The differing commitments of urban gardeners and their landing strategies are discussed in the next chapter. Throughout the history of urban agriculture, gardeners have adopted a range of strategies from squatting, working with municipal and other public agencies to increase access to public space,black plastic planting pots and renting vacant land to find space to cultivate. The tenure insecurity of these organized garden projects has been and continues to be immense. In their national survey of urban agriculture projects McClintock and Simpson identified a variety of tenure strategies used by contemporary garden organizations .
Looking across the urban gardening movement, the strategies for land access and secure tenure frequently appear to be disorderly, grabbag approaches to gardening. Yet, many gardeners would like to see urban agriculture as a more consistent and permanent feature in the urban landscape. For these gardeners, their land access and tenure strategies are filled with meaning and intention. Gardeners recognize that their strategies are bounded or to some degree shaped by contemporary property relations. Their assessment that property relations are a determining dynamic for the future of their gardens is acute. Many gardeners also contend that they are active participants in shaping the property relations that may determine the fates of their projects. Gardeners stress their projects are making a real impact on how local municipalities are embracing urban gardening as land use, how residents view the use of land for food production, and how gardening can challenge the priority of land value for development. I term the process of decision making gardeners that take in manifesting a land access strategy “landing.” Landing is a process of creating closure, when utopian desires are enacted on the land and preexisting property relations. Through landing gardeners recreate old or develop new socio-spatial relations, setting direction, and foreclosing on other possibilities if only for the moment. This chapter examines the landscape of strategies of land access and tenure used by over fifty garden groups in the Bay Area and analyzes the ideologies behind them. In this this chapter I analyze primary material from interviews and other sources to tell the stories of landing and the property relations gardeners create and contest. In claiming that today’s gardening will persist into the future, urban agriculturalists believe their strategies will move gardening beyond its previously held position as an interim use of land. Furthermore, they contend urban agriculture can be a long-lasting means to construct new social, spatial, and ecological relationships. As such some gardeners wish to and do contribute to enactments of property that challenge neoliberal and ownership based relations of land use that they see as a barrier to better urban forms. Yet, the opposite is a more pervasive trend.
Urban agriculture in the Bay Area continues to be a movement focused on momentary gains, acceptance of impermanence on particular sites, and goals other than enacting anti-capitalist land politics and spatial production. To understand gardeners’ land claims, we must first understand something about private property as it is institutionalized and practiced in the US. Emphasis on private property within contemporary economic policy revives liberal and utilitarian arguments that assert property is a stabilizing and productive social force . Neo-utilitarians draw from Bentham’s thesis that when individuals have clear and secure ownership they feel free to participate in economic activity . Bentham’s assertion is part of what Joseph Singer terms “the ownership model.” Singer argues that this model of property has become the dominant and guiding view of property in social and political life . The ownership model identifies property as a set of rights over particular things and the holder of those rights is the property owner . The set of rights imply that owners have the freedom to use the property, sell it or otherwise transfer title, exclude others from its use, and experience security that others will not attempt to take their property without the owner’s consent. The conditions of full and liberal ownership are an ideal that is frequently not met . The role of government is to attempt to establish legal frameworks in which full and liberal ownership may occur, thus giving owners a sense of security and empowerment. Within the ownership model both space and property are represented as “fixed, natural, and objective” . Property rights rely on spatial boundaries for their enforcement. As such, the freedom to property is conceived as a negative freedom, a freedom from either state or private intrusion . Thus, the model rests almost entirely on the dichotomy between private ownership and state ownership with little explanatory power for situations between or outside of these categories. Nonetheless, the ownership model remains dominant in its influence over property law as practiced in contemporary neoliberal urban spaces . Additionally, the ownership model presents property as static with only two moments of importance: the creation of the right and the transfer of that right. Objective representation of property, space, and law make current property relations “appear prepolitical, obvious, and unproblematic” .
The enforcement of property is possible through the assertion of claims as rights. Blomley cites Laclau and Mouffe as arguing that rights offer a means of acknowledging and measuring power relations in their political and conditional contexts . To demand access to those rights can produce powerful language of “naming, blaming, and claiming” . Rights, as enforced by the state, can be used as a powerful tool of oppression or in the least cause confusion within populations. States choose which rights warrant protection. As we will see in the next section,drainage pot when particular communities value aspects of property other than those protected by law, disjuncture and/or conflict can occur. From perspectives like those of Gibson-Graham that de-center capitalist relations, property can take on complex meanings, as alternative property dynamics may exist within our current society that are not completely outside capitalism nor completely capitalist . The ownership model sits side by side with resistant practices. In these perspectives, property, rather than being a static object, is a dynamic social relation. In the edited volume: Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations, the complex, varied and sometimes contradictory results of private property relations are demonstrated through several case studies . Similarly public property often has multiple and overlapping meanings . Following Gibson-Graham’s lead, Blomley calls this is a process of “unsettling” . In Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property, Blomley argues for the need to “depict property ‘at its loose ends’” thus destabilizing property as it is conceived in the ownership model, which occupies a hegemonic place in today’s society . Similarly in an effort to describe private property as untotalized, Rose describes property relations as plural, interrelated and unfixed . She coins the term “unreal estate” to describe when people make property claims or recognize others’ claims despite their knowledge that these claims are legally illegitimate. Hardt andNegri describe the commons as a project beyond the public/private dichotomy. Blomley offers this example: in Vancouver private gardeners are planting beyond their yards by taking over the soil in the space between the sidewalk and street. In particular, an artist collective used this space to place an old bathtub and other creative planters as a way to disrupt ideas of normal use of the space. The legal categories of private and public space had little relevance to these gardeners who used land in their daily practices. By analyzing these property practices, we can see property enacted more as a continual and somewhat open process of doing rather than a closed collection of laws . Property is manifested through story telling or complicated forms of communication, what Rose calls “persuasion”. Here she examines the cultural question of how particular stories and ideas of property are created and maintained through concrete practices. Recent analysis of environmental networks also shows the power of the narrative-network in creating communities of change .
Ingerson challenges the notion that most land in US cities is either private or public by suggesting that the actual practices of new experimental forms of ownership such as land trusts, neighborhood managed parks, limited-equity housing cooperatives, and community supported agriculture do not neatly fit into a public/private dichotomy. Instead these forms promote collective claims, management and ownership, forming what Ingerson called urban commons. As Blomley argues, “rather than settling social life, property emerges as a site for moral and political ambiguity, contest, and struggle” . Thus property can become both a site of resistance, a tool of resistance, and that which must be resisted. For the gardeners in this dissertation, property is all three: a place to enact other worlds, a tool to draw attention to contemporary social problems, and an obstacle to the work gardeners desire to do. Landing describes how property becomes a political tool, site, or instigator of conflict. The following section explores these landing strategies. Through description of landing, I analyze enactments of property in the actions and discourses of urban gardeners themselves. In my study of Bay Area urban gardeners and organized garden projects, I found a variety of land tenure arrangements are represented, . The forty organized garden projects represented are only a sample of the hundreds of projects across the region. This selection contains many of the most prominent projects as well as some that are fairly unknown and captures the variation in garden organization and tenure arrangements while documenting major trends. The descriptions that follow demonstrate the diversity of the urban agricultural projects currently existing in the region. Of the thirty seven garden projects that were not part of municipal run community gardening programs, twenty-two were non-profit organizations, six were businesses, social enterprises or private enterprises designed to engage the broader community, eight were community groups or collectives not affiliated with nonprofits, and two were sponsored governmental programs. Twenty-two of the garden projects used or were located on public land, twelve projects used private land they did not own, and eleven projects used land the gardeners or participants owned. Several projects included more than one garden and used different tenure strategies for the different garden sites. All but five of the garden projects were started after 2000.While the sample size in this project is not large enough to draw conclusions from cross tabulations, it is noteworthy that several private businesses used the personal properties of their managers or of individuals who were personal connections. Given the large variation in landowners for parcels used by non-profits and unaffiliated community groups, if a larger sample size were surveyed I do not believe there would be significant correlations between governance and tenure strategy. Alternatively the diversity of strategies employed by gardeners of differing aims and institutional support points to the broader conclusion of this dissertation, namely: that gardens occupy interim spaces in an urban fabric driven by development interests. My focus is to describe how these representative projects approached the questions of land access and tenure.For many gardeners, already preserved or recently acquired areas of public land offer an optimistic and strategic means towards greater tenure security. Using public land for long-term gardening is one form of activist engagement with the state. Yet, garden project advocates engage the state spaces and resources in multiple ways all shaping public opinion on the use of public space. This section explores these strategies including land inventories, and community garden programs and public private partnerships.