The garden was built but a few years later it lay fallow. He continued, “But if we’d gone around the block and just gotten everybody together and said, “What do you need? What do you want?” who knows?” He wondered if a neighborhood-based decision to build a garden, a community-art project, or some other use would have had a more engaging and lasting presence. Ultimately, Betcher does not want to see more legislation or advocacy purely for gardens, but instead advocacy that promotes neighborhood-based land use decision making processes. Gentrification has been a primary issue for organizers now working under the banner of “right to the city”. Activists have resisted displacement of low-income people and people of color, and have fought for residents’ voices in decision making about the use of land . The Right to the City national alliance states in their platform that they fight for “The right to land and housing that is free from market speculation and that serves the interests of community building, sustainable economies, and cultural and political space” . As Voicu and Been document in their analysis of the impact of gardens in New York neighborhood property values, community and urban gardens can increase property values and thus contribute to gentrification trends. The New Yorker publication sparked several organizations and projects to engage in further conversation on gentrification. About a year before SFUAA’s member Antonio Ramon-Alcala spearheaded the alliance’s release of a position statement on gentrification . The statement both recognized that urban agriculture and gentrification are tied up in urban processes of change, and rejected gardening as a cause though maybe a “Trojan horse” of displacement. The alliance advocates asking critical questions of themselves and believes they “can and should link up our struggles with those of others. Ultimately,gallon pot many of these struggles are about local community control over public resources, and that is a much larger battle.”.
An article published in the Atlantic Magazine, after the passage of AB 551 policies in San Francisco, critiqued gardening in a housing-stressed city and again stirred conversation amongst gardeners and Bay Area residents . San Francisco Housing Development Corporation and others expressed dismay that urban gardens are being promoted in a city with such a shortage of affordable housing and gentrification pressures. Yet, SPUR, formerly the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association and a strong proponent of development, does not agree with the dichotomy, arguing the legislation promotes growing on land that is not likely to be sold for development in the near future . As an urban planning organization SPUR has promoted housing construction, commercial construction, and many other land uses in tandem since its inception in 1910. SPUR gained ground as an influential San Francisco institution after WWII when the organization, led by business-class leaders, pushed for the city’s revitalization through targeted neighborhood demolition of primarily African American communities . Today SPUR remains an influential organization in San Francisco, just opened a branch in San Jose, and plans to open an office in Oakland, making their position on affordable housing and gardening one of importance in the region. For Doria Robinson the issue was clear: “Improve the areas with the people who are there. That’s the key. People who are wanting to gentrify are saying, “You don’t want to develop, you want it to be run down for ever so you can be the queen” We’re like that’s not what is up, we want our hoods to be better, we want them to be beautiful and thriving, and whatever, but we want to be there! To experience this, we want to be a part of this renaissance, not watch it.” . For this reason, Urban Tilth has worked with other organizations engaged in discussions with project managers of the newly proposed University of California Richmond Bay laboratory, research, and teaching campus to insist on community benefit packages and a say in the development process.
In San Francisco’s Bayview/Hunters Point, Betchel again warned, “I worry that one day people are gonna look at these newly fenced in locked, spaces with people they don’t recognize who come across town because they don’t have any land there, inside, bickering about weeds in their raised beds and say, ‘That’s no better than the Google bus that’s around, that’s just disempowering’” . But Betchel, Robinson, and others remain hopeful that urban agriculture as a movement will not turn a blind eye to this tension. As Cadjii explains, it’s just a question the movement needs to be uncomfortable with and yet sit with.Gardeners assert their projects can be part of a broader landscape of movements attempting to reassert community power in societal decision-making around land use and social well being. Organizations like Phat Beets work with neighbors to resist evictions and fight the Oakland gang injunction. Yet they also recognize that urban garden projects can increase property values and become an attractive attribute for real estate interests, thus contributing to gentrification. As gardeners work with other community-based movements they contribute to the coalitional aspirations of those working, conceptually and on the ground, with “the right to the city”. Resiliency is a debated term both in ecology and in the work of gardeners. Much academic work has explored the meaning of resiliency in ecological, agroecological and socio-natural systems, exploring concepts of system integrity, capacity to recover from disturbance or shocks, and stability of systemic basic functions. Originating from work of ecologists who were dissatisfied with climax models of ecosystem function, resiliency thinking gained popularity in the 1970s and later for ecological economists analyzing socio-ecological systems . I will refer to agroecologists, Miguel Altieri and C.I. Nicholls’s use of the term. World peasant farmers still inhabiting agroecological systems offer hope for resilience and varied solutions during change and uncertainties arising from times of disturbance such as peak oil and climate change . Gardeners contextualize the need for resiliency in both the increasing impacts of climate change and the uncertainty of urban social change. In San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland activists concern about resiliency is mirrored in city priorities. The three cities were selected to be part of the first group in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, in which the cities have appointed “Chief Resilience Officers to set priorities and an agenda for a more resilient future” .
Two dominant narratives of resilience expressed by urban gardeners can be traced in the first case to movement and organizing strategies, and in the second case to permaculture. Movement Generation, a Bay area environmental and social justice organization that works with many garden projects, including Urban Tilth and PODER, uses resilience-based organizing as a core principle of their work. In a PowerPoint presentation, Movement Generation explained their resilience-based organizing approach. To address the economic, racial, and ecological injustices caused by a capitalist economic system, Movement Generation’s approach advocates for organizing that engages resistance to power structures that continue to oppress, resiliency strategies to survive ecological and social change,gallon nursery pot restoration of ecosystems and communities that sustain us, and re-imagination of narratives of how we can live. Drawing inspiration from the Black Panthers and MST, they argue that neither conventional campaigns nor isolated projects for community improvement are enough. Instead they value pairing resistance and resilience. The second narrative derives from resiliency in the context of permaculture, also takes a holistic approach to socio-ecological change. For permaculturalists resiliency refers to “the ability of a system to hold together and maintain its ability to function in the face of change and shocks from the outside” . Resiliency lies at the heart of permaculture goals but the tactics to achieve it are often debated as evidenced in the case of the Hayes Valley Farm and interim use. For some resiliency is the ability to build projects and energy in short period of time in response to changes in political or ecological forces. One permaculturalist explained this position as, “Currently we are exploring multiple strategies for gaining access to marginalized space for the establishment of urban agriculture elements – interim-use agreements for public land, the Streets Parks Program, agreements with private land owners. Fundamentally, we are characterizing our organization as lightweight and nimble.” . Many of these strategies contribute to urban land use and decision-making that maintain the authority of owners and their power to use land for financial gain through development. For others, resiliency meant resisting structural forces that did not permit long-term relationships to be developed with the land, which is essential for building social and ecological systems of resiliency. But the majority of permaculturalists take a middle path. While recognizing the potential ecological consequences of not having tenure security they believe there are benefits to be gained. Doria Robinson, of Urban Tilth, is a partner with Movement Generation and a permaculturalist. While she ultimately believes that urban agriculturalists and their broader communities would be better served by secure tenure, Robinson also describes the benefits of gardening on insecure land, “I think we need to be vulnerable… If you are in a reciprocal relationship with the land, you put yourself in a vulnerable spot… And to give back to the land, even if we don’t know ultimately if it’s going to be worth it” . Beyond improving lives and environments in the short-term, tenure insecurity requires people to realize their vulnerability and embrace generosity towards the socio-natural landscape. A primary function of social movements can be to reform and rearticulate state institutions in favor of movement actors .
Food movement activists in the Bay Area have engaged in collaborative food policy councils and other alliances to lobby and advocate for municipal policy change. They have used the resources and specialties of local university urban planning programs to change local regulations regarding gardening. As discussed in Chapter Two, urban agriculture is gaining the attention of planners and city governments across the nation, in no small part due to food movement activism. In the last six years several national publications have documented best practices from various municipalities, making recommendations to planners regarding food system and urban agriculture zoning use definitions, specific areas of policy change, and mechanisms for empowering gardeners and food movements . In the Bay Area, city governments and planners in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose have collaborated with movement actors to enact recent changes to city code, general plans, and municipal programming, extending the reach of urban agriculture in all three cities. Urban agriculture is of interest to a variety of city agencies not only for its potential impact on sustainability and resiliency, food security, mental health, and community beautification and safety, but also for its impacts on economic development , city branding, and urban entrepreneurialism. How these collaborations have unfolded over the last five years speaks to both the trajectory of urban governance that food movement actors are supporting and to the emergence of dominant social movement strategies that shape land and property through city policy. The context in which these three Bay Area municipalities operate has developed over three decades of urbanization heavily influenced by the processes of neoliberalism. While environmental values and protection have had a strong hold in Bay Area politics for the last century , the growing entrepreneurial practices of American cities have created new challenges and opportunities for gardeners. Increasingly since the 1970s, US urban parks have been funded and managed through public-private ventures, such as the financial aid and volunteer labor support San Francisco Parks’ received from the San Francisco Parks Alliance, formerly the San Francisco Parks Trust and Neighborhood Parks Council . For urban agriculturalists in Oakland and San Jose, community gardens have increasingly become the territory for public-private partnership experiments. These partnerships are emblematic of an entrepreneurial urban form that decreases government spending while seeking to attract, directly or indirectly, investment and growth . In San Francisco, alliances between advocates and policy makers have promoted San Francisco as a city on the forefront of urban food production. At the same time the city is in crisis over housing availability, affordability, and rapid social dislocation of low-income residents; economic investment and growth are skyrocketing. Tensions over strategies advocating for entrepreneurial urban policies, such as AB 551 or the Recreation and Parks Department’s recent Pay to Play, both of which were discussed in my introduction, have elicited fiery debate amongst movement actors and city residents in the summer and fall of 2014.