In July 2006 in South Central Los Angeles, over 300 gardeners were evicted after public land became private through backroom deals. This eviction became perhaps the most publicized and scandalous urban farming land dispossession in U.S. history. Three years later in Albany, CA in the face of UC Berkeley’s plans to develop their last plot of urban agricultural land, a coalition of over thirty groups began a fifteen-year process resulting in an urban garden and community-university partnership. Today activists struggle to maintain access to the land for the future. Both of these cases, despite being gardens on public land engaging hundreds of community members, demonstrate the insecure access to land gardeners struggle with across cities in the US. Their stories are telling. The Los Angeles South Central Farm garden site, which was over ten acres, was obtained by the City of LA in the mid-1980s through eminent domain for the purpose of creating a trash incinerator facility . Local citizens successfully opposed the building of the incinerator, and in response to the 1992 social uprising spurred by the Rodney King beating and long term effects racism and poverty in south central LA, the site was purposed as a community garden. The local food bank saw the garden as a means to address a lack of food retailers and social marginalization of residents. Garden construction began in 1994. Gardeners, mainly recent Mexican and Central American immigrants and Latinos, farmed 350 plots, producing rich agroecological environments with fruit trees, dense plantings of vegetables and flowers,growing strawberries vertical system and difficult to find herbs and culinary ingredients.
Gardeners came to the farm to grow food for their families, practice or learn agricultural traditions from those still practicing their knowledges, feel more at home and socialize, and support family businesses . In a study of the farm’s biodiversity, Peña estimated there were 100-150 plant varieties, many varieties of which were difficult to find in the US outside of huertos familiares in Latino communities. In 1995, the development company that had lost the property to eminent domain in the 80s made its first attempt to buy back the property, but the City Council did not approve the deal . The developer sued arguing that he was denied his right to buy back the land that was taken with the purpose to build a trash incinerator. In 2004 the gardeners were given their eviction notices after the city as a result of an out-of-court settlement sold the property back to the developer for $5.05 million . In response to the eviction notices, the gardeners organized to form the South Central Farmers Feeding Families. The gardeners and their allies went through a roller coaster journey of successes then eventual failure in the courts. Local residents, internationally known actors, and city politicians supported the effort to keep the gardeners on the land. In April 2006, the Trust for Public Land and LA Mayor Villaraigosa’s office negotiated an option to buy the land, but the developer was now seeking $16.3 million for the property . When the coalition raised the funds to meet the asking price, the developer rejected the offer and, starting in June, barred gardeners from the land and demolition begun . Mares and Peña argue that the struggle over South Central Farm represented a turning point for the environmental justice movement. Latino immigrants had reproduced village-based forms of community self-organization, integrated agricultural traditions into a new place, and challenged undemocratic urban planning and policy. Many city officials had expressed support for the South Central Farmers, a group of Latino residents, including many undocumented immigrants. Still, in the end the city sided with an interpretation of the case as a simple matter of a developer’s right to his property .
The incident demonstrated that many local government officials who claimed to support the work of gardeners would only go so far in standing up to business interests, despite arguments that the sale of the city land was illegal . Gardeners who assumed city land would be secure from development saw the land sold out from under them. Despite the eventual development of the land, the gardeners’ resistance to claims by the developer galvanized a community and demonstrated their political power .In Berkeley, urban agriculture advocates struggled for fifteen years to gain a tenyear agreement for a garden on public land. In 1997 after learning of UC’s plans to develop a large tract of agricultural research land for commercial purposes, a coalition of over 30 groups began resisting the development and proposed instead an urban agriculture research and education center. For over seven decades the farm was used by the Division of Biological Control for research on integrated pest management, but in 1998 a research agreement was made between the UC Department of Plant and Molecular Biology and Novartis, a biotechnology corporation, which granted Novartis the right to license discoveries in exchange for a $25 million donation to the department . As a result, by 2001 the DBC was no longer allowed to use the land and was defunded by the university. Students, faculty and others organized against this “biotech buyout”, leading to the infamous tenure battle of Ignacio Chapela.1 At the same time students, faculty, and community partners were organizing to try to gain a better foothold for sustainable agriculture research at the University. Starting in the mid-1990s, the University of California Berkeley decided to sell the development rights to the unused south side of Gill Tract that was adjacent to UC Berkeley family student housing. UC students, neighbors, and urban garden advocates led by Peter Rosset and others at Food First organized to resist the development and advocated for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture training center 1997.
The UC moved ahead with planning the development at the same time it was seeing unprecedented tuition hikes, increased recruitment of out-of-state students, and increased investment in real estate and development on UC campuses . In 2004 the UC Regent’s released a Master Plan for Developing the University Village with details of Capital Projects Division’s plans to develop the entire tract with a shopping center, senior center complex, and recreation and open spaces . The Associated Students of the University of California and the Student Organic Garden Association at UC Berkeley released statements opposing the development of the land and supporting the creation of a garden/farm . Between 2004 and the early 2010s, the UC sought the necessary zoning changes and approvals from the city of Albany as well as solicited interested developers, including Whole Foods and Sprouts grocery stores.The occupation initially lasted three weeks during April 2012, until UC police stepped in to end the occupation. The land was reoccupied in May, 2013, when protesters again cleared grasses, tilled, and planted. This occupation was broken up by UC police, re-established, and then raided again. At the same time students and garden advocates were working with faculty, such as Miguel Altieri, and the College of Natural Resources,growing vegetables in vertical pvc pipe to develop a community-university partnership for use of the land. Today that partnership project manages a collectively run garden called the Gill Tract Community Farm located on part of the northern portion of the land. In addition, UC faculty continue to conduct agricultural experiments on the north side, while the south side is still slated for development. Occupy the Farm persists as a movement and many of the original occupiers now garden as a part of the partnership. OTF activists have also developed a connection with the MST 2 , organizing events that connect food and land sovereignty work in the global south to the struggle for the Gill Tract Farm. Occupy the Farm works to highlight the UC’s shift towards increasing privatization while little support is given to projects that support local agriculture, food security, or otherwise serve the local ecological and human communities. For example, OTF activists protested the December 2013 hiring of Robert Lalanne as the first ever ‘vice chancellor for real estate’ for UC Berkeley. On October 1, 2014, members of OTF and the Cal Progressive Coalition occupied the office of Capital Projects holding a sit-in until Chancellor Dirks met with the occupiers and provided several important documents about the Gill Tract development, which activists had been promised in May . This action was conducted as a part of a call for National Days of Action for Land and Food Sovereignty put forth by the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. The idea for these days of action came out of meetings at the second US Food Sovereignty Alliance Annual Assembly in 2013. The first was held in Oakland in 2011.
Organizing around land and food in the US context arose as an important theme for Alliance members, as well as for researchers. Food First initiated the Land & Sovereignty in the Americas’ Collective, which in October 2014 released its first informational brief on land and resources grabs in the US . OTF and others engaged in these actions have sought to bring land politics to the forefront of the struggles for sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty. These two urban agriculture projects aimed to enact better food systems, both as a part of contemporary food movements and as a part of the local struggles of their immediate geographic communities. The South Central Farm arose in the mid-1990s in Los Angeles in the same time and place as the community food security movement, as a solution to the hunger and lack of healthy food options in a majority African American, Latino, and Mexico and Central American immigrant community. Organizing for use of the Gill Tract Farm began in 1997 and for nearly two decades has focused on the need for public educational resources to be allocated towards sustainable agriculture. Advocates have stressed the environmental significance of preserving one of the last pieces of farmland in the East Bay. In 2010 the advocacy received a new boost of energy when Occupy the Farm activists identified the farm as important to the broader community project of reclaiming commons. Due to the intensity of their struggle, both of these stories gained positions of prominence in contemporary food movements. These examples demonstrate the fact that gardeners are most frequently not the owners or decision makers of land use choices for the parcels of land that they farm. This disconnect of land ownership and use has led to a significant problem for contemporary urban agriculture: tenure insecurity even on public land. But the stories go beyond highlighting struggles for tenure strictly for gardening. Both stories incite both outrage and debate in gardening communities on the topics of how urban space can and should be used in recreating food systems. Urban agriculturalists construct and define urban utopian projects that intend to reconfigure the city in more ideal forms. Ultimately, each project made food activists distinguish their positions on the appropriate uses, governance, and ownership of urban land in situations where gardeners are not immediately empowered to make land use decisions. Gardens are part of socio-ecological processes that create urban space, and gardeners are a part of the urban movements that struggle for ideal landscapes. Drawing on Lefebvre, urban political ecology understands space as socially produced through a history of practices, representations, and experiences . Gardeners change the production of urban spaces through actions like advocating for use of public lands, changing investors’ decisions on buying particular parcels, or passing legislation to increase access to space for gardens. Adopted as a strategy for change in various movements, community gardens in urban settings can have multiple and contrasting meanings of community and garden . Gardeners debate the questions: What kind of city do we want to live in? How do we want to eat and work, interact with nature, and engage with our neighbors and governmental agencies within that city? Can gardens help us transform cities today or prefigure new cities of our futures? Can we change the economic, political, social, ecological landscapes of cities through garden projects? These questions are central to the project of urban political ecology, which serves as a guiding framework for this dissertation. Urban political ecology brings together theories of production, space, justice and agency to understand socioecological landscapes .