Such coping mechanisms generally shift an additional burden onto the shoulders of urban women, in particular . In addition to expending her energy on food production and jobs in the informal economy, a female farmer may also divert income earned from sale of surplus produce towards the purchase of additional ingredients for a meal; as a Senegalese extensionist explains, “Whatever a woman earns [from her gardens] goes directly into the cooking pot” . A straightforward Marxian analysis of the combined impact of low wages and dispossession from the land can largely explain the rise of urban agriculture and its continued presence in the Global South. Indeed, primitive accumulation is ongoing as Southern countries integrate more fully into the global economy and communally managed property “enclosed” by titling arrangements and emerging land markets. In the North, however, such processes happened longer ago; it is therefore helpful to draw also on the work of Karl Polanyi in order to understand how social rift has produced urban agriculture in the North. Polanyi describes in detail how land, labor, and money are bought and sold as “fictitious commodities”, fictitious because they were not produced to be sold as a commodity. Under the expansion of laissez faire economic liberalism, they are increasingly subject to the whims of the free market . In times of economic crisis, when the market value of the fictitious commodities fluctuates dramatically, an “avalanche of social dislocation” tends to follow . Wages left to laissez faire or free market logic decline as surplus labor enters the market , round flower buckets depressing wages which lowers work and living standards .
Land—and by extension natural resources—valued only as a production input or commodity for exchange can be over-exploited for short-term gain with little consideration of its long-term productivity. In sum, “leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them” . To protect people from extreme social dislocation, a “protective counter-movement” inevitably arises which ranges in form from communal networks of support to government intervention and regulation. With the rise of rapid urbanization during the industrial era, urban agriculture repeatedly arose as part of a counter-movement to protect the population from the social dislocation resulting from “leaving the fate of soil and people to the market.” Subsistence food production was part of the American and European urban landscapes well into the 20th century. As urban areas developed during industrialization, urban agriculture often served as a coping strategy, significantly subsidizing the social reproduction of workers as in the South today. In Britain, the Commons Act of 1876 and various Allotment Acts obliged local governments to provide citizens with space for food production . In the US subsistence production was actively practiced and encouraged well into 20th century in urban centers such as Los Angeles, where chickens, pigs, beans, and tomatoes were common sights in the small yards of worker housing . Community gardens in the US and allotment gardens in the UK grew in number during times of economic hardship and austerity, but not due to household coping alone. Governments often orchestrated the growth of urban agriculture during these crisis periods as a part of a coordinated protective measure. Urban food production served not only to buffer food security, but also to quell potential unrest .
As America industrialized in the late 19th century, a growing pool of unemployed gathered in urban areas. Municipal governments provided garden plots and seeds to stave off hunger and unrest. During the Depression of 1893, the mayor of Detroit launched a so-called Potato Patch plan—later adopted across the US—to provide the unemployed with vacant lots between # and 1 acre each. More than 1,500 families farmed small vacant lots between an eighth- to a half-hectare each on 455 acres . Gardens were intended not only to provide food and employment, but also to create self-respect and to help assimilate recent immigrants. During the Great Depression urban agriculture again provided food and jobs for the masses of unemployed. The New Deal Federal Emergency Relief Administration spent $3 billion on relief gardens between 1933 and 1935 alone. One gardening program in New York City transformed 5,000 vacant lots into highly profitable gardens by 1934 . Garden programs also exploded during wartime. Liberty gardens proliferated in the US during the First World War as a government response to the food riots gripping the nation. Under the guidance of the National War Garden Commission, more than 5 million gardeners cultivated “idle” land. During World War II, under the National Victory Garden Program 20 million gardens produced 40 percent of America’s food by 1944. During the economic recession of the 1970s, “inflation” gardens flourished in America’s inner-cities with a boost from the back-to-the land ideals of the environmental movement and the USDA’s $1.5 million Urban Gardening Program.
During this period community gardeners and activists took over thousands of vacant lots left fallow as industrial and residential capital abandoned US cities . The discourse of crisis driving these programs was used not only to justify urban agriculture, but also to denigrate it as an act of welfare for the poor once crises had passed. As such, crisis discourse helped to obscure the subsistence role that urban agriculture has always played in urban landscapes, as well as to devalue urban agriculture in times of prosperity . Indeed, when the economy improves and adjacent land values rise, urban agriculture is no longer seen as a public good but an obstacle to development. In New York’s Lower East Side during the 1970s, for example, municipal government promoted community gardens as “a productive use of land considered to be relatively useless.” The gentrification of nearby SoHo in the 1980s, however, led to rising land values and a growing interest in development, and eventually to a moratorium of leasing vacant land for gardens and the bulldozing of several squatter gardens. Tensions also arose within the community over whether to use vacant lots as space for gardens or for low-income housing . These tensions between development and urban agriculture are often racialized, as in the case of the South Central Farms. The 14-acre community garden was originally established in 1993 by the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank in an effort to bring healthy food to the impoverished neighborhood. In the now famous case, the gardens were bulldozedin 2006 following a long and nasty legal and political battle between Latino/a activists, a black city councilor, and a white Jewish land owner . 31 Urban agriculture’s relation to social rift does not lie with land alone. Food, even while produced as a commodity in the capitalist agri-food system, functions in a similar manner to Polanyi’s other fictitious commodities. Understanding food as a fictitious commodity like land further clarifies urban agriculture’s ability to mend social rift. Its treatment as a simple commodity to be bought and sold according to market logic effaces the complex weave of relations running through its production, distribution, preparation, and consumption. The rapid transformation of the agri-food system during the 20th century was due in large part to the expanded commodification of food, from patented seeds to artificial ingredients and fast food restaurants. As food has become increasingly processed and packaged, the culture and traditions surrounding food production and consumption have gradually been obscured by the market based ideology of cheap food . The socio-cultural significance of food and agriculture rarely factors into calculations of profit margins; certain social relations woven into the agri-food system—agricultural and culinary knowledge and its cultural significance, for example—are impossible to quantify and either resist commodification or are erased by a commodified agri-food system. Since the middle of the last century, plastic flower buckets wholesale the commodification of food has systematically unraveled many of these existing social relations and created new commodity-driven relations of production and consumption that “undermine the source of all wealth—the soil and the worker” at multiple scales . Farming has evolved into a highly-specialized industry based on inputs and outputs and which engages less than 2 percent of the U.S. population; over-application of agri-chemicals have poisoned farmworkers and created a massive “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico; agricultural and culinary knowledge have been lost; diabetes, heart disease, and obesity have followed on the heels of junk food consumption worldwide. As a protective counter-movement, urban agriculture attempts to mitigate social rift by de-commodifying land, labor, and food. Various case studies in North America have illustrated how gardens are a site of interaction between various ages and ethnic groups, where knowledge about food production and preparation is shared and community ties strengthened .
Urban agriculture produces new commons, by returning—at least partially—the means of production to urban populations. The verdure emerging from cities’ marginal spaces—road medians, infrastructure rights of way, vacant lots, wasteland—signals both a reclamation of what remains of the commons and the creation of new commons from the interstitial spaces skipped over by capital or left fallow in its retreat. While the forces giving rise to it differ between the Global North and South, urban agriculture joins together these tiny tesserae into a fertile mosaic in both places, where gardens grown along the abandoned railroad right of way in Detroit are not unlike those growing alongside rusted rails in Bamako. Goats and cattle graze weeds growing up amid the cement blocks and rebar of all-but-abandoned buildings. A bean patch is tucked in the 3-meter wide strip of road shoulder between the asphalt and the wall of a government building. An abandoned racetrack is a patchwork of vegetable gardens irrigated from a nearby drainage ditch. Industrial brown fields in the US and Europe are transformed into urban green space dotted with community gardens .Social and ecological dimension alone cannot fully explain the rise of urban agriculture in the North. For many, a certain lifestyle politics drives the attraction to the urban farming; “getting in touch with nature” or “learning where our food comes from” are common tropes. As a broader social rift is cleaved by the commodification of land and labor, people experience an internalized dimension of metabolic rift, which I refer to as “individual rift”. Essentially what Marx called alienation from labor and from nature, it manifests as the perception of self as external to the environment. While this dimension of metabolic rift is perhaps the most difficult to overcome due how deeply rooted it is in the social processes outlined above, individual rift can be addressed—and potentially overcome—through urban agriculture more easily than can other forms of rift precisely because it arises at the level of the individual consciousness. Two interrelated forms of alienation are central to individual rift: alienation from labor and alienation from nature. First, individual rift arises from our alienation from the fruits of our labor. As discussed above, the social rift in metabolism arises from the commodification of labor and the separation of the worker from the means of production . What this means is that under capitalist production a wage laborer no longer owns the finished product he or she creates. Rather than producing something for his or her own use, the worker produces it for the capitalist to sell as a commodity to earn profits used to fuel further accumulation. As Sohn-Rethel argues, the root of this alienation lies in the division of intellectual and manual labor, a long historical process cemented at the dawn of capitalism via the rationalization of labor and which intensified individual rift.33 The later “Balkanization of knowledge” into social and natural sciences encouraged the division of labor, further alienating humans from nature as a result of the “inadequate understanding of how these knowledges connect with one another in the process of producing the concrete outcomes in which we are interested” . Due to this division of manual and intellectual labor, the rationalization of production through technological advances and the de-skilling of labor has further alienated the worker from the product and the whole process of production. In short, the more that science enters into production, the less the worker understands about the process of production and the more his or her creative capacity is undermined . Second, the separation from land as discussed in the previous section is central to individual rift. From both ecological and Marxian perspectives, humans simultaneously shape and are shaped by the ecosystems to which we belong. More specifically, we are the nature around us. Nature is, Marx theorized, integral to human life and development .