Bringing the city to the country? Responsibility, privilege and urban agrarianism in Metro Vancouver

ABSTRACT

This paper furthers the development of the theory of agrarian citizenship–the bundle of rights and responsibilities underpinning the food sovereignty movement. Through interviews with 34 participants engaged with urban agriculture in Metro Vancouver, Canada, we introduce the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands and, by extension, a relational responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. We argue that urban people, especially those with privilege, should recognize impacts associated with their social-ecological metabolism, and mobilize for food sovereignty struggles—including for the repatriation of lands stolen by colonial dispossession.

KEYWORDS:

• Food sovereignty
• urban agriculture
• agrarian citizenship
• Metro Vancouver
• responsibility
• privilege
• decolonization

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the participants for sharing their time and insights, and Dana James, Will Valley, Robert VanWynsberghe and two helpful reviewers for strengthening our paper. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of British Columbia Public Scholars Initiative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We opt for the language of ‘food providers’ rather than ‘food producers’, in line with critique of the latter term’s association with industrial productivism.

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

2 It is important to note that urban agriculture is decidedly unable to make any contribution to increasing grain crop yields, so the majority of academic studies of urban agriculture focus on vegetable and fruit growing.

3 Inequality between cities also creates differential responsibility at the global scale, where northern cities embody more of the world’s wealth and therefore share more of the global responsibility for closing the rift; however, this discussion is beyond the scope of this paper other than to note that Vancouver in particular is a global city embodying a relatively large proportion of global wealth and therefore responsibility.

4 The names of interviewees have been omitted to protect the identity of the participants and the organisations with which they are affiliated, as per university ethics guidelines.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 767-2015-0073]; University of British Columbia: [Grant Number #6456].

Notes on contributors

Evan Bowness

Evan Bowness is a PhD Candidate in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC) on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. He is a visual sociologist who studies food movements, urban agriculture and agroecology in Canada and Brazil, and teaches courses on visual methods, sociology and film.

Hannah Wittman

Hannah Wittman is a Professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and Academic Director at the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC. Her research examines the ways that the right to food is contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty and agrarian citizenship.