Entrepreneurial endeavors: (re)producing neoliberalization through urban agriculture youth programming in Brooklyn, New York

Abstract

Driven by social and environmental criticism of the neoliberalization of agro-food systems, urban agriculture today enjoys renewed interest throughout the United States as a primary space to engage the politics of food. Using Brooklyn, New York as a case study, I employ mixed qualitative methods to investigate the contradictions that arise in tensions between the goals of urban agriculture and its practice. Education and youth development programming figure prominently in Brooklyn’s urban agriculture movement and provide insights into understanding the neoliberalization of food politics, especially an emphasis on market mechanisms as central to human well-being and the disciplining of youth in the skills and modes of conduct required by the neoliberal economy. Although current trends indicate that urban agriculture youth programming works to (re)produce neoliberalism and undercuts the political efficacy of Brooklyn’s urban agriculture, these projects simultaneously produce openings for building political solidarities.

Keywords:

• Brooklyn
• entrepreneurialism
• food politics
• neoliberalization
• urban agriculture

Notes

1. Author conducted all interviews; names and affiliations have been excluded to maintain anonymity.

2. Agro-food is shorthand for the agriculture and food system(s), signifying an understanding that food and agriculture and linked systems and need to be understood and analyzed as such. Used in the singular to denote the hegemonic industrialized, conventional, globalized, capitalist, etc. system (i.e. traditional big ag); agro-food systems can also include various alternatives.

3. Fieldnotes, 8 June 2010: urban farms provide the only decent option in poorer neighborhoods, this becomes obvious through field work.

4. Fieldnotes, CSA in NYC, Just Food Annual Conference, February 28 2010.

5. Mitchell’s (2008, 11) endearing term for the insidious efforts to implement ‘a certain kind of neoliberal capitalism in which … accumulation – that is the chasing of money – is always a function of dispossession’.