Moving dirt: soil, lead, and the dynamic spatial politics of urban gardening

ABSTRACT

Urban gardens are often heralded as places for building social, physical, and environmental health. Yet they are also sites of significant conflict based on competing political, economic, and ecological projects. These projects range from radical re-envisionings of liberatory urban spaces, reformist aesthetic and sanitary improvement programmes, to underwriting the production of the neo-liberal city. These projects are based on divergent visions of the garden ground itself, in particular, whether this is soil (the fertile and living source for growing food and social values) or dirt (an inert and even problematic substrate to be removed or built upon for development purposes). These are not fixed or mutually exclusive categories, but are unstable as soil/dirt moves in discursive and material ways over time and space. Contaminants such as lead in the soil contribute to this instability, reframing fertile soil as dangerous dirt. To understand this discursive and material movement of soil/dirt over time and space, a dynamic spatial politics framework is needed that encompasses three scalar concepts: location, duration, and interconnection. This paper applies this dynamic spatial politics framework to interpret the 30-year conflict over the fate of an urban garden in Sacramento, California, that began as a countercultural space and was eventually transformed into a manicured amenity for a gentrifying neighbourhood, and the role of soil lead contamination in this narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighbourhood activism
• archival research
• community gardens
• soil lead
• urban development

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers for helping to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Bethany B. Cutts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7879-526X

Notes

1. Urban gardens can also serve politics between these radical and neo-liberal extremes. For example, in progressive manifestations, urban gardens build community among diverse populations (Shinew et al. 2004, Mendes et al. 2008, Shava et al. 2010, Drake and Lawson 2014), oppose excesses in the agrifood system, and catalyse movements towards more ecologically resilient cities (Smith and Kurtz 2003, Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004, Donati et al. 2009, Emmett 2011, Jermé and Wakefield 2013). Reformist urban gardens steward incremental change in social-ecological systems and promote food security (Smith and Kurtz 2003, Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004).

2. With the use of lead as an additive to automotive fuels, house paint, and a byproduct of smelting, the hazard produced by lead (Pb) concentrations in soils is long-lasting (Datko-Williams et al. 2014).

3. We used Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/web/), a web archiving initiative, to access websites no longer maintained.

4. The Ecology Action Center.

5. Sonoma County’s Green-Bloc.

6. The rest was transported to Buttonwillow, California, for hazardous waste disposal, effectively enrolling the Mandella Garden in one of the signature struggles of the environmental justice movement in California and U.S.-based scholarship (Cole and Foster 2001).

7. For information about the branding of Sacramento as the Farm to Fork Capital, see: http://www.farmtofork.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources [grant number 11-958] and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture [grant number ILLU-875-919].