Urban agriculture and the sustainability fix in Vancouver and Detroit

Abstract

Both Vancouver, British Columbia, and Detroit, Michigan, have significant and growing urban agriculture movements. In this article, I follow recent work investigating the connection between urban agriculture and neoliberalization to determine how these local governments have used urban agriculture in narratives of economic development to selectively pursue a sustainability fix. I analyze how different regimes of local governance have influenced the urban agriculture movements, leading to local, hybridized fixes that adapt to different material and discursive contexts in each place. I argue that in both cities, urban agriculture has radical potential as a grassroots response to economic and environmental injustice, but has also been enrolled as a device by the local state in which the primary goal of sustainability planning becomes enhanced economic competitiveness. Pursuing an agenda of food justice requires examining the larger context and effects of municipal involvement with food movements.

Keywords:

• Detroit
• food justice
• neoliberalization
• sustainability fix
• urban agriculture
• Vancouver

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to the many passionate city officials, planners, and urban agriculture movement participants I interacted with through my research. I also thank Elvin Wyly, Brian Klinkenberg, the political ecology and economy writing group at the University of Toronto, participants at the Canadian Association for Food Studies 2014 Annual Meeting, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term “movement” here for the sake of simplicity, but recognize that there is no singular “alternative food movement” (see Alkon & Agyeman, 2011, pp. 1–20), and therefore no singular urban agriculture movement. In fact, my fieldwork highlighted that a diversity of politics, property forms, social identities, and economic relations are reflected in the wide range of urban agriculture practices (see also Eizenberg, 2012; McClintock, 2011). However, for the purposes of this article, I am examining primarily the structural factors influencing the development of all urban agriculture as a feature of the urban landscape through state policies and practices.

2. This fact supports Jessop’s (2006) claim that spatial (and sustainability, in this case) fixes are fundamentally responding to the political crises of capitalism in addition to the material crises of overaccumulation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of British Columbia through a Faculty of Arts Graduate Award.