Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions

Abstract

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, CA, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organisation of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalisation. By focusing on one function or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture's transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help activists, policy-makers and practitioners better position urban agriculture within coordinated efforts for structural change, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

Keywords:

• alternative food networks
• community gardens
• neoliberalism
• Polanyi
• urban agriculture
• urban farming

Acknowledgements

I first developed some of these ideas in a working paper for UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change. Thanks to Ryan Galt, Leslie Gray, and Patrick Hurley for organizing the “Interstitial and Subversive Food Spaces” sessions at the 2011 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle where this paper took coherent form. My sincere gratitude also goes to Rachel Brahinsky, Sandy Brown, John Lindenbaum, Seth Lunine, Nathan Sayre, Dick Walker, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Research took the form of dozens of formal and informal interviews and participant observation while working with two urban agriculture organisations, a food justice collaborative, and a food policy council between 2008 and 2011.

2. Lefèbvre (1991) argued that space is best conceptualised as a triad comprising the following: “material space – the actual space and its forms and objects; representations of space – the knowledge about space and its production; and lived space – the emotional experience of space and the subjective practices that are attached to space” (Eizenberg 2012, p. 767). The production of space, therefore, involves all three interconnected forms. The right to the city comprises the right to participate in decisions related to the production of urban space as well as the right to appropriate already-existing urban space for new uses (Purcell 2002, Shillington 2013).

3. Polanyi calls land, labour, and money “fictitious commodities” because they were not actually produced as commodities for sale on the market. Moreover, they possess qualities that can neither be valued nor regulated by the market, which is why their treatment as simple commodities results in social upheaval. The overexploitation of natural resources and concomitant pollution, the outsourcing of jobs in search of lower wages, and the devaluation of currency all heap havoc on society.

4. A discussion of the social and environmental impacts of the industrial agri-food system is outside of the scope of this paper and has been well documented in a variety of recent popular books (Schlosser 2005, Pollan 2006, Patel 2008).

5. Harvey (2007) describes how overaccumulation of surplus value is absorbed by investment in the built environment and the expansion of the consumption fund (pp. 235–238); market bubbles result in housing booms and the expansion of infrastructure, as well as the building of parks and other forms of urban nature for consumption.