From the Ground Up: Community Gardens in New York City and the Politics of Spatial Transformation

Few places contain as diverse and numerous an array of community gardens as New York City. Many of these gardens trace their histories back to 1970s policy allowing residents to redevelop vacant lots. With New York's subsequent economic resurgence, especially during the Guiliani mayoral term in the 1990s, the city mounted an effort to reclaim these spaces for the development of new housing. This mobilized a variety of actors to defend the gardens, including neighborhood residents, several well-known New Yorkers (most notably Bette Midler), and nongovernmental groups including Green Guerillas, the Trust for Public Land, and the New York City Community Garden Coalition. What kind of politics and political subjects did these struggles engender? How has the production of garden spaces differed from or contested the forces of commercial development that have shaped New York over the last two decades? From the Ground Up, written by Efrat Eizenberg of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, focuses squarely on these questions, drawing on both extensive conversations with community gardeners and observations of garden spaces to theorize the role these gardens play within the spatial production of the largest U.S. city. Eizenberg draws heavily on the work of Henri Lefebvre to argue that New York's gardens are a uniquely antihegemonic space, an “actually existing commons” (p. 103) that produces diverse and communally minded citizens.

Eizenberg is not the first to interrogate the relationship between garden spaces and their urban context. Lawson's (2005) City Bountiful provided a detailed history of urban gardening from the late nineteenth century onward, noting how programs such as the Victory Gardens were designed to improve citizens' self-sufficiency in times of economic hardship. Others have focused on gardens in New York City and elsewhere to understand how efforts to create and defend these spaces redefine citizenship, reshape scalar politics, or even reaffirm neoliberal ideals. From the Ground Up vigorously defends the political potential of community gardens. In contrast to the neoliberal efforts to privatize city lots for upscale development, Eizenberg sees community gardens as resisting the urge to commodify space. They instead provide space for the cultivation of communal identities, as well as practices of celebration and creativity rooted in gardeners' collective labor. In this sense, New York's gardens disrupt the production of urban space under capitalism and provide space for the growth of both commons and commoners in New York's neighborhoods.

From the Ground Up is broken into four main sections. An initial chapter provides historical and geographic context for New York's gardens, beginning with their establishment in the 1970s and concluding with a renewed period of stability in the 2000s. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on how gardens both reflect and shape individual cultural identities and increase residents' sense of ownership over neighborhood space. As expressions of cultural and neighborhood identity, Eizenberg argues that gardens provide both physical and social spaces of self-determination for neighborhood residents. In Chapters 4 and 5, the book turns to gardens themselves as an urban commons formed in dialectical relationship with the political consciousness of their gardeners. New York's gardens follow a variety of models, ranging from expertly designed, mostly exclusive spaces to much more democratic and community driven ones. For Eizenberg, the latter of these epitomize Lefebvre's concept of heterotopias, sites of resistance to capitalist development featuring “multiple modalities, mechanisms of development, and ‘diverse socio-political effects’” (p. 103). Chapters 6 and 7 trace the formation of gardens and gardeners as political actors. Eizenberg notes the tensions between the increasing institutional infrastructure needed to support and defend gardens across the city and the grassroots vitality that has proved key to the gardens' survival thus far. Gardens also face increased standardization and regulation, which in the case of gardener-built structures, limits their ability to reflect neighborhoods' cultural identities. Although most gardens are more secure than a decade ago, acceptance into city governance thus brings its own price.

This book is a welcome contribution to efforts to theorize urban agriculture and understand the political significance of its place in New York City. Eizenberg provides a richly detailed analysis of the various actors and urban institutions that govern these spaces. That said, several factors limit the effectiveness of Eizenberg's argument. First, the book tends toward a dualism between gardener/residents and urban elites that presumes both as relatively homogenous groups. Keeping in mind Joseph's (2002) warning against the “romance of community,” more attention might have been given to the tensions within communities around the design and use of garden spaces. Whose visions for the garden predominate, whose are left out, and what might this say about power relations across class, gender, or racial lines at the neighborhood scale? Second, Eizenberg provides a rich and nuanced account of the interplay between gardening groups and the city, but his vision rarely extends beyond New York's boundaries. For a city as sui generis as New York, this focus is problematic. More ties, at least briefly, to garden scholarship and activism in other settings would have enriched this analysis, identifying where political struggles over New York's gardens resonate (or fail to) with garden projects in other large urban areas. Last, although the book celebrates the gardens as alternatives to capitalist development, it spends very little space on the ways that garden activism has interfaced with other right to the city efforts within New York, such as those around housing or employment. The end of Guiliani's term as mayor might have brought about increased security for community gardens, but the gentrification of New York continued apace through the Bloomberg administration. Here, clearer articulation of the broader political significance of community gardens in the city's ongoing redevelopment was needed.

Despite these limitations, From the Ground Up provides a thoughtful analysis of the complex political landscape surrounding New York's community gardens. A Lefebvrian focus on the production of space and right to the city is a useful framework for interpreting Eizenberg's extensive interviews, observations, and history telling. The book's notable focus on communities of color provides a useful bookend to other research that has framed community gardening as based in white, middle-class sensibilities (Guthman 2008). Those in geography, urban studies, agrifood studies, and sociology will find value in Eizenberg's analysis of gardens as a contemporary example of the ongoing production of both commons and commoners, one that challenges neoliberal logics of privatization and neighborhood gentrification.