The City After Abandonment

Chapter 1. Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture as Antithesis to Abandonment: Exploring a Citizenship-Land Model

CHAPTER 1 Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture as Antithesis to Abandonment: Exploring a Citizenship-Land Model Laura Lawson and Abbilyn Miller In abandoned cities, vacant land not only signals ongoing depopulation and deindustrialization; it also concerns residents because of its vulnerability to illegal dumping and crime and the associated perceptions of blight. Th ou gh many residents may dream of restoring their neighborhood to its past vitality, realistically all the vacant land cannot be redeveloped to its former uses— residences, industry, or retail and services. With city agencies often overwhelmed a nd u nderresourced, t he r esponsibility fa lls o n r esidents a nd neighborhood organizations to shift vacant la nd f rom being perceived as abandoned to having purpose. The inspiring stories of neighbors transforming trashed lots into community gardens lead some observers to suggest a more intensive application of urban agriculture to r evitalize abandoned neighborhoods. The emerging patchwork of backyard gardens, community gardens, school gardens, and for-profit urban farming suggests a conversion from brownfields to green fields and the promise of food, natural systems, and citizen engagement. Planners and designers, buoyed by the growing body of research, implicate gardening as a w ay to add ress not only vacancy but also concerns about food security, immigrant community cultural knowledge , neighborhood revitalization, and economic development. While “green cities” and “agricultural urbanism” have emerged as evocative ideas driving planning and design proposals, important groundwork remains to add ress t he r eality o f e ffort—the lab or a nd de dication of t he 18 Laura Lawson and Abbilyn Miller gardeners and farmers—and the resources and returns to sustain such efforts . These realities are particular to c ommunity gardening and locally based, small-scale, urban agricultural ventures, distinguishing these from larger, more centralized, market-driven farming efforts w ith considerable capital investment that offer substantively different obstacles and opportunities . Ultimately, the decision to c ommit to c ommunity gardening rests on a desire to act on some personal or community need and some assurance of a return on investment—the idea that this personal commitment of time and energy is worth it. In the absence of rigorous strategies to protect gardeners ’ i nvestments, t hese r eworked la nds r emain v ulnerable to o wners’ selling the land when opportunities for other development arise. Given the need to consider who will steward the land and why and what assurances of permanence such efforts will receive, this chapter draws out the essential elements of garden sustainability: participation, land, and institutional support. Rather than take citizen participation for granted, we develop a citizenship-land model that accounts for the necessary resources to sustain citizen participation, including government commitment to citizen-controlled land and organizational support. Particularly in the context of the city with extensive aba ndonment, a ttending to la nd r eclamation e fforts m atters, a s does the long-term function of the repurposed land itself. If community gardening is to serve as an effective urban revitalization strategy, it must be conceptualized as a process involving long-term participation, sustained material resources, and institutional supports. Urban gardens and farms that are appropriated for traditionally defined “higher uses,” such as economic development , only temporarily address the socio-spatial abandonment of urban neighborhoods. To develop this model, we first look at the historical evolution of community gardens and community-based urban agriculture in order to underscore the motivations inspiring such efforts even as short-term land access and temporary leadership structures discouraged a view of such investment as a l ong-term resource. These land and leadership strategies changed with more recent community gardening efforts, though ambivalent attitudes about land tenure remained a concern, particularly when land development pressures increased. This overview sets the stage for us to explore recent urban gardening efforts advocated in abandoned cities for a range of reasons—from addressing local food scarcity to catalytic engagement intended to grow into a larger social agenda—that still remain somewhat ambiguous in addressing land tenure and citizen control. We concentrate on two abandoned cities in the Midwest: Detroit and St. Louis, both of which have experienced overall Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture 19 depopulation a nd h ave ne ighborhoods w ith c oncentrated v acancy a nd abandoned properties. We chose these cities because, while both have experienced some of the most severe population losses in the nation...