UC Davis

This dissertation focuses on the ways that grassroots activists and urban gardeners in three United States cities have advocated for and organized the cultivation of urban land over the last half century. Since the 1970s, organized gardening activities have been sustained in many large cities across North America and beyond. However, community gardens continue to be viewed as temporary land uses in almost every case. Drawing on 55 interviews and thousands of pages of historical documents, I demonstrate how urban agriculture has come to be seen as a legitimate long-term land use in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle in different ways that relate to key organizational decisions as well as to the local culture, economic conditions, and policy context. Comparing the cities’ cultural contexts, I highlight the importance of local civic conventions for organizational advocacy and social movement organizing by illustrating how civic conventions in the form of policy infrastructure have created important leverage points and interfaces between community-based organizations and the local government, while civic conventions in the form of widely shared ideas have been important to movement formation and mobilization. Comparing the political-economic conditions of each city, such as the availability of public resources and policy at larger scales of government, I demonstrate how the evolving role of gardens in the urban milieu has interacted with distinct growth strategies and political processes at work in each locale. In all three cities, the main garden organizations came to emphasize an economic framing—employment in Milwaukee, blight removal in Philadelphia, and neighborhood amenity creation in Seattle. I show how the different organizations’ economic frames have succeeded to varying degrees in convincing city officials that garden sites deserve long-term land access, funding, and other forms of public support. Even though all three frames have been effective in lengthening land tenure, however, economically focused arguments cohere with processes perpetuating inequality in urban environments, which has set the stage for present and future conflicts. Building on my qualitative historical analysis, I use a unique longitudinal dataset of organization-affiliated gardens to demonstrate how the different priorities emphasized by each city’s main garden organization are reflected in the changing locations of their gardens over time. I show how across the cases, specific sustained organizational priorities are connected to different outcomes in the proximity of gardens to low-income residents, immigrants, and people of color. As cities become increasingly important sites of contestation over governance and resource allocation in the 21st century, understanding how community-based organizations such as urban agriculture organizations interact with local government is critical—not only how these organizations secure resources from public sources, but also how they win policy victories in the face of elite opposition. In developing and defending community gardens, the urban agriculture organizations that are the focus of this dissertation provide instructive cases for understanding both the constraints imposed by organizational environments and the potential power that everyday people have to reshape land use patterns and urban systems.