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Community gardens, and more specifically those involving food security, have engendered community asset assessments with this sphere as a focus. Community gardens, as a result, can respond to a range of instrumental community needs such as food security, places for intergenerational and interethnic contact, and community beautification. Expressive community needs, although much more difficult to measure but, nonetheless, equally important, can be met by having community gardens foster social capital bonding and bridging by providing a place and space for residents to gather and connect with each other. Furthermore, expressive needs can be fostered that cross generations, cultures, and knowledge and abilities pertaining to growing food.

Gardens are natural sites to congregate and converse and relax with others. In the urban community gardens of Los Angeles, some of the poorest, most marginalized newcomer immigrants gather to grow homeland vegetables, share community ties, and build new places of belonging. This chapter focuses on life in these urban gardens, where undocumented immigrants who are excluded from other spaces of Los Angeles collectively transform discarded urban patches of ground into oases of freedom, belonging, and homeland connection. On previously abandoned lots, they are producing bountiful vegetables and herb patches, vibrant community connection, and places of great beauty. As they tend to their gardens, they are tending to themselves, practicing care of self, family, community, and the land.

Community has been presented as central to urban gardens’ practices and outcomes. This chapter considers what kind of communities result and whether they can tackle inequality, questioning their potential as an inclusive basis for challenging injustice. Answering these questions requires attention to activities forming garden communities and their spatiality. Informed by relational geography, the chapter challenges simplistic treatments of links between garden, community and place. Case studies from the UK demonstrate how facets enabling gardens to form communities result in exclusivity, unintentionally limiting who can access their benefits. Communities formed through collective place-making are found to struggle to extend across space and time, limiting their potential to reduce social inequalities. Achieving wider change requires work to push spatial relations across time to imagine a better future, and across space towards neighbours, social justice movements and structural causes of injustice.

This chapter examines literature on agrifood studies, which is generally critical of the reformist aspirations of localism. It explains that agrifood literature provides valuable insights into the challenges of sustainability and social justice that localism as a pathway for change faces. It analyzes case-study materials on urban community gardening and urban nonprofit farms and discusses the sustainability and justice challenges of urban agriculture. The analysis shows that the government-oriented protest politics of variable scale and substantial concern with sustainability and justice issues can be found in this field of localist politics.

This chapter focuses on community gardening as an intervention aimed at addressing obesity. Community gardens originally sprang up in the United States as a response to social and economic crises dating back to the late nineteenth century. When these gardens are planted and cultivated by the community, they achieve a variety of key social, economic, political, educational, and health-related goals. A social justice perspective adds an important dimension to community gardens, particularly in its emphasis on community inclusion and participatory democracy. This chapter begins with a historical overview of urban farming before defining the phrase urban garden program. It then discusses the history of urban community gardening and potential pitfalls of community gardening. It also presents case examples that illustrate how community gardens facilitate comprehensive approaches that successfully allow health promotion to be conceptualized along a range of dimensions, including social justice-inspired change.

Chapter five traces the network of actors and storylines involved in creating, advocating for (or resisting), and maintaining urban agriculture in New York City. First, it describes a brief history of community gardening as a social movement in New York City since the 1970s. Then, it explores the vibrant material practices and varied narratives employed by a newer wave of civic practitioners engaging in urban agriculture from the 2000s to the present. The chapter parses this more recent trend into its various threads, which range from a focus on local food production, to commitments to food justice, to an interest in neighborhood stabilization and youth empowerment.

This chapter revisits themes developed in this book and discusses possibilities for rethinking and reinventing new models of garden making in Southern California, and metropolitan regions more generally. It argues that Southern California has always been a place of reinvention, and it remains a place of promise and potential. Rather than trying to create a paradise, one can strive for diverse gardens that promote environmental sustainability and a kind of cultural sustainability that promotes social equality, upholds fair labor standards, and recognizes the need for green spaces of beauty in all neighborhoods and communities. In the United States, people are also embracing shared backyard gardening and challenging restrictive municipal codes and policies that mandate lawn. There is a new enthusiasm for organic vegetable gardening without pesticides and herbicides, for wall gardens in cities where space is tight, and even for removal of lawns. The chapter reviews some of these projects, looking at new efforts in private residential gardens, urban community gardens, and public spaces, all with an eye to keeping immigration and the Southern California region in focus.

This chapter revisits self-reliance, examining it as a lens through which contemporary efforts to increase food access are framed. In it, a community garden at a public housing community is featured, focusing on the ways the gardeners attempted to build community, maintain the garden to meet food needs, and develop programming for youth development. The chapter also examines how this garden functions within a broader landscape of precarity: how they continued gardening despite displacement.

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine Southern California gardens through a migration lens. It argues that we cannot understand these gardens without acknowledging that nearly all the plants, the people, and the water in Southern California have come from elsewhere. The book underscores the sociological implications of migration and gardens, unearthing social, cultural, and economic consequences of Southern California gardens. It shares what the author has learned in her study of paid immigrant gardeners in suburban residential gardens; urban community gardens in some of the poorest, most densely populated neighborhoods of Los Angeles; and the most elite botanical garden in the West. The remainder of the chapter sketches three claims that frame the present study; discusses why sociology has ignored gardens; and describes the methodology used in the study; and provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013) especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of “right to the city” is operationalized as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to, a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space) and b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.

Consumer ethnography is essentially a semiotic enterprise inasmuch as the ethnographer is tasked with making sense of a situation or behavior through interviews and observations (Geertz 1972a & b). Unlike in-depth interviews and focus groups, which take place in the rarefied atmosphere of the recruitment facility, ethnography embeds consumer speech in the complex semantic context of consumers’ lived environments. Ethnographic methods enable development of a rich, multi-dimensional data set that sheds light on relationships between what consumers say and what they do, including the decisions they make about the disposition of goods in the home, the organization of their living spaces, their social interactions and their brand choices. The semiotic analysis of this data set decodes the patterns or codes that structure meaning production across multiple consumer encounters and interviews, identifies variations in the ways consumers modify the codes, and also identifies tensions between the various dimensions of the study. This chapter puts into play the skills and semiotic principles learned in the four previous chapters as they relate to research design, management, execution, and write-up of ethnographic consumer research for marketing. I wrote the reading for this chapter, a case study related to a prolonged ethnography of community gardening on the West Side of Chicago.

In broad brush strokes, gentrification encompasses the redevelopment of working-class communities for more affluent residents. However, in New York City, many of the communities currently experiencing gentrification are also home to food-producing community gardens that have traditionally emerged in response to long-term attempts by City Hall to displace residents of color. How are community gardeners responding to the transformations that come with gentrification and what is the role of community gardens in facilitating, accommodating, or resisting gentrification? To answer these questions, we trace the complex and contested relationship between food-producing community gardens and gentrification in three neighborhoods in the outer boroughs of New York City and discuss the implications of our findings for realizing food justice in New York City.

Chapter 3 considers some of the varied paths that led individuals and groups to work with Faith in Place. While the women and men I encountered during my fieldwork generally supported the organization’s values and messages, additional factors also contributed to their religious environmental involvement. This chapter examines the diverse set of motivations participants brought to their work with Faith in Place, including factors related to religion, racial and ethnic identity, civic identity, and economic opportunity.

Three general steps move civic ecology practices from small local innovations to broader policy innovations: giving a label to the phenomenon (in our case “civic ecology”); becoming more effective as local providers of ecosystem services and contributors to community well-being through partnerships with scientists; and government and larger NGOs formulating policies that allow civic ecology practices to spread. Civic ecology practices are small social or “social-ecological innovations,” whereas larger NGOs and government agencies are policy entrepreneurs who shape the policy environment. Policy entrepreneurs can also bridge between multiple civic ecology practices and larger management initiatives to form regional adaptive and collaborative resource management systems.

Community gardens have a complex relationship with urban growth and gentrification. This chapter draws on the history of Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens, which are well insulated from development pressure today, because dedicated resident-activists advocated for the gardens at critical times and won their preservation. Even while recognizing urban growth as a threat to their gardens, the P-Patch advocates opted for a pro-growth strategy, framing the gardens as good for a growing city. Indeed, the P-Patch gardens have fed Seattle’s image as a green and livable city, which has helped to attract high-income residents and increase property values. While the gardens are secure, and provide tangible benefits to many residents, low-income and other vulnerable residents face displacement from this green gentrification.

The production of urban space and associated neoliberalisation of urban governance limits opportunities for individual and collective freedoms. Such a socio-spatial approach to uneven urban development has influenced a number of authors in their examination of urban community gardens. The research has shown both positive agency and wellbeing benefits of these spaces and also more critical accounts of how the spaces are limited in their ability to truly enhance political freedoms, overcoming asymmetric power relations. In addition to ongoing issues of insecurity of tenure, such well-intentioned community garden initiatives may be seen as light green, weak approaches to urban sustainability rather than a true oppositional discourse of practice, therefore seen to continue neoliberal forms of both unsustainable and uneven development. Using qualitative, visual methods, the chapter focuses on the potential of community gardens to enhance both human agency and ecological sustainability of passive adult users, and active youth and child users in urban areas. The sites chosen are specifically designed with ecological principles and associated features. In order to examine the freedoms valued within these sites, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) is operationalized in five such sites in the UK and Ireland. Various critiques of the CA are addressed, and a particular approach to evaluating human wellbeing, linking the sustainable and just use of urban resources is developed. Such a re-conceptualisation of the CA is significant in realizing the potential role of the sites in enhancing a more expressive mode of being for individuals, along with the enhancement of participative and critical capacity in urban areas.

Broken places, also referred to as red zones, are places that suffer from poverty, crime, war, disaster, and environmental degradation. When they are created by sudden disturbances such as hurricanes or war, we call them “sudden red zones.” When they are created gradually over many years by industries abandoning a city, leaving behind unemployment, poverty, crime, environmental contamination, and neglected open space, they are called “slow burn” declines. In some cases, a lake, city or other social-ecological system crosses a “threshold” after a sudden or slow-burn decline, where ongoing social and ecological processes are seriously disrupted. Community gardening in Detroit and Boston, memorial gardens after 9/11 in New York City, and community tree planting in New Orleans all demonstrate how civic ecology practices emerge in sudden and slow-burn broken places.

Governance refers to how multiple institutions and organizations influence policy. Governance institutions include not only city, county, state, and national governments, but also businesses, community groups, and small non-profit organizations, as well as large national and international NGOs like The Nature Conservancy, and multilateral organizations like the United Nations. Based on multiple studies conducted over many years on systems as different as policing and forest management, Elinor Ostrom concluded that, relative to top-down government, multiple layers of governance do not produce inefficiencies but rather enable societies to more effectively address complex challenges. This is because the various organizations bring a variety of ideas to the table, which become experiments that can lead to better solutions. Community organizations conducting civic ecology practices are one of many organizations involved in such polycentric governance systems. Additionally, civic ecology practices play a role in the civic environmental movement, which as opposed to the more antagonistic environmental movement that emerged in the 1970s, focuses on collaborations among the non-profit and government sector in environmental management and policy formation.

Block clubs were primarily focused on making local improvements. Many block club activities centered on beautification projects. Vacant lots were common sources of concern to block club members because they were unsightly and attracted nuisances such as illegal drug use, garbage, and cars. Many block clubs transformed vacant lots into local assets such as gardens and playlots for children. In order to inspire neighbors to beautify their homes, block clubs regularly participated in larger institutional campaigns and competitions that offered prizes for the most attractive properties. Summertime projects focused on making improvements to buildings and sprucing up yards; in winter, block clubs held Christmas decorating competitions. Such campaigns sometimes promoted government action, such as when the City of Chicago launched an “Operation Pride” campaign. But they primarily depended on private, voluntary participation.

This chapter applies the author’s previous work on property rights justification to the significance of community gardens. After criticizing the traditional Lockean private property justification, which emphasizes economic expansionism, it argues that the experiential basis for legitimate property ownership derives from “belonging,” a felt bond of lived experience over time between a person or group of people and an object, being, or place, and that this can be in tension with the Lockean abstract orientation the author calls “possession.” It is then argued: (i) that the combination of this orientation with technocratic politics has a powerfully reductive impact on contemporary life, making the goods of connection to nature tragically uncommon, and (ii) that certain types of belonging, exemplified by community garden practices, can offer rich, persuasive practical alternatives to the reductiveness of the current path.