Surveying the Landscape of Urban Agriculture's Land Politics: Civic, Ecological, Heritage-Based, Justice-Driven, and Market-Oriented Fields
K. Michelle Glowa, Antonio Roman-Alcalá
Urban Farm DB summary
A chapter examining the politics that shape land-access strategies and dynamics in urban agriculture (UA) through five heuristic categories—Civic, Ecological, Heritage-based, Justice-driven, and Market-oriented. These categories are used to trace how different lineages of urban agroecology intersect to produce existing UA land politics, agroecological dynamics, and their interrelations. The chapter surveys various UA projects and instances, tracing their histories of land access, land politics, and agroecology across different lineages of practice. It notes that while Civic UA tends to comply with land-use normalization, all garden projects retain the potential to destabilize the meaning of land and its agricultural use, and that the Civic field is hegemonic in land politics but not exclusively so. Justice-driven projects, the chapter finds, often arise from long-term patterns of marginalization in urban contexts and operate on principles grounded in participants' lived experiences and analyses of injustice.