Research & reports

Jennifer L. Barron · Local Environment · Global

This paper explored how neoliberal processes of privatization, state entrepreneurialism, and devolution intersect with community gardens. It argued that certain characteristics and orientations of gardens are more conducive to resisting neoliberalism. These include cultivating producer, citizen, and activist subjectivities, elevating the use value of shared lived space, advancing spatial justice through community access to non-privatized space, and promoting food justice through non-commodified means of obtaining food.

Starecheski, Amy · · United States (New York City)

This chapter examines the contested nature of value, urban citizenship, and property claims through the study of squatting, urban homesteading, and community garden activism in the South Bronx, New York City. It highlights how squatters' initiatives, while challenging neoliberal privatization, could also be coopted into a discourse of individual responsibility in a neoliberalizing city. The research explores how squatters claimed a right to the city based on their labor and citizenship, and used history and property rights to redefine their urban presence amidst renegotiated meanings of debt and homeownership.

Amy Laura Cahn, Paula Z. Segal · ˜The œFordham urban law journal/Fordham urban law journal · United States

This paper argues that the invisibility of community-stewarded spaces, such as community gardens, within urban governance frameworks in North American cities leads to their enclosure and loss. It highlights that marginalized residents often have the least acknowledged claim to urban space. The study suggests that making existing community-stewarded places visible and exposing pathways to access is crucial to prevent enclosure and promote equity.

Rob Moquin, Alan P. Diduck, A. John Sinclair, Iain J. Davidson‐Hunt · Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l alimentation · Canada

This research documented participants' experiences of community-building through community gardening in Kenora, Ontario, Canada, using Photovoice with twelve participants, follow-up interviews, and participant observation. Findings revealed a relational perspective of community gardening and the importance of sharing and learning, but also identified barriers to social capital and ecological citizenship. Future initiatives must address colonial and racial barriers to collaboration and ensure accessible garden locations.

Natalie Hall · · China

This ethnographic research, based on two months of fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, investigated alternative food networks in China, including organic farms, farmers' markets, and garden plot rentals. The study argues that these networks exhibit complex and contradictory characteristics, not neatly aligning with either alternative or conventional food systems. The practice of alternativeness is presented as a pragmatic response to food safety uncertainty and declining social trust, rather than an escape from capitalism or a purely transformative agenda.

Katharina Nowak · Freiburger Geschlechterstudien/Freiburger Zeitschrift für Geschlechterstudien · United Kingdom (London)

This paper explores participation in London's local organic food network, Organiclea, examining how whiteness and coloniality influence engagement in food activism. Using inductive interviews and intersectionality, the study found disproportionate participation of diaspora subjects in the design and operation of local organic food practices. This highlights racialized ecological identity formation within such networks.

Alesia Montgomery · International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · United States (Detroit)

A case study of downtown Detroit theorizes that the history of clashes between racial capitalism and social movements in public space reappears in the contradictory design of market-driven placemaking. This placemaking subordinates the black urban poor, even while incorporating black entrepreneurs and culture. Consequently, it suppresses the ability of African Americans to shape public space, despite the return of the white middle class to central cities.

Matthew M. Mars · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Canada (Vancouver)

Michael Ableman's book "Street Farm" tells the story of how an urban farm transformed vacant lots in Vancouver, Canada's Low Tracks neighborhood into sites for food production, partial community restoration, and nurturing the human spirit. The narrative reveals a tenuous balance between the promises of urban farming and the harsh realities of addiction, hunger, homelessness, and violence often characterizing inner-city conditions. Urban agriculture is presented as a means to sustainably produce food for a city while also feeding the souls of disenfranchised individuals and communities.

Elizabeth Vibert · Journal of Contemporary African Studies · South Africa

This article examines the Hleketani Community Garden in Limpopo Province, South Africa, highlighting the successes of women farmers in reducing poverty and improving health outcomes. Despite these benefits, the research identifies significant structural barriers, including lack of access to resources, unfavorable policy frameworks for small-scale agriculture, and worsening climate change, that hinder small-scale farmers, particularly women.

Lal, Prita · Academic Commons (Stony Brook University) · United States (New York City)

This dissertation studies the relationship between community gardens and gentrification in New York City. It argues that low-income people's efforts in revitalizing their blighted neighborhoods by building community gardens in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to gentrification in the 1990s and beyond. The research points out that real estate developers preyed on people's efforts, and the people subsidized the city's revitalization. It concludes that while gardeners did not cause gentrification, their efforts played a significant role in the process, and stronger policy protections for gardens are needed as city policies permitted gentrification.

Rosalie M. Sharp · Wellesley College Digital RepositoryWellesley (Wellesley College) · United States

Through an interdisciplinary literature review and interviews with stakeholders in the Boston, Massachusetts urban agriculture network — including The Food Project — this study examines the social and historical context of lead exposure in urban gardens in the Dudley neighborhood. It shows that products of structural racism, particularly redlining and disinvestment, created the social and physical environments that allow lead contamination to persist in low-income communities of color like Dudley. An alternate growing material or soil amendment was found to dilute lead concentrations, reduce lead bioaccessibility, and limit fine particle resuspension, and working with The Food Project, these findings shaped gardeners' behavior to reduce lead exposure. The findings on urban soil lead bioaccessibility are presented as contributing to a broader body of research that informs policy decisions such as benchmarks for safe soil or compost lead levels.

Efrat Eizenberg, Simone Tappert, Nicola Thomas, Andis Zīlāns, Kristine Abolina, Theodosia Anthopoulou, Jevgenijs Duboks · · Europe

A book chapter examines the changes and challenges facing allotment gardens in European cities from the perspective of urban political economy, reading these new urban configurations within the macro-framework of capitalism and governability. It traces past and current processes of urban change through the economic, political and spatial lens of the "entrepreneurial city," discusses the impact of urban restructuring on allotment gardens' structure, operation and meaning, and states that political and spatial restructuring in the entrepreneurial city has been accompanied by a sharpening of social and economic inequalities within cities.

Sofya Aptekar · Sociological Forum · United States (New York City)

This 2015 ethnographic study, conducted between 2011 and 2013 in a diverse and gentrifying New York City neighborhood, analyzed conflicts within a community garden. It found that disputes among gardeners over aesthetics and conduct reproduced broader gentrification struggles, with privileged gardeners leveraging resources to impose their vision. However, less privileged gardeners, through cross-class and cross-racial relationships, were able to destabilize hierarchies and defend their alternative visions for the public space.

Eric Holt-Giménez · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Global

This paper argues that the modern food system, shaped by 30 years of neoliberal globalization, has led to unprecedented global inequality, disproportionately affecting people of color. Despite the emergence of a U.S. food movement focusing on various components like urban agriculture, the underlying structures of the corporate food regime continue to control the context of these alternatives, hindering systemic change.

Margaret Ellen Kubek · UWM Digital Commons (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) · United States (Wisconsin)

This thesis explored the food provisioning strategies of year-round and seasonal residents of Phelps, WI. Ethnographic data gathered in the summer and fall of 2011 found that Phelps, WI, is classified as food insecure, leading residents to modify routines for lengthy drives to purchase food, while year-round residents utilized self-provisioning strategies. Newly initiated farmers' market and community supported agriculture projects increased overall food availability, but these efforts were mostly utilized by seasonal residents, with year-round residents finding these options unaffordable and inconveniently scheduled.

Benno Gammerl, Rainer Herrn · sub\urban zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung · Global

This article outlines the theoretical, empirical, and political potential of the tension between affective disruptions of ordered structures and the emotional processing of power-infused spatial relations. It uses urban gardening practices and gentrification debates as examples to demonstrate how analyzing dynamic interactions between spaces and feelings can foster a critical perspective on urbanity, particularly regarding issues of equity. The study focuses on the ambivalent dynamics and effects of emotional-spatial processes.

Ryan E. Galt, Katharine A. Bradley, Libby Christensen, Julia Van Soelen Kim, Ramiro Lobo · Sociologia Ruralis · United States (California)

A study of 111 CSA farms in California examined the effects of competition within alternative food networks. Analysis showed that perceived competition is negatively correlated with CSA farms' profitability, farmer satisfaction, various indicators of CSA's social embeddedness, and two community food security strategies. Competition was found to undermine some commonly held CSA values, specifically fair farmer compensation and strong member-farmer relationships.

Kristina Satterlee · Digital Commons @ Connecticut College (Connecticut College) · India (Mumbai); United States (New York City)

This comparative study of urban agriculture in Mumbai, India, and New York City, USA, utilized in-depth interviews with urban farmers and secondary research. The research revealed that farms and gardens in lower-income areas in both cities had access to significantly fewer resources than their counterparts in wealthier areas. Additionally, both movements struggled to form networks across socioeconomic divides.

Danny Tarng · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

This commentary discusses how nonprofit urban agriculture organizations, central to the U.S. food justice movement, can foster better allyship. It highlights that as the movement expands, the transformation of allies' privilege into empowerment at an organizational level is crucial for ongoing growth and success. The text provides insights into organizational policies and practices that can improve allyship.

Jenny Sjöblom · · Sweden

This study describes the origin and development of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in Sweden, identifying and interviewing organizations and entrepreneurs. While CSA is nascent but growing, with prerequisites for expansion in both rural and urban areas, the study notes implications regarding its accessibility to the broader population that require further exploration.

Elizabete Cristina Ribeiro Silva, Alexandre Brasil Carvalho da Fonseca, Fernanda Pereira Dysarz, Ernani Jardim Reis · Alexandria Revista de Educação em Ciência e Tecnologia · Brazil

This research identifies parameters for school gardens in Brazil, analyzing various experiences and an urban public school case. The study correlates the health of students and farmers in agricultural activities, explicitly pointing out negligences in this regard. It argues that a healthy eating concept from school gardens requires an equally healthy production system, and attention to student safety can highlight farmers' working conditions, which is crucial for food and nutritional education.

Sabine Lefkowitz · · United States (Portland)

This thesis examined the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and outdoor time in Portland, Oregon public elementary schools. The study found that higher SES elementary schools spend more time outdoors than low SES schools. This disparity amplifies existing disadvantages for children in high-poverty schools, suggesting an inequity in outdoor time provision.

Benno Gammerl, Rainer Herrn · Goldsmiths (University of London) · Europe

A theoretical essay (in German and English, from a European context) on the tension between affect that disrupts ordered structures and the emotional processing of power-laden spatial relations. It uses practices of urban gardening and debates about gentrification as its examples, arguing that analyzing the dynamic interplay between spaces and emotions is fruitful for a critical view of urbanity - explicitly linking urban gardening practices to gentrification as an exclusionary dynamic.

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern · Antipode · United States

Research on farmworker food insecurity in the USA points out that food assistance providers often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color do not know "good" food. This study argues that food security and healthy eating are not a matter of consumers making healthy "choices," but rather a matter of class-based and racial differences within the food system.

Margot J. Pollans · Pace Digital Repository (Pace University) · United States

This article examines the various roles law plays in the cultivation of urban agriculture. It argues that despite growing enthusiasm for urban agriculture, serious equity and ecological concerns exist within the forms of modern urban agriculture, recommending that careful strategic planning should align the implementation of available legal tools to address these concerns.