(Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification

Abstract

Community gardens are fertile fields of complex political, economic and social relations, on both a local and global level. From environmentalism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender studies, transnational migration, commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers an abundance of research opportunities and analytical resources. This article seeks to contribute to the efforts to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment, forces that are rooted in what Foucault identified as a set of sacred binaries which underpin a host of power relations that are “given” and form the unquestioned framework of a given set of power relations. This is therefore a project which is bent on a “theoretical desanctification of space” by a disordering of one set of several sanctified oppositions which can be found in the space of the community garden. The article de-sanctifies space by exploring the historical context of the community garden in New York and Oakland California and posits that the work of the gardener is co-opted into a value regime by a process I call “conspicuous labor”. This process is similar to Veblen's conspicuous consumption except the value generated is not in modeling consumption but rather in emulating class patterns and re-configuring the urban poor as a productive, passive and pastoral.