Unearthing the entangled roots of urban agriculture

Jonathan K London,Mary L Cadenasso,Kirsten Schwarz,Bethany B Cutts,Li Schmidt

doi:10.1007/s10460-020-10158-x

Abstract

This study examines urban agriculture (UA) in Sacramento, California (USA), the nation's self-branded “Farm-to-Fork Capital,” in order to highlight UA’s distinct yet entangled roots. The study is based on 24 interviews with a diverse array of UA leaders, conducted as part of a five-year transdisciplinary study of UA in Sacramento. In it, we unearth three primary “taproots” of UA projects, each with its own historical legacies, normative visions, and racial dynamics. In particular, we examine UA projects with “justice taproots,” “health taproots,” and “market taproots.” We use this analysis to understand how different kinds of UA projects are embedded in racial capitalism in ways that transform relationships between people, the city, and food systems. Unearthing these entangled roots helps illuminate UA’s underlying politics, showing how these roots grow in both competitive and symbiotic ways within the soil matrix of racial capitalism. We argue that these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. In particular, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued. However, we argue that there are some prospects for building alliances between the UA movement’s three roots, and that these are both promising and problematic.

Highlights

In cities across the United States and the world, urban agriculture (UA) movements are building sustainable and equitable urban agricultural systems that confront structural factors like structural racism, uneven capital accumulation, and environmental injustice (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Alkon and Mares 2012; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010)
Recent work has drawn on theories of racial capitalism (Johnson and Lubin 2017; Pulido and De Lara 2018; Robinson 2000), and analyses of black geographies and plantation futures (McCutcheon 2019; McKittrick 2011, 2013; Ramirez 2015; Reese 2018), which are seen as fertile settings for understanding and pursuing food justice
Within this socio-natural agricultural system, we look at UA projects with justice, health, and market taproots, and ask: what are their historical bases, characteristics, and interrelationships? How does racial capitalism structure the connections and differentiation within and among them? We argue that these entangled roots and their interactions with racial capitalism are important attributes of UA in Sacramento, and that by unearthing them, one can identify critical dynamics between communities, racial justice, and the food system

Summary

Introduction

In cities across the United States and the world, urban agriculture (UA) movements are building sustainable and equitable urban agricultural systems that confront structural factors like structural racism, uneven capital accumulation, and environmental injustice (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Alkon and Mares 2012; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010). UA movements have been both commended and critiqued because of the ways they resist, transform or reproduce racial inequities observed in conventional food systems and urban development processes (Block et al 2012; Bradley and Herrera 2016; Cohen and Reynolds 2015; Galt et al 2014; Reynolds 2015). Each type of taproot interacts in distinct ways with the soil matrix, reproducing, resisting, and/ or transforming the structural conditions in which it grows. The taproots compete with each other for resources, and work symbiotically for their mutual benefit Depending on their strategies, UA projects with different taproots can change the nature of the soil matrix itself

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