Stacking Functions: Identifying Motivational Frames Guiding Urban Agriculture Organizations and Businesses in the United States and Canada

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture\u27s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives impact how urban agriculturalists practice UA and that political orientations and discourses differ across geographies, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes

The tale of two community gardens: green aesthetics versus food justice in the big apple

There has been a vibrant community gardening movement in New York City since the 1970s. The movement is predominantly located in working class communities of color and has fought for decades to turn vacant land into beneficial community spaces. However, many of these communities are struggling with gentrification, which has the potential to transform access to and use of community gardens in the city and the politics around them. Drawing on separate multi-year ethnographic projects, this article compares two community gardens in food insecure communities in Queens and Brooklyn: one that is undergoing gentrification and one that is not. We analyze how race and class transformations in each community shape the trajectories of urban agriculture spaces, specifically the ideologies, agricultural practices, and daily interactions among gardeners and as well as between gardeners and nongardeners. We find significant differences in how the two sets of community gardeners conceptualize the purpose of their gardens, particularly in constructing them as green spaces, agricultural production sites, and tools for achieving food justice. We argue that these differences can be best understood at the intersection of the personal histories of individuals, the organizational settings in which the gardens are embedded, and each neighborhood’s history of urban renewal and gentrification. Our findings show why some community gardens in food insecure communities adopt a food justice vision, while others do not, and how gentrification can amplify racial and class tensions within community gardens and between gardeners and nongardener