Gerda R. Wekerle

Food production in the city: (re)negotiating land, food and property

This paper addresses issues of access to land for food production in Toronto by offering fresh perspectives on urban agriculture in the neo-liberal city of the global north. It examines attempts to scale up urban agriculture that emphasise changing the relationships between land access, property and new collaborative relationships among different stakeholders. These initiatives involve renegotiating access to land for growing food between private property owners and landless growers, concomitant shifts in control over valued resources and commercialisation. These shifts are often based on relations of trust within a sharing economy rather than public battles over political decisions to develop urban agriculture lands. Growing food on private lands in the city is political in challenging taken-for-granted ideas and practices of property and urban agriculture. New approaches offer options for training and income, as well as expanding the land base for urban agriculture. Small-scale farming projects are affirmative political manoeuvres. They challenge urban residents to consider land for food production across the categories of public and private property. We document three approaches that challenge current property relations: temporary use of a development site through “soft” squatting; redesignating suburban backyards for farmer training and community-based and private food production; and garden sharing of private home backyards for urban food production and commercial growing. Such initiatives articulate alternative visions of sustainability and food security that rely on principles of collaboration and a sharing economy that challenge prevailing notions of property ownership and food security.

Reaping Nature's Dividends: The Neoliberalization and Gentrification of Nature on the Oak Ridges Moraine

In this article, we follow the position that neoliberalism is not a state but a process of political, social, and economic development. We explore the neoliberalization of nature in the exurban region of a rapidly expanding metropolitan conurbation, the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario, Canada. Since 2001, the Oak Ridges Moraine legislation has been in place to halt urban sprawl and conserve the nature of a regionally significant landform. Our analysis suggests that the Oak Ridges Moraine legislation is consistent with neoliberalization but that the process needs to be seen in the context of half a century of rural and exurban gentrification. Longstanding class privilege is perpetuated through the aegis of legislation to preserve nature and protect the countryside. The legislation aestheticizes the Moraine as a unique landform, complements private-based conservation efforts, and voluntary policy initiatives, as well as marketizes the Moraine as a desirous place where wealthy residents reap natures dividends. This analysis confirms the usefulness of neoliberalism as a concept, but suggests that it needs to be explored through a historically and place-based informed perspective. The case study also sheds light on natures role in state action, and the rallying and shaping of a regional nature to support state power.

Building bioregional citizenship: the case of the Oak Ridges Moraine, Ontario, Canada

In the last 20 years, the Oak Ridges Moraine in Torontos metropolitan region has changed from a scarcely mentioned landscape feature into an environmental icon for residents and environmentalists and a conservation object for the provincial government. In efforts to save the Moraine from urban sprawl, the concepts of bioregion and bioregionalism have been invoked to create a suburban/exurban defence of non-human nature and to promote an ethic of place. We identify three dominant currents of bioregionalism: ecocentrism (a concern for the intrinsic value of non-human nature), scientific managerialism (focused on the setting aside of natural areas), and socio-environmental considerations (centring on environmental justice). We note that invocations of ecocentrism and science are NIMBYist or shallow, and references to environmental justice issues are absent. We conclude that a concept of bioregional citizenship that sees beyond a physically defined bioregion recognises the emotional ties people feel beyond their immediate living space, and includes environmental justice as a useful concept to advance the bioregionalist agenda.