Nathan McClintock

Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, CA, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organisation of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalisation. By focusing on one function or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agricultures transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help activists, policy-makers and practitioners better position urban agriculture within coordinated efforts for structural change, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

Uneven Development of the Sustainable City: Shifting Capital in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon, is renowned as a paradigmatic “sustainable city.” Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland’s sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning documents, and secondary source histories, we attempt to elucidate the structural origins of Portland’s “uneven development,” exploring how and why the urban core of this paragon of sustainability has become more White and affluent while its outer eastside has become more diverse and poor. We explain how a “sustainability fix”—in this case, green investment in the city’s core—ultimately contributed to the demarcation of racialized poverty along 82nd Avenue, a major north–south arterial marking the boundary of East Portland. Our account of structural processes taking place at multiple scales contributes to a growing body of literature on eco-gentrification and displacement and inner-ring suburban change while empirically demonstrating how Portland’s advances in sustainability have come at the cost of East Portland’s devaluation. Our “30,000 foot” perspective reveals systemic patterns that might then guide more fine-grained analyses of particular political-socio-cultural processes, while providing cautionary insights into current efforts to extend the city’s sustainability initiatives using the same green development model.

Soil Fertility Management and Compost Use in Senegal's Peanut Basin

The Jóór (Dior) soils of Senegals Peanut Basin are inherently low in organic matter, limiting yields of millet and other crops and threatening the food security of smallholders. Focus groups and interviews were conducted in eight villages to characterise the site-specific fertility management by farmers in the Peanut Basin. Results of the qualitative survey revealed that farmers base management decisions on a series of fertility indicators that include type, colour, and texture of soil, presence of vegetation, and productivity in previous years. In an effort to equalise fertility across the field, farmers amend areas they classify as less fertile with decomposed manure and household waste from the family sëntaare (traditional pile) orwith compost from managed piles. On-site measurements of soil in areas of fields amended with compost or sëntaare material revealed significant increases in peanut and millet growth over unamended areas, but little difference between the effects of compost and manure. Similarly, chemical analysis revealed increased effective cation exchange capacity (ECEC) and nutrient concentrations (K, Mg and Al) in soils amended with compost or manure. Similarities in the chemical characteristics of compost and sëntaare material suggest that development workers could emphasise improved pile management rather than promoting more labour-intensive composting.

The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, community development, and connections to broader social change efforts. The literature suggests, however, caution in automatically conflating urban agriculture’s social benefits with the goals of food justice. Urban agriculture may reinforce and deepen societal inequities by benefitting better resourced organizations and the propertied class and contributing to the displacement of lower-income households. The precariousness of land access for urban agriculture is another limitation, particularly for disadvantaged communities. Planners have recently begun to pay increased attention to urban agriculture but should more explicitly support the goals of food justice in their urban agriculture policies and programs. Takeaway for practice: We suggest several key strategies for planners to more explicitly orient their urban agriculture efforts to support food justice, including prioritizing urban agriculture in long-term planning efforts, developing mutually respectful relationships with food justice organizations and urban agriculture participants from diverse backgrounds, targeting city investments in urban agriculture to benefit historically disadvantaged communities, increasing the amount of land permanently available for urban agriculture, and confronting the threats of gentrification and displacement from urban agriculture. We demonstrate how the city of Seattle (WA) used an equity lens in all of its programs to shift its urban agriculture planning to more explicitly foster food justice, providing clear examples for other cities.

Cultivating (a) Sustainability Capital: Urban Agriculture, Eco-Gentrification, and the Uneven Valorization of Social Reproduction

Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values and rallying point for progressive claims to the right to the city. Recent critiques, however, warn of its contribution to gentrification and displacement. With the use–exchange value binary no longer as useful an analytic as it once was, geographers need to better understand UAs contradictory relations to capital, particularly in the neoliberal sustainable city. To this end, I bring together feminist theorizations of social reproduction, Bourdieus “species of capital” and critical geographies of race to help demystify UAs entanglement in processes of ecogentrification. In this primarily theoretical contribution, I argue that concrete labor embedded in household-scale UA—a socially reproductive practice—becomes cultural capital that a sustainable citys growth coalition in turn valorizes as symbolic sustainability capital used to extract rent and burnish the citys brand at larger scales. The valorization of UA occurs, by necessity, in a variegated manner; spatial agglomerations of UA and the ecohabitus required for its misrecognition as sustainability capital arise as a function of the interplay between rent gaps and racialized othering. I assert that ecogentrification is not only a contradiction emerging from an urban sustainability fix but is central to how racial capitalism functions through green urbanization. Like its contribution to ecogentrification, I conclude, UAs emancipatory potential is also spatially variegated.

Historical geographies of, and for, the present

While many human geographers maintain a long-standing interest in historical analysis, we believe that there is a need to more explicitly examine the theories, methods, and, ultimately, the stakes of such work. For this forum, we invited five geographers to reflect on their own approach to historical analysis and its implications for scholarly and political debates in the present. These commentaries suggest that, at its best, historical analysis is not just about the past; it is also crucial for critical human geographers’ efforts to understand, and intervene in, the present. Thus, we argue for a rejuvenation and extension of approaches to historical-geographical scholarship which are inspired by direct engagement with problems in the present and intend to do something about them.