Elsevier

Cities

Volume 40, Part B, October 2014, Pages 133-142
Cities

Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the U.S.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.07.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Community gardens are often seen as temporary uses of vacant land.

  • Gardeners see them as important parts of neighborhoods and cities.

  • Local governments and organizations historically planned gardens to be temporary.

  • Increasingly, gardeners reproduce those dominant narratives as well.

  • Rethinking these transformations can lead to better policy toward vacant land.

Abstract

Community gardens have gained attention and support in recent years because of a range of expected benefits and outcomes, and they are one of many examples of transformations of vacant land into green space. While the improvements to vacant or underutilized land are lauded, the practice of community gardening is underpinned by the assumption that it is a temporary practice on temporarily-available land. This assumption, which is at times implicit and at others explicit, maintains that support for community gardens—technical assistance and especially access to land—can be temporary. Through a genealogy of community garden advocacy in the U.S., we find that a dominant narrative of community gardening as a means to an end has been continuously reproduced for more than a century in large part by government agencies and philanthropic organizations. In recent decades, community gardeners have become key actors in advocacy, and although they portray gardening as a meaningful part of everyday city life, they also reproduce that narrative of temporariness by promoting it as a means to address various issues. We argue that this tension between means and ends—especially coming from community gardeners—is problematic. It is a challenge for community gardeners and the many other producers of green space on supposedly vacant land because their means-oriented discourse takes precedence in the public imagination; it perpetuates the notion that the land is ultimately still vacant.

Section snippets

Literature review: Community gardening, vacancy, and means versus ends

Community gardening embodies a diverse set of practices that vary over time and space; they are not merely instrumental interventions but become complexly interwoven into neighborhood and broader urban processes. Although numerous studies have shown how community gardening has assisted residents in times of crisis (Bassett, 1981, Lawson, 2005), many others show how community gardens become more than simply a stopgap measure. Empirical research indicates that community gardening facilitates many

Methods and materials

We believe that a historical perspective can shed light on the processes through which community gardening has often come to be identified as a temporary practice—an interim use of vacant land. Below, we engage the interpretive frame of genealogy, which is useful in tracing the complicated histories of taken-for-granted assumptions (Elden, 2009, Foucault, 1984). This form of analysis particularly focuses on the ways that dominant narratives persist even though exceptions repeatedly appear (

Vacant lot cultivation in the 1890s

In the American city of the 1890s, gardening was an attractive solution for a range of economic, social, and environmental concerns and spurred inter-connected efforts in income-generating vacant gardens, school gardening, and beautification efforts (Lawson, 2005). Of particular interest to this paper is the effort to engage unemployed workers in gardening for food and income, known as Vacant Lot Cultivation Associations (VLCAs). Advocacy directed toward the unemployed during this period

The domestic war front: Gardening and vacant land

During both World Wars I and II, federal agencies and national organizations framed gardening as a popular aspect of domestic war preparedness, addressing a strained food system, drawing people together, and encouraging health. In World War I, the message was that people were starving and Americans must grow food so more could be sent overseas. As President Woodrow Wilson stated, “everyone who creates or cultivates a garden helps, and helps greatly, to solve the problem of the feeding of

1970s to Present: Community gardeners setting the tone

From the 1970s onward, community gardeners and garden interest groups became key figures in community garden discourse. They talked about how community gardens are integral parts of their lives, but characterized vacant lots as the locations for such activities. By the 1970s, the nation faced very different social and economic picture than in previous decades. Political movements were often grassroots-oriented; community garden advocates included environmental groups, education groups, and

Discussion: The difficulty of means to ends and end in itself

There is a long history of understanding community gardening as a temporary practice. The previous critical examination reveals how a taken-for-granted assumption that links community gardens and vacant land came to be so prevalent. It continues to underpin many people’s thoughts about gardening and vacant lots, particularly those organizations that are not made up of community gardeners. Yet, as gardeners have become key actors in community garden discourse in recent decades they continue to

Conclusion

Community gardening is an effective lens through which to examine how vacant land is being repurposed in a variety of ways. Our genealogy highlights the historical trajectory of garden advocacy that has produced knowledge of community gardens as temporary uses of temporarily-available spaces and how advocates, and some gardeners themselves, reproduce that dominant narrative. By doing so, we seek to open a space of possibility in rethinking who gets to decide when land is “vacant” and also raise

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