Elsevier

Cities

Volume 40, Part B, October 2014, Pages 175-182
Cities

Reprint of “The production of urban vacant land: Relational placemaking in Boston, MA neighborhoods”

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.12.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We characterize “on the ground” perceptions of urban vacant lots.

  • We draw upon focus groups and a neighborhood design/build case study.

  • Access to and ownership of vacant land are critical for neighborhood residents.

  • Control over land-use change is also important to neighborhood development.

  • Public–civic cooperation may strengthen access, ownership, and land control processes.

Abstract

The persistence of vacant land in urban areas exhibits geographic unevenness. While central cities have experienced waves of reinvestment over the past decades, vacant lands often persist in adjacent low-income neighborhoods. Thus a networked local-scale perspective is integral for understanding metropolitan areas. Local scale analyses require an understanding of informal decision-makers and institutions and the ways that they connect more broadly with other actors. Drawing on focus groups with civil society organizations (CSOs) and a neighborhood design/build case study, this paper characterizes “on the ground” perceptions of and responses to vacant lots in urban neighborhoods in order to provide insight into their analysis and management. The fieldwork extends insights from studies of community gardens to suggest that access to and potential ownership of vacant parcels, in addition to the political economic forces driving land-use change, are critical factors that drive vacant land governance at the neighborhood-scale. Public–civic partnerships in weak market areas have the potential to strengthen this access and ownership in a way that improves vacant lot management.

Introduction

Vacant lots reflect the spatial unevenness of urban land use and property values. The spatial heterogeneity of urban redevelopment, including the variability in which vacant areas are prioritized for growth, calls for a multi-scale analysis that examines changing functions of vacant land as they relate to local, urban, and regional dynamics. The function of urban land needs to be understood in terms of the “relationship between a parcel of land and the wider physical and socioeconomic spatial systems to which it belongs” (Platt, 2004: 39). A neighborhood-level analysis of vacant land is necessary to broader understandings of how vacant lots are perceived and function in urban space. Drawing on the framework of relational place-making (Pierce, Martin, & Murphy, 2011), we examine the neighborhood-scale perception of vacant land within its broader socio-economic context and relations. We argue that sustainability efforts in core urban neighborhoods requires a multi-level understanding of not only the production and redevelopment but also the perceptions and stewardship of vacant lots.

This paper explores the ways in which residents perceive and act to change vacant land in their communities, in order to inform vacant land interventions in urban neighborhoods. First we use exploratory focus groups with civil society organizations (CSOs) in Boston neighborhoods to examine grassroots perceptions of vacant lots, and then we document a CSO-led design/build project that transformed one vacant lot into a neighborhood pocket park. These cases lend insight into the structural constraints of broader political economic forces and opportunities for civic agency at the site- and neighborhood-level. CSO’s approach to land value is mediated by historical processes relating to land tenure and decision-making and social processes of engagement and stewardship. We examine how these processes can foster or alternatively hinder contexts in which CSOs can develop green space in their neighborhoods.

Vacant land in urban neighborhoods draws attention to the way “changing meanings of nature have intersected with wider debates about urban change” (Gandy, 2002: 13). Transformations of the neighborhood landscape produce social and cultural perceptions and rationalities, and it is in this sense that urban vacant land simultaneously marks broader political economic change and particular expressions of identity, power, and space (Massey, 1994). The production of vacant lots has coincided and interwoven with an urban history characterized by an increasingly privatized public realm and growing socio-political and economic polarization (Gandy, 2002). Post-WWII de-industrialization, suburbanization, urban renewal, and redlining enabled this polarization and spatial fragmentation (Jackson, 1985). In Boston (as in other American cities), these processes resulted in a shift of capital investment and population growth from urban to suburban regions, and a concentration of African–Americans in urban core neighborhoods (Gamm, 1999, Medoff and Sklar, 1994).

As Lynch (1971) first noted, landscapes serve not only social, political, and ecological functions, but they also embed communicative codes among the network of users that interact with them. Landscapes render legible the ‘image of the city’ to its inhabitants (Lynch, 1960). The context of increasing polarization and exclusion has presented a challenge in which the ‘image of the city’ belonging to urban planners, developers, and residents has fragmented (Gandy, 2002), and there are important spatial effects of this fragmentation (Harvey, 1989). Joan Nassauer’s landscape aesthetics work (c.f. Nassauer, 1995) investigates the ways in which landscape language communicates human intention, particularly care for the land. Daily dwelling and work spaces are normally characterized by neatness and order, which Nassauer interprets as “sociable human intention” (1995: 162). In areas with limited capital investment, however, city dwellers who have access to vacant land may use their time, rather than money, to care for their environment (Nassauer, VanWieren, Wang, & Kahn, 2008). Nassauer’s research points to the importance of social interaction and engagement in fostering community places. Robert Sampson’s theory of collective efficacy similarly emphasizes social relations, referring to informal strategies of maintaining public order by urban neighborhood residents and extracting financial and political resources for the benefit of the neighborhood (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). It is associated with residential tenure, home ownership, and class and racial/ethnic integration.

The concept of “neighborhood” situates the context of urban vacant lots between their formal political jurisdiction and informal governance and cultural meaning. The neighborhood situates home and daily life interactions (Park et al., 1967, Martin, 2003a), representing the site at which domestic needs intersect with public services, such as trash collection (Castells, 1983). The term neighborhood further implies social interaction or shared experience and may form the basis of shared social identity, albeit in the context of simultaneous far-flung social relations (Cox, 1982, Forrest and Kearns, 2001, Logan and Molotch, 1987, Martin, 2003b). A neighborhood, as a place-based community, forms the basis of potential collective action especially in relation to local governance (Martin, 2003b). Community groups, or civil society organizations (CSOs), enable residents to express “care” and value in their communities via coordinated actions. A persistent difficulty faced by CSOs is the ability to remain attentive to the needs of the most marginal residents, rather than only their more powerful public and private funders or partners (Lake & Newman, 2002). Additionally, one area of community activism receiving growing scholarly attention is so-called “strategic neighboring,” in which middle class individuals express their religious identities and commitments through residency and neighborliness in poor urban areas (Hankins & Walter, 2012). Such activism brings to the neighborhood scale multi-scalar dynamics of class, activism, and CSO-governance relations in transformations of and attitudes about urban space (Hankins, Martin, & Martin, 2013).

On the other hand collective efficacy itself, therefore, is also influenced by forces that may not be visible in examinations at the neighborhood scale, including outsider perspectives such as media (Ley, 1994, Martin, 2000), or relations between different groups within a neighborhood and with external forces, including government and economic powers (Brownlow, 2006). Individual perception must be seen within a web of social influences that shape individual understandings. For example, the concept of neighborhood gradually develops social meaning through local practices and municipal planning (Haeberle, 1988, Martin, 2003b). Vacant lots thus acquire functions and values in accordance with their local physical and broader social and economic contexts (Brownlow, 2006, Goldstein et al., 2001, Pierce et al., 2011). The research on community gardens reinforces the importance of broader economic and policy contexts to their stewardship and survival.

For decades, community gardening has reclaimed vacant land in a way that also provides nutrition and expresses connection with the environment (Armstrong, 2000, Lawson, 2004, Schmelzkopf, 1995, Schmelzkopf, 2002, Smith and Kurtz, 2003). Gardening is an activity that challenges negative perceptions of economically depressed areas by creating new functions and values of space within neighborhoods (Glover, 2003, Schmelzkopf, 1995). Collective gardening also offers residents opportunities to come together in a way that fosters relationships and collective identity (Glover, 2003, Landman, 1993, Lawson, 2004).

Community gardens comprise sites of local control over design and management, which foster Nassauer’s “cues to care” (1995) in a way that increases land use functionality and improves neighborhood perception (Glover, 2003, Lawson, 2004). Such local control relies upon support of non-local entities, as non-profit agencies and government at a variety of scales grant legal access to land, coordinate gardening volunteers, and offer other forms of support. As land dynamics change, community gardens may conflict with city-wide or regional plans (Lawson, 2004). “Garden programs tend to be structured as interim activities rather than as sustained places”, as city planners view community gardens as temporary solutions to problems of vacant land (2004: 165). Alternately, community gardening may also build neighborhood value in a way that generates new land demand, thereby re-inscribing the gardens into cycles of reinvestment for urban renewal projects (Schmelzkopf, 1995, Schmelzkopf, 2002, Smith and Kurtz, 2003). For example, numerous community gardens in Manhattan’s Lower East Side have been reclaimed by the municipal government during periods of increasing development pressure (Smith & DeFilippis, 2002). Community gardens highlight a complex dynamic about vacant land; even when evident solely as a single parcel in an urban area, vacant land is multi-scalar in its meaning (Platt, 2004). As illustrated by Lawson (2004), community gardens initiate and rely upon networks of relations between agencies within city government, non-profit groups, and residents. Municipal governments are important players, but rarely instigators of community gardens.

Urban shrinkage is a component of the spatial unevenness that characterizes urban development focused on increasing returns to scale (Krugman, 1981). Urban shrinkage is a widespread phenomenon that characterizes a range of cities from Detroit to Boston (Oswalt, 2006). Despite its prevalence, however, urban shrinkage is an area in which “planners have little background, experience or recourse” in the US (Hollander, Pallagst, & Schwarz, 2009; see also Rybcynski & Linnerman, 1999). Early municipal governments responses expressed a ‘managerial’ tendency to raise taxes (Harvey, 1989, Rybcynski and Linnerman, 1999). The last three decades witnessed a shift to entrepreneurial approaches, which rely upon public–private partnerships (PPP) to attract external sources of funding, new direct investments, or new employment sources” (Harvey, 1989: 7). The redevelopment of the most marginal land, however, may require local public–private community development corporations or community activism as a means to foster growth (Lake and Newman, 2002, MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999).

As urban vacant lots pose a new governance problematic, new policies, protocols, and organizational forms are needed. In the absence of intervention, the presence of vacant lots creates a cascade of deleterious effects in a positively reinforcing cycle of urban decay, which some call the “contagion effect” (Hollander, 2011). The presence of abandoned land is immediately associated with increased criminal or illicit activity, physical signs of decay; and dumping of waste and conceptually linked to suburban sprawl (Goldstein et al., 2001). These attributes catalyze a drop in property values, which in turn causes property owners and renters to be less willing and able to maintain their property. This phenomenon is particularly true for absentee landlords relying on speculation (Goldstein et al., 2001). Further, in areas with little or no green space, or with green space but high levels of crime, access by local residents to such spaces may be minimal, hindering positive human-environment benefits (Brownlow, 2006, Pincetl and Gearin, 2005). The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society argues that “‘city governments  tend to view vacant land only as a revenue-generating commodity. Because this perspective obscures land’s value as a community resource, city officials lose sight of their responsibility to manage land in ways that promote public values’” (Goldstein et al., 2001: 12). As with the case of community gardening, urban planning tends to prioritize land value and resulting tax revenue, producing a bias towards built infrastructure over open space (Lawson, 2004).

The redevelopment of core urban areas in the 1980s and 1990s draws attention to the relationship between urban function and urban form, and market value and public policies have driven redevelopment of vacant parcels in a spatially uneven and highly networked way. The revitalization of commercial and mixed-use core urban areas rarely extends to poorer core urban neighborhoods (Platt, 2004). These neighborhoods are frequently characterized by outdated physical infrastructure, including streets, schools, water, sewerage, and parks that deflates its value compared with nearby suburban land. Thus the function of urban redevelopment relates less to adjacent urban neighborhoods than other areas of the region, such as the suburbs. The city may financially flourish as an urban region while certain areas within the city continue to stagnate and decay. Vacant lots are also products of municipal policy, business development, and civic engagement. While community gardens have become incorporated into narratives of urban renaissance, the story of urban vacant lots tends to be associated with the nearby neighborhood demographics. Also, lots tend to be understood as a feature of a city’s past, rather than its present or future (Glover, 2003). This act of isolating vacant land in space and time speaks to the need for more complex and multi-scalar approaches to the function and meaning of a place.

A relational approach explores the uses and meaning of vacant lots according to their drivers and dynamics at multiple scales; a place-based approach examines the spatial relationships associated with vacant land; and a place-making approach draws out temporal relationships among historical change, current traditions, and desired future actions on vacant lots. Relational place-making is a combined territorial and networked approach to conceptualizing and studying place (Pierce et al., 2011). Drawing on Massey, 2005, Pierce et al., 2011 argue that place is not a particular and a priori fixed and local scale, but is dynamically produced and defined through both broad social, political, and economic processes and also through individual, environmental, and shared experiences. Such experiences include the presence of trees or garbage and on-the-ground social relations, which are themselves manifestations of much broader social processes.

Conceptualizing vacant land as relational highlights both its multi-functionality – as stressed by Platt (2004) – as well as the agency of a range of people – which span elected and appointed officials, area residents, and community-based agencies – in creating meaning in urban space. An examination of the past, current, and potential future functions of vacant land in the context of the daily experiences for urban residents lends insight into the way that actors at multiple scales shape the uses and meanings of urban space. From our research standpoint in this project, place refers to the range of material spaces where people and processes meet: the city, neighborhoods, parcels, water bodies, and/or streets; but primarily we focus on vacant lots in relation to these terms. Each lot is thematically defined in two ways: (1) it is territorially located within the participant-defined neighborhood area, and (2) it is also relationally defined by networked ecological/environmental, socio-economic, political, and cultural processes and structures. The experience, function, and meaning of each site is dually defined by the territory of the neighborhood as well as the intersection of broader socio-political and biophysical processes. In urban neighborhoods, relational place-making reconfigures the term ’local’ to refer to both the territory of the neighborhood together with political-economic processes that influence the perception and experience of the neighborhood or vacant lot. A relational place-making lens enables the study of places as they change over time, in accordance or conflict with the priorities of actors at multiple scales. In this paper, we examine how residents in core Boston neighborhoods respond to and may seek to alter vacant lots in order to better understand the implications of land management for neighborhood functions and meaning through civil society organizations as well as government.

Section snippets

Methods

This paper draws on two initiatives related to the function and meaning of urban vacant land in Boston neighborhoods. Focus groups with CSOs examined perceptions of the neighborhood and environment at the neighborhood district level, and a landscape design project zoomed in on one vacant lot transformation. Taken together, these projects provide insights into the types of perceptions and interventions around vacant lots by CSOs in the study area.

The first initiative consisted of exploratory

Focus group results: vacant lots as paradoxical spaces

The neighborhood was selected as the unit of analysis because it constitutes the place at which individuals possess a shared experience and possibly shared identity. Similarly, neighborhood-based civil society organizations (CSOs) were identified as the target group because CSOs indicate collective concerns and priorities at the grassroots level. CSOs in the context of their neighborhoods indicate a middle level between individual agency and broader political-economic processes. We identify two

Landscape design results: from vacant lot to pocket park

The landscape design/build case study illuminates an instance in which neighborhood-based initiative reconfigured the value of a vacant parcel for the benefit of the community. In this section, we discuss the assets and strategies that enabled this landscape transformation. The Talbot-Norfolk Triangle (TNT) is a neighborhood that exemplifies the pervasiveness of small-scale, previously-developed parcels of land. In the mid-twentieth century, Codman Square was a stable working- to middle-class

Discussion and conclusions

As the relational place-making framework suggests (Pierce et al., 2011), vacant lots occur due to macro-scale economic processes, but perceptions, attitudes, and values about such lots derive and constantly evolve from a mix of local, regional, and national dynamics which in turn, interplay with economic and political processes at a variety of scales. Examination of neighborhood-level dynamics in areas with vacant lots provides the basis for the development of policy interventions that can

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Number SES-0849985. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Martha Ziemer, Maya Lim, and Beth Anne Martin worked as NSF REU Clark University Human-Environment Research Observatory (HERO) fellows to assist with the data collection and processing. Hamil Pearsall and Sue Lucas gave helpful

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    An error resulted in this article appearing in the wrong issue. The article is reprinted here for the reader’s convenience and for the continuity of the special issue. For citation purposes, please use the original publication details: Foo, K., Martin, D., Wool, C., Polsky, C. (2013). The production of urban vacant land: Relational placemaking in Boston, MA neighborhoods. Cities, 35, 156–163.

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