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    Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City
    Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City
    Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City
    Ebook353 pages4 hours

    Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City

    By Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen

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    Urban agriculture is increasingly considered an important part of creating just and sustainable cities. Yet the benefits that many people attribute to urban agriculture—fresh food, green space, educational opportunities—can mask structural inequities, thereby making political transformation harder to achieve. Realizing social and environmental justice requires moving beyond food production to address deeper issues such as structural racism, gender inequity, and economic disparities. Beyond the Kale argues that urban agricultural projects focused explicitly on dismantling oppressive systems have the greatest potential to achieve substantive social change.

    Through in-depth interviews and public forums with some of New York City’s most prominent urban agriculture activists and supporters, Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen illustrate how some urban farmers and gardeners not only grow healthy food for their communities but also use their activities and spaces to disrupt the dynamics of power and privilege that perpetuate inequity. Addressing a significant gap in the urban agriculture literature, Beyond the Kale prioritizes the voices of people of color and women—activists and leaders whose strategies have often been underrepresented within the urban agriculture movement—and it examines the roles of scholarship in advancing social justice initiatives.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateAug 15, 2016
    ISBN9780820349480
    Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City
    Author

    Kristin Reynolds

    KRISTIN REYNOLDS is a visiting assistant professor of Environmental Studies and Food Studies at The New School and a lecturer at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

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      Book preview

      Beyond the Kale - Kristin Reynolds

      Beyond the Kale

      GEOGRAPHIES OF JUSTICE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

      SERIES EDITORS

      Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

      Mathew Coleman, Ohio State University

      Sapana Doshi, University of Arizona

      ADVISORY BOARD

      Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto

      Zeynep Gambetti, Boğaziçi University

      Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University

      James McCarthy, Clark University

      Beverly Mullings, Queen’s University

      Harvey Neo, National University of Singapore

      Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

      Ananya Roy, University of California, Berkeley

      Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

      Ruth Wilson Gilmore, CUNY Graduate Center

      Jamie Winders, Syracuse University

      Melissa W. Wright, Pennsylvania State University

      Brenda S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore

      Beyond the Kale

      URBAN AGRICULTURE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM IN NEW YORK CITY

      KRISTIN REYNOLDS

      AND NEVIN COHEN

      © 2016 by the University of Georgia Press

      Athens, Georgia 30602

      www.ugapress.org

      All rights reserved

      Set in 10/12.5 Minion Pro Regular by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

      Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

      The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and

      durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

      Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

      Most University of Georgia Press titles are

      available from popular e-book vendors.

      Printed in the United States of America

      20 19 18 17 16 P 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Reynolds, Kristin, author. | Cohen, Nevin, author.

      Title: Beyond the kale : urban agriculture and social justice activism in New York City / Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen.

      Other titles: Urban agriculture and social justice activism in New York City | Geographies of justice and social transformation ; 28.

      Description: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia Press, [2016] | Series: Geographies of justice and social transformation ; 28

      Identifiers: LCCN 2015043957| ISBN 9780820349497 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820349503 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820349480 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Urban agriculture—Social aspects—New York (State—New York.

      Classification: LCC S451.N7 R48 2016 | DDC 338.109747/1—dc23

      LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043957

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      Preface

      CHAPTER 1  Seeing Beyond the Kale

      CHAPTER 2  New York City’s Urban Agriculture System

      CHAPTER 3  Growing More than Just Food

      CHAPTER 4  Embodying Socially Just Systems

      CHAPTER 5  Cultivating Policy

      CHAPTER 6  Addressing Uneven Power and Privilege

      CHAPTER 7  Rethinking Scholarship to Advance Social Justice

      CHAPTER 8  Taking a Collective Step Beyond the Kale

      APPENDIX 1  Research Methods

      APPENDIX 2  Elements of New York City’s Urban Agriculture System

      APPENDIX 3  Urban Agriculture and Community Groups Highlighted in This Book

      APPENDIX 4  Select Population Characteristics of New York City and Community Districts

      APPENDIX 5  Urban Agriculture Activities of Select New York City Organizations and Agencies

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Writing can be a solitary activity, even when the work is about social movements and community activism. Yet we did not feel alone while writing this book. We were fortunate to have been part of a diverse network of individuals—farmers and gardeners, political activists, leaders of nonprofit organizations, city agency staff members, program officers of foundations—who make up New York City’s urban agriculture system and who have contributed in significant ways to Beyond the Kale.

      We would like to acknowledge first and foremost the contributions of the urban agriculture activists featured in this book. Their work to advance social justice remains an inspiration, and the knowledge and opinions they shared with us brought to life the arguments we have made. We extend our heartfelt appreciation for the time and insights they have shared with us over the last few years. We have, with their permission and an opportunity to review for accuracy, used their actual names and quotations in the chapters that follow to highlight, in their own voices, their important efforts. Nevertheless, the analysis is our own, and some of the ideas we have expressed may differ from those of the individuals we interviewed. We also take full responsibility for any errors or omissions in the text.

      Our colleagues Navina Khanna, Maya Joseph, and Monica White read early drafts of the manuscript, offering constructive criticism and valuable suggestions. Their feedback enabled us to clarify and focus the text and ensure that we were conveying ideas about race, gender, and class accurately and respectfully. We are truly grateful for their time and assistance. Karen Berman copyedited every single word of the manuscript, making it a much clearer and more accurate and readable document. We are grateful for her editorial talents and attention to detail. We are also thankful for the helpful comments of three anonymous reviewers, as well as Mick Gusinde-Duffy, Nik Heynen, and other members of the University of Georgia Press editorial board and staff.

      We were fortunate to have had the support of several talented student research assistants who worked on nitty-gritty aspects of this project. Steven McCutcheon Rubio and Pauline Zaldonis transcribed interviews, searched for journal articles, compiled data, proofread drafts, and performed many other critical research tasks. Brett Silvers and Siu Him (Jimmy) Tang helped design the Beyond the Kale website. In particular, Katherine Nehring was an indispensable assistant over several years. In addition to transcribing interviews and helping with other research tasks, she coordinated activists’ feedback on quoted material and helped organize public events—sometimes with very short turnaround time as we worked toward important milestones.

      We also acknowledge and thank our dear colleagues Peleg Kremer and Rob Stephenson for their contributions to the book. Peleg created the map of projects discussed in the book, and Rob photographed the featured farms, gardens, and activists. Their work adds important visual elements to the narrative.

      Our research, the Beyond the Kale website, and related activities were supported in part by small grants from the Merck Family Fund, the Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund, and The New School. We also received much support from the Environmental Studies Program at The New School, where we were faculty members while researching and writing this book. Alan McGowan, who chaired the program during our research, and Brandon Fischer, Environmental Studies program manager, were especially supportive.

      Finally, we thank our families and the many friends who offered encouragement throughout the writing process. Their shared enthusiasm for this work made the research and writing much more rewarding.

      Beyond the Kale the book is a beginning, not an end—what we hope is a small contribution to a long-term project to dismantle oppression and advance social justice. We look forward to continuing to work together with the urban agriculture activists described here, additional activists engaged in similar work, and those inspired by the efforts detailed in the following pages.

      Kristin Reynolds

      Nevin Cohen

      PREFACE

      The seeds of this book were planted in 2010, when we were part of an interdisciplinary research team that spent two years studying the urban agriculture system in New York City. Our work was part of a project called Five Borough Farm, overseen by the nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space, which sought to develop policy recommendations and evaluation tools to strengthen urban agriculture throughout the city. With other members of the team, we conducted interviews with farmers, gardeners, and staff from nonprofit organizations, foundations, and government agencies in New York, and we reviewed city agency and organizational records to complement what we learned through the interviews. The photographer Rob Stephenson, whose photos appear in this book, captured the vibrancy of New York City’s urban agriculture system, and the project’s graphic designer depicted important aspects of the system through a series of infographics. A number of the study participants and other individuals familiar with policy making and evaluation served as advisers to strengthen the final recommendations and report.

      Through formal research and informal discussions, we gathered information about the overlapping issues related to food, public health, environmental degradation, education, and community-scale economics that farmers and gardeners seek to address through their work. We also learned that while many farmers and gardeners and their supporters were interested in the social justice aspects of urban agriculture—such as providing youth development opportunities and increasing food access in lower-income communities—several had observed race- and class-based disparities among farming and gardening groups. These interviewees spoke about imbalances in funding, access to resources, and connections to key decision makers that gave particular advantage to white middle-class farmers and gardeners. They pointed out that these disparities hindered programs led by people of color, as well as the overall success of urban agriculture in New York City. Both people of color and white people made these observations.

      As avid urban agriculture observers (and, at times, practitioners), the two of us were disconcerted by the seeming paradox of an urban agriculture system that was inequitable at the same time that a dominant narrative about city farming and gardening highlighted its social justice benefits. Yet from the perspective of much broader movements for racial and economic justice, gender equity, and LGBTQ rights, these disquieting findings made sense: patterns of disparity among urban agriculture groups were another indication of structural forms of oppression that so often produce unequal balances of power and privilege. In-depth discussions about the roots of food and environmental injustices had been largely absent from the urban agriculture narrative, and we felt compelled to draw attention to this fact.

      Despite the importance of these issues, the Five Borough Farm project’s final report, published in 2012, included only a brief, rather general section on race and class disparities in New York’s urban agriculture system. As researchers and coauthors of the final report, we reluctantly went along with what was, in our view, a less-than-satisfactory discussion of inequity in urban agriculture to stand in for a more radical, and certainly more honest, analysis.

      In our view, these factors resulted in a report that made a weaker contribution to a dialogue about racial justice and socioeconomic equity in the food system than it might have, a result that we felt was unfortunate, not least because the report received a fair amount of media and public attention. We had sought to support farmers’ and gardeners’ efforts; yet despite some of the positive outcomes of the Five Borough Farm project, we had been party to a well-worn pattern of researchers overlooking social structures that granted us privilege in our personal and professional lives. We, along with a number of farmers and gardeners, felt that the lack of substantive discussion about race and class was a conspicuous gap in the report that needed to be filled.

      As we reflected on this situation over several months, we began to take closer notice of the tendency for initiatives led by middle-class white people to receive the bulk of attention in the media and in scholarly accounts of urban agriculture. We knew that this focus discounted the work of the many people of color, including recent immigrants from regions of the Global South, who have been growing food in cities for generations. We began to see the lack of attention to these farmers’ and gardeners’ work as being tied to structural forms of oppression, particularly in terms of the privileges often conveyed to those who are seen as the face of a movement. We wondered whether some of the observed disparities between urban agriculture groups in New York City had resulted from the overrepresentation of white farmers and gardeners, despite the longstanding presence of farmers and gardeners of color.

      In the months between finishing our sections of the Five Borough Farm report in the spring of 2012 and its official release that summer, we grew determined to communicate about these issues independently. We also reflected on our own positions as white, upper-middle-class academics with training in critical social science and public policy, time for in-depth research and writing, and relatively ready access to publishing. Knowing that we could not erase our personal or professional identities even if we had wished to do so, we thought about how we might use these privileges as tools to uncover social justice paradoxes in urban agriculture and to help increase recognition and support for the work and leadership of people of color. We were inspired by an idea we had learned from many activists of color: that white people need to engage in racial justice work in their own communities. Ultimately, we decided to write this book as one contribution to this effort.

      The title of the book, Beyond the Kale, has multiple meanings. Urban agriculture has been portrayed as a newly emerging activity practiced by young, upper-middle-class hipsters, even though it has always been practiced by low-income and working-class urban residents. Similarly, kale has been discovered by foodies and restaurateurs, made trendy as a healthy superfood and an ingredient in twenty-dollar cocktails, even though it has long been a staple in the diets of people of limited means throughout the world. In this sense, moving beyond the kale means looking beyond the trendy aspects of growing food in the city to see people who have been using urban agriculture to make the food system less oppressive and more socially just.

      The title is also a play on the phrase beyond the pale (outside the bounds of acceptable behavior), which originated in the Middle Ages to describe the land and people living outside of the portion of Ireland enclosed by a fence and controlled by England (the English Pale). Urban agriculture is about much more than food production and can extend to address problems of social justice and political power. Beyond the kale thus suggests the need to see beyond the borders of a garden to understand both the broader significance of urban agriculture and the social and political structures in which it is embedded. The title also reflects activists’ efforts to move beyond the conventional rules, institutions, and expectations of existing governance and policy-formulation structures to create a more socially just food system through urban agriculture practice.

      Finally, although the saying beyond the pale refers to working beyond boundaries and conventions, given the contemporary use of the word pale to describe lighter colors, the allusion to this word in the title ironically, though appropriately, suggests that those of us—white people in particular—who are interested in advancing social justice through urban agriculture need to see beyond initiatives dominated by white people. People of color, including those living in the Global North or having emigrated there from regions of the Global South, are among the farmers, gardeners, and activists who see in urban food production a resilience strategy and even a path toward urban systems that are more socially just at their core. This book, written as an activist effort, is part of a project that we hope will contribute to far-reaching recognition of these realities as well as to measures to support urban agriculture as a form of social justice activism led by those most negatively affected by food and environmental inequities, and supported by many more.

      Unlike many academic publications that keep the comments of interviewees anonymous, this book uses the real names of the urban agriculture activists we interviewed. Our decision to include their words, with their permission and an opportunity to check quotations for accuracy, was an effort to make them and their work more visible, and to give readers an understanding of the interviewees’ perspectives as well as our own. We appreciate the degree to which the people we interviewed shared stories, ideas, and concerns with us, and their willingness to be up front about controversial issues. But we emphasize that the questions we asked, the way we used quotes to illustrate general points, and the manner in which we framed the book’s perspective involved decisions about curation, interpretation, and analysis that were ours alone, and may thus differ from the perspectives of those we interviewed.

      Beyond the Kale

      CHAPTER 1

      Seeing Beyond the Kale

      In the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Yonnette Fleming of Hattie Carthan Community Garden begins one of her food justice workshops with a tribute to the late Ms. Carthan, a Bed-Stuy neighborhood environmentalist and activist after whom the garden is named. The garden’s trees provide a welcome respite from the rising city heat on this late-summer day. As the participants settle in, Fleming calls attention to the many other gardeners and community members who have participated in the garden’s evolution since its founding in the late 1970s, recounting its history and its importance in this particular community.

      Following personal introductions and a discussion about food accessibility in the neighborhood, Farmer Yon, as Fleming often refers to herself, helps the participants understand various forms of oppression and the ways these forces shape food and agricultural systems. Discussions cover topics such as how racism, patriarchy, and policies rooted in mainstream economic paradigms lead to limited food access, health disparities, and diminished levels of local control in low-income communities and communities of color—in Bed-Stuy and around the world. Fleming calls on participants to think about how these structures may have affected their own lives and what they might do to confront them. She is accepting of individuals’ personal circumstances, yet unrelenting in her drive to help them move beyond the type of thinking that perpetuates power imbalances at the individual and societal levels, and to help them experience how agriculture can be at once about food, environment, and liberation.

      In addition to Fleming’s food justice training sessions, she and other members of Hattie Carthan Community Garden lead regular events that similarly extend the understanding of gardening beyond an activity focused on food. Summer weekends feature two on-site farmers’ markets, one of which is held at the Herban Farm, a second, smaller site that Fleming and other community members have recently transformed from a vacant lot into a vibrant green space. Seasonal events throughout the year celebrate the heritage of the African Diaspora and feature dishes that Fleming (who is originally from Guyana but has lived in the neighborhood for many years) and other community members have prepared using eggs and produce from the garden and farm. Fleming also leads regular women-only discussions about health and spiritual wellness, along with women-centric events designed to foster leadership and personal empowerment among participants. Beyond the more obvious themes of these events—food access, urban green space, safe spaces for women—the gatherings also focus on community resilience and, particularly through Fleming’s leadership, ways that racial justice and women’s empowerment can be cultivated through food production, herbalism, community-based markets, education programs for youth of color, and policy advocacy growing out of urban farms. Fleming speaks regularly about how various forms of oppression play out with respect to food and the environment, and she explains, I’m interested in understanding how women can become true advocates for flora and fauna and justice in the world.

      By calling herself a farmer and helping to maintain Hattie Carthan Community Garden as a public green space, Yonnette Fleming underscores the significance of growing food in the city, particularly in historically low-income neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, where fresh food can be prohibitively expensive or hard to find. She also reclaims the identity of a farmer, as a person of color and a woman, despite the association of agriculture with exploitation among many people of color and despite the stereotype of US farmers as white and male. By growing food, working to break down oppressive social and political systems, and celebrating connections between people and the land, Fleming exemplifies the potential power of longtime neighborhood residents to create change in their own communities.

      Advocates of urban agriculture often see city farming as a way to advance social justice, and while this presumption is fraught with paradoxes, particularly with respect to race, class, gender, sexual preference, and community control, activists like Yonnette Fleming demonstrate how farm and garden programs can create food and environmental systems that are more just at their core. In such systems, fresh, healthy, culturally acceptable food is accessible, and environmental and public health risks and benefits are equitably distributed among all communities. In addition, people of color and working-class people are meaningfully involved in food and environmental decision making—and are recognized for their leadership—and governance structures reflect members’ articulated social justice values (e.g., see Bullard 1993; Cole and Foster 2001; Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009; Pellow 2000; Schlosberg 2004).

      Beyond the Kale examines these aspects of urban agriculture in New York City, as well as the work of people of color and women activists to attain specific social justice goals. It is not a book about the overarching benefits of urban agriculture; many others have covered this topic. Rather, it is about how urban agriculture groups led by people of color and women should, can, and do reflect more socially just systems, and about the processes through which these goals can be achieved.

      Urban Agriculture and Social Justice

      Urban agriculture, the act of growing crops and raising livestock in cities and their peripheries, is common worldwide but has expanded greatly in the Global North within the past two decades. In the United States, backyard and community gardens have been joined by aquaponic systems (which integrate fish and vegetable production) and rooftop farms, which have redefined growing spaces and helped maximize urban food production, often in unlikely places. As they have for decades, neighborhood residents have organized to clean up vacant lots, but gardeners have also practiced phytoremediation—cultivating plants to remove soil toxicity—and local youth have learned about ecological systems, healthy eating, and leadership skills from working at urban farms. The scope of urban agriculture continues to grow.

      Urban agriculture has also become popular among a wider range of city residents, expanding from longtime neighborhood gardeners and people growing food primarily to meet their dietary needs to include so-called locavores intent on eating food grown close to their homes, entrepreneurs capitalizing on consumer interest in supporting smaller-scale farms, and postcollege hipsters steeped in do-it-yourself culture. Networks of backyard farms, along with farmers’ markets and low-cost community-supported agriculture (CSA) models selling food grown within the city, have expanded opportunities for residents to benefit from urban agriculture, even if they do not garden or farm themselves; similarly, value-added products from salsas to pickles made with urban-grown produce have spawned professional training programs, small-business incubators, and community-based economic development projects linked to urban gardens and farms. Media coverage of these activities has helped fuel their popularity, though at times such coverage has favored initiatives led by young, middle-class white people over those led by people of color who have been growing food for decades—like many of the gardeners at Hattie Carthan, including Farmer Yon.

      As urban agriculture has expanded, so too has recognition that farming and gardening projects produce multiple benefits, and many studies have documented these benefits in cities throughout the United States and the world (e.g., Draper and Freedman 2010; Blair 2009; Golden 2013; Bellows, Brown, and Smit 2003; Brown and Carter 2002; K. H. Brown et al. 2002; Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; Smit, Ratta, and Nasr 1996).

      Joining those who support urban agriculture for more ideological reasons, landscape architects, designers, and urban planners have examined physical aspects of urban agriculture, exploring both the possibilities of creating interconnected, productive spaces within city landscapes (Viljoen, Bohn, and Howe 2005) and a number of architectural, design, and planning innovations to integrate farms and gardens into the cityscape (Gorgolewski, Komisar, and Nasr 2011). In a similar vein, government reports and policy papers on urban agriculture have highlighted its potential to foster self-help (through self-provisioning of healthy food, for example) and to encourage community development—though they have just as often defined it narrowly in terms of neighborhood beautification, greening, and increased property values, sidestepping concerns about gentrification and control of public space. Research and policy papers have added to the growing understanding of urban agriculture as a beneficial part of the city, though not always with full consideration of the broader social and political contexts within which farms and gardens are situated.

      Many discussions of the benefits of urban agriculture have focused on the ability of farms and gardens to provide fresh, affordable, and culturally appropriate food in low-income communities lacking conventional food retailers. However, some have also recognized urban agriculture as a way to increase green spaces in

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