My friend and colleague in the Toulan School, Megan Horst, and I, along with Lesli Hoey in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, just published a new article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, entitled: The intersection of planning, urban agriculture, and food justice: A review of the literature. The article emerged from our contribution to a White Paper, Scaling Up Agriculture in City-Regions to Mitigate FEW System Impacts, developed in support of a NSF-funded workshop held in 2015 at University of Michigan.

Here's the abstract:

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.
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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.

I've been invited to give a talk at the U of O Department of Sociology's weekly colloquium.

Talk Title: Cultivating sustainability capital: Urban agriculture and eco-gentrification in Portland and Vancouver

Abstract: For many activists and scholars throughout the Global North, urban agriculture (UA) is central to food justice struggles. As new gardens crop up at a furious pace, however, critics from within and outside academia have begun to question who UA serves, raising the alarm about UA’s contribution to gentrification and displacement. Drawing on an ongoing mixed-methods study of UA in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia, I illustrate how capitalist valorization of UA occurs unevenly, mediated by land rent, municipal policy, race, class, and the growing predominance of an eco-habitus. Gardens ultimately become sustainability capital in a spatially and temporally variegated manner, undergirding a “sustainability fix” and related processes of eco-gentrification at city- and neighborhood-scales. At the same time, some UA activists are now linking their efforts to broader struggles for social justice; in some cases, their concerns over equity are actually filtering into municipal food and sustainability policies in new and potentially transformative ways.

I just published a new paper in Agriculture and Human Values, co-authored with Mike Simpson, entitled "Stacking functions: Motivational frames guiding urban agriculture organizations and businesses in the United States and Canada." Here's the abstract:

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture’s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives drive UA and that political orientations and discourses differ by geography, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes.