More thoughts on urban farming

For this blog, I’m going to discuss some points from Saed’s article “Urban Farming: The Right to What Sort of City?” and Julie Guthman’s article “Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice” as they relate to my practice experience.

There are a number of potential benefits that communities can derive from urban farming.  Aside from providing more sustainable local food to those who might not otherwise have access to such things, urban farming can also contribute to remediation and the greening of cities.  Here, Saed points out that the environmental clean-up that can result from urban farming is a kind that polluters in both the private and public sectors prefer to evade, and asks “would it not be an irony if urban farming ultimately served to socialize the costs of urban environmental degradation?”

This question is not one that I had previously thought of.  My practice experience organization, Self-Sustaining Communities, operates in Richmond, CA and aims to meet the needs of distressed communities and create a more sustainable city through urban farming projects.  The organization is run on donations and all of the labor comes from volunteers.  The urban farming projects that this organization and others in Richmond are involved in, while successful, seem to be in line with what Saed describes most projects in the movement to be doing, that is “temporarily and selectively cleaning up the mess generated by the capitalist mode of production.”  By operating in this way, I would agree with Saed that it seems urban farming, including that done by my practice experience organization, may be serving to socialize the costs of urban environmental degradation.

To my knowledge, the projects in Richmond do not necessarily address the problem of the pollution and degradation itself by going after the sources.  The structural inequalities that result in the conditions these projects are concerned about are relatively left alone.  Rather, they act more like a band-aid to the problems of contamination and hunger.  Whose responsibility is it to be the band-aid?  Would it be better or more appropriate if we make the polluters pay while advocating for alternatives to the ecologically destructive processes?  Do urban farms still play a role in that kind of movement?  These are questions that I will make sure to keep in mind as I’m doing my practice experience.  However, I also think that the costs of pollution and degradation in industrialized urban cities like Richmond is already socialized in the form of health risks to local communities, and that doing something like urban farming is much better than doing nothing at all in environments like these.

In Julie Guthman’s article, she writes about undergraduate students at UC Santa Cruz in the Communities Studies major, which are required to work on projects as part of the major and are not unlike students at UC Berkeley in the GPP minor.  Her students that work with organizations in the alternative food movement have often come back feeling a sense of disappointment due to their work not resonating with the communities they are working in.  Guthman points out that this may be due to the whitened cultural practices she has identified in the movements and the fact that they can tend to take on an almost missionary-like quality.

I was very interested in these points because it is so similar to what I’m doing.  The article made me reflect on my practice experience organization and think about whether or not it has missionary qualities to it.  From what I know, not having started working with the organization yet, it would seem that the organization does not go into communities trying to change the people like missionaries.  Instead, the organization helps people that come to it by offering knowledge, labor, and material resources to meet the needs of communities and individuals that seek them out.  This is certainly a positive thing, but I’ll be keeping all of this in mind as I’m doing my practice experience to see how things really are.

Guthman, Julie. 2008. “Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice.” Cultural Geographies 15: 431-447.

Saed. 2012. “Urban Farming: The Right to What Sort of City?” Capitalism Nature Socialism 23, no. 4: 1-9.

Self-Sustaining Communities: http://www.self-sustainingcommunities.org/