Keywords

FormalPara Cracks in the Food System: How Do We Plan for and Respond to Disasters AuthorGroup Author AuthorName Subhashni Raj

From the vantage point of the global COVID-19 pandemic it is easy to see the vulnerabilities in our local, regional, and global food systems. The pandemic is a double-header for many communities, exacerbating inequities and creating new challenges, very much as impacts of climate change would. In the pandemic's aftermath, governments are scrambling to put together recovery packages, which in many cases include food security via supporting food banks. But as one community member shared during my time in the field, how governments and agencies respond can also further exacerbate the disaster. The response itself can be a disaster if there is little thought for context and understanding of the community needs.

What we see currently is a reliance on food banks and charity infrastructure to address increased levels of food insecurity due to the pandemic, while on the production and supply chain side responses are less clear. What is becoming apparent is that beyond the hunger infrastructure, food systems interventions have not evolved to address disasters of the scale brought on by the pandemic. For example, there is little action to protect farmworkers and workers in processing plants - who are at once both essential and dispensable. In fact, as businesses, meat and poultry plants are propped up against economic failure by state and federal funds, but little is being done to protect the actual workers who keep the food supply chain viable. How much of the public funds used to prop up these businesses are being spent on testing, health care, and protective personal equipment for the food system workers? The workers are a critical part of the food system supply chain, yet under normal circumstances we pay them and their plight no heed. If not for the pandemic, the Fight for $15 would still be on the fringes. Similarly, the reliance on the school lunch program to address childhood hunger was brought to light. Schools in many instances operated drive-through meal pickups so that children would not go hungry. But even then, these responses were ad-hoc and uneven. A post-pandemic evaluation of (local-regional-state) government response will be more telling of the intentionality, forethought, and efficacy of prescribing food systems solutions.

Perhaps there is something to be learned from the Global South for food systems policy and practice in the United States. Many vulnerable nations in the Global South have been preparing and responding to climatic shockwaves for decades now. To respond better, there has been a concerted effort to create response plans for different types of disaster at all levels: community, local, and national government. It is difficult to respond in the moment, and to do it well. Even with a response plan, efforts go awry, but the point is to develop a series of coordinated, representative, and concerted interventions that facilitate all members of the community to withstand the impacts (economic, social, and environmental) of the disaster and ease into recovery without much burden. What the pandemic has clearly shown us, more so than a singular climatic event could, is that the food system is embedded in a neoliberal, inequitable, and racist framework. Our response plan must go beyond the traditional (hunger infrastructure) and towards the transformative (democratization of the food system).

Public policy is the decision to act, or not to act, by a government entity in response to a societal issue. Nearly 40,000 local, regional, and metropolitan governments across the United States routinely develop and implement policies in a variety of domains, ranging from ensuring public safety to the provision of physical infrastructure. In the last two decades, community advocates and scholars, in part urged by Jerome Kaufman and colleagues, called on local governments to develop, support, and/or implement policies that strengthen, rather than hinder, urban agriculture (UA) and food systems. While Jerry urged planners and policymakers nationally – and even globally – to engage with UA and food systems, he also engaged in efforts to transform policy and plans in the city of Madison, WI, where he lived and worked.

Jerry was the inaugural director of the Madison Food Systems Project, an action-research project funded through a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A quintessential scholar-practitioner, Jerry served on the City of Madison Advisory Committee on Community Gardens. The city government charged the Advisory Committee to develop a strategy for protecting and sustaining community gardens around Madison. In 1999, the Advisory Committee submitted to then-Mayor Bauman a report, Growing a Stronger Community with Community Gardens, recommending that the city recognize community gardens as a permanent land use (City of Madison Advisory Committee on Community Gardens 1999). The members wrote:

We, the members of this committee, feel the time has come for the City of Madison to recognize community gardening as a valued resource for growing food and fostering community, and we call on the City’s residents, Mayor, members of the Common Council, and City staff to support, adopt and implement the […] proposals to make community gardens a permanent and fully productive feature of our landscape.

The report outlined a series of policies and actions to protect the city’s community gardening spaces, including for Troy Gardens, 4-acre site (one of the co-authors, Raja was a graduate student at UW-Madison at the time, and had the good fortune of working under Jerry’s supervision as a research assistant to the Advisory Committee). Many of the ideas and suggestions in the report have come to fruition, thanks in large part to a broad coalition of community partners and academic leaders. For example, Troy Gardens has become a nationally recognized, urban agriculture-centric 31-acre planned unit development that includes green-built affordable housing, an urban farm, community gardens, prairie restoration area, and nature trails, as described earlier in the book (Lipman and Caton Campbell 2024). Following Jerry’s retirement from UW-Madison, his colleague Dr. Marcia Caton Campbell, took over as the Director of the Madison Food Systems Project and continued work on the Troy Gardens Project. As the Executive Director of Rooted, the organization that manages and programs Troy Gardens (along with a host of additional UA programming in Madison), Dr. Caton Campbell continues to shape urban agriculture and food systems (she is also the co-editor of the book in which this chapter appears).

On the planning and policy front, the City of Madison has developed a series of planning and policy initiatives to support UA, many of which are rooted in and/or inspired by Kaufman and his colleagues’ early work. For example, the City’s comprehensive plan explicitly supports urban agriculture and urban food systems. The zoning code includes land use designation for urban agriculture districts as well as for indoor agriculture (as outlined by Lipman and Caton Campbell (2024)). In 2012, one year before Jerry’s passing, the City established a food policy council that develops and recommends policies to strengthen investments in urban agriculture and the food system. The FPC also receives a budget to advance its programming, and food policy work is coordinated by a city staff person in the Economic Development Division. In a city where Jerry did his foundational intellectual work on food systems planning, UA has been recognized and institutionalized in the local government policy and planning landscape.

Jerry’s policy engagement in Madison, and later nationally, reflects his particular approach to planning: a blend of strategy and ethical vision for a just city. As director of the Madison Food System Project at UW-Madison, Jerry chose to redirect project resources from the university to community-based policy action in Madison. For example, one graduate research assistant and Jerry’s doctoral advisee, Mark Stevens, coordinated a community coalition called the Research, Action, Education, and Policy on Food Group (REAP) founded in 1997 to catalyze community conversations around food. Now a not-for-profit organization, REAP continues its mission to transform communities through ‘good food.’ As noted earlier, Raja was lucky enough to be assigned as a graduate research assistant for the Madison Food System Project to support the writing and research that culminated in the 1999 report by the City of Madison Advisory Committee on Community Gardens. The report is possibly one of the earliest municipal planning reports calling for community gardens as a protected use of land in cities. With Kami Pothukuchi, Jerry conducted one of the country’s earliest community food assessments in the city of Madison as part of a graduate planning practicum or studio course; graduates of this class, now planning practitioners and researchers, reflect on their experience in Chap. 22 (Born et al. 2024). The city of Madison served as a testing ground for Jerry’s planning ideas and actions in urban agriculture, and more broadly, urban food systems. Kaufman’s early national work on UA documented ways in which cities around the country were providing policy support. The resulting report (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000), authored by Kaufman and then graduate student Martin Bailkey and funded by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, was influential in drawing attention to UA as urban land use (Bailkey and Greenstein 2024).

Since Jerry’s early engagement with policy for UA in the late 1990s and early 2000s, numerous local governments around the country, including Madison, have expanded their engagement with urban agriculture, and urban food systems more broadly (Raja et al. 2018b). For example, in 2011, the City of Minneapolis adopted the country’s first comprehensive urban agriculture plan. Recognizing the centrality of local governments in food systems a group of researchers and practitioners – one of whom was Jerry’s former student (Raja) and another his mentee (Hodgson) – co-designed Growing Food Connections, an action-research initiative to use local government policy and planning to strengthen food systems. The original team included university researchers from University at Buffalo (Raja) and The Ohio State University (Jill Clark), and planning practitioners, including Cultivating Healthy Places (Kimberley Hodgson) and American Farmland Trust (Julia Freedgood). The national American Planning Association (APA), represented by Anna Ricklin and David Rouse, was a key partner in the initiative. The Growing Food Connections initiative, which is dedicated to Jerry Kaufman, builds capacity for research, education, and policy across the country with the support of a transformative $3.96 million federal grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Launched formally in 2012, the Growing Food Connections initiative documented how innovative local governments around the United States used plans and policies to strengthen food systems – the team called these jurisdictions Communities of Innovation (COIs). The team was especially focused on strategies that connected farmers with underserved residents in the same region. Several COIs are featured in this book, and a series of policy briefs documenting their successes are available through GFC. Urban COIs include Baltimore (MD), Cleveland (OH), Lawrence (KA), Philadelphia (PA), and Seattle (WA), among others.

Working with a team of national advisors, the GFC team also selected eight jurisdictions that had significant opportunity to leverage local government policy for connecting farmers with food insecure residents. The team focused on capacity building in these Communities of Opportunity (COOs) (capacity building in the COOs was led by the American Farmland Trust). Selected COOs were both urban and rural, and some defied popular understanding of urban or rural (especially in the southern parts of the US). The COOs included Chautauqua County, NY, Douglas County, NE, Dougherty County, GA, Cumberland, ME, Dona Ana, NM, Luna County, NM, Polk County, NC, and Wyandotte County, KS. With support from GFC, all COOs launched community advisory groups focused on food systems planning; some started food systems planning processes while others established food policy councils. Some also struggled to make food systems central to their jurisdictions’ policy priorities.

To help local governments, including COOs, learn from precedent examples, in 2014, GFC launched a national database that tracks local government plans and policies to strengthen food system (Raja et al. 2014a-present). With leadership from Cultivating Healthy Places (Kimberley Hodgson), the database established a taxonomy of urban food systems as relevant to local governments. A range of adopted polices from around the country were gathered, coded, and broadcast to illustrate the creative ways in which local governments can strengthen food systems. The GFC policy database was the first in the country, possibly the world, to track local government action on food systems (especially adoption of plans). Today, the database, which is maintained by the UB Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab, includes a range of food-related policies including local laws, ordinances, resolutions, motions, orders, and directives, as well as plans, standards, guidelines, tax exemptions and other public financing policies. Policies in the database encompass all geographic regions of the United States. Users can search for policies by size of government, rural and urban contexts. In addition to general information about policy types, topic and adoption date, the database includes actual policy documents, or the adopted policy language for each policy. Designed to be interactive, local governments can also update their own policies. The database illustrates the significant engagement of local governments in food systems in the United States since Pothukuchi and Kaufman’s call for action to planners in 2000. Among the hundreds of unique local government policies focused on food systems included in the national Growing Food Connections (GFC) database, 85 policies from 85 cities focus on urban food production (Growing Food Connections n.d.).

While this growth of local government engagement in food systems – and urban agriculture – is heartening at first glance, a deeper examination – including the lessons from the GFC initiative – reveals a complicated picture. First, engagement in food or urban agriculture activities is far from a routine city government activity in the United States compared to, say, the provision of a sewer system and garbage removal. In a 2014 national survey of American Planning Association (APA) members conducted by the Growing Food Connections initiative, only 1% of respondents reported that food was a top priority for the local, regional, and/or local government that they represented.

A recent analysis of survey data on urban local governments gathered by the Growing Food Connections initiative illustrates that although local government policy pays attention to food production (and retail and food service), there is little effort to invest in the “middle infrastructure” that would build system resiliency (Clark et al. 2020). Indeed, in Part II of this book, Hall et al. (2024) note a similar reluctance from the local government to support the development of a food hub led by a noted community organization in Albany, GA, one of the GFC Communities of Opportunity.

Moreover, most local governments that are explicitly engaged in planning for UA tend to privilege a regulatory approach. Many are preoccupied with creating, modifying, and/or enforcing zoning laws, rather than deploying land, resources, or capital for urban agriculture. Regrettably, UA land also continues to be treated as a temporary use of urban land, often through short- or medium-term leases (e.g., in Baltimore). Local governments, increasingly functioning as neoliberal regimes, retain control over land in preparation for greater financial gains resulting from the future development of land. Gatekeeping by city government results in commodification of land resources.

Local governments that tend towards a more progressive stance toward urban agriculture also fall short because of gatekeepers and lack of transparency that influences the design and outcomes of policy processes. Inequities in the design of policy governance and policy processes result in inequitable UA policies (such as racially neutral UA programs), and inequitable UA policy outcomes. Of course, community networks challenge hegemonic UA practices to promote food sovereignty, but this is not the norm in public policy. Recent research by members of the UB Food Lab suggests that even in 2022 very few urban agriculture policies explicitly address racial equity. As a result, local government policies that ostensibly favor urban agriculture only serve to gentrify and eventually displace people on the margins. All the ways in which planning and policy are co-opted in other sectors of planning appear to have carried over into how local governments approach UA as well.

Chapters in this section (Chaps. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19) highlight the contested and complex engagement of municipal governments with urban agriculture. Most chapters are written by interdisciplinary teams comprised of scholars and public policy practitioners from across the country. The practitioner-scholar nature of most writing teams allows for a reflexive perspective that draws on the deep and grounded experience of practitioners combined with the more theoretical approach of scholars.

The opening chapter (Chap. 14) describes the story of how the American Planning Association (APA), the country’s national association of professional planners, came to formally acknowledge food as a planning issue. Key figures in this story of transformation include Jerry himself, along with his long-time colleagues and co-authors of this chapter, Drs. Kameshwari (Kami) Pothukuchi and Deanna Glosser (Pothukuchi and Glosser 2024). The authors illustrate how their strategic and collaborative work of the trio set the stage for launching food systems planning as a formal sub-field of planning. Kaufman and Pothukuchi began collaborating on food systems research, teaching, and civic projects at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-1990s, resulting in numerous publications, classes, and presentations. A 2003 keynote at the APA National Conference delivered by Jerry inspired Deanna Glosser, a practicing planner, to engage in food as a professional issue. Deanna, Jerry, and Kami’s collaborative efforts catalyzed conversations about food systems as an area of relevance to planning practitioners, with a key milestone being the adoption of the APA’s Guide for Community and Regional Planning in 2007. Subsequently, food system advocates and food-friendly planners around the country, and across the globe, referenced the APA guide in their efforts to call for greater attention to food within their own communities.

The subsequent Chaps. (15, 16, 17, 18, and 19) in this section delve into experiences of local government policy successes and failures from cities across the United States. Authors were asked to reflect on local governments’ role in UA (and urban food systems), with explicit attention to ethics and equity. Case studies of Cleveland and Detroit (Pothukuchi 2024), Seattle (Hodgson 2024), Baltimore (Buzogany et al. 2024), and Denver (Gosch et al. 2024) show us the possibilities and pitfalls of local government policy engagement in urban agriculture.

In the Rustbelt cities of Cleveland and Detroit, the availability of vacant land opened up the opportunities for integrating agriculture into the urban fabric through the work of capable community organizations working within somewhat varied policy and governance frameworks. In Chap. 15, Pothukuchi (2024) outlines the varied UA policy trajectories of these cities. The scale of urban agriculture in Detroit is much larger than that in Cleveland. In Detroit, urban agriculture, both entrepreneurial and not-for-profit forms, operates largely independent of the municipal government. In Cleveland, both city government and land grant university extension have been involved in providing support, including grant programs and the like. Extension’s leadership is both applauded and questioned. Pothukuchi reports a mismatch between the offering of extension gardener training enterprise and the community needs, suggesting that a peer-based approach to training may be preferred. In some instances, more traditional institutions may need to step back from the UA space to allow other forms of community training to materialize (see Ramos-Gerena on critical food policy literacy, 2023). Perhaps there is a need for more peer-based models of learning than the more formal trainings offered by land grant universities and extension. Cleveland has a redistributionist approach (that departs from pure marked-oriented approaches) that is embedded in broader sustainability efforts and community development goals that allowed for more genuine buy-in from the local government. Comparing Detroit’s pro-growth land governance municipal agenda to Cleveland’s pro-equity land governance and community development model, Pothukuchi reports that municipal policy regimes in both cities treat urban agriculture as tenuous and temporary. This is especially ironic given that both cities have significant amounts of vacant land that could lead to purposeful planning for urban agriculture.

A city government with a sustained history of supporting urban food production, Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods has operated the P-Patch Program, an extensive network of community gardens, since 1973. The city’s work in UA and food systems has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, now with a dedicated staff person who oversees comprehensive efforts to strengthen the city and county’s food system. Despite the extensive local government efforts, disparities exist within the food system to this day. For example, community gardens usage is not proportionate across racial groups. Gentrification pressures raise questions about racial and social inequities in the use of and benefits of UA. The author of Chap. 16, Kimberley Hodgson, who, along with Marcia Caton Campbell and Martin Bailkey, wrote one of the earliest reports on planning for urban agriculture in the United States during her time as a staffer at the American Planning Association (Hodgson et al. 2011), notes that Seattle’s current efforts are insufficient in addressing linkages between historic traumas such as colonization, segregation, and displacement, to more contemporary food injustices (Hodgson 2024). Seattle has a racial equity tool to facilitate decision making but its implementation is uneven. For example, for-profit developers out-bid non-profit developers for land around the Rainier Beach light rail station, suggesting equity tools need to filter into fiscal decision-making, such as tender and bidding processes.

Chapter 17 showcases the work of the city of Baltimore, MD, an emerging leader that has embedded urban agriculture (and food systems) into comprehensive city-wide efforts using the lens of sustainability. Food-focused work in Baltimore is urgent given the inequities experienced by residents, especially Black and brown residents. The team of practitioners and scholars who co-authored this chapter report that 43% of predominantly Black neighborhoods have low availability of healthy food compared to just 4% of predominantly white neighborhoods. The city government is responding to systemic challenges with its comprehensive Baltimore Food Policy Initiative (BFPI). The institutionalization of food through provision of staffing, execution of planning processes, and establishment of clear priorities has allowed BFPI to leverage funds, including to compensate residents for their time to participate in food policy processes. Baltimore’s establishment of a Resident Food Equity Advisor group is especially notable. RFEAs are selected through a competitive application process to represent each of the city’s council districts to advise on food policy. The authors writing about Baltimore posit that the city’s success in moving forward on food policy is grounded in its plans and planning processes (Buzogany et al. 2024). The authors note that it is also the work of community organizations – that have an explicitly anti-racist perspective to urban farming – that compels the city to rethink its own urban agriculture work. Avoiding overly prescriptive solutions, Baltimore is slowly transitioning from representational to participatory food policies, although authors suggest the city is not there yet (Buzogany et al. 2024).

The final case (Chap. 18) of Denver, CO draws lessons from a policy failure. The team of authors, which includes researchers and a food policy leader, discuss how the conversion of vacant public land to agriculture failed to be implemented despite broad support for food systems planning within the city (Gosch et al. 2024). Denver is viewed by many as a city that celebrates food. Yet, many residents have limited access to food. Feeding America estimated that in 2018 about 11% of individuals in Denver City and County were food insecure. The Denver Sustainable Food Policy Council viewed urban agriculture as a tool to respond to food insecurity while also advancing other sustainability goals. In a policy advisory titled City Food, City Land, the council recommended the conversion of 100 acres of public land to urban agriculture, both commercial and not-for-profit by 2030. The policy did not, however, pass municipal review. Competing pressures for land may have played a role in a city where gentrification is a powerful force (Sbicca 2019). The authors of the chapter suggest that insufficient communication among key stakeholders, especially between food advocates and municipal agencies, may also have stalled policy adoption. Structural inequities, bureaucratic impediments, and nature of local government matters when mobilizing food system changes through policy. Broader struggles over what is the highest and best use of land may also play a role in the treatment of urban agriculture in cities that follow pro-growth regimes.

Chapter 19, the closing chapter in this section, offers comparative insights from policy processes from multiple local governments across the United States drawing on research from Growing Food Connections. The paper argues for the importance of relational infrastructure in building UA and food systems local government policy. Irish et al. (2024) explore the emergence of interpersonal relationships in food systems planning and policy, the characteristics of social environments that foster such interpersonal relationships, and the traits/activities that foster interpersonal relationships in food systems policy processes. The authors argue that collaborative governance in food systems policy rests on the existence of interpersonal relationships that have largely been underreported. In a comparative case study of local and regional governments viewed as innovators in food policy formation, adoption, and implementation, including Seattle-King County (WA), Marquette County (MI), Staples Region (MN), and Lawrence-Douglas County (KS), the authors report five characteristics of environments that fostered interpersonal relations in food policymaking. These were the presence of a shared vision across local government and community partners; strong community support by political leaders and community at large; passionate (Individual) champions who catalyzed ideas into action; pre-existing informal relationships among actors; and professional latitude that allowed local government (and other actors) to go beyond the boundaries of their work. Some of these characteristics also have a negative side, as the authors remind us. Pre-existing informal relationships, for example, can exclude people who are traditionally marginalized in policy and social networks. As such, it is crucial that interpersonal relational infrastructure itself be critically examined, and fostered to include, not exclude, people.

Reflecting on the experiences of city governments across the country, contrasted with those offered by community-centered perspectives reported in Part II of this book, we are left with a somewhat conflicted view of local government engagement in urban agriculture. On one hand, local and regional governments have most certainly ‘discovered’ urban agriculture. Many have also developed a suite of policies and plans to support – or, rather, regulate – urban agriculture. However, these policies and plans often lack the budgetary commitment that makes them real on the ground, making them not much better than the “dusty shelf” plans of generations ago.

In addition, local governments fail to fully engage with deeper structural problems – such as racism – that beset urban neighborhoods in the United States. It is, therefore, no surprise that local governments don’t recognize how urban agriculture may interface with structural problems, both positively and negatively. There are one too many examples of cities where Black, brown, and immigrant residents’ aspirations to design, control, and imagine land uses in their neighborhoods, including for urban agriculture, have received short shrift from municipal policy leaders. In Buffalo, NY, for example, community gardening and urban agriculture was pushed into the municipal policy discourse by community actors, scholars describe as rustbelt radicals (Raja et al. 2014b). The municipal government operates largely as a handmaiden to large-scale developers, favoring a large-scale, trickle-down, form of land use development that offers limited to no benefits to the city’s Black, brown and/or poor residents. The city’s Black, brown, and immigrant neighborhoods are beginning to gentrify, placing low-income residents of color at risk of dispossession. On the other hand, the aspirations of Black/brown and low-income residents have received limited traction from planning and policy leaders. Most recently, the local government’s approval of expansion plans for the city’s only Black-owned urban farm, Urban Fruits & Veggies, on the city’s historically Black area have been delayed, repeatedly. The lack of municipal imagination toward urban agriculture – and more broadly Black-led community-led UA projects – is especially troubling because of persistent food apartheid in Buffalo’s Black neighborhoods.

Overall, questions of ethics and equity – and racial equity – remain under-addressed in local government urban agriculture policies. So, what does an equity-centered, ethically grounded local government policy engagement in urban agriculture look like? There is no singular prescription, of course. However, there are a few general approaches that can be the basis of an equity-centered, ethically grounded approach to UA policy. A broad framework for planning as public nurturance is proposed by Raja et al. (2024) in the conclusion of the book in which this overview appears. Briefly, planners and policy leaders have to demonstrate both individual ethics, by behaving with integrity and transparency commensurate with the planners Code of Ethics, and institutional ethics, by form of adopting policies that result in equitable outcomes for those who are most marginalized in cities. Without the broader push for institutional ethics, ethical individual planners are set up for failure. Planning operates within the hegemony of pro-development government practices (see for example, the cities of Hawaii where funding is used to protect or rehab resources important for tourism versus to increase community capacity to cope with cascading disasters). Individual planners are embedded in this pro-development approach, and many planners are trained without so much as taking a class on ethics (though this is required in the PAB curriculum). Institutional and individual ethics are paramount.

As has been discussed widely in the literature, including in the chapters in this section, it is imperative that the design of planning processes foreground questions of transparency, equity, and inclusion. Elsewhere we have discussed the characteristics of food systems planning processes that are equitable and inclusive (Raja et al. 2018a).

Unfortunately, attempts to design equitable planning processes may not always ensure equitable outcomes. Jerry Kaufman, a consequentialist in his approach to ethics, recognized and wrote about this. Therefore, it is important for municipal planners who aspire to serve varied public interests to focus on both equitable processes and outcomes. A new ethic of urban agriculture policy demands that it be embedded in both procedural and distributive justice. Returning to the earlier example from Seattle, a bidding process rooted in distributive justice would have allocated more points to the non-profit development (compared to the for-profit developer) as their plans would more likely geared to protect the neighborhood from the vagaries of gentrification. Tendering and bidding processes, too, need to adopt a racial equity lens and weight bids based on how they address structural inequities.

Importantly, planners must pivot from the unitary idea of the public interest to recognize that, (a) there are varied publics, and (b) some publics are routinely excluded from public policy processes and public (and private) resources. In the context of UA in US cities today, municipal planners can conduct a racial equity analysis of land ownership (or land access) in their cities to determine how Black and other marginalized households are being served through UA. Only by understanding whose interests are protected by current UA policies – and general municipal policies – can planners strive for more equitable futures.

Of course, local governments can secure land tenure to protect UA from the vagaries of real estate markets. However, such land security must be ensured commensurately with other strategies to protect Black, brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities’ use of and access to the secured land. When urban agriculture or food systems work is exclusively viewed through a monetary lens (e.g., in the Rainier Beach example, Chap. 16), capitalist modes of operation will likely co-opt good intentions. Failure to enact such commensurate strategies will result in the protection of UA land to work against marginalized people, by gentrifying neighborhoods and displacing them.

To conclude, a growing number of city governments show leadership in supporting urban agriculture and food systems. Many of these are highlighted in this section of the book. Experiences across the cities suggest that local context matters a great deal, and that planners ought to pay attention to these variable contexts. In some cities, land acquisition is highly competitive (e.g., in California and Hawaii), and scholars have noted that Black, brown, and indigenous farmers in such settings are on the fringes of urban growers’ network, likely pushed out of policy processes. In such settings, relational infrastructure as outlined by Irish et al will look different than in other contexts. Publics, too, vary in each context, and policy processes must serve those specific publics. In places where urban agriculture planning is formalized, dominant and/or elite publics (e.g., well-resourced white farmers/gardeners) benefit from UA. Municipal governments continue to struggle, however, to center questions of ethics and equity in their policymaking even as they engage in the progressive agenda of urban agriculture. The next generation of local government policy must center equity and justice, including in the domain of urban agriculture.