Keywords

FormalPara A New Seating Arrangement: Addressing Exclusion in Current Food Systems AuthorGroup Author AuthorName Sydney Jones

Verse

Verse When you traded our bodies like cards, did you not see that we were breathing, just like you? Did you not realize We had a home? We had a life? We had our freedom too? Was it too hard to see beyond your eyes blinded by dollar signs? Exploiting our hope became your favorite pastime But now you blame us for having dreams… That never make it past the pillows we rest on My ancestors had everything now we have debt and no opportunity Try to fix it with programs that only give our shackles, continuity Why did you invite us to a table Only to seat us in chairs that would crumble beneath us? Why did you shake our hands Only to forget your promises the moment our fingers divorced? Why? The answer that will never come from a white face with a crooked smile

I remember when my mother would cook stew. It would simmer in her pearl-white crockpot all day, and the scent of herbs, potatoes, and sweet onions would creep up our carpeted stairs. That scent would float into my bedroom where it’d tickle my nose, and next thing I know, I’m waltzing to the kitchen to sneak a taste of Ma’s stew. Everyone knows not to sneak into the pot until Ma says dinner is ready, but it’s too good not to try. There were many times I’ve had my hand slapped away, or my mother gave me those eyes that signaled I better just wait “or else”—a childhood memory that many Black kids share. As a people, our hands are still being slapped away, and it feels like an eternal sting, passed down for generations.

The problem with our nation’s food system is where, and more importantly, who value is placed on. As a student, as a researcher, as a Black woman—I can look through these distinct lenses, yet the same reality persists: Meager value is placed in and on Black communities. This deficit in human value can be seen by analyzing food environments in Black neighborhoods experiencing food apartheid. Today, the slapping away of the hand is shopping for overpriced, poor-quality food, which signals “you can eat, but you don’t deserve to eat well.” It’s wanting to eat healthy, and be nourished, but being given bodegas and fast food as our only options. In Pothukuchi and Kaufman’s article, The Food System: A Stranger to the Planning Field, a sound foundation to strengthening the food system was conceived. If planners and those with a hand in food systems work want to create a “new ethic,” and build upon Kaufman’s direction and vision for the food system, there needs to be a consideration of those who have been left out of our current food systems (planning). As a Jerome L. Kaufman Fellow, I know that my legacy will carry on his legacy; it is my duty to mirror his ability to tackle fresh, but difficult questions that need answers. My current question is how to get my people—Black people—a seat at the (planning) table.

Jerry Kaufman was a theorist at heart and regularly taught both planning theory and planning ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. So, it is something of a surprise that as he and a handful of other academics worked to develop a definition and understanding of food systems planning, they did not seek to frame food systems planning using theory. This omission may have been strategic, considering the timing and relationship of the new topics to academic study and professional practice. In the latter, planners in government mostly worked under the theories that dominated practice at the time: a blend of rational planning and communicative planning constrained by a healthy dose of practicality. Accordingly, it is understandable that Kaufman stayed in the realm of immediate practicality given the need to both educate and then enlist practitioners and other academics in this new addition to planning practice. Still, the limited attention to theory in a field that purports to engage in praxis—the discursive relationship of theory and practice in action—is worthy of addressing as food systems planning moves into a more mature state.

This limited theoretical consideration precluded considering systems thinking or systems theory even as planners began to investigate and describe food systems. This is all the more surprising since the food system is itself a system of systems, with stocks and flows, nodes and linkages, boundary conditions, tipping points, and other characteristics that are components of systems thinking and theory. Unfortunately, this short-term oversight (or strategy) resulted in long-term problematic approaches that failed to see a wider view of the food system and its drivers and roles for planners. Following system theorist Donella Meadows (Meadows 1997), planners did not understand at what point (in time, or in the provisioning chain) to best intervene in the food system; most of their work was reactionary.

Relatedly, early food system planners failed to see (or ignored) the deep structural elements of food system market failures, making, for example, critical race theory or political economy afterthoughts in practice. This even though community-based food system organizations regularly raised these concerns just as planners were getting involved in the mid-1990s, as evidenced by the racial and socioeconomic tensions that highlighted the election of the proposed Board of Directors at the first Community Food Security Coalition conference in 1997. Ultimately, the lack of attention to these issues as fundamental to the community food security movement probably led to the downfall of that organization some 15 years later. This might have been due to a lack of vision, or more likely given the position of planning in democratic governance, its limited taste for radicalism, preferring instead a more moderated, incremental approach to change.

This reactionary and moderate approach in planning was not limited to food systems planning in an era that was increasingly defined more by the adulation of free market power and the rise of the neoliberal state, and increasingly less by large-scale government intervention such as the War on Poverty of the mid-1960s. Even this shift in political economic theory was missed, and not just by food systems planners, as a key driver to how planning functioned at the jurisdictional level.Footnote 1 The impact of this was for government planning to turn to short-term thinking with a focus on urban development and permitting. As John Rahaim, the former Planning Director for the City of San Francisco, said in a 2019 talk at the University of Washington about the recent history of planning in his city: “[O]ver the last 30 years, most planning departments have become current planning and permitting offices,” doing less and less long-range and holistic planning (Rahaim 2019).

Other fields from which planning often draws theoretical lessons such as geography and sociology had been exploring food through multiple theoretical lenses for over a decade, providing some examples if only planners were to look for them. Food systems planning was then, and still is open for theoretical examination—a practice in need of theory, as Anderson and Cook (1999) suggested about the concept of community food security in 1999.

Whether it was related to this lack of explicit connection to theory, there has also been a lack of explicit attention to the ethical underpinnings of planning that are clearly represented in food systems research and practice. These ethical dimensions, usually defined as some form of redistributive justice, are definitely drivers of change for planners. Accordingly, data-driven historic and modern descriptions of the food system have been and continue to be important. But a more considered understanding of ethics has not been a common framing for food systems planners. In this volume we asked authors in all of our sections to bring ethics into sharper focus and out of the shadows.

Disparities that trigger ethical consideration abound in the food systems of our communities, including income, food access, health status, and even life expectancy; food system issues are equity issues. But these underpinnings were engaged only partially, not principally, in most early food systems research. Certainly, it was important for planning academics and practitioners in the 1990s and 2000s to describe the conditions they were learning about, but the field might have taken on a different cast had equity and ethics been more central to the work, or even the central claim for action (in some cases it was, as in Seeds of Change, which suggested a right to food and explicitly considered equity) (Ashman et al. 1993). The question of right action in planning is always nuanced: any action must balance many situational factors, including community conditions and political context and timing. A closer connection to ethical practice for food systems planning is something we think Jerry would have appreciated, even in hindsight. However, his strong commitment to strategic action might have been a reason he focused on effectiveness and did not center his argument on ethics. It is likely that a professional focus on ethics would not have resonated in cities during a time where seeking market efficiencies was the order of the day.

In this section we seek to review and explore past possibilities and draw out some implied theoretical connections in the first wave of food systems planning scholarship. Some threads explicitly called for theoretical application to the field as a necessity for its development. Other threads were not explicitly engaged with theory but a theoretical frame could be reasonably inferred (not unusual in planning practice, see below). In addition to looking back, we also begin to outline current food systems thinking that is explicitly theoretical and challenges future food systems scholarship. One such challenge is for the scholarship to be more critical about how and where it is situated and what the implication of different types of action might be. How can such scholarship directly consider justice, empowerment, control, and epistemologies that drive action? Our aim here is aspirational. Instead of dwelling on what might have been, we hope to inspire practitioners and scholars to consider what might yet be.

Planning practitioners are a varied bunch. They work in different institutional settings and hold a wide-ranging set of values. They work for the state, for civil society, and for and in communities, and deal with challenging societal choices around the use of land, water, and other resources. As such, their roles may constrain or define their ability to employ or engage with theory—especially the more transgressive lines. Urban agriculture practitioners also work in diverse settings that could be described along various spectra such as grassroots or more “corporate,” fluid and informal or formal, and ephemeral or long-lasting. The intersection of planners and UA practitioners is complex, and sometimes complicated. Some of both groups (planners and urban agriculture practitioners) would be comfortable in contemporary urban development work, tied to capitalist formations of the city. For others, dismantling the structures of capitalism, which they might perceive to be the fundamental problem of an unjust and unsustainable food system, is a life’s work.

In reality, these groups experience theory in both a lived sense and an intellectual one. For example, whether they have read Henri Lefebvre or engaged with critical theory, many have a visceral understanding of a right to the city, of usufruct rights versus rights of exchange, and UA practitioners particularly might avail themselves of these more tangible understandings of property rights. As this section unfolds we will try to be vigilant in understanding the breadth of practice for planning practitioners and UA practitioners, as well as their potential comfort or limitations with regard to engaging theory. We would hope that planners would have a degree of familiarity with planning theory, as it helps drive the field. For food systems planning, though, there exist many thought leaders from other fields and lived experiences: ideas coming from planning or food studies (or geography, etc.) or community are each necessary but insufficient. We need the combination of all of them.

That said, one of the challenges in planning has always been to define the boundaries of the field; the same is true with the subfield of food systems planning. In this section, we consider only—or mainly—the work of planners and planning academics, and only look cursorily to related fields like rural sociology, public health and nutrition, and geography, which have examined food and food systems for a longer time than planners, and also have deeper theoretical foundations. We include in our thinking geographers and others who have “crossed over” to planning, but we do not include those only considering the food system more generally or descriptively, or without action as a focus or outcome. This might seem like an arbitrary distinction, but the question of how and whether knowledge moves to action is particularly important in planning, so we set the boundaries for discussing food systems planning as those works that directly engage with planning or implementation.

We know that many mainstream planning practitioners assiduously avoid discussing theory, even to the point of equating it with ineffective, ponderous practice. Yet, in practice their choices embed ethical and political theory in everyday life. At risk of stating the obvious, we would disagree that discussing and understanding theory leads to ineffective practice. We instead find ourselves aligned with a long history of planning scholars who suggest that theory can help to inform and enrich practice, and vice versa. We think that one of the impediments for planning practitioners (beginning in their student days) is that they oftentimes equate theory only with something akin to critical theory, which is an overly restrictive understanding of the endeavor. Although planners often casually disparage theory, they also unknowingly or uncritically fall back on economistic rational choice theory (economic profit motive in cost benefit analysis) or social exchange theory (rewards or punishment within human relationships in cost benefit analysis) without considering the powerful implications of alternatives (like critical theory, or feminist theory, for example).

This reluctance to engage with theory is unfortunate, because theory offers many opportunities for planning. This is familiar to any planning scholar, as we speak regularly about how integral theory and practice are to each other. It is sometimes suggested that theory is what practitioners should turn to when they don’t know what else to do. The editors have a broad understanding of planning theory, including meta and critical theory and general theories of planning to meso and micro theories in planning (Faludi 1973). Theories of planning allow us to address what planning does, or what it should do, and the context in which those actions are situated. It includes critical and normative approaches. Theories in planning address what planners do, what they should do, and how they do it, as ways of conceptualizing action and organizational activities. Both are valid approaches for theorizing planning. From a scalar perspective, then, we embrace the macro to the micro and anything in between. From a breadth of analytical frames, we think planning can be addressed by numerous social, economic, and political theories (and maybe physical, mathematical, and biological as well). Theory is an exciting motivator for the advancement of the field, intellectually and practically.

The section of the book that follows represents a selection of authors who engage with food systems and theory in different ways over different times. The section opens with one of the earliest food systems planning articles and then moves to a contemporary reflection on an influential early report on entrepreneurial urban farming. Both of these works are predominantly practice-oriented and do not significantly discuss theories of or in planning that may apply to their setting. The subsequent three contemporary chapters employ or discuss several possible theoretical framings and cover urban agriculture and food commons governance.

The first chapter is a reprint of one of the foundational articles of food system planning; arguably, without it there might be no disciplinarily formalized planning for food systems. Kami Pothukuchi and Jerry Kaufman’s (2000) The Food System: A Stranger to the Planning Field did two important things. First, it defined the term food system, a new term and concept for urban planning (though not other fields such as rural sociology or geography). Pothukuchi and Kaufman described the elements of food systems that planners should be aware of and already address in their work, and importantly they included regulatory and institutional structures in their definition. The article also highlighted the untenable position that planners took with regard to the food system: while planning examines three of the four highest needs for humans (shelter, air, water) extensively and comprehensively, it had to that point essentially ignored the food system except for a few sub-elements (farmers markets, economic development, etc.). Planning lacked a systemic view of how food was important to human settlement. The second major contribution was an examination of planners’ opinions about their engagement with the food system. By surveying city planning agencies directly, Kami and Jerry learned why planners thought they were not or should not be engaged in food system issues and provided a baseline by which planners’ perspectives could be evaluated in the future.

Perhaps due to the article’s publication in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the leading disciplinary journal of practice, Pothukuchi and Kaufman almost entirely avoided mentioning how theory might be important to food systems planning. Perhaps they did not want to dilute their core argument, or lose their audience; it very well may have been a strategic decision. But shy of a few mentions of possible theoretical frames such as community food security, community health, public interest, and sustainability, they neither provide theoretical guidance nor suggest the relevance of any type of theory for the practice-oriented suggestions they eventually make.

On balance, there is no question that this article in the main journal dedicated to practice helped introduce the topic to a new audience and steer the field of planning towards the inclusion of food systems planning. In that regard it was very important and remarkably successful. One is left to wonder what might have been had the authors taken a more directive theoretical framing of the issue to guide that developing practice. Reflecting on their roles as academic-practitioners, it is a little surprising. In the article, Pothukuchi and Kaufman place great faith in planning and planners without seriously considering the extensive evidence through history of planning working at odds with community needs and interests—something of which they were very aware. Why would they think it would be any different in the case of food systems planning? This question remains unanswered as we review this work some twenty years on.

The next chapter, by Martin Bailkey and Rosalind Greenstein, is itself a reflection after twenty years on work done by Jerry Kaufman and Bailkey, his then-PhD student (Bailkey and Greenstein 2024). The original research study and report, Farming Inside Cities: Entrepreneurial Urban Agriculture in the United States, was part of a larger effort funded by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to address issues of formerly industrial cities (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000). It is almost exclusively a practical piece, and remains relevant today for its findings about the challenges of operating farms as businesses in cities.

Because of the Lincoln Institute’s involvement, an interesting possible theoretical thread presented itself: the Institute is strongly influenced by the theories of Henry George and his land value tax as a way to address poverty and the excesses of capitalism. Elements of Georgist thought regularly influenced the programming or publications of the Institute. However, given a wide latitude to interpret the use of Georgist land use theory into Lincoln-funded projects, it is not surprising that these provocative ideas were not explicitly examined in Kaufman and Bailkey’s study of entrepreneurial agriculture. That connection remains one to be detailed by future researchers or planning theorists.

While not directly addressing theory, as Bailkey and former Lincoln Institute Land Markets program director Greenstein note, Farming Inside Cities was still to some extent a reflection of rational planning analysis. It was not limited to rational planning’s scope, though, as it had a broader understanding of expertise and an epistemology that included experiential knowledge and information generated by urban farmers, not professionally trained planners. Ultimately, it was a pragmatic piece that served multiple audiences and is a demonstration of Kaufman’s strategic approach to developing a body of food system literature to influence the planning field.

Bailkey and Greenstein suggest an important point about Farming Inside Cities and Jerry’s beliefs about the roles and abilities of the public sector: they are predicated on a vision of effective public sector facilitation of food system activities that planning has yet to fully embrace. There are many possible explanations for this. The first is that the public sector simply has yet to understand and implement the many food system ideas provided by practice and research. Another possibility is that food system resources are heterogeneous, and different types require different forms of governance to steward them effectively. Perhaps the belief in consistency and effectiveness in public sector planning is itself the problem; maybe a better food system organizational strategy would be less centralized and hierarchical? These questions are examined by another chapter in this section by Frimpong Boamah (2024), who fundamentally questions the ways in which food “commons” ought to be governed, tackling a basic tension of planning about the role of state-based planning versus community-led planning.

The next piece in the section, which is also reprinted with permission from the Journal of the American Planning Association, by Megan Horst et al. (2017, this volume, Chap. 6), demonstrates how theoretical concerns began to be represented more in the food planning literature. More than just food planning, though, they examine the broader literature on urban agriculture to see connections to a set of theoretical concepts. They certainly follow other authors in planning in this regard, many of whom offered theoretical lenses to social movements and food systems practice, such as Gerda Wekerle (2004) and Kate Clancy (2004). However, Horst, McClintock, and Hoey offer more of a meta-analysis, and examine a larger literature on a narrower topic. Through their review of planning, urban agriculture, and food justice, they bring a (food) justice consideration as well as several other critical lenses. While they are dealing with a more limited topic—urban agriculture—than food systems planning, they understand the implications of not having a food justice framing to the work. They say: “Without valuation of food justice, however, urban agriculture strategies may primarily benefit the propertied class and newcomers rather than disadvantaged communities” (Horst et al. 2017, p. 278, this volume, Chap. 6). The same qualification can be made for the use of such framing with regard to normative theory in food planning. Without such consideration, planning is likely to continue as it has, benefitting most those who are already advantaged by the system.

Tellingly, the authors in this case draw from a “wider scholarly literature” (that is, beyond planning) to find and demonstrate how a critical analysis can benefit planners in prioritizing food justice, which is consistent with the values of the planning field as described by Pothukuchi and Kaufman. Such frames, as Horst, McClintock, and Hoey describe in the chapter, include a rights-based approach including a right to the city, an explicit distributive justice approach, a focus on food democracy, political economy and neoliberal governance, radical self-determinism, property rights and ownership, anti-capitalist organizing, and critical race theory. Each of these approaches would have its own influence on planning practice and the forms of practice that would be used or even acceptable, especially as planners increasingly seek goals of sustainability and resilience in the context of urban (and other) development. Written seventeen years after Pothukuchi and Kaufman’s groundbreaking work, this article is indicative of the potential of a new generation of planning thought, theoretically informed to provide a considered way forward for food systems planning. As such, it interacts well with the other modern pieces in the section written by Domenic Vitiello and Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah.

In the former, Vitiello (2024) examines urban agriculture in Chicago and Philadelphia, cities that Jerry Kaufman and Martin Bailkey also studied, and develops an argument that cities value urban agriculture differently. Some cities take a public goods approach, while others take a more economic and redevelopment value approach to understanding the potential contributions of urban agriculture to urban space. Vitiello points out these are divergent theories of urban land use and lead to different systems of urban agriculture and commensurate support institutions.

Vitiello asks what values and aims cities have ascribed to urban agriculture, how support systems have been organized accordingly, and what these choices imply for urban agriculture as a land use in cities. Teasing apart the possibilities of urban agriculture as a public good on one hand, or as providing for the public interest on the other, we see that this different conception drives how urban agriculture systems operate. Pointing out that (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000) use the community food security framework to focus food systems planning and intervention, Vitiello suggests that community food security has become “a theory of practice for many food system planners since then” (2024). The public goods versus public interest (as economic value) framing is another way to assess city performance with regard to urban agriculture and bring theory to bear on practice.

Drawing from past work of Kaufman, Pothukuchi, Bailkey, and his own work with Laura Wolf-Powers, Vitiello shows how cities use conventional planning notions of “highest and best use” to drive land use decision making—to the detriment of long-term land tenure for urban agricultural uses, even when the cities are losing population. Even when such agricultural uses are successful in economic terms, the argument is made by all of these authors that cities should recognize and more highly value the “second and third order” economic development impacts. Borrowing from Nathan McClintock’s incisive critique, Vitiello suggests that a clear distinction between the public good and public interest approaches is impossible—urban agriculture is necessarily tied in to the complex dynamics of urban growth, including the paradox of elements of urban agriculture at once serving communities and neoliberal interests alike.

Looking at Philadelphia and Chicago provides an understanding of different city trajectories for urban agriculture based on the values expressed in their municipal and institutional systems. Vitiello shares the example of Chicago’s NeighborSpace as a model organization that prioritizes urban agriculture and long-term land tenure. This is a break from treating urban agriculture as a temporary land use to address the ills of economic and social crises. He calls for city governments to move away from the redevelopment paradigm and to value urban agriculture for the many things it does well. This would require prioritizing the public good approach and developing governance and other institutions to support the growth and sustainability of community gardens, farms, and what Frimpong Boamah describes as Urban Food Commons.

The section ends with perhaps the most ambitious theoretical approach to considering food systems planning, by Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, who addresses complexity in form, function, and governance of urban agriculture. He does this by first defining how urban agricultural spaces can be considered a type of commons, which he calls urban food commons (UFCs) (Frimpong Boamah 2024) These then can be folded into the extant conversation about governance structures appropriate to different types of commons. Inherent in the definitions is the idea, shared and elaborated in the previous chapter by Vitiello, that urban agriculture can be considered a public good, with commensurate governance implications.

Frimpong Boamah opens with two questions, which themselves provide the reader theoretical grounding for thinking about UFCs: should they be governed as public or private spaces, and, at what scale should they be governed? He calls these the “public-private, state-market debate” and the “institutional scale debate.” Based on theoretical examples, he demonstrates how UFCs are not singularly defined, and thus should also be governed by an array of institutional arrangements that comport with the characteristics of the UFC. Ultimately, he lands on the concept of polycentricity, or polycentric governance, which brings together a variety of actors in UFC spaces in a governance system that responds through locally specified mixes of rules. There is no one-size-fits-all governance model for UFCs.

Frimpong Boamah breaks down polycentric UFC governance through the use of metaphorical pillars (two) and institutional design parameters (four) to demonstrate how they might be combined to achieve desired goals and manage spillover effects. The systems, he suggests, should be self-organized in support of these ends. The prospects of his ideas are exciting, and map fairly well to some urban agriculture organizations. As with most decentralized, complex forms of governance structured by adaptable rules, one is left curious about both practical efficacy and whether such flexibility would provide enough predictability for market and non-market actors to make decisions. To demonstrate how such a polycentric governance system might work in practice, Frimpong Boamah provides a case study of Chicago’s NeighborSpace (also highlighted in Vitiello’s chapter). Described in this piece in a fashion congruent with the polycentric UFC frame, we see a nested system of stakeholders and flexible decision making at multiple scales appropriate for the given outcome.

As cities continue to work urban agriculture into their physical and institutional spaces, both Vitiello and Frimpong Boamah suggest that such UFCs should be actively queried as to what value they (should) provide to the city. Both come down on the side of UFCs as public goods. Both suggest that organization and governance of these spaces and activities are not easily encompassed by one organizational or regulatory structure. Frimpong Boamah provides a theoretical path that could show the way for cities to structure and govern such complexity.