Keywords

When faced with a quandary, Jerry Kaufman’s former students and colleagues are fond of asking ourselves WWJD, or, What Would Jerry Do? As the book illustrates, Jerry always had an eye on the future, observing trends and asking questions before others did (Raja 2024). Jerry was among the earliest planning scholars, with his colleague Kami Pothukuchi, to draw attention to the importance of the food system in planning. Jerry embodied what it means to be a visionary thinker, but his visioning wasn’t purely theoretical. He translated his visions into action. In his foreword to this book, Dan Kaufman recalls that Jerry “embodied the Wisconsin Idea, the century-old ethos that places a moral obligation on the University of Wisconsin’s faculty to serve the citizens of the entire state” (Kaufman 2024). Jerry nudged planners to consider the ethical dimensions of their choices. Indeed, he was instrumental in advocating for the development and adoption of the American Planning Association’s statement of Ethical Principles in Planning in 1992 (https://www.planning.org/ethics/ethicalprinciples/). This statement of ethical principles was the precursor to the current American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (https://www.planning.org/ethics/ethicscode/), which offers aspirational principles and a set of guiding rules for practicing planners in the United States today.

True to his calling as a planner, Jerry was a pragmatist and a strategist, connecting opportunities to needs. Importantly, as a planner, Jerry was committed to building the capacity of individuals and institutions for the greater good. He urged his former students and colleagues to do the same. He was extraordinarily persuasive. Bailkey and Greenstein, his advisee and colleague, respectively, describe Jerry’s approach: “Kaufman was fond of using clear and simple metaphors to first clarify a concept in his mind, then present the concept to others.” They note that in one of his reports, Jerry “summarized the most common impediments to urban agriculture as six general concerns, intentionally phrased – in a very Kaufman-esque maneuver – to represent a “devil’s advocate: position against the practice….” (Bailkey and Greenstein 2024). Jerry was also one of the early adopters of conflict resolution techniques in planning pedagogy and practice, applying these techniques to the wicked problems planners encounter, almost as a matter of routine.

The book Planning for Equitable Urban Agriculture in the USA: A New Ethic in City Building, compiled by 50+ co-authors including Jerry Kaufman’s colleagues, students, and students of students, is a testament to his legacy of nurturance. Knitting together Jerry’s scholarship, teachings, and actions on ethics and urban agriculture, we argue for framing planning as public nurturance. This chapter describes the concept of public nurturance – and illustrates how planning for urban agriculture, in particular, may serve as a lever for promoting varied public interests, especially of those who are marginalized.

Public nurturance extends the idea of nurturance – or provisioning of material and non-material nourishment – to advance the well-being of publics that are marginalized in society. Jerry frequently reminded his students that protecting and promoting the public interest is the primary duty of planners. Urban agriculture offers multiple potential pathways for promoting public interests: access to healthier foods, greener spaces, ecological services, community and organizing spaces, and one’s control over the food system, for example.

Public nurturance demands that planning be understood as an explicitly value-laden proposition that protects the interests of the marginalized. Thus, public interest or collective well-being cannot be advanced if particular groups of people are precluded from leading full and dignified lives for any reason, including by virtue of their identity or membership in a particular socio-economic group. Public nurturance requires building the capacity of marginalized individuals and groups so they may co-design and claim the benefits/opportunities available through public institutions. Public nurturance also requires that actions and outcomes be evaluated to ensure accountability, and, subsequently, resources, plans, and policies be redirected as necessary. Public nurturance requires co-designing equitable institutions with people so that finite resources are targeted toward those who have been historically and are currently marginalized.

1 Planning as Public Nurturance Protects Interests of Those Who Are Marginalized

One way of describing planning is as an exercise in using reason to protect the public interest for current and future generations (Brenman and Sanchez 2012). However, a vast body of scholarship on city building suggests that planning in the United States has fallen far short of this ideal. Given that planning is an under-theorized field (Born 2024), planners have also been misled by framing the public interest as a unitary concept, sometimes with terrible consequences for those disenfranchised by their access to socio-economic or political power. Planning has been implicated in perpetuating racial segregation, economic disparities, displacement/dispossession, and a host of other socio-economic injustices (see, e.g., Rothstein 2017; Stein 2019). Scholars have also critiqued the neoliberal turn in city building by illustrating that planning has been increasingly complicit in advancing private development interests. Too often, the city has emerged as a site of profit making. Most pertinent to this book, many of these planning and policy approaches, by neglecting the multiplicity of public interests, have laid the ground for food apartheid in urban settings (Raja et al. 2008; Reese 2019). In Buffalo, NY, for example, predominantly Black neighborhoods are underserved by traditional, large-format supermarket retail compared to predominantly white neighborhoods even when controlling for income and other factors (Raja et al. 2008) – a spatial pattern that aligns with historic redlining patterns in the city. In the same predominantly Black neighborhoods, the city’s only Black farmer has struggled to acquire land for their urban farm, while, in an example of elite capture, private development projects in the same area have benefited from public incentive programs.

Planning as public nurturance would require re-imagining an entirely different future for US cities, one that examines Gottlieb’s (2022) pathways for change toward a “care-centered politics” in the process of reclaiming planning’s role as balancing, protecting, and promoting the many public interests that exist in cities. It would require understanding whose interests are routinely marginalized, and protecting these interests through structural reforms. Public nurturance requires care for present and future generations – and promoting such intergenerational well-being requires acknowledging intergenerational trauma.

For the sake of a thought exercise, envision a hot real estate market where planners are considering using a 30-acre, publicly owned land parcel currently leased out to an urban farmer for a 5-year term (the lease is ending). Consider three fictitious (but typical) choices that city planners face: (1) renewal of the lease of land to the urban farmer for a farm, (2) a mixed-use development proposal brought forth by a developer, or (3) preparation of the site for future affordable housing development per the city’s (somewhat dated) comprehensive plan. In choice 1, renewal of the urban farm’s lease could ensure provision of green infrastructure in the neighborhood, helping to mitigate the effects of changing climate by managing increased rainfall. The farm may also serve as a site of food production. Choice 2, a mixed-use development with housing and retail stores, may increase housing supply and access to services. Choice 3 requires city planners to prepare the site exclusively for residential housing development to increase affordable housing supply.

On the surface, all three choices present planners with a somewhat technical land use decision. However, each of the three scenarios may have hidden institutional arrangements, agents (and beneficiaries), and power asymmetries that may position one or all of the choices as no better (or worse) future for the neighborhood residents. All of the choices may have spillover effects. In choice 1, the presence of the urban farm may increase the amenity value of the neighborhood, which may over time translate into increased property values for adjacent properties. In choice 1, even the ostensible support for urban agriculture is not without complications. One might ask a series of questions to probe who benefits (or loses). Who does the urban farm serve? What if the farm is owned and operated by an entrepreneur who does not live in the neighborhood? Who does the farm sell its produce to? What if the farm grows and sells only high-end herbs to a high-priced restaurant (and not produce food for the local residents)? What benefits does the urban farm offer the neighborhood compared to, say, an affordable housing development? Choices 2 and 3 are complex as well. The resulting development may result in a discrete increase in property tax structures for a revenue-hungry city (setting aside for a minute that the new development may demand increased municipal services, and result in the city having to expend increased public funds). As prices (and rents) and property taxes increase, residents, especially those with limited incomes, may be displaced to more affordable neighborhoods.

Agents with power (or proximity to power) may engage in – and influence – the design of planning institutions, processes, and outcomes of all three technical choices we have described. This power to wield an influence on institutions plays out in planning for urban agriculture because of information asymmetry between various publics – and between the public and the city government – about something as straightforward as how to access a vacant parcel for food production in a city. Elite capture of available resources deepens inequitable access to urban agriculture resources such as land. The trajectory of institutional arrangements and processes is set well before the outcomes see public light. Debates surrounding gentrification, for example, emerge after development projects begin to surface in neighborhoods – well after the underlying land use plans have been adopted that set the stage for development patterns (and often without the full engagement of long-time residents of a neighborhood).

The heart of the matter is who identifies the public interest(s) for a particular neighborhood, and how a particular planning choice protects the interests of those who are marginalized. Failure to design a planning process where residents have a say from the outset – and throughout the process – creates the longstanding and well-known false dichotomy that pits community gardens or other green spaces against other land uses such as affordable housing (as outlined in choice 3). Notable examples include New York City’s history of selling off community gardens to land developers (http://emeraldreview.com/new-york-citys-history-of-uprooting-community-gardens/) and the destruction – and hopeful eventual restoration – of South Central Farm in Los Angeles (https://www.southcentralfarm.org/). When residents, planners, affordable housing developers, and urban agriculture practitioners are able to come together, they can co-design new residential developments in ways that meets multiple public interests, with urban agriculture practitioners and members of marginalized communities as part of the planning and design team. The result is vibrant, co-created community spaces like Madison’s Troy Gardens (Lipman and Caton Campbell 2024) and the Denver Housing Authority’s projects (Cohen et al. 2024).

Urban agriculture becomes part of a community’s or a neighborhood’s permanent fabric through a process of negotiation and change that planning would do well to emulate. Urban agriculture practitioners take community interests, needs, and cultural foodways and traditions into account on an annual basis, through mechanisms as simple as customer feedback on crop choices and as significant as how they expand their farms to multiple sites, and expressed in various physical forms (e.g., community gardens, educational farm, production farm) appropriate to the surrounding neighborhood (Riordan and Rangarajan 2024). Urban agriculture growers often include aspects of social enterprise in their projects, creating community capacity building, educational, and economic development opportunities for community members – an undervalued aspect of urban agriculture that is important to historically and currently marginalized communities. Creating social enterprise opportunities constitutes public nurturance, which planners would do well to recognize as they plan for urban agriculture (which is so much more than food production alone).

The point here is that planning as public nurturance requires that those who live in neighborhoods and cities must be full participants in envisioning the future of their own communities – and that this future must protect the interests of those who are marginalized. Technical decisions, such as those about land use with or without urban agriculture, too, must protect the collective interest of those who are marginalized.

2 Planning as Public Nurturance Reduces Information Asymmetry and Builds Capacity in Marginalized Communities

Increasing codification of planning rules and regulations in cities makes planning even more opaque to urban residents, businesses, civic groups, and, yes, urban farmers. City governments (and funders) seek ‘shovel-ready’ projects. Setting aside the irony that, in planning-speak, shovel-ready has nothing to do with farming, calls for project readiness overlook the varying capacity of urban agriculture practitioners to navigate inaccessible municipal development and policy processes. Urban farmers find their operations require them to interface with multiple city agencies from zoning and permitting to licensing, and find it especially difficult to navigate the bureaucratic maze and mechanisms of city government. Large-scale builders and developers, on the other hand, have project managers whose job includes interfacing with city government. In this case, information asymmetry between urban growers and large-scale builders about policy processes fuels elite capture of available public resources.

For their part, many city governments have created a streamlined review and permitting process for developers – but we have yet to come across a municipal government that has offered a ‘one-stop shop for urban agriculture’ in their city. The closest some cities have gotten is offering briefs or handouts for urban growers to help them navigate a city’s land use regulatory processes. Expecting farmers to submit ‘shovel ready’ land use or other plans is akin to expecting planning directors to know what produce is in season in their region.

Along with discharging their technical duties, planners who practice public nurturance have to invest in critical public education about how planning works in their particular jurisdiction. In a review of literature, Ramos-Gerena (2023) writes about the limited scholarship on critical food policy literacy, a gap that has severe consequences for urban growers who find municipal policy a hindrance to their work. The frame of public nurturance shifts the onus to planners, and not the public, to decode how planning works with respect to urban agriculture. Decoding processes that control publicly held material resources, such as land or grant dollars or loan funds, is especially important to reach smaller-scale, community-led efforts to plan and transform neighborhoods. Decoding and making navigable urban land acquisition and management processes in cities is especially important for urban agriculture to reduce information asymmetry between urban growers and other users competing for public resources such as land.

Academic curricula, too, must transform to embrace “equitable, just, and compassionate food systems pedagogy” (Caton Campbell and Judelsohn 2024) that trains future planners to function as capacity builders, catalysts for and animators of ideas. Building the capacity of a range of community actors around planning topics is more likely to result in mutually reinforcing ways of engaging in city-building processes, including around urban agriculture.

3 Planning as Public Nurturance Complements Implementation with Accountability

That planning and plans must result in action is a well-understood, if poorly enacted, principle in professional planning practice. City governments must also be held accountable — indeed, should hold themselves accountable — when their actions (or inaction) do not achieve the collective interests of the marginalized. The absence of accountability not only frays public trust but is an extraordinarily inefficient way of using and monitoring finite public resources. When planners and city governments fail to act or assure outcomes that protect the public interest, people understandably take matters into their own hands.

The rise of urban agriculture projects in the United States (Morales and DeMarsh 2024), in many ways, illustrates people’s cynicism about their local (or other forms of) government to ‘fix’ neighborhoods. Multiple authors in this book and elsewhere have illustrated that Black, brown, and immigrant communities take it upon themselves to provide mutual care and services in the face of poorly run (or missing) publicly run programs and services in cities (Raja 2020).

Again, consider Buffalo, NY, as an example. In this city, the failure of municipal (and other forms of) government to invest in its historically Black neighborhoods made national headlines in 2022, in the wake of a massacre by a white supremacist in a grocery store that resulted in 10 people being shot dead. The city’s Black neighborhoods, which lie east of Main Street, have seen negligible public investment over the decades. Relevant to urban food systems, predominantly Black neighborhoods in the region have less than half the share of supermarkets compared to predominantly white neighborhoods, even when controlling for the wealth of neighborhoods and other factors. In the neighborhood where the shooter executed his evil plans, there was/is only one supermarket where residents shopped, a structural deficit that the shooter recognized and used to his advantage to target and kill Black residents. It is important to note that though public policy has failed to protect the public interest (e.g., food access) in the neighborhood, Black-led organizations and coalitions have continued to provide collective care (Griffin et al. 2024). Urban Fruits and Veggies, a Black-led urban farm founded by Allison DeHonney, grows fresh produce but has struggled to secure land for expanding its operations. Buffalo Freedom Gardens, a front yard/backyard garden program launched in the wake of COVID by Gail Wells, promotes self-sustenance and liberation in Black Buffalo. African Heritage Food Coop, a Black-led food cooperative founded by Alexander Wright, sells fresh food and builds Black ownership of the food system. Many of these organizations went into overdrive in the wake of the shooting, forming a coalition that delivered fresh food and groceries to traumatized families. Of course, all levels of government have stepped up in the wake of the shooting, but their failure to act affirmatively for decades and their lack of accountability for that failure does not engender trust. Community advocates recognize that the absence of policy to address the Black community’s aspirations is, in fact, de facto policy.

A shift to planning as public nurturance would require cities not only to act, but to evaluate the short-term and long-term impacts of their (in)actions on public interest outcomes for marginalized peoples. In a hopeful turn, in Erie County, NY, where Buffalo is located, the county government has assembled a task force of multiple agencies, including planning and public health, to learn about and respond to the frayed urban food infrastructure in Buffalo in the wake of the massacre. Planning departments could conduct post-hoc evaluation of public policy (in)actions in partnership with community organizations, multiple public agencies, such as public health or social services, or academic partners that monitor and measure public interest outcomes such as health inequities (Mui et al. 2018). Accountable city governments — and planning departments — would embrace post hoc evaluations, and pivot their plans and programs to promote the interests of the marginalized.

4 Public Nurturance Planning Centers Equity and Ethics in the Design of Institutions

Scholars suggest that planning practitioners face ethical and emotional dissonance in their work (Lauria and Long 2017). The gaps between individual ethical stance, workplace culture, and the professional code of ethics makes planning a difficult exercise for practitioners. Of course, some planners find creative and strategic ways to individually advance equity-centric planning within the constraints of their planning institutions/organizations. For example, one senior planner in a city advised a resident advocacy organization about the intricacies of planning and budgeting, enabling the civic group to counter a development proposal in their neighborhood. Other planners are redefining planning as more expansive, putting their planning skills in the service of work that is more aligned with their values but outside of formal municipal planning (e.g., working with an advocacy organization). An early career planner worked with a not-for-profit organization to facilitate community gardens in a city with abundant vacant land (this required the individual to oppose the city’s policies on land management). Still others find the ethical dissonance within the neoliberal state too much to bear and are simply exiting the profession.

Among the three groups of planners we describe above, the individual planning practitioner is often expected to navigate public interest quandaries and dilemmas, and exercise an individual ethic of care. The expectation for individual planners to exhibit an ethical stance is, of course, welcome. However, the hyper-focus on the individual responsibility of planners detracts attention away from the institutions and processes — the structures — within which individual planners make decisions (ethical or not). Indeed, the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) expects individual planners to comply with a code of ethics, but no commensurate professional expectations exist for an institutional ethic of care (e.g., departments of planning) or for policies (e.g., comprehensive plans). An individualized ethic of care, thus, masks the necessity for structural or collective ethics of care. If the larger structures, rules, codes, taxonomies, and power hierarchies within (and outside) of a municipal government circumscribe the actions of individual planners, what good is individuals’ adherence to the AICP Code of Ethics?

Urban agriculture is, in fact, a portal into this conundrum. In its narrow fiscal hierarchy of land use, city governments do not consider urban agriculture to be the ‘highest and best’ use of land (Vitiello 2024). Urban agriculture advocates do. Often situated on land owned by community land trusts, conservation land trusts, or nonprofit organizations that do not pay property taxes, urban agriculture will not generate the same level of property taxes as, say, a condominium development (the net fiscal impact of urban agriculture for municipalities may, in fact, be beneficial compared to the condos. Though urban agriculture generates less in property taxes, it also demands less in public services such as schools, police, etc.). Still, so long as property taxes, rather than the full suite of benefits from urban agriculture highlighted throughout this book, remain the primary (or sometimes sole) metric to gauge which land uses belong in a city, no amount of ethical decision-making by an individual planner can help advance urban agriculture. In addition, developers typically impose a project on a neighborhood (or offer token community input opportunities such as, “Do you like Concept A or Concept B better?”) after project concepts and features are already decided upon. Urban agriculture, on the other hand, becomes part of a community’s or neighborhood’s permanent fabric (or so we hope) through a process of continual negotiation and change. A more equitable institutional response would suggest that cities use their full suite of policies, from laws to budgets, to invest in urban agriculture to promote the interests of the marginalized. As chapters in this book illustrate, the primary way that planners and local governments engage with urban agriculture is through regulation (e.g., zoning and permitting) (Raja et al. 2024). A public nurturance approach would seek to use all possible institutional mechanisms to maximize urban agriculture’s benefits for the collective interests of people, especially those who are marginalized. Public lands could be made available for community land trusts led by and for Black and brown farmers, for example. Public budgets could be redeployed away from police expenditures – callously called public safety – to investments in urban agriculture programs or tool-lending programs. Public resources, such as compost generated by a municipal composting program, could be made available to rebuild depleted soils at urban farms and community gardens (which provide green infrastructure services). Large-scale development projects could be subject to a food (equity) impact assessment rather than the narrower (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999), but frequently used, fiscal impact assessment, to gauge their impacts on people’s well-being. In a nutshell, an equity-centric assessment would focus on documenting the impact on those who are marginalized.

Local governments will not ultimately enact lasting structural and institutional reforms if individual planners, especially those in leadership positions, do not lead from within. Jerry Kaufman referred to this approach as planners functioning like “guerrillas in the bureaucracy” (Needleman and Needleman 1974). Indeed, landmark studies of planners’ ethics by Jerry and his colleague Beth Howe identified planners who drew on their values, technical expertise, and political acumen to advocate for change from within (Howe and Kaufman 1979, 1981); some of this change we would describe as institutional. Jerry was a consequentialist, according to Beth Howe (who distinguishes her own focus on the inherent rightness or wrongness of processes from his more outcome-oriented approach). We suspect, though we never had this conversation with Jerry, that his preoccupation with equitable outcomes was rooted in his observation of continued structural and institutional oppression of particular peoples despite planners’ adherence to ‘good’ planning processes. Indeed, even when individual planners act ethically, the institutional structures they occupy or represent, can continue to inflict harm. Worse, an ethical planner’s presence may even be used to mask institutional harm. Equitable outcomes require ethical principles be demonstrated by and acted upon by both individual planners and planning institutions. Planning [for urban agriculture] as public nurturance departs from the prevalent individualist view by suggesting that questions of equity and ethics ought to be foregrounded in the institutional taxonomies that shape planning practice – and, indeed, planners’ actions.

Jerry Kaufman would expect nothing less of us.