Keywords

1 Introduction

For Jerry Kaufman, a working paper on urban agriculture represented, broadly, a late-career integration of his long-held commitment to social justice. More particularly, it represented his strong interest as a planner in the theory and practice of central city revitalization, and a new personal belief in food systems as a legitimate area of professional planning practice best expressed in the classic article he wrote with Kami Pothukuchi (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000), concurrently with Farming Inside Cities (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000). Upon its completion, Farming Inside Cities served to advance a domestic urban agenda within the Lincoln Institute, and was welcomed by urban farmers and representatives of the then-new community food movement as a serious, academic recognition of their own belief in themselves as change agents. Today, as urban farming has become more widespread, and considered less of a novelty, the highly practical nature of Farming Inside Cities, directly influenced by Kaufman, and its description of the opportunities and challenges of entrepreneurial urban agriculture still holds up. Despite its practical value to urban agriculture practitioners, many of them socially disadvantaged, it does not make explicit the deep value of urban farming as a symbolic and often-effective vehicle for advancing social equity, food justice, and self-determination within urban communities. Nor did Farming Inside Cities strongly tie urban agriculture to other elements of community food systems, many of which urban agriculture strongly connects to, such as farmers markets and other forms of direct marketing to urban consumers.

Kaufman’s motivation was largely driven by his moral imagination that led him to see vacant and abandoned property as an outcome of the neglect of both private and public sectors. Indeed, where both public and private capital fled from the neighborhoods and cities that bore the brunt of the disinvestment of the 1970s and 1980s, these places and their residents had been the focus of Kaufman’s career. For us, there was no difference in who Jerry was as a man, as a friend, as a teacher, as a boss, as a mentor, as a researcher, or as practitioner. Whoever he was, was not compartmentalized. That is, one reason we found Jerry to be an inspirational colleague was that his moral compass informed his professional ethics. He was an ethical man in how he treated people (community residents and professional colleagues) and his social justice commitments informed all of his actions. Central city revitalization was important to Jerry because it was a reflection of just actions for real people, not abstract people or “other people.”

2 The Objectives of Farming Inside Cities

Jerry was a child of the Great Depression and Victory Gardens. So it’s no wonder that he could imagine the reuse of urban vacant parcels in older industrial cities for food production. Urban agriculture combined a self-help ethic, a responsibility to the revitalization of urban neighborhoods and their residents born of a commitment to social justice, and a belief that food was as essential to life as clean air and clean water and as planners we could not improve human settlements without paying attention to food systems (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999).

It might have seemed an odd time in his career to begin a new research area. Yet, this new field meant that Jerry had the opportunity to meet an entirely new cohort community of activists and get the opportunity to spend hours in leisurely conversations with them, driven by his wide curiosity, all across the Upper Midwest.

When Jerry came to Greenstein for funding this new area of work she was more than a bit skeptical. The skepticism came, in part, because she did not find his argument that local food systems were as important an area of planning as was any other system that affects cities a convincing one. For Greenstein, her training as an economic development planner, led her to understand food as an industry. Moreover, it was an international industry, with global supply chains, dominated by large multi-national, publicly-traded corporations. From a political economy perspective, the notion that planners could somehow use vacant land and seasonal farmers’ markets to effectively plan alternative food systems seemed naïve, at best. Using the Institute’s grant-making and agenda-setting activities, Greenstein was allocating resources into topics that would be of interest to community change agents in older industrial cities. Jerry’s project would further that agenda. The pragmatic needs of a philanthropist won out over the political-economy informed skepticism and Greenstein was able to fund Kaufman and Bailkey.

2.1 Value Capture

Within the context of the Institute’s urban land markets program resources were directed towards issues around planning and development in the cities and metropolitan regions. Issues related to taxation, as well as planning and development in the suburbs, peri-urban fringe, and regional environmental issues were the purview of other programs. Despite these programmatic divisions, all program heads were guided by the Institute’s bylaws that described its purpose as the dissemination of the ideas in Henry George’s book, Progress and Poverty (Brown 1997). Within this overarching goal, and depending on who was sitting in the Institute’s president’s office, program directors were largely free to interpret this charge.

Greenstein interpreted George as a radical capitalist who was morally outraged by the presence of poverty in the face of plenty. Writing as the US was moving from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy, George argued that widespread access to land would reduce poverty. The single tax on land—but not on improvements—would discourage speculation and encourage placing idle land into productive use. If the poor were using this idle land for productive use, George argued, they would no longer be poor. George’s analysis is highly influenced by the agrarian economy and the imposition of a simple agrarian truth onto an industrializing and urbanizing economy. However, the argument also runs parallel to one advanced by Thomas Jefferson, in which his social values inform the value he places on production. For Jefferson, independent farmers who were not beholden to employers were needed to guarantee a democracy. For George, if one had land to farm, one might be poor but not starving, and thus would retain dignity. It is from these social values that George argues that taxing land would force owners to put that property into productive use.

The single tax was meant as a vehicle to eradicate poverty. George’s argument in favor of the single tax was based on an understanding that private urban land gets its value, not from private effort, as much as from public actions and public investment. Much of the growth in urban land value comes from the natural growth of population that creates demand, as well as public investments in infrastructure, transportation, public health and public education (see Brown 1997 for an interpretation of George in a contemporary context.) George argued that government was justified to tax the incremental value of land. In the US, the property tax is a blunt fiscal instrument that municipal governments use to capture this publicly created land-value. Planning regulations also serve as a mechanism for capturing this land value increment. In a very thorough treatment of land value recapture including intellectual history and planning application in an international context, Alterman (2012) argues that the British planning term “betterment” is useful for understanding the planning connection to land value recapture.

In an effort to extend the Institute’s audience beyond its mostly suburban reach (significant Institute resources in the 1990s were spent on smart growth and land conservation land trusts–areas that tended to be of interest to actors interested in increasing land values of property owned by white suburbanites) the land markets program and the subsequent department of economic and community development, built a portfolio of research and professional training around institutional mechanism to capture the land value increment for community benefit. This framing justified allocating Institute resources to support the work of low-income communities and communities of color living in America’s cities attempting to increase private land values in their communities through interventions that would benefit the community at-large. Urban agriculture would forward that agenda.

2.2 Redefinition of Policy Maker

In the 1990s the Institute audience was policy makers, policy analysts, elected and appointed public officials. However, the thought leaders in economic and community development broadened the definition of policy maker to “change agents,” and understood policy makers as just one category of change makers. This framing allowed the inclusion of community-based non-profit organizations, city residents, and their allies in the Institute’s audience. This was particularly important for professional training, where the curriculum was developed out of the research. Specifically, professional training was developed to be of use to community-based organizations making neighborhood investments in previously disinvested cities and neighborhoods. Once again, Kaufman’s proposal would support this agenda.

3 Urban Agriculture in the Late 1990s

Although not its primary intention, Farming Inside Cities served as a snapshot of the state of entrepreneurial urban agriculture practice in the late 1990s. For-market urban farming across the United States, as considered separately from community gardening, comprised independent farm projects scattered about the country, individualistic in reflecting the characteristics of their originators and managers (often the same person[s]), and typically improvisational in execution. There were few models of success for any particular urban farm to follow, little dissemination of best practices, and few avenues by which a single urban farmer could feel herself part of a larger, national community of practice. A handful of urban agriculture projects appeared in local and national media; these included the God’s Gang Worm and Fish Project, a youth-based vermiculture and aquaponics project operating out of Robert Taylor Homes public housing in Chicago, Food From the ‘Hood, the producer of salad dressing made from vegetables grown by Crenshaw High School students in Los Angeles, and Growing Power, the revamped organization founded and led by Milwaukee urban farmer Will Allen.Footnote 1 All three projects were profiled in Farming Inside Cities.

Community gardens were widespread in 1998, and seen by both gardeners and observers as the contemporary offspring of earlier urban food production efforts, notably wartime victory gardens. Entrepreneurial urban farms, on the other hand, particularly those operating for five years or more, were few, and many faced uncertain futures. City farmers then faced the same primary obstacles they do today, chief among these being the struggle to generate adequate revenue and the challenge of gaining long-term access to vacant urban land.

When the Farming Inside Cities research began in 1998 one would find within large American cities unplanned mixes of community gardens with a handful of for-market urban farms managed by community-based nonprofit organizations using them to achieve one or more organizational goals, or farms operated as individual for-profit businesses. The extent of this mixture in a particular city would reflect a number of independent and dependent factors. These might include a city’s historic connections to agriculture (Chicago), an in-migration of residents with strong, indigenous (Albuquerque) or immigrant (New York City; Holyoke, Massachusetts) agricultural traditions, or a municipal government exploring creative approaches to vacant land reuse (Philadelphia). A large inventory of vacant land would encourage and, to a degree, facilitate the establishment of urban farms (Detroit). In cities with little if any available vacant land, urban agriculture would be fostered by progressive political and environmental cultures (San Francisco Bay Area).

A few cities had an organization dedicated to connecting local urban farmers – Boston Urban Gardens, Denver Urban Gardens, the Detroit Agriculture Network – but they tended to be of limited value given that their membership base was typically too busy with their own farm projects to network with peers. Other cities were fortunate to have active urban extension offices offering technical assistance to community gardeners and urban farmers; for example Cornell Cooperative Extension in New York City, and Penn State Extension in Philadelphia.

4 Concurrent Urban Agriculture Research

Reflecting the under-the-radar nature of urban agriculture in the US, there was little descriptive or supportive literature, in or out of academia, in the late 1990s. What did exist were practical guides, such as extension publications, for those currently doing city farming, and books and articles introducing urban agriculture to the general public as an approach to healthy living, sustainability and the greening of urban environments. There were also titles blending those two types.Footnote 2

Literature on urban agriculture practice in developing nations was more prevalent. At the start of their Lincoln Institute project, Kaufman and Bailkey relied on Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities by Jac Smit, Annu Ratta, and Joe Nasr, and published by the United Nations Development Program (Smit et al. 1996). Although focused entirely on urban farming in developing regions, the book provided both a general background on urban agriculture and a research path based on case study examples across different urban contexts. More importantly, perhaps, Smit, an urban planner and the founder of The Urban Agriculture Network (TUAN), a small, Washington, DC-based research center, was an acquaintance of Kaufman from their early planning careers in Chicago. Kaufman welcomed the opportunity to reconnect with Smit over urban agriculture, and what he learned was energizing and legitimized urban farming as a viable possibility for US cities.

Farming Inside Cities was commissioned, researched and written within a 2-year period that saw the completion of three other studies on the general validity of entrepreneurial urban agriculture. Rather than harboring any concern regarding overlapping efforts, Kaufman and Bailkey welcomed the other studies as a validation of their topic. Communication and some sharing of information soon occurred with authors scattered across the country.

The first of these concurrent studies, and the one Kaufman and Bailkey saw as setting a direction for urban agriculture research in the US, was Entrepreneurial Community Gardens: Growing Food Skills, Jobs and Communities (1999) by Gail Feenstra, Sharyl McGrew and David Campbell, and supported by the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program (SAREP, still active today). It preceded Farming Inside Cities by a year and was also a national overview, but with an emphasis on California projects. The examples it portrayed eschewed the strict separation between traditional community gardens and for-market urban farms adopted for Farming Inside Cities. Instead, Feenstra and her coauthors defined their unit of analysis, “entrepreneurial community garden,” as “any community-based garden that included a formal component in which garden products were sold or community residents were employed, or both” (Feenstra et al. 1999). Of the 27 projects reviewed in Entrepreneurial Community Gardens, four were profiled in Farming Inside Cities. One important factor distinguished the two studies. Feenstra, McGrew and Campbell dug deep into the operational and business dimensions of their projects, profiling them both individually and in the aggregate as noteworthy examples of community-based and community-scaled entrepreneurship around local agriculture. Kaufman and Bailkey followed their lead in combining the particular with the aggregate to make their case. Yet, they used the portrayals of urban farms less to highlight them as individual endeavors, and more to facilitate the creation of further such efforts by identifying and addressing their shared obstacles within city contexts having some similarities and some local differences.

The second concurrent study, Rethinking Direct Marketing Approaches for Urban Market Gardens in Low & Moderate Income Communities (Lawson and Mcnally 1999), was an in-depth analysis of a single urban farming project, the Garden Patch Youth Market Garden Program of Berkeley (California) Youth Alternatives (BYA). The research was conducted over 2 years by Laura Lawson and Marcia McNally, and also supported by SAREP.Footnote 3 The BYA Garden Patch was profiled in Farming Inside Cities as an urban farming project with a clear social agenda, but also one where community-based goals, such as youth training and employment and sustainable neighborhood development were not reconciled with the accompanying goal to have some success as a farming business. An assessment of the project by BYA led to the decision to prioritize job and entrepreneurial training over business achievement.Footnote 4 Today, this inability to reconcile community goals with maximizing revenue, documented by Lawson and McNally two decades ago, strongly exists as an issue facing most community-based and community-focused urban farms initiated as not-for-profit organizational programs. Farming Inside Cities noted the issue of competing goals, but did not express a bias towards either side.

The third study was The Feasibility of Urban Agriculture with Recommendations for Philadelphia (2000), produced by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), and written by PHS consultant, Hope Wohl, a local market researcher. Wohl’s research coincided with the later months of Kaufman’s and Bailkey’s work. The PHS/Wohl report essentially blended the case study approach of Feenstra et al., (examining eight active urban farms in the Northeastern US, only one of which was in Philadelphia) as individual business enterprises, with Kaufman’s and Bailkey’s advocacy of entrepreneurial urban agriculture as a practical and viable public policy approach for Philadelphia’s 40,000 vacant parcels. An important element of the PHS/Wohl study was the outlining of six urban farm business models derived by Wohl from the eight case studies (two which were profiled in Farming Inside Cities).Footnote 5 While local policymakers were part of PHS/Wohl’s intended audience, another audience segment was clearly specified as “potential investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders who are interested in promoting and pursuing urban agricultural businesses” (Hope Wohl Associates 2000, p. 4). While Kaufman and Bailkey thought that Farming Inside Cities might make it into the hands of a few investors and business leaders, that group was not its primary audience.

5 Research and Writing, Theory and Advocacy

In the language of research terminology, Farming Inside Cities was an exploratory study; in reality, however, it was essentially an introductory inquiry that transitioned into an exploratory study. By any measure, neither Kaufman nor Bailkey knew anything about entrepreneurial urban farming at the time of Lincoln’s commissioning the research. Kaufman was familiar with the concept of allotment gardening from earlier trips to European cities. Bailkey was aware of community gardens through his years of graduate study and later teaching in landscape architecture, but had no awareness of urban market farming.Footnote 6 So, the two essentially started with no bias derived from prior experience, but instead a feeling that urban agriculture represented one positive future for distressed urban communities.

The research initially had a narrower intent to frame urban agriculture within one particular approach to central city revitalization. Kaufman felt that urban farms could be legitimate activities for community development corporations (CDCs). He saw that the CDC movement had, by the mid-1990s, built a solid track record in creating new affordable housing, new central-city businesses and other types of community improvements. CDCs had also seen success at remediating and redeveloping brownfield sites, essentially addressing one of the key obstacles to farming urban land parcels. With his characteristic vision and optimism, Kaufman believed that the Lincoln project could explore the viability of CDC involvement in urban agriculture (which he felt confident about), and advocate for such involvement by CDCs.

The first research trip under the Lincoln Institute project had Kaufman and Bailkey attending the 1998 Annual Conference of the National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED) in Kansas City, Missouri. NCCED was the leading membership association of community-based nonprofit development organizations, and Kaufman saw an efficient opportunity to test his belief. Although he made his case with vigor, Kaufman came away feeling that CDCs were, by and large, essentially conservative and hesitant to veer away from what they knew how do successfully. Even though the Lincoln research discovered a few noteworthy examples of CDC involvement with urban agriculture – most significantly by Isles, Inc., in Trenton, New Jersey, and the New Kensington CDC in Philadelphia – the idea of making CDCs a focus was set aside. Farming Inside Cities did devote sections to the specific obstacles to CDC involvement in urban farming and strategies for overcoming those obstacles. Bailkey also wrote an advocacy piece for the NCCED newsletter in 1999.

The experience with CDCs broadened Kaufman’s and Bailkey’s research strategy – and the working paper’s envisioned audience. Instead of non-profit community development professionals, the audience expanded beyond CDCs to those positioned to initiate urban agriculture projects in a wider range of contexts – in particular local government representatives, but also prospective urban farmers, local and national foundations, and a wider range of community-building organizations. This broadening was a key to the eventual success of Farming Inside Cities.

The decision to visit urban farms and interview urban agriculture supporters (and a few skeptics) as the core of the Lincoln research, along with a limited travel budget, led to the identification of three case study cities with active urban farming scenes and some evidence of supportive contexts in and out of their local governments. These were Chicago (close to Madison, and having Kaufman’s network of local government connections), Philadelphia (where the municipal government had dedicated itself to outlining a comprehensive strategy towards its 40,000 vacant residential parcels), and Boston. Boston lacked the significant vacant land inventories of Chicago and Philadelphia, thus offering a counterpoint. In addition, both Kaufman and Bailkey had a special interest in Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) and its pioneering greening and land acquisition practices (Medoff and Sklar 1994); plus, the Lincoln Institute’s Cambridge offices were nearby. Due to Kaufman’s other commitments the bulk of the project-related travel was done by Bailkey, who made three trips to Philadelphia and one to Boston between December 1998 and June 1999. Kaufman accompanied Bailkey on visits to Chicago and Boston.

A total of 122 individuals were interviewed for the study; 67 were interviewed formally, in person or on the telephone, and 55 were interviewed informally at conferences or project sites (with some sites being outside of the three case study cities). Because of the initial exploratory nature of their research, Kaufman and Bailkey relied heavily on the snowball approach where an initial cohort of interviewees became a key source for the next.

Although Kaufman had deep knowledge of different planning theories, Farming Inside Cities did not intentionally connect itself to any particular one. It instead reflected the same ideology of pragmatism and practicality displayed by the urban farmers interviewed. Structurally Farming Inside Cities had three simple parts: (a) an overview of entrepreneurial urban agriculture, (b) the obstacles keeping entrepreneurial urban agriculture from becoming more widespread, and (c) strategies to overcome those obstacles. Kaufman was fond of using clear and simple metaphors to first clarify a concept in his mind, then present the concept to others. This was certainly the case with Farming Inside Cities where he created a simple visual concept, then consistently used that image to explain the research framework to others.

To imagine the framework for this study, visualize a wobbly three-legged stool. One leg of the stool represents urban vacant land, and the government agencies and policies affecting its disposition and management. The second leg represents entrepreneurial urban agriculture, a movement composed of individuals and organizations having the desire and knowledge to produce food in the city for market sale. The third leg represents the institutional climate within a particular city, the environment in which entrepreneurial urban agriculture would take place – be it accommodating, neutral, or restrictive. The interest behind the study was to find out whether the three legs of the stool could be made sturdier – that is, whether an increased number of entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects would be developed on vacant city land within the context of a more supportive institutional climate – or whether the legs would continue to wobble (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 3).

When reviewing Bailkey’s initial drafts, Kaufman’s chief role as coauthor was ensuring not just that the three stool legs were rendered clearly but that the real goal – stabilizing the stool – was presented just as clearly. This meant a strong focus on the obstacles to entrepreneurial urban agriculture, and an even stronger emphasis on how to overcome the obstacles.

From the perspective of planning theory, Farming Inside Cities, to the extent that one can read it as an urban planning study, displays certain characteristics of rational planning analysis. It offers a clear statement of a particular planning question – is urban agriculture a viable use of inner city vacant land parcels? – followed by a factual analysis of what keeps urban farms from being more common, and ending with strategies to promote urban farms that were clearly drawn from the preceding analysis.

Over several drafts the consistent goal of Kaufman’s writing and editing was to clarify as much as possible the identified obstacles to entrepreneurial urban agriculture and related strategies to overcome those obstacles. This included first separating the obstacles unto four clear categories:

  • site-related – contamination, security and vandalism, lack of long-term tenure

  • government-related – essentially the lack of recognition of urban agriculture as a viable use for a city’s vacant land inventory

  • procedure-related – including, among others, the lack of supportive financial resources, staffing concerns, and managing an urban farm spread across more than one site

  • perception-related – negative attitudes about having agriculture in cities at all

What follows, a two-part systematic presentation of how to address these obstacles, firmly establishes Farming Inside Cities as an advocacy document and not merely an objective survey. First, the most common impediments to urban agriculture are summarized as six general concerns, intentionally phrased – in a very Kaufman-esque maneuver – to represent a “devil’s advocate” position against the practice:

  • entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects cannot be sited on vacant city lots because these parcels are too contaminated

  • entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects located in crime-ridden areas are undermined by considerable vandalism

  • entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects are not economically viable as profit generators, not as operations seeking only to cover expenses, thus they are not worth initiating or supporting

  • entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects are run by people who, although energetic and committed, lack the necessary management and business skills to make such ventures successful

  • entrepreneurial urban agriculture practitioners operate too independently, and fail to work together to promote the potential and overall value of city farming

  • entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects represent a temporary land use, lasting only until “real” revenue-producing development occurs

Each of these six are then addressed in detail, using projects in the three case study cities to counter the concern through a best practice approach. The second stage of advocacy shifts from urban agriculture itself, and is directed at the separate cohorts who determine whether there will be entrepreneurial urban agriculture in the future. Suggested actions are first offered to existing proponents to bolster their advocacy, then to key cohorts seen as gatekeepers to the creation of more urban farms: government officials (primarily local, but also federal and state), national and local foundations, and CDCs.

This clarity of thought and thoroughness of argument represent Kaufman’s biggest influence on the final form of Farming Inside Cities, and is arguably the key to its continued viability after two decades. A theoretical foundation in rational planning can be read between the lines. But by understanding the pragmatic concerns of its audience, Farming Inside Cities became at its core an outline for action.

6 Outcomes of the Study

Farming Inside Cities was well-received upon its release. It became one of the more popular titles among the Lincoln Institute’s series of working papers aimed at policy makers, academics and students, and was later expanded into a chapter within the collection of essays summarizing the cross-disciplinary research on underutilized, abandoned and vacant land published by the Lincoln Institute during the period (Kaufman and Bailkey 2004).Footnote 7 Its practical approach and easy availability over the Internet made Farming Inside Cities popular among urban farmers and organizations doing urban agriculture who welcomed the study as recognition of their work and the legitimizing of their view of themselves as community change agents.

Another outcome for Kaufman and Bailkey was their quickly becoming national “experts” on urban agriculture in general, not just its entrepreneurial side, and they were approached by other researchers and writers in the US and Canada. Kaufman, by this point, was looking beyond urban agriculture, strategizing how to establish food systems as a legitimate area of professional planning practice, and steered inquiries on urban agriculture to Bailkey. As Farming Inside Cities was being written, Bailkey was contacted by a freelance writer researching urban farming for a new journal on sustainable development produced by Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. The resulting article (Lazarus 2000) was published a few months before Farming Inside Cities, cited it as a work in progress, followed its lead by profiling a number of projects that Bailkey directed the author to, mentioned the work of Feenstra et al. and Wohl, and interviewed TUAN’s Jac Smit. While proclaiming “There is an astounding vibrancy and interest in urban agriculture in the United States today” and “No other economic development activity has as much appeal to those concerned with sustainability as urban agriculture,” the article also asked the standard question, “but does it pay?” 2 years later, another freelance writer, Charles Wilson, featured Kaufman and several urban agriculture practitioners in an article for Preservation magazine (Wilson 2002) that mentioned some of the same urban farms as Farming Inside Cities, while offering more vivid personal portrayals.Footnote 8

For Kaufman, always a firm believer in maintaining a wide network of connections, the experience of Farming Inside Cities bolstered his developing web of professional contacts within the community food system world. In addition to renewing his connection with Jac Smit, Kaufman’s introduction to urban agriculture led to several new contacts, each impressing him with their dedication and commitment to what for him was a new form of social and environmental activism. These included Alison Meares Cohen, then director of Heifer International’s Chicago project office; Pat Gray, the longtime executive director of The Food Project in metropolitan Boston; Ken Dunn, the founder of the Resource Center in Chicago (an early advocate for large-scale urban composting); and Les Brown, the founder of Chicago’s Growing Home, Inc. Kaufman continued to speak highly of each long after Farming Inside Cities was completed. Clearly, however, the most significant personal introduction was to Growing Power’s Will Allen. Following their first meeting in 1998, as Allen and his organization (then called Farm City Link) struggled to gain a foothold in Milwaukee, Kaufman became Allen’s friend and ardent supporter. He later led the nomination effort that resulted in Allen’s 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the well-known ‘genius’ award) and became Growing Power’s board president, a post Kaufman held until December 2012, one month before his death.

Within the context of the Lincoln Institute, the work on urban agriculture was part of an effort to create a body of work on the reuse of vacant and abandoned urban land that would benefit the communities who had borne the brunt of urban deindustrialization. Toward that end, Greenstein commissioned a series of working papers, many of which were published in Recycling the City (Greenstein and Sungu-Eryilmaz 2004). The Kaufman and Bailkey chapter, along with a case study on the preservation of industrial landscapes for cultural uses from the Rühr Valley in Germany, and the reuse of an old incinerator site in Boston for what we would now call Green Development, were examples of then-innovative reuses and were presented in the final section of that collection.

This volume laid the groundwork for other Institute efforts to support community change agents to organize in favor of community-driven neighborhood investment over market-driven investment. For example, Lincoln partnered with colleagues at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in the Roxbury section of Boston, to create a curriculum to provide training for community-based organizations working on comprehensive community change initiatives; the convening was entitled the Community Control of Land. The Institute commissioned curriculum and then offered extensive training on community benefits agreements, community land trusts, and inclusionary housing. These are three tools, that when controlled by residents, provide a mechanism that distributes the benefits of development to residents. These tools for community control of land were contrasted to the planning tools available to residents in higher income communities who can use zoning tools such as large-lot zoning to allow individuals (rather than communities) to have control over land.

The spirit of reallocating resources to underinvested inner city neighborhoods also informed the Lincoln Institute’s City-Land-University initiative, which was funded during this same period. Much of this activity, went on to inform work on Anchor Institutions (Perry and Wiewel 2005; Wiewel and Perry 2008). Both the urban agriculture and city-land-university initiatives are examples of planners turning their attention to urban problems with more of a pragmatist’s disposition than that of a theoretician. It is true that it is far easier to mobilize around specific interventions (e.g., community use of university space just beyond the campus gates or accepting EBT at a farmers’ market) than it is to mobilize around the theoretician’s abstractions. Perhaps this is an argument for planning theorists to join practitioners in designing the planning studies in graduate planning programs?

7 Looking Back After Two Decades

Much of what Farming Inside Cities presented in 2000 holds up today, with Jerry Kaufman’s three-legged stool still displaying a bit of wobble. Several of the urban farming organizations profiled are still in operation and thriving (a group that includes Growing Home, The Food Project, and Nuestras Raices in Holyoke, Massachusetts). Others, including Growing Power, are no longer operating after two decades, however, a larger group of exemplary urban agriculture organizations and projects can be found across the US, in cities big and small.

Although Farming Inside Cities is clearly forward thinking, it did not anticipate the importance of other forms of urban farming beyond the in-ground vegetable farms and the few examples of hydroponics and aquaponics visited during 1998 and 1999. It did not, for example, envision the growth of rooftop farms (such as Brooklyn Grange in New York City), nor today’s high-volume, high-tech, highly-capitalized indoor vegetable production operations that typically occupy older industrial buildings. (One early example of the latter, Village Farms in Buffalo, was profiled in Farming Inside Cities but ended operations in that city soon after.)

A re-reading of Farming Inside Cities after twenty years reveals that its identification of obstacles to entrepreneurial urban agriculture and approaches to overcome those persist. While the obstacles identified in 2000 are still in play, more avenues exist to address them. For example, to broaden awareness of urban agriculture among policy makers, local food policy councils (not nearly as prevalent in 2000 as today) advocate for the inclusion of urban agriculture in comprehensive plans and convene stakeholders through forums directly connected to policymakers. Also still valid within Farming Inside Cities is the belief that urban farming will be advanced by several cohorts – urban farmers, community-based organizations (including CDCs), foundations, and local/state/federal government – acting together. Yet, two of the most significant practical obstacles that vexed urban farmers and urban agriculture organizations in 2000 vex them today – the twin challenges of long-term land access and security, and balancing the specific requirements for generating adequate revenue (i.e., simply covering costs) with the different energies required to generate beneficial, non-financial social outcomes.

Although policy makers and non-profit organizations were a primary audience, another key target for Kaufman was professional planners, and Farming Inside Cities can today be read and appreciated in the context of his emerging engagement with the planning community around food systems. It is also valid to believe that the thinking that led Kaufman to envision the consistent and effective public sector facilitation of community-based food system actions, including urban agriculture, are yet to be fully understood by the planning field. Although progress here has certainly been made, younger planners having had exposure to food systems in school (Greenstein et al. 2015) or in the early phases of their careers can, as they advance professionally, find their food systems advocacy compromised by the necessary balancing of food goals with other public concerns; i.e.; having to incorporate a food system vision as part of a comprehensive plan, rather than creating a stand-alone “Food System Plan” for a city, county or region having greater detail.

And in the specific case of urban agriculture, even those dedicated to food system planning cannot solely be “urban agriculture planners,” but typically must balance the facilitation of urban agriculture with similar support for other areas of the food system. When read today by anyone familiar with the holistic concept of a community food system, the isolation of for-market urban agriculture in Farming Inside Cities from other now-accepted components of the local food movement (farmers markets, community supported agriculture, school food programming, etc.) is evident, but not particularly glaring. Its simple aim to link the opportunities offered by entrepreneurial urban agriculture to the opportunity offered by large amounts of urban vacant land is immediately evident to the reader, and sits well within the limitations of the strategic “working paper” commissioned by the Lincoln Institute. Thus, it is left to modern readers to understand urban agriculture within their personal conceptions of a thriving community food system.

Finally, while the sharp observation and clear pragmatism evident throughout Farming Inside Cities remains valid and useful to readers, were Kaufman to undertake the research anew today the final product would not lightly address, as did the earlier work, the significant social causes driving much of today’s urban agriculture, nor the strong cultural rootedness it often manifests. The consequences of urban disinvestment and related public policy in the neighborhoods of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston – in particular, the existence and prevalence of vacant and undervalued land parcels – clearly drive Farming Inside Cities, and urban agriculture is presented objectively as a focused, proactive response to the myriad forces of financial disinvestment. Today, however, a deeper, more subjective cultural importance is attributed to the practice of urban agriculture, particularly within neighborhoods of color where an urban farm can represent deep and tangible resistance to the forces of structural racism.

This resistance is evident in the pronouncements of community-based organizations for which urban agriculture is a core activity, such as Planting Justice in Oakland and the Urban Growers Collective in Chicago. It is also evident in recent academic writing, such as Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen’s account of how New York City’s urban farmers, in addition to growing food, use urban agriculture to tackle racism and economic inequalities (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). Resistance also drives Monica White’s narrative of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and its D-Town Farm, as a contemporary manifestation of the southern black agricultural cooperatives of the 1960s and 1970s dedicated to “collective agency and community resilience” (White 2018, p. 7), referring to a group’s ability to choose actions that determine its future and resist external adversity, respectively.

However, for progressive planners with a social justice motivation behind their practice, there are important lessons from the food system movement. Specifically, the food system movement demonstrates the value of public education in movement building in 1999. Pothukuchi and Kaufman wrote:

Air, water, and food are the three essentials of life. Clearly, it would be extraordinarily difficult to have high quality human settlements without high quality air, water, and food. Planners have been heavily involved in efforts to improve the quality of air and water through air and water pollution control programs. But the third leg of the life essential stool, food, has been virtually ignored by planners. If planners are truly concerned about improving human settlements, they need to incorporate food issues into their working models. (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999, p. 220)

What happens though, if rather than transforming the way planning is conceptualized with the inclusion of food systems, by learning more about the challenge of transforming the industrial food system, urban residents changed their working models of what is possible? Through the Real Food Challenge of the late 2010s, college students challenged campus food service organizations to change procurement practices. Through their campus-based education, organizing and mobilizing they advocated for a “just and sustainable food system for all”. This campaign attracted students motivated by the impact of healthy eating on individuals, the impact of organic farming on ecosystems, the impact of workplace practices on workers, as well as the role of locally-produced food on the local economy. Coalescing around the challenge of increasing local, organic, and fair trade food in the campus cafeteria taught a generation of college students about collective action and public engagement.

Similarly, the reconstruction of Puerto Rico’s coffee industry in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, demonstrated a new understanding of resilience (Borges-Méndez and Caron 2019). In the island’s coffee growing region, producers, retailers, entrepreneurs, and cooperators responded to slow and technocratic responses, not with paralysis, but with collective action that supported self-reliance, not the dependency that characterizes and defines Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship.

Both of these are examples of challenging how food and the system that creates it can be transformed to support and contribute to our desired future. Rather than interrogate how a planning system (e.g. housing, transportation, or land use regulations) affect the distribution of power and resources, these are examples where community activists are using the food system and residents interest in food, to bring about a more just and inclusive society.