Keywords

“Community gardens are the highest and best use of land in the city,” says Ben Helphand (2016) director of NeighborSpace, Chicago’s community land trust for community gardens. In the logic of real estate economics and urban redevelopment, he is wrong. But for cities that prioritize other values and impacts, there may be no higher and better use. Arguably no other urban land use enables people of all ages and backgrounds to reap such a broad range of social, health, educational, and other benefits (Draper and Freedman 2010; Lovell 2010). For these reasons and others, some cities treat agriculture as a public good, permanent public space accessible to all.

Yet many municipalities in the United States, and some urban agriculture support organizations, value farming and community gardening more for their contributions to redevelopment, with narrower, shorter-term aims. Many cities are reluctant to grant long-term land tenure, viewing agriculture as an interim use waiting for “higher and better” land uses that generate tax revenue, jobs, and private investment. Some cities organize their agricultural sectors centrally around access to vacant land, pitting growers against developers. Some cities prioritize economic and redevelopment outcomes from farms and gardens, including enterprise growth, land reclamation and property value increases (Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014).

Most big U.S. cities encourage a mix of community gardens and farms, valuing urban agriculture’s various demonstrated and potential impacts, sometimes in tension with one another. Parks, health or other agencies enacting social and environmental policy commonly treat urban agriculture as a public good, prioritizing non-market benefits. Economic development and redevelopment agencies more often view it as an interim use and enterprise development opportunity. Planning departments vary in embracing these different visions and values (Hodgson et al. 2011; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014).

Urban agriculture support systems in U.S. cities likewise differ substantially. Some cities’ urban agriculture support functions are based more in the public sector, others more in the nonprofit sector. Cities’ core institutions supporting community gardens and farms vary in their missions, scope of work, and the durability and funding streams of municipal and nonprofit programs (Lawson 2005; Lawson and McNally 1999; Vitiello and Nairn 2009). Municipalities and civil society also manage land access and tenure for urban agriculture in distinct ways. Access and tenure are key determining factors in how much a city’s urban agriculture system operates as a public good, and how much it promotes equity and justice in people’s control over land and food production (Drake and Lawson 2014; Ela and Rosenberg 2017; Lawson 2005).

In his work on ethics in the 1970s, Jerry Kaufman encouraged planners to reflect on our values and those of our constituents, as we define and promote particular visions of the malleable and contested “public interest” (Howe and Kaufman 1979, 1983). In Jerry’s later food planning research, advocacy, and leadership of institutions, he promoted urban agriculture as both a public good and a tool for community economic development and redevelopment. Jerry and Kami Pothukuchi argued that food is “among the essentials of life” and should be an important part of “public-interest driven” planning. They quoted one planner who averred, “Food issues are a public good that transcends the market”; and may be read as suggesting as much themselves, particularly in their call for planners to embrace community food security as a framework for evaluating and intervening in community and regional food systems (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000, pp. 113, 117–118).Footnote 1 This framework has served as a theory of practice for many food system planners since then.

In their landmark study of urban agriculture in the United States, Farming Inside Cities, Jerry and Martin Bailkey introduced many planners to the opportunities and challenges of farming and gardening as land uses in the city. They showed how “entrepreneurial urban agriculture” in the late 1990s was tied as much to public and nonprofit support institutions as it was to the private market. This and other parts of their study raised critical questions about its potential to serve different public and private interests, including distinct visions of community and economic development (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000).

Inspired by these parts of Jerry’s work, this chapter explores how urban agriculture has been valued, governed, and supported in two U.S. cities that he and Martin studied in depth, Philadelphia and Chicago. It asks: What values and aims have these cities ascribed to urban farms and community gardens? How have the cities organized their urban agriculture support systems, including land access and tenure? What do different paradigms of policy and support mean for urban agriculture’s position as a land use, and for gardeners and farmers?

The narrative below surveys what Kaufman and Bailkey found when they visited Philadelphia and Chicago in 1998–1999 and how the two cities’ landscapes of farms and community gardens, support systems, and policies evolved over the next two decades. Chicago and Philadelphia are among the most vibrant centers of urban agriculture in the U.S. Both cities have substantial histories of community gardening and farming, histories that largely paralleled one another through the end of the twentieth century. However, in the twenty-first century, their municipal governments and urban agriculture support organizations embraced distinct visions for farming and gardening, reflecting different values. This resulted in divergent governance and support systems, with critical implications for the management, stability, and equity of the two cities’ urban agriculture sectors. While Chicago increasingly treated urban agriculture a public good, in Philadelphia its purpose and place in the city remained more contested and unstable.

This analysis is based on quantitative and qualitative research, including citywide censuses of community gardens and farms, as well as work with growers, policymakers, support organizations, and advocates I have conducted with colleagues in the two cities since the mid-2000s (Vitiello 2008; Vitiello and Nairn 2009; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014). It contributes to a growing literature on the purposes, meanings, and governance of urban agriculture (Cohen and Reynolds 2014; Daftary-Steel et al. 2015; Horst et al. 2017, this volume, Chap. 6; McClintock 2013; McClintock and Simpson 2018; Pothukuchi 2015, 2017, 2018; Ventura and Bailkey 2017; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014) . Comparing different cities can help scholars, practitioners, and advocates assess how equitable our urban agriculture systems and sectors are. It helps us take stock of recent policy and practice and prioritize what we most value moving forward.

1 Urban Agriculture Research and Practice: Visions and Values

In Farming Inside Cities, Kaufman and Bailkey (2000), highlighted the entanglement of, and competition between, different visions, values, aims, and expectations of urban agriculture in U.S. cities. In the years since, their colleagues, students, and other scholars have produced a substantial literature – and engaged in policy advocacy and practice – grappling with these tensions. A central question in this research and practice concerns the extent to which urban agriculture can or should be a viable private market activity, a redevelopment strategy, or a public good.

Jerry Kaufman’s contributions to the practice of gardening and farming in U.S. cities also embodied the diversity of urban agriculture and its impacts, especially as a board member of the Madison Area Community Land Trust and board chair of Growing Power. The land trust’s major initiative, Troy Gardens, includes a patchwork of different sorts of public space, which Jerry played a central role in realizing. Growing Power showed millions of people how urban agriculture could scale up in some of the ways that Jerry and Martin, who became the in-house evaluator at Growing Power, envisioned in Farming Inside Cities. Its workforce and youth development programs, training centers in other cities, and numerous partnerships applied urban farming to a wide range of community and economic development strategies, some public goods, others corporate ventures. While some constituents of Growing Power saw it as proof of urban farming’s commercial viability, on more than a few occasions I heard Jerry correct people who said “GROWING power” – “It’s growing POWER,” he would stress, pointing to the organization’s mission to promote racial and food justice.Footnote 2

Farming Inside Cities was a study of “entrepreneurial urban agriculture.” But only a few of the seventy farms they found were turning a profit. Some had closed; others were still in the planning stages. And like others who have studied urban agriculture, Jerry and Martin often found it difficult to differentiate between farms and gardens, as they recognized a range of commercial and non-market activities occurred across both categories (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000).

Kaufman and Bailkey recognized the incongruous fit between even the most profit-driven urban farming at the time and the value systems of redevelopment professionals. One of the greatest obstacles, they concluded, was the “sobering reality” that agriculture “is not seen as the ‘highest and best use’ of vacant inner city land by most local government policy officials who would like to attract ‘better’ tax paying uses on this land” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 84). Yet economic valuations were not all that mattered, they argued: urban farms provided “a variety of other social, aesthetic, health, and community-building and empowerment benefits.” Kaufman and Bailkey cast entrepreneurial agriculture as a worthwhile addition to cities’ redevelopment strategies for its numerous potential benefits for residents of disinvested neighborhoods, from stipends for youth growers to fresh food access (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 85).

In subsequent scholarship, landscape architect and planner Laura Lawson and her colleagues have further exposed the rifts in values and goals between different interests and actors in community gardening, farming, and redevelopment of vacant land. Lawson (2005) points up the long history of city governments, elite-led nonprofits, and philanthropists supporting urban agriculture largely in times of crisis, while their commitments have waned at other times. Meanwhile, disadvantaged and especially migrant communities from rural origins have engaged in urban gardening and farming more continuously, where and when they can. Lawson acknowledges community gardens’ impermanence and the “precarious nature of semi-public space” (Lawson 2009). She and colleagues emphasize land tenure, enduring support systems, and ongoing attention to participation as keys to gardens’ longevity (Drake and Lawson 2014, 2015; Ela and Rosenberg 2017; Hou et al. 2009; Lawson 2005, 2007, 2009; Lawson and Drake 2015; Lawson and Miller 2013).

In their study of Seattle, Jeff Hou, Julie Johnson, and Lawson (2009) make an explicit case for community gardens as a public good, “as public open space.” With the P-Patch support program in the city’s Department of Neighborhoods and P-Patch Trust and parks department holding land, Seattle is arguably the leading example of urban agriculture as public space in the U.S. Community gardens may not be locked, have signage in many languages, and are located around the city, some of the largest in working-class neighborhoods (also Lawson 2005). Other scholars and practitioners also recognize P-Patch as one of the nation’s strongest, most equitable systems (American Planning Association 2007, Hodgson et al. 2011, Horst et al. 2017, this volume, Chap. 6; Vitiello and Brinkley 2014).

By contrast, Kami Pothukuchi’s studies of Detroit and Cleveland (2015, 2017, 2018) present a powerful critique of the “redevelopment model” of urban agriculture. She illuminates how even in cities where vacant land abounds as population loss continued in the twenty-first century, politicians, city agencies, and redevelopment scholars discourage granting long-term tenure to agriculture. Their “growth paradigm” struggles to value it as more than an interim use. For the city to “foster an enduring urban agriculture sought by advocates,” she concludes, “the value of both urban land as well as agriculture will need to be reimagined.” More “conventional notions of highest and best use of land may need to be replaced… with more durable support” that treats urban agriculture as a long-term, low-profit land use, appreciated and protected for the “community value” it creates (Pothukuchi 2018, p. 2, 16).

Related research by myself and others highlights the limits but also the ways urban agriculture is successful as economic development in the U.S. Our findings contest the expectation that most urban farming can satisfy outcomes traditionally sought by economic development agencies, including profitable firms, stable jobs, and related taxes. Instead, we echo Kaufman and Bailkey in arguing for an appreciation of urban agriculture’s contributions to supplemental income, education and workforce integration, social enterprise, nonprofit jobs, and contributions to households’ food budgets and networks of social support (Biewener 2016; Daftary-Steel et al. 2015; Dimitri and Oberholtzer 2016; Ventura and Bailkey 2017; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014). The ambiguous lines between what constitutes gardening and what counts as farming only make this more important (Hodgson et al. 2011).

Indeed, to imagine a clear dichotomy between urban agriculture as a public good and for economic or property development, is clearly false. As Nathan McClintock argues, “urban agriculture has to be both” … “a form of actually existing neo-liberalism and a simultaneous radical counter-movement arising in dialectical tension,” if it is to realize its potential to support social and ecological change. The variety of urban farming and gardening social enterprises of recent decades, for McClintock, are part of “urban agriculture’s entanglement in various processes of neoliberalisation,” the shift to market models of governance and reliance on private actors to produce social benefits. Most notable in these processes is “the roll-out of non-profits to fill in the gaps left by the rolling back of the social safety net, and the promulgation of neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and market-based solutions” (McClintock 2013, pp. 148–149).

Even community gardens are caught up in these processes, with mixed results for disadvantaged communities. Community gardens are typically the most public, often the most equitable, form of urban agriculture, places where poor people stabilize their neighborhoods and lives. More ambiguously, gardeners help create the conditions that support gentrification and sometimes displacement: improvements to land and property values, neighborhood beautification, increased safety. Some real estate developers employ community gardens to beautify and attract interest to properties before construction. More and less public and equitable forms of community gardening thus impact – and are deployed variously within – the larger processes of neighborhood change in U.S. cities (Branas et al. 2012; Lawson 2005, 2007; Martinez 2010; South et al. 2018; Vitiello and Nairn 2009).

The uneven approaches of city governments and nonprofit urban agriculture support organizations both reflect and reproduce these tensions and variable outcomes. Only some U.S. cities have substantial public sector involvement in urban agriculture. Only some have strong citywide support systems, including community land trusts that help acquire, own, pay insurance, and sometimes manage gardens and farms. And only some of these land trusts hold a large, well-distributed, accessible, and stable landscape of community gardens or farms (Choo 2011; Drake and Lawson 2015; Hou et al. 2009; Lawson 2005; Rosenberg and Yuen 2012).

Assessing the effectiveness, equity, and sustainability of urban agriculture support systems is an important part of food system planning and community development (Bleasdale et al. 2011). In many cities a large swath of the public participates in community gardens and farms (Drake and Lawson 2015; Lawson 2005). In most cities, urban agriculture is in some way contested, by neighbors, public authorities, private developers, and growers (Hodgson et al. 2011). In too many cities, urban agriculture and the policies and institutions that support it are celebrated uncritically, and without perspective on other cities’ systems. And in some cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago, urban agriculture policies, support systems, and landscapes of gardens and farms have changed considerably in recent decades.

2 Philadelphia

Fitting the larger narrative of urban agriculture’s history in the United States, vacant land and social crisis are central to its history in Philadelphia. Like Chicago, Detroit, and New York, most histories of urban agriculture in the city begin with the Vacant Lot Cultivation Association in the depression of 1893–97, which gave people access to undeveloped land. Government gardening programs during the world wars and Great Depression scaled up food production in these and other cities again in subsequent decades, on vacant land, parks, and cemeteries, though always temporarily (Lawson 2005). Just one Victory Garden from World War Two survives in Philadelphia (Vitiello and Nairn 2009).

In 1954, elite women from the suburbs formed the Neighborhood Gardens Association, bringing horticulture programs to working-class blocks, reflecting what Lawson (2005) has characterized as Philadelphia’s particularly paternalistic culture of community gardening. In the mid-1970s, the elite Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) established the Philadelphia Green Program, and Penn State County Extension became one of the first sites of the USDA Urban Gardens Program. These programs helped diverse Philadelphians, especially working-class African American, Puerto Rican, and Southeast Asian migrants, establish hundreds of gardens on vacant land around the city. In the 1980s, the two organizations established the Neighborhood Gardens Association land trust (NGA, distinct from the earlier group), to preserve some of these gardens (Lawson 2005; Vitiello and Nairn 2009).

In 1998 and 1999, Bailkey and Kaufman found farming was expanding in Philadelphia, with a mix of for-profit and nonprofit growers and diverse business models. Greensgrow Farm, “a privately-owned, hydroponic vegetable producer,” had increased its seasonal workforce from three to five with Welfare-to-Work subsidies. For-profit Philaberry Farms had grown raspberries and blackberries for groceries and restaurants for 7 years on a vacant lot, a speculative real estate holding strategy “until the time is right for residential development.” Nonprofit Sea Change, Inc. provided jobs and training for formerly houseless people at its tree farm, CSA, and cafe; and the nearby nonprofit Village of Arts and Humanities had recently planted a tree farm. Sea Change, however, was on “the brink of bankruptcy” due to “difficulties of fundraising, the marginal revenues produced by the CSA and Cyber Café, and the inability to resolve issues of future land access” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 38; Vitiello 2008). Philly Farms Mushrooms, a joint venture of larger investors and the Kaolin mushroom company, still in the planning stages, and the garden at University City High School, supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s Urban Nutrition Initiative, rounded out their list of “entrepreneurial” agriculture sites.

The bigger part of Philadelphia’s urban agriculture sector, however, remained its non-profit community garden support system and the gardens it supported. Penn State was still one of “the city’s two major urban agriculture actors” in 1999, “providing technical assistance and educational support to over 500 community gardens.” In this program, “for-market production has not been emphasized or supported, primarily because its constituents are older and not interested” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, pp. 41–42).

But PHS, which supported most of these gardens and many other spaces around the city, was exploring urban farming as part of a larger vacant land greening and management strategy. This was a priority for policy makers in a city of some 40,000 vacant lots (Pennsylvania Horticultural Society 1995, Philadelphia City Planning Commission 1995). PHS held a conference and commissioned a report on urban farming but did not start new programs for farms at the time, largely due to farming’s limited economic prospects (Hope Wohl Associates 2000).

As Philadelphians elected a new mayor, John Street, in 1999, Kaufman and Bailkey wrote, “city government presently plays no explicit role in the support of urban agriculture.” Instead, community gardens and farms had “a large and somewhat diffuse supporting infrastructure… outside of municipal government” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 44). Land disposition in the city remained a barrier: “despite the positive awareness of city farming in Philadelphia, acquiring the land needed to implement it is, in practice, difficult due to bureaucratic complexity and the way in which city agencies managing vacant land guard their own interest.” City council members and municipal agencies’ reluctance to transfer land seemed counter to “the stated concerns of city government for the social and economic consequences of blighted properties in central Philadelphia neighborhoods.” They hoped the new mayor, with his “commitment to a focused policy addressing neighborhood blight, may anticipate greater opportunities for entrepreneurial urban agriculture,” including as a strategy for managing vacant land as PHS advocated (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 45).

For the most part, the Street administration proved hostile-to-uninterested in urban agriculture, but new farms grew up in the 2000s even as most of those profiled in Farming Inside Cities closed. Greensgrow survived, largely thanks to its CSA sourcing from the region, its nursery, and grants for its community kitchen and education programs. Philaberry, Sea Change, and Philly Farms Mushrooms (which never got into production) all folded by the early 2000s. The Village abandoned its tree farm, and University City High School was later bulldozed. By 2008, new farms included Weavers Way Coop’s market gardens and orchards at Awbury Arboretum, MLK High School, and its new CSA at Saul Agricultural High School, a public vocational school. Private Flat Rock Farm sold much of its harvest to the cafeteria of a nearby private school. Mill Creek Farm, an educational nonprofit, grew out of a stormwater management project supported by the Water Department. So did Somerton Tanks Farm, a demonstration farm promoting the economic viability of the Small Plot Intensive (SPIN) Farming growing method (Vitiello 2008). By 2010, Philadelphia had about 20 farms.

Bigger changes happened in community gardening, as the city’s robust garden support system declined. In 1996, Congress de-funded the Urban Gardens Program, devastating city extension offices around the country. Philadelphia County Extension kept its program going until 2000. Community gardening programs at PHS also lost their main sources of philanthropic funding and shrank dramatically (Lawson 2005; Vitiello and Nairn 2009).

In 2008, my colleagues and I visited over 700 sites in the city where Penn State and PHS had supported community gardens, as they had lost track of which gardens remained active. City Harvest, the new name for urban agriculture programs at PHS, supported just 37 sites that year. We found 227 community gardens growing food in the city, down from 501 in 1996, when Penn State last documented them (Vitiello and Nairn 2009) . Philadelphia had lost more than half of its food-producing community gardens in just 12 years.

Interviews with current and former gardeners, neighbors, and city and nonprofit staff suggested three principal reasons for this decline. First, as Kaufman and Bailkey identified a decade earlier, gardeners were aging and passing away. Second, the decline of garden support programs meant many older gardeners who depended on support ceased gardening. Public and nonprofit systems for accessing a plot in a community garden were fragmented, unclear, often informal, which meant that many older gardeners were not replaced. We heard more than once, “to get a plot, you have to know someone who knows someone…” Staff at the Redevelopment Authority even lost the institutional memory that the agency was tasked with administering annual agreements with gardeners on scores of city-owned lots (Vitiello and Nairn 2009).

The third reason, compounding the first two, was Mayor Street’s signature project, the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). Launched in 2000, it sought to demolish vacant buildings, “clean and green” vacant lots, and assemble land for development. PHS scaled up its vacant land management, but not with farms and gardens. Rather, PHS and its partners planted and mowed grass ringed by trees and wood fences on thousands of properties. This stabilized many lots, and subsequent research found cleaned and greened lots had significant effects on safety and health (Branas et al. 2012; South et al. 2018).

But this “cleaning and greening” also destroyed community gardens, especially on city-owned and tax-delinquent lots in North Philadelphia. We encountered about a dozen people on different blocks who told us something to the effect that, “a man came from the city one day, said we couldn’t garden here anymore, and” soon after, “a bulldozer came and cleared the garden.” Most of these sites, where usually smaller gardens were displaced in the early and mid-2000s, remained vacant in 2008. Displacing gardeners, we observed, “was made easier by the fact that most community gardens are listed on city property databases… as ‘vacant land’” (Vitiello and Nairn 2009, p. 37). Notwithstanding the benefits of vacant land management, these gardens and their gardeners had impacted health and safety in similar ways. They had taken care of land, getting people outdoors, growing relationships and trust, arguably in more impactful ways than fencing and mowing the same lots.

These changes helped produce clearly inequitable patterns and trends. Most of the gardens that disappeared between 1996 and 2008 were in poorer sections of North, West, and South Philadelphia, rowhouse neighborhoods where African American, Puerto Rican, and Southeast Asian residents were aging. Most of these neighborhoods would gentrify in the subsequent decade, as developers built on these and other gardens that lacked protection from displacement. The NGA land trust owned 26 gardens in 2008, most in already gentrified areas where affluent white gardeners had purchased the land and transferred it to NGA. This, we wrote, “helped reinforce the pattern of gardens in low-wealth neighborhoods disappearing while those in middle class neighborhoods more often survived” (Vitiello and Nairn 2009, p. 37).

Still, the longevity of hundreds of gardens in the city represented an important finding. Scores of community gardens had persisted for two or three decades or more. This led us to conclude, “our findings… contradict one major assumption made by many city agencies and philanthropists, namely that community gardens are simply a ‘temporary land use’” (Vitiello and Nairn 2009, p. 43).

But casting urban agriculture as an interim use was increasingly a winning strategy with politicians and redevelopment professionals. PHS responded to the limits and opportunities of city and philanthropic funding under Mayor Street and his successor Michael Nutter with new rationales for agriculture. Since the 1970s, PHS had presented its community gardening programs as bringing together residents of blighted neighborhoods to “take back” and beautify their neighborhoods. But by the late 2000s, its case for City Harvest emphasized contributions to property values and redevelopment. Economists’ finding that vacant land management, gardens, and other greening helped raise adjacent property values supported this new narrative (Voicu and Been 2006; Wachter and Wong 2008). This was a key part of a larger paradigm shift in the values underlying urban agriculture in the U.S., raising expectations of real estate and economic development payoffs, a vision promoted also by SPIN farming and other advocates (Hunold et al. 2017, Institute for Innovations in Local Farming and Urban Partners 2007, Vitiello and Nairn 2009).

At the same time, nationally and locally, urban agriculture policy, funders, and advocates increasingly cast urban farming and gardening as helping to solve food insecurity (Delind 2014). PHS came to promote City Harvest largely as a program for community gardens donating produce to food cupboards (Meenar and Hoover 2012; Vitiello and Nairn 2009). This fit the older narrative of urban agriculture as a response to temporary social crises.

Like its predecessor, the Nutter administration lacked a coordinated strategy for urban agriculture, perpetuating contests over where and what it should be. In 2008, advocates convinced Nutter’s first sustainability director to establish a Food Policy Advisory Council (FPAC). But in 2009, heads of the Redevelopment Authority and the Department of Parks and Recreation argued over which agency should control urban agriculture, and whether to treat it as an interim use, a stance promoted by Nutter’s redevelopment director and his director of planning and economic development. In 2010, the Redevelopment Authority and Parks and Recreation failed in respective attempts to locate market gardens on their properties, the former since it offered only short-term leases and the latter since it threatened a longtime agricultural use, the hayfield of Saul Agricultural High School (Hodgson et al. 2011; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014). Neither department pursued a major commercial farming project again. But in 2014, Parks and Recreation established the FarmPhilly program, supporting new and existing community gardens and farms at recreation centers and parks.

In the 2010s, gardeners and advocates turned increasing attention to the preservation of community gardens, as private development took off in many neighborhoods. The NGA land trust had never been the center of PHS or Penn State’s garden support systems. In the late 2000s, PHS leaders decided to shut down NGA before PHS’s new president Drew Becher, who came from Bette Midler’s land trust for gardens in Manhattan, reversed this decision. PHS took control of NGA and renamed it the Neighborhood Gardens Trust (NGT). Under Becher, though, PHS invested more in pop-up beer gardens than in NGT (Hodgson et al. 2011).

In this context, in 2011 attorney Amy Laura Cahn started the Garden Justice Legal Initiative (GJLI) at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. Much like 596 Acres in New York, GJLI helped individual community gardens and farmers gain land ownership and defend against displacement, while at the same time pursuing policy advocacy in City Council and the FPAC (Public Interest Law Center). GJLI incubated Soil Generation, a coalition of growers and advocates led by Black and brown people. The first true organized group of grassroots advocates for agriculture in the city, Soil Generation’s campaigns focused on threatened gardens and policies that promoted or limited community-owned agriculture. Its members included leaders of new nonprofits working on food justice in communities of color, such as VietLead and Urban Creators.

In 2012 and 2015, GJLI updated our 2008 census of community gardens and farms, assisted by geographer Peleg Kramer, political scientist Craig Borowiak, my students and me (Borowiak et al. 2018). We found significant, sustained growth of community gardens, but a more uneven growth and then decline in the number of sites growers called farms. The boundaries between those categories remained ambiguous, and the city’s number of community gardens stayed below that of the 1990s (Table. 5.1).

Table 5.1 Community gardens and farms growing food in Philadelphia
Full size table

GJLI and Soil Generation altered the city’s institutional ecosystem of urban agriculture, but they continued to operate within its system – and political economy – that tied urban agriculture to redevelopment. Cahn helped strengthen the FPAC’s urban agriculture committee, its name, the Vacant Land Subcommittee, signaling its greatest focus. She advocated treating community gardens and farms as “commons” and characterized GJLI’s “interventions to hold enclosure at bay” as a process of “mak[ing] existing community-stewarded places visible and expos[ing] pathways to access” (Cahn and Segal 2016, 196). This vision contrasted with the city’s ongoing realities.

GJLI, the FPAC, along with PHS and NGT, sought to influence and collaborate with the city’s nascent land bank. Yet their visions of land bank support for gardens and farms conflicted with other interests’ priorities for the land bank. Local council members still controlled the land bank’s decisions about transferring land, and some council members were more favorable to urban agriculture than others. Advocates’ embrace of the land bank, a tool for redevelopment whose primary purpose was putting properties back into taxpaying use, limited their ability to counter the “redevelopment model” that still dominated urban agriculture governance in the city.

Philadelphia in the twenty-first century regrew a vibrant urban agriculture sector despite its lack of a coordinated public strategy or strong land trust for community gardens and farms. But in the late 2010s efforts to change these conditions took important steps forward. The Neighborhood Gardens Trust expanded under subsequent leadership at PHS, from 38 community gardens in 2018 to almost 50 by 2021 (NGT). Within city government, my former student Ash Richards convinced the Department of Parks and Recreation to create the position of Urban Agriculture Director and initiate a citywide urban agriculture plan. Soil Generation led community engagement for the planning process, though the COVID-19 pandemic slowed their work after initial meetings attended by hundreds of growers. The FarmPhilly program grew to serve some 60 gardens and farms on Parks and Recreation land, along with compost, education, and other programs for other growers in the city (FarmPhilly 2021). Indeed, Philadelphia’s greatest agricultural assets were virtually all located on parkland, including Saul High School and several other large farms and community gardens. Not coincidentally, these were the sites where agriculture in the city was most clearly treated as a public good.

In Philadelphia, agriculture has operated predominantly within a redevelopment framework, but also partly as a public good. As in many older industrial cities, vacant land remained an important part of urban agriculture, with attendant tensions between different visions of gardening and farming. Like New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Philadelphia experienced an era when the city bulldozed a substantial number of gardens. This plus gentrification and growing interest in urban agriculture helped inspire a new era of activism. Like Detroit, Cleveland, and Oakland, but unlike New York and Seattle, the city lacked sustained collaboration between the parks and other departments, the land trust, and other urban agriculture support organizations. This limited its ability to develop a more stable, accessible system of land preservation and assistance for community gardens and farms well distributed throughout the city. Philadelphia’s urban agriculture support systems, and by extension community gardening and farming, remained embedded in and vulnerable to the cycles of economic growth and crises.

3 Chicago

By contrast, in the years since Farming Inside Cities, urban agriculture in Chicago became a more substantial public good, with a strengthened institutional infrastructure supporting it. But up into the 1990s the two cities shared key similarities. Histories of urban agriculture in Chicago typically begin with its Vacant Lot Cultivation Association in the 1890s, world war and Great Depression era gardens. In the post-World War Two decades, an elite-led horticulture organization, the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG), largely dominated the city’s community garden support system. Even before PHS in Philadelphia, though, the CBG’s community garden support program lost its core funding. By the time Kaufman and Bailkey visited Chicago, the program was closed. Indeed, the complete collapse of the prior citywide urban agriculture programs made room for Chicago to develop a new support system.

Kaufman and Bailkey did not mention the CBG in their report, nor the recently closed Urban Gardens Program run by University of Illinois Extension, which closed when Congress and the USDA defunded it in 1996. They concluded, “a strong citywide non-governmental support organization for urban agriculture does not exist to the same degree as in… Boston and Philadelphia” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 33). Still, they highlighted emerging public and nonprofit support programs that were providing increasing support for urban farming and community gardening.

As in Philadelphia, in 1999 Kaufman and Bailkey found a “diverse array of for-market urban agriculture projects are underway,” and “most are managed by non-profit organizations” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 29). Two farms operated under the Resource Center, a nonprofit focused on job creation through recycling and other environmental projects. The God’s Gang Worm and Fish Project and the Cabrini Greens program ran indoor vermiculture and aquaculture farms at public housing projects slated for demolition. Heifer International supported these and other youth programs. Kaufman and Bailkey also highlighted three nascent farming projects: a youth project by Los Angeles-based Food From the ‘Hood, in start-up phase; a job readiness program of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless called Growing Home, presently remediating its site; and a church garden that had recently begun producing vegetables, flowers, and duck eggs it planned to sell. Finally, they profiled volunteer-run Ginkgo Organic Garden, which donated its harvest to a restaurant that employed houseless people and a food pantry serving people with HIV and AIDS.

Indoor farming was more established in Chicago than in Philadelphia. The privately-owned, for-profit Chicago Indoor Gardens, reported Kaufman and Bailkey, was “growing eleven different varieties of sprouted grasses and beans under artificial conditions in a small factory building.” Started in 1987, it had ten employees, supplied supermarkets and health food stores, and reported $700,000 revenue in 1998 (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 28).

In Chicago, Kaufman and Bailkey noticed other forms of less “formal” agricultural enterprise, mainly in immigrant communities, which studies of urban farming have often missed. These included “Hispanic women raising tilapia fish in their homes, … a solar greenhouse project on thirteen vacant lots in a West Side Hispanic neighborhood, and a possibly clandestine operation where Asian growers are raising vegetables beside the railroad lines on the city’s north side for an informal consortium of Vietnamese restauranteurs” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 29). These sorts of conditions also existed in Philadelphia in the late 1990s, mostly on marginal land near railroad tracks or the airport, often without ties to support organizations.

Kaufman and Bailkey expressed “guarded optimism” about city government and civil society support for urban agriculture. “Chicago’s motto, urbs in horto, the ‘city in a garden,’ is being realized,” they proclaimed, “by organizations in and out of government now creating the institutional context for entrepreneurial urban agriculture” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 29). They cited three main factors: “a strong city-wide greening movement centered in local government and supported by a number of non-profit organizations, an emerging interest in urban agriculture projects by a few local foundations, and the presence of Heifer Project International” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 30). This last institution had established “its first urban, North American office in 1996 in Chicago,” and had “become the leading institutional supporter of entrepreneurial urban agriculture projects in the city,” providing funding and technical support to ten projects, with more planned (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, pp. 31–32).

Still, as in Philadelphia, city government in Chicago supported urban agriculture unevenly, though Kaufman and Bailkey perceived opportunities in its enthusiastic embrace of urban greening. “A small cadre of people working for local government are supportive” of urban farming, they noted, “but for most local government officials the topic is not on their radar screens” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 33). Mayor Richard M. Daley had championed various sorts of greening, though not yet urban farming. But his Department of Environment’s Greencorps program had a mission “to enable Chicagoans to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods by providing horticultural instruction, materials, and employment.” It provided “about $3,000 worth of resources in the form of plants, materials, and soil amendments” to each of 71 gardens, and more modest assistance to another 137 groups cleaning vacant lots and planting and maintaining gardens (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 30).

One “unique public sector organization,” Kaufman and Bailkey predicted, “could be a boon to urban agriculture.” Established in 1996, NeighborSpace was an autonomous nonprofit community land trust, created through an intergovernmental agreement by the city’s Department of Planning and Development, Chicago Park District, and Cook County Forest Preserve District (the agreement was renewed in 2016). Representatives of these agencies served on its board and approved NeighborSpace’s requests to acquire land for community-managed open space, principally community gardens. It held title to 60 gardens by 1999, though only seven grew food; the rest were ornamental (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 30). NeighborSpace required “the community groups using the land to take responsibility for its management as a community project,” facilitating “public” ownership in multiple ways. Remarkably, thus far in its young history, NeighborSpace staff reported “gaining local government support for urban agriculture was not a significant problem” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 31).

Ultimately, Kaufman and Bailkey characterized entrepreneurial urban agriculture as “still in an embryonic stage in Chicago. There are some hopeful signs that a firmer foothold might materialize… in the future, but at present only a light layer of support exists.” However, they concluded, compared to Philadelphia and Boston, Chicago contained “both the largest core of entrepreneurial urban agriculture activities and the municipal structure closest to fully supporting city farming as an alternate use of vacant land.” (Kaufman and Bailkey 2000, p. 33).

By 2011, when Ben Helphand invited me to work with NeighborSpace and other partners on a census of Chicago community gardens, the emergent trends that Kaufman and Bailkey identified a dozen years earlier were playing out. Heifer International closed its Chicago office the year before (and its nascent office in Philadelphia), and Greencorps had cut its support for community gardens. But NeighborSpace helped convene gardeners to organize a new support system for themselves. This became the gardener-run Chicago Community Garden Association. Open to all community gardeners, this group effectively replaced the Botanic Garden and Greencorps as the citywide distributor of seedlings and other materials and support. It also gave Chicago an organized constituency of gardeners, who owned and ran key parts of the garden support system themselves.

Community gardening in Chicago has grown recently, with most gardens now growing food, and a substantial share of gardens preserved. In 2013, we identified 209 community gardens growing food in the city. While we did not find reliable figures for earlier years, urban agriculture support professionals in Chicago consistently reported that, as in Philadelphia, the number of community gardens in the city had grown from the 1970s to early 1990s, diminished in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and was clearly growing again since the late 2000s. As research by NeighborSpace and our partners in the Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping Project (CUAMP) since then has shown, the number of community gardens grew to 279 by 2018, 242 of them growing food (CUAMP). NeighborSpace held 71 gardens in 2010, and by 2018 it held 107 gardens and two nonprofit farms, with close to 70 more gardens in city parks (Hieggelke 2010).

Chicago remained a vibrant center of urban farming, too, despite substantial turnover. New farms since Kaufman and Bailkey’s study in the late 1990s included several worked by Growing Power’s youth programs (later the Urban Growers Collective, which survived Growing Power’s closure in Milwaukee); City Farm, envisioned as a temporary installment on the former site of the Cabrini Green housing project; the largely indoor aquaponic Iron Street Farm, a nonprofit youth program; several growing sites of Windy City Harvest, a youth program run by the Chicago Botanic Garden; two farms at Growing Home, including one held by NeighborSpace; among many other nonprofit and commercial farms. By 2018, CUAMP counted 88 sites calling themselves urban farms, community farms, or gardens operated by restaurants and catering companies (CUAMP).

The group that ran CUAMP, Advocates for Urban Agriculture, established in 2002, also gave Chicago an organized constituency of farmers, home and community gardeners working together and with NeighborSpace to influence policy. Urged by these and other advocates, in 2007 Mayor Daley’s planning commission adopted the Eat Local, Live Healthy plan, with a goal to increase food production in city neighborhoods (City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development 2007). In 2011, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel announced, the city “relax[ed] fencing and parking requirements for larger commercial urban farms in order to hold down overhead costs for entrepreneurs and community organizations that launch and maintain these as enterprises.” New policies formalized permission for hydroponic, aquaponic, and apiary systems, and committed to supporting green job creation (City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development 2011). Two years later, Emanuel endorsed a plan to make city land available for an expanded “incubator network” of workforce and small entrepreneur training farms (Rotenberk 2013). These policies embraced a neoliberal vision of urban agriculture promoted by some Chicago farmers. Yet the city’s ongoing support for community gardens was arguably more significant for a far larger number of Chicago residents.

NeighborSpace brought relative stability and equity to Chicago’s landscape of community gardens and system of urban agriculture support, compared to many other cities. This manifested in more than the growing number of gardens preserved and protected under its ownership and insurance. The organization grew partly out of the city’s need to rectify the well-documented and visibly gross inequity in the distribution of public space in affluent versus poorer parts of the city. For many aldermen, city bureaucrats, and much of NeighborSpace’s leadership this was its central reason for being. In more practical terms, as Ben Helphand reported, the city has continued to donate land to NeighborSpace through the Department of Planning and Development and “invests in the garden infrastructure because successive administrations and city council members have prioritized these community spaces, but also because our process is predictable. NeighborSpace vets applicants thoroughly and establishes ongoing relationships with community stewards so that the land will be maintained for the long-term” (Ela 2016; Ela and Rosenberg 2017; Helphand 2015).

The organization’s core focus on community stewardship represented an investment in social sustainability. As Helphand noted, NeighborSpace “assists with an array of stewardship issues such as gaining access to water, fixing broken infrastructure, leadership transitions and emergencies such as a downed tree or someone driving through a fence, which might otherwise derail a community garden over the long-term.” Like agricultural land trusts in other cities, it also addresses “[t]he requirements for insurance, leases, testing, permits and other hurdles that would drown [many] community gardens.” Unlike NGA’s experience with some of its gardens, “[w]hen a NeighborSpace-protected site is faced with challenges, such as a lack of interest or leadership capacity, it does not revert to vacancy.” The organization’s “staff works with the community to re-establish, deepen and/or expand community environmental stewardship” (Helphand 2015).

Chicago has had a vibrant urban agriculture sector in the last decade thanks largely to two structural factors. First, it has an organized constituency of community gardeners, farmers, and allies from around the city, with greater longevity, control of garden support systems, and influence on municipal government than in Philadelphia. Second, in addition to liberalizing urban agriculture regulations as many cities have since the mid-2000s, Chicago city agencies have made a clear, enduring commitment to urban agriculture in their creation and support of NeighborSpace. Centering urban agriculture support in a land trust, in complement and collaboration with the Park District, means that the institutional infrastructure of the city’s community gardening system is at its core dedicated to fostering permanent ownership and community stewardship. The result is a system that, compared to Philadelphia and many other cities, is more accessible, navigable, and equitable – more of a public good resembling Seattle’s P-Patch system.

4 Conclusion

Philadelphia and Chicago experienced similar histories of urban agriculture up to the 1990s, but then took divergent paths in the structure, focus, and predominant values of their municipal and nonprofit support systems. This yielded different experiences for community gardeners and farmers, due to different levels and trajectories of land preservation, organized advocacy, and public and private support. NeighborSpace and the Neighborhood Gardens Trust resembled one another in their operations and the protections they provide for gardens (Helphand 2015; Vitiello and Nairn 2009). But NeighborSpace has operated much more at the center of Chicago’s urban agriculture system, with more stable and collaborative relationships with city agencies.

To a great extent, Philadelphians and their institutions have continued to view urban agriculture as an ephemeral redevelopment strategy to address social, economic, and health crises. Until recently, even activists rarely imagined a substantial shift away from the city’s focus on access to vacant land through the land bank. By contrast, Ben Helphand casts NeighborSpace as a break in the history of treating agriculture as temporary, with its attendant booms and busts in support for gardening and farming. “In order to break out of this cycle,” he argues, for agriculture to “have a permanent place in the urban geography it is imperative that models are developed that provide both long-term land security and can navigate the vicissitudes of community interest.” If the organization “can successfully acquire a site, it holds the title forever and cannot be uprooted,” as long as community stewardship is sustained. NeighborSpace characterizes this strategy as “permanently grassroots” (Helphand 2015; Helphand and Lawson 2011).

The relationships between urban agriculture and urban economic development and redevelopment in U.S. cities were relatively unexplored when Jerry and Martin produced Farming Inside Cities. But a growing body of evidence from subsequent research and practice that they helped inspire suggests it is time to break with the redevelopment paradigm as a major part of U.S. cities’ approach to urban agriculture. Cities build stronger, more enduring and more equitable urban agriculture systems and sectors when they situate agriculture in a policy and institutional framework that does not seek to extract from growers a set of economic outcomes that they are not well positioned to deliver (Hou et al. 2009; Helphand and Lawson 2011; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers 2014; Pothukuchi 2017, 2018).

Cities should value urban agriculture for what it is demonstrably good at: in U.S. cities, mainly its social, health, and related non-market benefits. Doing this means prioritizing urban agriculture as a public good, accessible to the city’s range of publics, and a long-term land use. This does not mean giving up on entrepreneurial urban farming, but rather embracing the diversity and multi-functional impacts of urban farming by nonprofits and for-profits, individuals and collectives. For governments, support organizations, advocates, and growers alike, this more realistic approach can make urban agriculture more manageable in practice, too. It means farmers and gardeners incur less risk of failing to deliver on false promises, for instance that agriculture in itself can solve poverty, obesity, or other societal problems.

Centering urban agriculture systems in land trusts – not in land banks or redevelopment agencies – is essential for producing more sustainable and equitable landscapes of community gardens and farms in U.S. cities. NeighborSpace provides a replicable model for this (Ela and Rosenberg 2017). Elite horticulture organizations still play important roles in supporting growers in many cities. But their histories remind us that institutions without a mission centrally focused on urban agriculture can easily drift away from it when funding and other opportunities pull them elsewhere. By contrast, community land trusts prioritize enduring community benefits and community control. They are also well positioned for long-term collaboration with park systems, grower support programs, and other partners with social, environmental, and health missions. This all can help make agriculture a more permanent part of cities and communities, a public good whose benefits can accrue in more sustained and equitable fashion.