Unearthing the entangled roots of urban agriculture
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Unearthing the entangled roots of urban agriculture Jonathan K. London1 · Bethany B. Cutts2 · Kirsten Schwarz3 · Li Schmidt4 · Mary L. Cadenasso5 Accepted: 18 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This study examines urban agriculture (UA) in Sacramento, California (USA), the nation’s self-branded “Farm-to-Fork Capital,” in order to highlight UA’s distinct yet entangled roots. The study is based on 24 interviews with a diverse array of UA leaders, conducted as part of a five-year transdisciplinary study of UA in Sacramento. In it, we unearth three primary “taproots” of UA projects, each with its own historical legacies, normative visions, and racial dynamics. In particular, we examine UA projects with “justice taproots,” “health taproots,” and “market taproots.” We use this analysis to understand how different kinds of UA projects are embedded in racial capitalism in ways that transform relationships between people, the city, and food systems. Unearthing these entangled roots helps illuminate UA’s underlying politics, showing how these roots grow in both competitive and symbiotic ways within the soil matrix of racial capitalism. We argue that these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. In particular, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued. However, we argue that there are some prospects for building alliances between the UA movement’s three roots, and that these are both promising and problematic. Keywords Urban agriculture · Racial capitalism · Food justice · Sacramento · California Abbreviations BHC Building Healthy Communities BLM Black Lives Matter * Jonathan K. London [email protected]
SBF Soil Born Farms SUAC Sacramento Urban Agriculture Coalition UA Urban Agriculture UC Davis University of California, Davis YFUF Yisrael Family Urban Farm
Bethany B. Cutts [email protected]
Introduction
Kirsten Schwarz [email protected]
In cities across the United States and the world, urban agriculture (UA) movements are building sustainable and equitable urban agricultural systems that confront structural factors like structural racism, uneven capital accumulation, and environmental injustice (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Alkon and Mares 2012; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010). UA movements have been both commended and critiqued because of the ways they resist, transform or reproduce racial inequities observed in conventional food systems and urban development processes (Block et al. 2012; Bradley and Herrera 2016; Cohen and Reynolds 2015; Galt et al. 2014; Reynolds 2015). A burgeoning field of scholarship on food justice has highlighted efforts by communities of color to promote selfempowerment through culturally resonant food ways, food sovereignty, and community development based on social
Li Schmidt [email protected] Mary L. Cadenasso [email protected] 1
Department of Human Ecology, UC Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2335 Hart Hall, Davis, CA 95616, USA
2
Dep
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