REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: MORE THAN EVER,THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA

Community-produced spaces such as community gardens are attracting widespread scholarly interest for the potential of not only food production, but also for social, environmental, and educational benefits. Yet community gardens have also been scrutinized as sites of governmentality that produce neoliberal subjects. In this article, six case studies are analyzed as representative of three ways to organize and manage gardens—grassroots, externally-organized, and active nonprofit management. I use performativity theory to examine how definitions and enactments of community can be used to include, exclude, or bridge difference. The analysis highlights some of the specific moments in garden organizing and management that influence participation or resistance to community-oriented urban food production.     

Urban Perennials: How Diversification has Created a Sustainable Community Garden Movement in The United States

Our research seeks to understand how the contemporary community garden movement in the United States differs from its predecessors and whether its new foundation increases the political and financial sustainability of today's gardens. To this end, this article reviews historical and contemporary literature, and surveys participants in three distinctive community gardens, to answer several related research questions. First, what is the current state of the US community garden movement, and how have its historical roots shaped its response to current policy concerns? Second, which populations comprise today's community gardeners, and what motivates them to participate? After considering the findings from our three study gardens, and from a review of secondary and “gray” literature, we conclude by positing that a greater diversity of gardeners and gardening motivations, accompanied by changing leading views on urban land uses, will lead to such urban gardens remaining a more lasting feature of city neighborhood landscapes.     

KITCHENSPACE,FIESTAS, AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION IN MEXICAN HOUSE‐LOT GARDENS*

ABSTRACT. The house‐lot garden in central Mexico is gendered space where changing cultural identities are negotiated, re‐created, and celebrated as “tradition” is continually redefined. No clear boundary separates the kitchen from the house‐lot garden or the private space of the household from the semipublic space of the community. During collective food preparation for religious fiestas, gendered reciprocity networks strengthen community relations and foster alliances between traditional neighborhoods and between communities in the region. At the intersection of everyday life and fiestas, food‐preparation spaces, or kitchenspaces, in the house‐lot garden are fertile areas in which to explore the cultural reproduction of nature‐society relations. They are vital to understanding gender, place, and culture in this region and represent people's symbolic connection with the land in increasingly urban contexts. This article analyzes the sense of place that Mexican women derive from their house‐lot gardens.     

CREATIVE PRESERVATION IN CALIFORNIA'S DAIRY INDUSTRY*

ABSTRACT. Farmers in Marin and Sonoma Counties, located north of San Francisco, are experimenting with numerous alternatives to California's widely known industrial dairy style. Many analysts suggest that consumer politics, food scares, and globalization explain such shifts to organic and other types of “quality” food production. While acknowledging the importance of these factors, we argue that the alternatives in this region are best understood as an outcome of broad‐based land‐conservation efforts developed through historical and ongoing struggles over urban growth, rising concerns about environmental values, and deep regional interests in dairy preservation. Over time, preservation of this agricultural landscape has contributed to the emergence of a quality food industry historically rooted in the region's politics of place.     

Gated barriadas: Responses to urban insecurity in marginal settlements in Lima,Peru

The explosive growth of so‐called marginal settlements in Latin America's cities has received considerable academic attention in past decades. The inability of the state to adequately provide affordable housing for a rapidly growing urban population has meant that these neighbourhoods relied on community mobilization to achieve common objectives of basic infrastructure and legal recognition. With increasing consolidation and less need for coordinated action, many local organizations lost their rationale. Fear of crime and violence, a major concern in Latin American metropolises, is inscribed on the urban landscape by a growing number of gated and fortified residential enclaves for the better‐off. Marginal neighbourhoods, however, experience a ‘security gap’ as they receive insufficient police protection and lack the financial resources to employ private guards. In many cases, the real or perceived insecurities of inner‐city life have prompted organized bottom‐up, mostly informal and sometimes vigilante, responses. Drawing on research on the rise of informal security‐related interventions in the neighbourhoods of Lima Metropolitana, Peru, this paper explores the rationales underlying the different approaches and adoptions, including the involvement of the main actors, community associations and other local interest groups.     

ISTANBUL'S BOSTANS: A MILLENNIUM OF MARKET GARDENS*

ABSTRACT. For centuries, a network of market gardens throughout Istanbul provisioned the city with fresh vegetables. These bostans and their gardeners held a respected place in Istanbul life, contributing to the city's food and employment needs. Today, only fragments remain. Massive urban development, intense competition for metropolitan space, modernization, changing institutions and laws, and the global industrialization of food have threatened this tradition with extinction. But in spite of the overwhelming forces behind their demise, some of Istanbul's bostans persist. Efforts to support and promote the gardens, and to draw from the expertise and experience of their gardeners, are emerging. From a historical perspective, this article examines Istanbul's bostans to understand their meaning and contribution to the city's people and landscape.     

DIFFERENTIATING MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF GARDEN AND COMMUNITY

Community gardens are widely recognized as an effective grassroots response to urban disinvestment and decay. There has been remarkably little attention paid, however, to the differences among community gardens as physical and social spaces. This paper suggests that variations among gardens reflect and reproduce differing interpretations of the meaning of both community and garden in the city. A comparative discussion of three community gardens in Minneapolis, Minnesota, highlights the concept that at the intersection of notions of community and garden are the issues of enclosure, inclusion and exclusion. Decisions about whether and how to enclose community gardens shape the role that community gardens play in urban neighborhoods. [Key words: community gardens, neighborhood revitalization, urban activism.]     

Domestic Residential Garden Food Production in Melbourne,Australia: a fine-grained analysis and pilot study

Even though cities cover approximately only 3 per cent of the earth's land area, they are often located on what previously was prime agricultural land. In line with what was common historically, many cities around the world are now deliberately seeking to promote and expand agricultural production within their borders. Pressure for change is coming from a number of sources, including both governments and private citizens. Potentially, community gardens and domestic backyard food production have an important role to play in this process, but while there now exists a sizeable body of research on the former, there is a serious lack of data on current productive practices in private domestic gardens. While other researchers have asked householders to estimate garden production, we believe this to be the first project to carefully document measured output by multiple households. The paper presents the results of a fine-grained study of 15 selected householders in metropolitan Melbourne. Participants collected detailed daily information about their food production over a three-month period. In addition, two of the respondents had been keeping daily production records continuously for one or more years. The results demonstrate enormous diversity in the food harvested, as well as some extremely high levels of productivity from relatively small domestic spaces. Participants were also questioned about their motivations for engaging in backyard food production and dealing with surpluses.     

Can community gardens and farmers' markets relieve food desert problems? A study of Edmonton,Canada

This article integrates community gardens and farmers' markets into a spatial analysis of food deserts in the City of Edmonton, Canada. Our results show that community gardens and farmers' markets can improve fresh food accessibility and help relieve food desert problems to some extent, especially for mature, inner-suburban neighborhoods. However, based on the minimum road network distance and high need indicators, four neighborhoods throughout the city can still be considered as food deserts even after farmers' markets and community gardens are taken into consideration. Regression results reveal that community gardens tend to cluster with supermarkets, so that neighborhoods that have poor access to supermarkets also tend to have limited access to community gardens.     

Food gardens as important elements of urban agriculture: Spatio-developmental trends and future prospects for urban gardening in Czechia

The main research goals of the article are to explain the historical context of urban food gardens in Czechia, to describe the current spatial pattern of allotment gardens, and to introduce and analyse recent trends in urban gardening. The main method for achieving the first goal was a literature study. For the second goal, geographical mapping and analysis of data relating to the spatial distribution of allotment gardens were used. For the third goal, mapping together with analysis of semi-structured interviews carried out in community gardens in Prague were used. The analysis showed a strong tradition of urban agriculture and urban food gardening activities in Czechia. Both allotment gardens and newly emerged community gardens were concentrated mainly in the biggest cities and in areas with a rich industrial and mining tradition. This finding supports the significance of gardening as an important element of urban agriculture. However, uncertainty regarding land tenure and long-term sustainability were among the greatest obstacles for the future of allotment and community gardens. The authors’ main recommendations are that urban agriculture should be included as primary land use in sustainable planning and there should be broader community involvement in planning and decision-making processes.     

An obsolete dichotomy? Rethinking the rural–urban interface in terms of food security and production in the global south

The global food system is coming under increasing strain in the face of urban population growth. The recent spike in global food prices (2007–08) provoked consumer protests, and raised questions about food sovereignty and how and where food will be produced. Concurrently, for the first time in history the majority of the global population is urban, with the bulk of urban growth occurring in smaller-tiered cities and urban peripheries, or ‘peri-urban’ areas of the developing world. This paper discusses the new emerging spaces that incorporate a mosaic of urban and rural worlds, and reviews the implications of these spaces for livelihoods and food security. We propose a modified livelihoods framework to evaluate the contexts in which food production persists within broader processes of landscape and livelihood transformation in peri-urban locations. Where and how food production persists are central questions for the future of food security in an urbanising world. Our proposed framework provides directions for future research and highlights the role of policy and planning in reconciling food production with urban growth.     

Seeds for Change? Attaining the benefits of community gardens through council policies in Sydney,Australia

Modern industrial systems of food production cause a wide range of detrimental impacts to the environment, human health and society. Integrating community gardens into local food systems is one way to counteract some of those impacts. This research looks at the elements that community garden policies should contain in order to best promote community gardens and attain their benefits. Focusing on Sydney, the research evaluates and compares the quality of the community garden policies with the distribution of community gardens in local councils and across broader geographic regions. Councils or regions that might benefit from greater access to community gardens are identified and ways in which councils, and the Sydney Region as a whole, might improve their community garden policies are discussed.     

MAKING SUSTAINABLE CREATIVE/CULTURAL SPACE IN SHANGHAI AND SINGAPORE*

ABSTRACT. Shanghai and Singapore are two economically vibrant Asian cities that have recently adopted creative/cultural economy strategies. In this article I examine new spatial expressions of cultural and economic interests in the two cities: state‐vaunted cultural edifices and organically evolved cultural spaces. I discuss the simultaneous precariousness and sustainability of these spaces, focusing on Shanghai's Grand Theatre and Moganshan Lu and on Singapore's Esplanade—Theatres by the Bay and Wessex Estate. Their cultural sustainability is understood as their ability to support the development of indigenous content and local idioms in artistic work. Their social sustainability is examined in terms of the social inclusion and community bonds they engender; environmental sustainability refers to the articulation with the language of existing urban forms and the preservation of or improvements to the landscape. Although both Shanghai and Singapore demonstrate simultaneous precariousness and sustainability, Singapore's city‐state status places greater pressure on it to ensure sustainability than does Shanghai, within a much larger China in which Beijing serves as the cultural hearth while Shanghai remains essentially a commercial center.     

An Experience Inspired by the Evolution of Community Gardens in New York City

In many highly dense urban environments, the urgent needs of residents for increasing green space, improving the quality of the community environment and reconstructing the relationships among residents have given birth to the new space type of community gardens. However, China still lacks this relevant experience. In contrast, New York City’s community gardens had a relatively early start, and they now have rich experience in space construction, operation and maintenance. Given their level of experience, they can be used as references for the development of community gardens in China. This paper adopts a bibliometric research method, identifies 201 periodical literature sources published between 2000 and 2020 from the core library of the Web of Science as the object of study, and finally assesses the research hotspot for transferring from macro-research to space-type construction method, social impact, and so on, through CiteSpace software analysis. By virtue of the research process analysis and the results of field surveys and interviews, this paper probes the development status of space construction and social organization construction of the community gardens in New York City, and summarizes that area’s effective experience of development. Based on the current development situation of China’s community gardens, it is proposed that the development of community gardens should be directed by ensuring the land for development, giving full play to social benefits, and mobilizing social organizations, so as to effectively realize urban space construction and social governance.     

Urban Community Garden Agrodiversity and Cultural Identity in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania, U.S.

Considerable research has examined the social, cultural, economic, and community benefits of urban gardening. Few studies, however, have empirically assessed factors that influence urban community garden agrodiversity or its relationship to these dimensions of gardening. We conducted an interdisciplinary study of agrodiversity and cultural identity, based certain markers of identity, including how people see themselves with respect to race, ethnicity, or place of origin, in community gardens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We conducted fifty‐six semistructured interviews with gardeners with different cultural identities in eight community gardens on their motivations for urban community gardening during 2014. We conducted plant inventories of the corresponding garden plots and found 104 cultivated edible and ornamental species and 28 varieties representing 34 families. We find that although gardens with culturally diverse gardeners did not have higher species richness, the cultural identity of the gardeners influenced species selection and reason for gardening. Further, the structure, design and species composition of garden plots reflected the identities of garden members. These finding have implications for the recent institutionalization of urban agriculture into city land policies in Philadelphia and other cities in North America.     

TRACEABILITY: TRACKING AND PRIVACY IN THE FOOD SYSTEM*

ABSTRACT. Lapses in food safety have spurred development of governmental traceability systems to track every stage of food production as part of a standardized information base. These systems form part of national and international government efforts to reduce food‐security risks and control food‐related disease outbreaks. The European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada have traceability requirements now in various stages of implementation, as does the Codex Alimentarius. Traceability regulations require that, from farm (plant or animal) to fork, foods have a clear, verifiable record that tracks through all stages of cultivation, production, supplying, transporting, processing, and distribution. Traceability implies complete information control over the geography of one of life's most essential acts, eating. The apparent object of traceability is food, which seems to imply that human tracking is not part of the process, but food does not move on its own. Those people responsible at each stage for food transfers and transactions may go into the traceability database, making their locations part of the record and supporting precise monitoring of labor performance, consumer buying patterns, and ownership and management strategies. Given these capabilities, the development of public‐sector traceability systems demands careful consideration. Owners, especially large exporters and importers, are likely to see their needs and fears shape the system. The food workforce may well bear tracking's brunt. Consumers, the presumed beneficiaries of the systems, will probably resist direct incorporation (and full benefit), favoring their privacy over their safety.     

Lacan on urban development and national identity in a global city: Integrated Resorts in Singapore

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been used in film, literature and other areas of social thought, but rarely in the domain of urban studies and human/cultural geography. Following its introduction by urban planners Michael Gunder and Jean Hillier, I apply the theory of the four discourses and the mirror stage of development to Singapore's urban development of the two Integrated Resorts at Marina Bay and Sentosa. The decision to allow gambling and build casinos was a contentious one and provides a point of departure for insight into the identity issues and planning decision making processes in Singapore. I critically analyse the rhetoric of the public debate from 2004–2005 to draw conclusions about the government's self‐perception of Singapore as a city‐state and the manifestation of this identity through the creation of cosmopolitan spaces as an attempt to project that identity onto its citizens. The aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to provide an understanding and recognition by analysis to enable a change of signifiers, values and ideology among the masters and the subjects to better represent the true needs and wants of the community. This reflective position enables a movement toward postcolonial urban studies and planning.     

GARDENS AND DWELLING: PEOPLE IN VERNACULAR GARDENS*

ABSTRACT. Investigations of dooryard gardens, kitchen gardens, home gardens, and houselot gardens fall unequally into one of three groupings. The first are those that treat the plants in the gardens as biological entities and define a space considered a culturally controlled biological community or habitat. The second are those that consider plants cultural traits and the space defined by their positions a setting for household activities. The third conceives of plants as design elements within a garden or a landscape that frames a house or provides a setting for formal human performances. Recent decades have witnessed a broadening focus in the study of gardens, from spatial characteristics and biological content to social and cultural concerns such as reciprocity networks, contested spaces, and the concept of “dwelling.”     

The Space Community Policing Makes and the Body That Makes It

This paper examines the ways that community policing organizes urban space in order to increase the police's ability to observe and to enforce. The logic of that organization, I argue, rests in the particular way that police are integrating civilians into police practice as part of community policing's police-community partnership, a partnership that is characterized by the concrete metaphor of a policing body. This paper presents the results of twenty months of field research with the Boston Police Department whose community policing program, Neighborhood Policing, is being hailed as a national model.     

Measuring the Size,Scope, and Location of Civil Society Organizations in Johannesburg's Food System

Food security civil society organizations (FSCSOs) are key institutional players in the Global South, yet researchers have not adequately examined their size, scope, or location within urban areas. To fill this gap, this article analyzes Johannesburg's FSCSOs using quantitative survey data and spatial analysis. Data findings suggest that FSCSOs’ resources are unevenly distributed across Johannesburg, with larger, privately resourced FSCSOs located in white suburbs and smaller, unstable, turnover-prone FSCSOs located in black townships and informal settlements. Overall, these data suggest that the city's network of FSCSOs is spatially polarized and weakest in areas where food insecurity is the greatest.