(Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification

A brief history of community gardens

The tranquility of the urban garden hides a bloody, violent past and a contentious present. Community gardens are synonymous with war; a war of armies and a war of classes. In its earliest forms during the 19th century, the garden was a source of food and a way to offset urban poverty, as a steady flow of rural labor found its way into the overcrowded slums of growing industrial cities. During the early twentieth century, gardens were overtly linked to war. Food production came under strain during the first and second world war, as farm labor was pressed into military service. Governments heavily invested in the practice as a way of offsetting food shortages, while invigorating patriotic and nationalist sensibilities as “morale boosters”. The “Victory gardens, as they were called, had such high-profile proponents as President Woodrow Wilson, who declared that “food would win the war” (Hayden-Smith, 2014: 12).

Post-industrial community gardens were rooted in anarcho-communist and environmentalist visions of the future. Squatting in empty buildings and transforming empty lots into productive green fields was a form of activism and protest against what many viewed as the destructive tendencies in the wake of the eclipse of the Fordist-Keynesian era. The appropriation and collectivization of abandoned, devalorized and devalued public and private spaces presented an alternative to the portrayal, if not the reality, of decay, poverty and abandonment of the American city by the 1980s.

Practices, such as racial covenants and redlining, prevented African-Americans, Hispanics and poor whites from enjoying the generalized upward mobility produced by the post-war boom and kept them rooted in place, as wealthier groups relocated to a rapidly expanding suburbia (Crowder, 2000; Lee and Ferraro, 2007; Massey and Denton, 1993). These groups found themselves isolated in a rapidly declining, environmentally degraded and economically barren landscape of the post-industrial city.

New York, perhaps more than any other city, most clearly embodied this distinctly American phenomenon in the popular imagination. While Europe continued to invest in its cities during the 20th century, where the most affluent residents chose to live, the American response was to abandon urbanization in favor of suburbanization and the automobile. The near bankruptcy of New York in 1975 and adamant refusal of the Ford administration to support a federal bailout embodied political hostility to the American city and its strong union base. Ford responded to the crisis by proposing legislation that would increase the likelihood of bankruptcy. Help eventually came from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), who salvaged the city by buying $150 million ($630 million in 2011 dollars) in municipal bonds with pension funds (Lichten, 1986).

New York’s fiscal crisis was an indicator of the structural transformation of the United States economy from city-centered manufacturing and trade, to the technoburb in which housing, as well as manufacturing and the newly dominant service and technology industries, migrated to suburban areas (Fishman, 1989). It also clearly sounded the alarm to developers, speculators and the middle class, that the economic power of the State was focused on development outside of the urban core, not within it, a process which had begun soon after WWII with the massive publicly subsidized highway building project that would make the suburbanization of America possible (Jackson, 1985). The result for cities during this period was a decreasing tax base, coupled with increasing liabilities, primarily in the form of social services such as education, health care, sanitation and infrastructure maintenance, as the middle class fled, taking with them tax and spending dollars, leaving behind poorer groups.

This racial and economic segregation served to intensify poverty and, coupled with the practices of redlining and blockbusting, increased vacancy rates and the abandonment of housing in the city (Massey and Denton, 1993; Thabit and Piven, 2003). The confluence of government disinvestment, corporate withdrawal from the strongly unionized urban cores, and “white flight”had a devastating effect upon American cities during this period (Thompson, 1999). More than half of U.S. cities experienced population decline after 1950. By 1970, more than two-thirds were losing population at an increasing and alarming rate (Rappaport, 2003). And for those cities that did not lose population overall, many experienced “white flight”, in which wealthier and usually, but not always, white residents were replaced by poorer residents of color. One study found that, for every black resident that arrived, 2.7 whites fled (Boustan, 2010) and that these new urbanites were much poorer than their predecessors (Grubb, 1982).

A similar tale unfolded across the continent, in a city that was once the symbol of manifest destiny, the trope of progress and the promise of modernity: Oakland California. At the terminus of the transcontinental railroad, it was a city originally conceived as an “industrial garden” that would, by the 1960’s, become the center and symbol of black power politics and the struggles around space and power. Evoking America’s slave-holding past, black nationalists and intellectuals portrayed the “industrial garden” as a new “urban plantation” and “black colony”, in which the promises of prosperity and equality were suffocated by the “white noose” of suburbanization (Self, 2003: 211; Weaver, 1948).

If Oakland’s trajectory from progressive ideal to dystopian ghetto was more explicitly couched in racial terms, it was because Oakland was, if only briefly, far more integrated than most American cities and, hence, felt the sting of deindustrialization and residential segregation more acutely (Rhomberg, 2004: 36, 82). It was also a city that had been designed with the “garden city” in mind. The architectural fusion of machine, nature and humanity into the “industrial garden” were, as planners Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumford envisioned, designed to cure society of everything from disease to class conflict. These “industrial gardens” were to harmonize society, not intensify its divisions and stratifications. Much like the community gardening movement of the 1970s, Howard’s “commonsense socialism” proposed a “joyous union” of town and country, public ownership of land and “co-operative organization” that were direct antidotes to the Victorian factory town’s belching smoke stacks, congestion, poverty and class conflict (Meacham, 1999: 57). Therefore, Oakland’s halcyon promise of plentiful employment in a bucolic, village-like setting of neat Victorians with lush gardens, felt all the more tragic as, by the 1960s, West Oakland, in particular, became the picture of the very Victorian industrial dystopia of poverty, pollution and inequality so reviled by the reformers and planners of the “garden city”.

Oakland's early development at the beginning of the twentieth century as an “industrial garden” played strongly upon its more rural and bucolic character to draw in wealthy San Franciscans. Ironically, in the wake of Oakland’s success as a multi-racial wartime ship-building and manufacturing hub, and then the massive economic and social upheaval that struck in the post-war period, it was these very same ideas of the combination of the rural and the urban into a perfect concoction that would draw upwardly mobile, mostly white workers further out into suburban areas. Much like New York, San Francisco and Oakland became increasingly segregated, impoverished and starved of public and private investment and resources as it’s tax base vanished. And, also like its East Coast counterpart, this devalorized space gave birth to radical movements that contested the vison of an exclusive suburban America that had left many facing unfulfilled promises of equity and social mobility.

The period from 1945 to the late 1970s marked a cataclysmic shift in demographics and residential segregation, but also in the underdevelopment of the city and overdevelopment of the suburbs, the erosion of a multiracial city in Oakland, but also a multiracial working class and the beginnings of the tensions and struggles over community, identity, public spending and space that would mark the remainder of the century. While, in New York, Robert Moses was bulldozing neighborhoods to make way for the automobile to link industry (the city) with garden (the suburb), and unintentionally producing the urban garden in the space in between, in Oakland, the garden was already in the city, in the form of the single-family home placed close to industry.

Yet, in both places, space had to be remade by those left out of America’s rush to the suburbs. For blacks in post-war Oakland, the garden city was too reminiscent of the “plantation”, as frustration mounted at the lack of progress after the civil rights movement. For the Black Panthers and other black radicals, “the industrial garden of midcentury had become Babylon - a false city that had to be remade to stave off collapse” (Self, 2003: 19).

In New York, likewise, the communities that could not trade their tenement apartments for single-family suburban homes as had previous generations, built their own “garden city” on the abandoned lots of the LES. In both New York and Oakland, a demographic shift and residential reshuffling occurred, resulting in a smaller and poorer city. Between 1970 and 1980, New York lost over eight hundred thousand people, the majority of whom belonged to upper income households (Marcuse, 1985). Empty lots appeared in the Lower East Side, once the most densely populated neighborhood on earth (Barr and Ort, 2013). As wealthier residents moved to the surrounding suburbs, abandoned buildings succumbed to vacancy, vandalism, fire, arson and demolition. It was in this apocalyptic landscape that a movement would emerge. Residents, organizing around notions of solidarity and the community writ large, reclaimed and reshaped neighborhoods forgotten by real estate interests. Squatters, homesteaders and artist’s collectives emerged, along with an urban gardening movement that resulted from a combination of multiple perspectives, such as environmentalism, new urbanism, social justice and communitarianism, to name but a few of the tendencies that coalesced at this moment and time.

The oldest and, perhaps, the most well-known community garden to emerge during this period was the Liz Christy garden (1973) on the corner of Houston and Bowery, in the heart of what would become the downtown art scene. The lot was the first among many to be appropriated by a group of urban gardeners who called themselves the “green guerillas” (Lamborn and Weinberg, 1999). What was particularly notable about this garden was the speed and effectiveness with which the group was able to obtain legal recognition of temporary rights to the land. The city’s Department of Housing and Preservation and Development agreed to “rent” the land for one dollar per year in 1974. Today, this area constitutes one of the most exclusive and expensive zones of real estate in New York City. In the 1970s, the Bowery was a skid row, composed mostly of single-room occupancy motels (SRO’s), aging and neglected tenements and vacant lots. It stands to this day, surrounded by gleaming luxury condominiums.

Not too far away, on the Lower East side, is the cautionary tale of Adam Purple’s Garden. It was a 15,000-square-foot architectural and social monument composed of five abandoned city lots that were transformed into a spiraling garden by an urban edenist, activist and squatter named Adam Purple and his supporters. It began in 1975, two years after the Christy Garden, but under the same conditions (Mendelsohn, 2009). However, it ended rather differently. Despite Adam Purple’s garden drawing domestic and international attention, being featured in National Geographic and becoming a centerpiece for urban theorists and scholars, it succumbed to the bulldozer on January 8, 1986, as Adam Purple watched from the window of his squatter apartment in an adjacent abandoned building (McKinley, 1998; Mendelsohn, 2009).

From guerillas to gentrifiers

The Green Guerillas and Adam Purple were part of a now familiar wave of urban colonization by the artist/“pioneer”. These, often well-educated, white, politically progressive but poor internal migrants, tended to settle in low-value areas of the city. Their social presence, work and activism directly produced a series of material and symbolic shifts that contributed to the revalorization of urban space. One of the earliest studies of gentrification in New York notes that, when there is space in a city for artists, “it often has the effect of enhancing property values, and so it becomes a springboard for real estate development” (Zukin, 1982: 111).

The artists moving into the old garment factories of lower Manhattan, beginning as early as the late 1950s, embodied a wide range of social practices which become clearly marked as belonging to a privileged elite (Shkuda, 2016). What begins as a bohemian enclave of alternative lifestyles is transformed into a model of urban living and consumption. The necessity of “loft living” for the impoverished artist is turned into a “bourgeois chic”. The arts, as Zukin notes, are on one level a symbolic force but also a consumer amenity for particular classes. The rapid rise in property values in SoHo demonstrated this effect, as the aesthetics of bohemianism were captured and repackaged as a downtown “allure.” Much like the community gardeners a few blocks away on the LES, artists produced and contributed to the revalorization of space, and SoHo would become unaffordable for the very artists who had transformed it. “The structural forces of capitalism and the particularities of place” that made urban space cheaper – deindustrialization – are also the same forces that create an economy around cultural production and consumption, and which eventually make that space expensive once again (Beauregard, 1990).

The meteoric rise of SoHo as a cultural and economic center is the familiar and cautionary tale of the late twentieth century. Today, the arts and gardens have a much more strained (Colomb, 2012), as well as scripted (Evans, 2009), relationship with developers, urban patricians and middle and upper-class consumers. However, the deliberate and planned marketing, branding and construction of “creative cities” has not been a panacea for all. The urban poor and working class, who did have a place in the industrial city as laborers, find themselves increasingly excluded from the new economy and the new city. As artists and art, as both market and lifestyle, would come to define the revitalized postindustrial city as a playground for the rich, well-heeled and educated, the poor and working class would become its antithesis – a persistent problem that needed disciplining, institutionalization and de-subsidizing. The welfare to workfare program, mass incarceration and the privatization of public housing was the response to the “poor” while subsidies and space were provided for the “creative class.”

In this case, gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods is enabled by the free, alienated and conspicuous labor of the disenfranchised underclass, exhibiting the consciousness (edenism, pastoralism) of the hegemonic, and formerly suburban, class in the revitalization of empty lots with the community garden. The practice of the everyday gardener, tending to a lush patch of greenery in a brick and mortar wasteland revalorizes that space, changing its meaning by importing ‘nature’ (the garden) and expelling the post-industrial blight that reminds us of a capitalist society that has intensified social stratification and increased poverty, with a failed social contract and an uneven economy. Further, as the lot is transformed by the labor of the gardener, the recognizability of the gardener is transformed as well, from the allegedly idle, disenfranchised, unemployed member of the urban poor, to the productive and leisurely hobbyist of the suburban dreamscape. The inner city, then, begins to resemble the suburbs with their green spaces and weekend gardeners.

In the early models of gentrification posited by theorists, “urban pioneers” transform the urban space through their patterns of production and consumption, i.e., public art, cafes, galleries and fashion, just as the neighborhood itself is transformed and a long process of devaluation is reversed. The artists who, in the late 1960s and 70 s moved into the abandoned lofts of SoHo, were seeking cheap space in order to make their art, essentially seeking an economic space devoid of the profound process of rent extraction in the rentier economy. Yet, their presence and the manner in which they live and work has come to symbolically represent the most desirable ‘urban’ qualities of readily available and diverse opportunities for consumption. The process, then, of attempting to escape the rentier economy draws the rentiers into these devalorized spaces by the very non-productive (art and gardening are very laborious and productive but not profitable) activities of the pioneer/artist and gardener. Their free and conspicuous labor constructs a space that can be recognized and commodified in the form of higher rents, land and housing costs and, eventually, what is commonly called gentrification. This is the symbolic inclusion that Mele noted occurring on the LES in the 1980s, but it is also more than the cooptation, descripting and representation of artists and gardeners by outside actors. The labor of the gardener produces a very real material transformation of space, while simultaneously drawing forth a legacy of tropes about poverty, work and the redemption offered by the garden. The cycle of alienation is complete. It is much like Marx’s analysis of the factory worker, in which:

the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labor’s realisation is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realisation of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (Marx, 2012: 69)

For example, New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy found the LES of Manhattan, once the most densely populated place on earth and home to waves of immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries, to be the only neighborhood in Manhattan to experience a drop in real estate prices from 1974–1980 (−28.5%) and second only to the high poverty neighborhood of Concourse/Highbridge in the Bronx (−28.6%), while property values actually rose in Manhattan on the whole during this period (+28.6%) (Armstrong et al., 2011). However, during the revanchist period of the 1980’s, the LES experienced the highest property value gains of any neighborhood in New York (+262.2%), far outpacing that of New York City as a whole (+152.2%). In the “Loisaida” area of the LES, an area that underwent intense gentrification during the 1990’s and was the site of pitched battles between activists/squatters and police in Tomkins Square Park, and the center of resistance to the Giuliani administration’s class-cleansing policies, there existed an abundance of community gardens (Smith, 1996). This was the neighborhood of the Guerilla Gardeners and Adam Purple. It was also the neighborhood that saw an influx of artists and musicians pushed out of some of New York’s most exclusive neighborhoods, such as Greenwich village in the 1960s and SoHo in the 1980s.

While the labor of the cultural producer (in this case, the gardener) is not objectified in a specific commodity as in the factory, since there is no physical object that can be exchanged in substantial quantities, it is rather the recognizability of the garden itself, the appearance of a green neighborhood, with productive, i.e. working, if without remuneration, denizens, visibly engaged in the idyllic and leisurely activity of gardening that is captured and exchanged in the market as future value. These are the areas designated as ‘up and coming’, ‘hip’, ‘edgy’ and ‘vibrant’ - all code for various socio-economic and racial categories that must be reconceptualized as non-threatening. Risk and aversion are overcome by the promise of both material and cultural profit as values rise on the wave of reinvestment, and consumption forms the basis of a new community that supplants the old.

This process depends on the signaling of a different class and community than that which was, and often still is, present. The garden is part of a performance which signals to the viewer that this neighborhood is ‘good’ and its people ‘diligent’. Thorsten Veblen, in his seminal work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, noted the power of consumption in establishing class practices and social hierarchy. For Veblen, the activities of labor, consumption and leisure are social activities that are extensions of the division of labor in society. In a society in which social hierarchy is based on wealth differences, visible behaviors (conspicuousness) become of increasing importance as they communicate class position. These behaviors must indicate freedom from the need to work; they must be leisurely, and form the basis of a moral order which privileges the activities of the upper classes and degrades the activities of the lower classes. Veblen writes:

Abstention from labour is not only an honorific or meritorious act, but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence on property as the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention from labour is the convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on leisure. Nota notae est nota rei ipsius. According to well established laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men’s habits of thought as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling; while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy life. (21)

Why the community garden?

As well as being a rich site and offering multiple scales of analysis, the study of community gardens positions the question of space and power as central themes, a framework consistent with the “spatial turn”. This theoretical shift is inspired by Foucault, who writes, “A whole history remains to be written of spaces - which would at the same time be the history of powers (both of these terms in the plural)[original italics] - from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” (Soja (1989: 21). Spaces such as the community garden reflect social relations, but are also the means by which social structures, hierarchies and relations are constituted.

And, if the community garden does not appear as stark, severe and important as the archipelago of prisons, schools and hospitals that form Foucault’s line of inquiry, it is only because they are draped in the deceptively innocuous guise of leisure. But, let us recall that neoclassical economics understood leisure as central to a modern economic system and class structure and, hence, not a trivial matter to brush aside. It was argued that the emergence of leisure as a wide-spread social activity marked rising affluence and its corollaries: free time and consumerism. The twentieth century’s proliferation of museums, resorts and amusement theme parks catered to the “fun-seeking middle-class family with children” (Cross and Walton, 2005: 122). Consumption is the mark of a developed economy with advanced technology, high productivity and increasingly visible and dominant forms of entertainment and consumption, and ultimately becomes a significant engine of the economy and culture (Galbraith, 1958; Tawney, 1920; Veblen, 2001). Leisure, then, and the conspicuity of consumption that has become its hallmark, is not outside the domain of power; rather, it is central to the constitution of power in a late capitalist society, as leisure is an integral component of the economy and culture.

One of the many recognizable forms of leisure is the garden. Yet, it is strangely amorphous and syncretic, and without turning to biblical tales of serpents and sin, we can assert that the garden in the city is a contentious and conflictual space. The garden has a variety of forms and functions in the city, from political mobilization and contestation to basic survival as food justice (Bassett, 1979). Gardening’s leisurely activity embodies simultaneously the hard labor of the agrarian peasant and self-sufficient anarchist squatter, the landed aristocrat and even the suburban lawn tender. This dialectical relation of work and leisure, production and consumption, low class and high, economy and culture, fixes the garden squarely in the center of questions surrounding work, class and the city. The community garden is deeply imbricated in the complex swirl of activities forming a crucial component of the trifecta of the modern economy; a “dialectical indissolubility of the three dimensions of production, distribution and consumption” (Jameson, 1991: 211) that we may glimpse in the sweaty brow of the urban gardener.

Space, then, and in this case the space of the community garden, is more than just a site for understanding various social relations; it also produces them, both as production and consumption. As production, the space of the garden is a material improvement. As consumption, it is not fresh vegetables or fruits that are its primary yield; rather, its fruit is symbolic. The space of the garden, its visual impact on the passerby, is a clear class signal; a message that this area is “improving” and “safe”, and that these gardeners are working and being productive.

Labor forms a key component of this process, both in the material form of labor power to transform the built environment, and as a symbolic force that operates on the level of ideas, perception and affect. The garden is a physical space but it is also a symbolic space that resonates out into the social fabric of the community. The “work” of the garden is multifaceted. It is personal and public, individual and social, as it involves persons but is by definition a community endeavor. Gardens are physical spaces in which the city is “improved”, as empty, trash-ridden lots are transformed into vibrant green Edens, but they are also sites in which the individuals and communities are also improved. This process is, therefore, deeply imbedded within a value system that privileges and values certain types of space and certain types of people and communities over others, and, through this value judgement, orients individual perception and collective policy.

Free-labor in the therapeutic garden

Several figures populate discourses surrounding urban renewal, gentrification and the postindustrial economy. Some of the more often used monikers are the creative class (Florida, 2004), the knowledge worker (Drucker, 1959), the cognitariat (Hayden-Smith, 2014) and the urban pioneer (Smith, 1996: xiv). All are harbingers of a virtual brave new world, centered round technology, symbolism, affect and information, differing only in whether cognitive capitalism will be liberatory or more deeply and completely subsuming and exploitative, reaching even into emotions, mental states and the “soul” of the worker.

These “new” workers and the “new” market or consumer society are central to the discussion of conspicuous labor in the community garden. The former is a nebulous class, stripped of the antagonisms, struggle and conflict of the old industrial economy. Drucker and Florida’s workers are skilled, highly educated and freed from the bonds of physical work, steady long-term employment, and the drudgery of the old economic system. They are the rootless and “mobile” (Martin‐Brelot et al., 2010) denizens of the “gig economy” (Milkman and Ott, 2014) and no longer burdened by the industrial logic, time or routines of the old economy (Thompson, 1967), especially as they easily slip into the gap between exploited worker and exploiting Western consumer, as the bulk of manufacturing is shifted to the developing world.

The cognitariat combines “cognitive worker” and “proletariat,” reintroducing the idea of labor and value back into the discussions of the new economy. A third figure also lurks in the discussion of the city; the “artist”, who has long been marked as a purveyor of high cultural capital in the revalorization of urban space, as cultural mediator and cultural sommelier in the vast field of cultural production and consumption, selecting and signifying immanent gentrification (Ley, 2003). However, the rosy image of these liberated workers ignores the working poor, immigrant enclaves and, most recently, even the middle-class, who, in the revalorization of the city, find themselves priced out and pushed out.

I would like to add a fourth, and neglected, figure to the tale of revalorization, the community gardener, who is part of a larger urban class that, by definition, creates value in the city through work and, yet, who is frequently ignored. This class finds itself excluded in the new economy, and yet is part of the historic revalorization process of the city through their free and conspicuous labor. As a powerful and pervasive component of late capitalism, free labor has only been sketched by theorists studying the knowledge economy (Terranova, 2000).

Building upon the work of Mauricio Lazzarato, Terranova sees a broad shift in late capitalist societies that have transformed labor and its meaning from a Fordist material labor (labor recognized as work) to a post-Fordist immaterial labor (labor that appears as pleasurable and freely given and, therefore, not work) (Hardt and Virno, 1996). Her target is the information economy or “netslaves” that embody the generalized condition of a new type of worker, whose free “immaterial labor” in the “social factory” valorizes private corporate domains.

The garden in the city is also another site in which the free conspicuous labor of the proletarianized masses valorizes private domains (Debord, 1998). In this case, the abandoned urban spaces are rehabilitated, as are the proletariat, before being absorbed back into the formal economic system as valuable real estate (Voicu and Been, 2008). As will be shown later in this paper, subversive cultural strains are not only appropriated and commodified by the market (most clearly evident in fashion and music), but are already enmeshed with an earlier bourgeois logic that privileges the edenic over the urban and depends upon the willing, self-directed, self-managed work of an urban proletariat who reshape the industrial landscape into a welcoming suburban facsimile. In so doing, they do the work of power by regularizing and, therefore, regulating social and political relations while revalorizing space for capital.

The notion of work as a means of social and moral improvement is central to the management, discipline and regulation of the poor (Wacquant, 2009) and has a long history, beginning with the progressive era of the 18th century and, perhaps, harkening even further back to the Protestant Reformation (Abramovitz, 1996). The community garden serves as such a balm in the discourses of urban blight, social welfare and the constructions of poverty.

A recent study situates this discourse in the skid row of San Francisco. In her study of the unhouseds in San Francisco, Teresa Gowan identifies three dominant discourses about the underclass; sin-talk, sick-talk and system-talk. All three discourses frame poverty as a pathological state but ascribe different causes and cures. Sin-talk sees poverty as a moral failing,; sick-talk as the product of some kind of pathological physical state, such as drug addiction or mental illness; and system-talk situates poverty at a systemic level. Each construction, in turn, is parallel by a particular response from the individuated punitive call for the broad criminalization of poverty and mass incarceration of the poor to large- scale social engineering. Moral failings are met with “exclusion and punishment”, and rarely “redemption”,; pathologized conditions, such as addiction and mental illness, with “treatment”; and systematic ills, such as inequality, with “regulation” and “transformation” [all original italics] (Gowan, 2010).

Public policy has embraced these constructions of poverty and, when the community garden appears in these debates and discussions, it inevitably is framed as a panacea. Sin-talk and sick-talk both blame individuals for their status in society and condition their redemption on the conspicuous greening of the community and the productive labor of the individual. Structural issues are also remedied by the community garden, as everything from nutrition to underfunded schools, to broken homes and mass incarceration, can be solved with a garden.

Community gardens do have a transformative capacity, but not in a morally redemptive or therapeutic fashion (Gowan, 2010: 222). Instead, the transformation is of space (physical and social) from that which has low value to high value, poverty to wealth, underclass to upper class, productive labor to leisure, urban to suburban. In the same way that the “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentlemen of leisure” (Veblen, 2001: 36), the conspicuous labor of the garden is a means of reputability to the urban denizen. Yet, this process reifies the terrible price paid by the laboring gardeners, first in the gift of free, unremunerated labor, and, in the future, land value and rent increases to come; in short, in the alienation of their labor in the urban regime of capital accumulation.

Gardens are deceptively pretty: Edenism

It is, perhaps, this shift which indicates a transition in the role of the community garden from a putatively benign edenism, grounded by the figure of the bourgeois humanist and an idealization of nature (Marx, 2000), that can be transposed or superimposed onto the poor with the simple activity of gardening, to a contest between classes in the current neoliberal condition of increasingly concentrated wealth, power and property and the withering away of public space (Banerjee, 2001). The centrality of this contest to the increasing stratification and polarization of society is clearly demonstrated in the struggle over the use and possession of urban space, from the favelas of Brazil (Perlman, 1976) to the sidewalks of New York (Susser, 2012). The garden in the city, then is not neutral, or merely a nice way to spruce up a neighborhood, or uplift the underclass, it is a resource; one which began as a form of self-empowerment and resistance but, more often than not, ends up disempowering those that labor freely and conspicuously. The ways in which this occurs, of course, depend on locality, or as sociologists like to say, the context or milieu. Some gardens prevail, some disappear or are destroyed by development, but each shares a common element; the punctum (Fried, 2005) of ‘nature’ in the metropolis (greening) and the constitution of new subjectivities (gardener).

In a poor neighborhood, community gardens are a momentary boon or a herald of hope and resistance to the post-Fordist conditions of underemployment and gentrification. As we have seen repeatedly in recent decades, these poor neighborhoods don’t remain poor indefinitely, and the garden becomes part of a process of “revitalization” and “reinvestment”, predicated on the alienated, free, conspicuous labor of the gardener. Despite its altruistic character, the garden in the city is a site of labor, which appears at first as the classical notion of unalienated labor and a mode of resistance to the logic and forces of economic stratification and residential displacement and segregation, but through the commodification of culture becomes alienated; that is, exchangeable by increased land and rent values. The relationship of the urban poor to the garden is characterized by an uneven distribution of wealth that perpetuates poverty through a process of expropriation, softened, or reified, by the pseudo-entrepreneurial charity of the community garden.

Gardens that are legal, or allowed, present the image of a benign urban policy, a gift from the privileged and powerful. And, as Marcel Maus has shown, a gift is far from disinterested. Rather, it can be a form of domination and obligation (Godelier, 1999: 12). Giving can uplift but it can also subordinate. In the case of a scarce resource like land in a city, giving:

seems to establish a difference and an inequality of status between donor and recipient, which can, in certain instances become a hierarchy: if this hierarchy already exists, then the gift expresses and legitimizes it. Two opposite movements are thus contained in a single act. The gift decreases the distance between the protagonists because it is a form of sharing, and it increases the social distance between them because one is now indebted to the other …. It can be, simultaneously or successively, an act of generosity or of violence; in the latter case, however, the violence is disguised as a disinterested gesture, since it is committed by means of and in the form of sharing. (p.12)

The process of displacement has been well documented, with the continuing debate centering on the ‘how’, and not the ‘if’. The general question is whether this shift is a top-down phenomenon coming from power holders and brokers (Smith, 1979) or ‘natural’ demographic and economic transformation (Florida, 2004). What is left out in these debates are the people in these communities who, through the gift of their labor, transform these spaces. It is not the privileged, young, educated, creative class, or even the exploited cognitariat. Instead, it is the “rehabilitated” or “redeemed” urban working poor who create and inhabit the affective space of a bourgeois aesthetic in the green garden of the city. In so doing, they reinforce their own subordination to the existing relations of power and wealth by contributing to the revalorization of urban space by cleaning and greening it, making it familiar and palatable to the aesthetic and political sensibilities of wealthier groups.

The garden as estranged labor

The uses of space in the city have changed as the socio-economic relations of labor have changed. Just as pre-industrial era centered around vast swaths of land and unfree labor, the industrial era focused on the factory and wage labor, then the contemporary economic center is the urban core, where the leisure class (Veblen, 2001) and cognitariat have relocated as the knowledge, or information, economy (Powell and Snellman, 2004) has replaced the old manufacturing base. The shift from land in feudalism, to land as a space for machinery to concentrate productive labor under industrialization, to land as a space for consumption and information production and exchange - neatly ties up the trajectory of a developing economic and ideological tendency that moves from the objectivism, or concrete value of land and labor, to the constructivism of a consumer society, detached from the means and mode of production. In other words, land and labor are not just the concrete physical asset of productive capacity or ability, but become symbolic and cultural commodities as well. While the various theories of value and labor are far too complicated and contentious to cover in full in this article, it is sufficient to emphasize the symbolic role of labor.

Along with the death of the factory and its resurrection as the luxury loft comes the dismemberment and now expulsion of the stranded and impoverished descendants of the old working class who held on amidst disinvestment, abandonment and marginalization during the period of post-Fordist deindustrialization that ravaged the American city. Greening movements are more than simply civic activism or desire for Swiss chard. They symbolize and embody the momentous transformation and restructuring of economic production and class formation from peasant to worker, to the urban underclass. It is a shift from the objective value of labor in the factory, to the subjective value of consumption in a new market of culture (lifestyle), underpinned by rent-seeking speculators and investors in the “revitalized” urban core.

While land permanence and tenure have been salient concerns for community gardeners for some time, the renewed contest over space in the urban core is part of a larger concern over public space, affordability and accessibility (Nemore, 1998). The contest over the most basic and necessary of resources (land, and thereby shelter and food) have been elided under the rubrics and rhetoric of revitalization, renewal, renaissance, reinvestment, improvement, rejuvenation, reurbanization (Slater, 2009). Reinvestment in the urban core as a project of ‘improvement’ continues a process of shifting the rhetoric and debate away from the terrain of social equity and justice to neoliberal economic programs of privatization and wealth consolidation (Lees et al., 2010).

Considering the accelerated, global and historically unprecedented character of what amounts to the massive displacement of the most vulnerable classes of people and redistribution of land, and thereby wealth, upwards, the community garden regains its earlier importance as a site of resistance to neoliberalism in the metropole (Davis, 2006). The grassroots movements that have emerged in the post-war period and converted abandoned urban space into various social visions and utopias are not simply a small interest group attempting to pursue individual or small-scale entitlements against the needs of a growing metropolis. These movements are part of the larger-scale and ongoing resistance to the privatization of public assets and wealth and the continuing onslaught on the remains of the welfare state (Gilbert, 2002; Raco, 2012).

Community garden in the gentrification debate

Community gardens have been treated as overwhelmingly positive phenomena by urban theorists, who note self-reported measurable improvements in a community. They argue that gardens increase neighborhood pride, improve aesthetic maintenance of properties and shared spaces, reduce litter and increase opportunity for social networking and community cohesion and organizing (Armstrong, 2000; Twiss et al., 2003). In California, one study noted the increase in physical activity and health among gardeners in low-income communities (Twiss et al., 2003). Along with improvements in the quality of life, there is a significant increase in social capital, resulting in greater civic engagement, the expansion of social networks in the community and the reduction of poverty (Hanna and Oh, 2000). We can all agree that these measurable changes are beneficial to residents in the short-term, but I would like to question whether these shifts benefit poorer communities in the long term. Specifically, I would like to complicate the notion that urban/community gardens are strategies for the improvement of existing communities, rather than the initial stage in a process of gentrification and thus dislocation that is both socio-cultural and political-economic (Palen and London, 1984) in its origins. The community garden, or the urban edenist, becomes an unwilling participant in the very process of “revitalization” that inevitably leads to their own displacement, as in the case of Adam Purple. Therefore, we should view the greening of urban spaces as a twofold process. First, it is the surrender of unpaid labor to the built environment. Second, this unpaid labor is appropriated through property relations and by real estate, municipal and entrepreneurial agents.

The positive impact of community gardens on a neighborhood and community are undeniable in the short term. However, the long-term impact of the surrender of free labor towards the built environment which is not owned by the laborer reproduces the classic condition of alienation. Therefore, one must question the nature and impact of this transformation on the socio-economic and racial demographics of a neighborhood over time. In other words, community gardens do improve communities, but for whom, exactly how, in what way and for how long? Much work has already been done on the notion of gentrification, noting both its governmental as well as socio-cultural origins and its impacts upon the composition of residents (Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Ley, 2003; Rose, 1984). The role of community gardens in the process of gentrification has, however, been neglected. Not only has the garden not come under the critical lenses of analysis, but the most recent scholarship on gentrification has been oriented towards its denial, erasure and abandonment as a concept and clarion call for social justice (Slater, 2009).

‘Gentrification’ can become mired in debates about the definition of the word (Slater et al., 2004). For the purposes of this article I use, as have many before me, Ruth Glass’s classic and oft-quoted definition of the phenomenon:

One by one, many of the working-class neighborhoods of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences … Once this process of ‘gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly, until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed (Glass, 1964).

Even in the case of the “competing theoretical schools” of thought around gentrification, what Chris Hamnett has called “production side” and “consumption side models,” both agree that the fundamental character of the process is marked by displacement, social class and capital improvement (Hamnett, 1991). If we look more closely at the “competing theoretical schools”, what we find is that, while the visible effects of the process are identical to those described by Glass over half a century ago, the causes are contested. This long-lasting debate can be extended in the current discussion to the putative public space of the community garden. Community gardens form a distinct and valuable multiplier for social forces such as solidarity. Further, by focusing upon the role of community gardens in the process of gentrification, an important dissonance between two competing arguments over of the process of gentrification may be sutured.

If we are to take the dominant understanding of gentrification, which itself has increasingly come under scrutiny, wealthier groups supplant less privileged groups through leveraging resources such as economic and political capital in order to gain access, ownership and control over space in the city. Yet, the concept of gentrification, as defined by Glass, presumes the desirability of the urban space. This has not always been the case, particularly if we think of the post-war period in the United States. The suburbanization of post WWII America suggests the devaluation of the urban. Neil Smith has argued that this devaluation of the urban landscape produces the opportunity for profit and, thereby, a magnet for capital. It is thus part of a bust-and-boom cycle that depends on economic fluctuation and crisis (Smith, 1979; 2002). Cities are, therefore, zones of economic opportunity, not as in the industrialized society’s ability to concentrate labor and manufacturing, but as the post-industrial opportunity to extract value through rents and development.

The displacement of London’s working class, as noted by Glass, could be substituted in the American experience as the displacement of the working poor and minorities. In New York City, the process has been most acute in historically African-American and Latino neighborhoods - a fact that further complicates this notion by adding race, as well as class, to the formula. Since Glass’ first articulation, theorists have tried to account for the phenomenon by either a production-side or consumption-side explanation. The two theoretical positions converge around the community garden, or rather the garden as an ‘object’, a space in which the means and modes of production of the society are both preconceived and produced (p.85). On the one hand, we have Neil Smith’s production-side account of the process of gentrification, relying on the notion of the “rent gap” (Smith, 1979, 1987). Briefly, when a land parcel’s capitalized ground rent from its current use is sufficiently below its potential ground rent value if its uses were shifted (from low income homes to luxury rentals), then capital is drawn in as speculative investment. This encourages a general shift in the types of housing and results in displacement and rising rents.

If we were to consider the community garden momentarily in the rent-gap theory, then it initially serves as a form of resistance to speculative investment by ‘underutilizing’ space and preventing its circulation in the marketplace. Land removed from the market cannot generate direct profit for real estate speculators and, instead, generates a use value (food, outdoor space) for the user. However, while the garden cannot, in some instances, be inserted into the circulation of market forces if it resists appropriation (remains a community garden), it does function as a cultural producer (as abstract labor) creating a familiar symbolic system (suburbs, countryside) that valorizes surrounding space, indirectly functioning as a market stimulant. This, in turn, alludes to the consumption-side theory of gentrification.

David Ley notes that the embourgeoisement of inner cities relies upon shifting labor markets that bring in new populations with new socio-cultural and economic sensibilities. Using Bourdieu and his notion of the production of cultural fields, Ley furthers his cultural-level investigation of gentrification as a hermeneutical possibility for exploring the “restructuring of urban space in post-industrial cities, where the exaltation of representation over function is far from the ethos of the industrial city and its muscular modernism, glorified in the efficiency and utilitarianism of mass production”. As Ley extends Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, in which economic (entrepreneurs) and cultural capital (artists) dialectically reinforce each other’s activities in the process of gentrification, he ventures that “the origins of gentrification included the establishment of an urbane habitus that drew its identity from a perspective rich in cultural capital but (initially) weak in economic capital.” But these agents (artists) who are (initially) weak in economic capital are, indeed, members of the dominant class, embodying their dispositions, tastes, practices and frequently racial mark. For Ley, then, the artist functions as a colonizer, but one who is being perpetually colonized and exploited by more dominant members of the class whom they represent (as a cultural vanguard of the elite) or class which is prefigured. (Ley, 2003: 2529, 2538).

While there is clearly a symbiosis between culture and commodification in late capitalism, the focus upon the symbolic domain or representation over function, while an important and meaningful aperture into the role of capital, further reifies the underlying social and economic relationships. The artist, the gardener, or the immigrant-family-run restaurant are producing value and are all forgotten, if not deliberately erased, in the discussions of gentrification. By tracking the tension between cultural producers, such as artists, and their tension with the entrepreneur who commodifies and markets cultural production, we forget a question that has dogged labor and its dual nature as both abstract general labor (symbolic and social) and concrete use-value (material, specific and oriented toward the producer’s use), and its capture in the form of exchangeable commodities. While the gardener or the artist is a cultural representative of the elite, and therefore functions as a transitory stage in gentrification, they both are, at base, laborers constructing concrete objects that serve as symbolic signposts and real material objects for gentrification. The artist produces art, the gardener the garden. Both tasks are forms of physical, unpaid work (free labour) that are not remunerated in the usual sense of a wage labor system. Simply put, neither is paid for their work, but rather, both are expected to give their labor to a system that may or may not reward them.

This “expectation” to give freely of their labor, is a tendency we can see across society in various forms, such as the unpaid intern (Frenette, 2013; Perlin, 2012), journalism, blogging, writing, and in one of the most exploitative and overlooked systems of free labor, the University with its cadres of graduate students doing an increasingly larger share of the work of the University, as they teach and research, functions that the paid professoriate monopolized just a few decades ago (Bousquet, 2008). This dual existence as “culture” and “worker” reveal what Marx called the dual nature of labor, which is on one level abstract, on another level concrete.

Further, the dual nature of labor is treated by Ley and those theorists who see culture as convertible to capital as two separate domains, when they are just two sides of the same process; the creation of value, which is always “a purely social reality” (Marx and Fowkes, 1979). Whether it is a mural or a green space, the “establishment of an urban habitus” depends upon free conspicuous labor, which is valorized in the “social reality” that constitutes the habitus. The gardener creates and represents elements that allude to a habitus that is grounded in a historic bourgeoisie, whose privileging of nature, leisure and rejection of the “industrial city and its muscular modernism” (Ley, 2003: 2539) favors the edenism of the 19th century, serving both to alleviate the anxieties and fears associated with the industrial city, and to neutralize altogether the promiscuous heterogeneity of the deindustrialized city.

This appropriation would not be possible without the community garden as one among several important signifiers of this new class, but which also acts as a magnet for this class as it embodies, represents and calls to the bourgeois sensibility marked by the greening of urban space. Despite the exultation of “urban living,” decidedly suburban preferences and sensibilities (i.e., the garden) are sought as comforting. And in this deeply contradictory positioning, in which the urban is literally bulldozed away in the name of revitalization and replaced with a simulacrum of the city composed of endless consumer opportunities and a socio-economically homogenized population, the estranged labor of the community, in the form of the garden but also art, cuisine and even the very notion of community as a collectivity, is subsumed, absorbed and erased.

A recent incarnation of this process can be seen at “The Logan” a new apartment development By RAD Urban in Oakland. Rents can top $6,400, significantly above the median rent in the area. The building promises numerous amenities for residents, such as monthly curated events, a resident Ambassador, on-site coffee and tea service, housekeeping, on-demand dry cleaning, dog walking, a car wash and a 25,000-ft rooftop garden maintained by management. As a debate about gentrification grew to a fever pitch in the Bay Area, this six-story, 204-unit luxury rental building first introduced itself to the community by presenting the lot as a “demonstration farm” created and maintained by Top Leaf Farms, a California licensed contractor, hired by the developers RAD Urban. For one year, the massive lot at the busy intersection looked like a large community garden. While the garden’s flora may have been organic, its emergence was not. It’s rapid appearance and subsequent disappearance are a testament to the industrial efficiency of the developers’ overarching revenue model – to integrate and capitalize on the garden in the city (RADUrban, 2020).