Abstract
In recent decades, urban agriculture has drawn practitioners seeking ways to increase both environmental sustainability and social equity in their cities. The practice has also drawn criticism for the ways it reproduces inequalities based on differences of class and race. In this paper, I argue contestations around urban agriculture are part of ongoing yet shifting processes of class formation intersecting with racial differentiation, in particular the emergence of green middle-class identity. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a small city in Michigan, USA, I examine urban agriculture as a historic spatial and aesthetic practice, drawing on examples of chicken-kee**, permaculture-style gardening, and concerns with neatness and blight. By positioning urban agriculture within historical narratives of landscape aesthetics and land use policy, I demonstrate how this practice becomes bound up in the ongoing production of class distinctions and inequalities. Throughout, I draw attention to how processes of class formation unfold in ways that diverge from, or are in excess of, local gardeners’ and agriculturalists’ intentions. In conclusion, I gesture to the ways the instability and dynamism of class formation via urban agriculture presents opportunities for addressing the reproduction of race- and class-based inequalities and for nurturing more equitable and sustainable forms of urban agriculture practice.
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Notes
All names of places and persons have been changed to protect participants’ identities.
Also called passive solar greenhouses or high tunnels, full-size is 30′ × 96′ and was not clearly legal under the existing zoning code. There were only two in the City in 2013.
By urban agriculture I refer to a suite of activities, including vegetable gardening and raising livestock, undertaken as a primary or supplementary livelihood strategy and occurring within the sociospatial bounds of a city.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge funding for this research from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research). I would also like to thank the many people of “Elmwood” who shared their stories, hopes, and histories with me.
Funding
The funding was provided by National Science Foundation Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (Grant No. 1356904) and Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant No. 8883).
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Maurer, M. Chickens, weeds, and the production of green middle-class identity through urban agriculture in deindustrial Michigan, USA. Agric Hum Values 38, 467–479 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10174-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10174-x