Abstract
Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City is an engaging, clear-eyed look at the emergence and growth of the urban farming movement in the decade following Hurricane Katrina. Based largely on in-depth interviews with growers over the course of more than a decade, and including some limited ethnographic observation and historical research, Yuki Kato theorizes the New Orleans urban farm movement as “prefigurative urbanism,” which is “civic action that aims to bring about immediate, tangible changes through direct actions that deviate from social and legal norms” (p. 11). It is distinct from more recognized social movements in that it is based on “noncollective” action, through individualized, pragmatic, and prompt social change that is pursued to manifest an imagined alternative future. Related to Carl Boggs’s prefigurative politics, which he described as a social movement tactic, practitioners of prefigurative urbanism “do not frame their practice as explicitly political” (p. 14).
Chapter One looks at the history of urban cultivation in New Orleans. Subsistence farming and kitchen gardening was an established part of the city’s culture from the colonial period but became less prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century. The post-Katrina decade saw an increase in the visibility and prevalence of urban cultivation. The book divides this decade into three periods: recovery (2005 to 2008), transitional (2009 to 2011), and redevelopment (2012 to 2015), which describe both the dominant framing of priorities by city government and media as well as the economic and social conditions that affected urban cultivation. Urban cultivation projects spread after Katrina without much attention or support from the authorities. Many African Americans native to New Orleans started cultivation projects, but the majority of urban cultivators were young, white transplants. Much of the book’s analysis is concerned with thinking through the differences in motivations, opportunities, resources, and outcomes that arise from the social differences afforded these different groups of cultivators.
Chapter Two develops a typology of prefigurative aspirations, focusing on the differing personal and social motivations that moved growers to begin their cultivation projects. These aspirations are urban cultivation expansion, community rebuilding, alternative food systems, social entrepreneurialism, and alternative careers—and they are described as ideal-type categories that are not mutually exclusive, but that encompass distinct future visions and purposes for the spaces they create. Kato observes that noticing the array of distinct prefigurative aspirations helps to explain why urban cultivation in New Orleans never cohered as a united social movement. The way that different aspirations map onto distinct social positionalities also helps to explain the tensions that arose regarding the connection between urban cultivation and the gentrification of New Orleans. The “community rebuilding” motivation emerged among African American New Orleanians who started cultivating as an act of hope and resistance in the face of the racist abandonment that harmed their communities before, during, and after Katrina. In contrast, the YURPs (young urban rebuilding professionals) drawn to New Orleans as a site of experimentation with new social visions used “alternative food systems” to describe their motivations. Those differences became incorporated into the polarizing rhetoric of gentrification: the former group of cultivators were often overlooked or dismissed as part of “old” New Orleans, while the latter group were framed as bringing in “new” knowledge that would transform the city for the better.
Chapters Three, Four, and Five examine the challenges and opportunities that growers experienced and how growers enacted prefigurative urbanism in their practice. These chapters also track the factors influencing the survival or ending of the farming projects over the course of the decade. Using interviews over time, these chapters are an engaging account of how growers brought this (non-)movement into being, and how it evolved in relation to the city’s redevelopment agenda. The chief difficulty for cultivators was simply finding spaces that would allow safe cultivation over a longer term. Cultivators were treated by property owners and the city’s redevelopment apparatus as transitional placeholders whose projects could be used to maintain or improve abandoned lots until the spaces recovered their value enough to be redeveloped. These chapters also convey how these projects developed through a process of relationship-building with residents who were often traumatized and worried about the impact these projects could have on living conditions and future redevelopment in their neighborhood. Another theme, developed most strongly in Chapter Four, is the relationship between prefigurative urbanism and changes in market relations, discussing the ways that growers had to figure out how to make their projects financially sustainable and socially engaged. Kato argues that despite their short-term orientation, there are lasting prefigurative impacts in the communities where they were established: growers recovered underused and abandoned land and visibly changed local landscapes, they created new local food distribution networks, and they helped bring into being new kinds of market relations, for example by establishing cooperatives and linking with New Orleans restaurants.
Chapter Six and the Conclusion turn to a broader analysis of what this account of urban farming in New Orleans reveals about the “potential and limitations” of prefigurative urbanism and concludes with a post-pandemic update and prognosis for how this movement could persist and develop in the future. The strength of this section, as in the rest of the book, is how Kato develops a framework for looking at the character of current urban movements that takes them on their own terms, but with a clear-eyed analysis of what they do and don’t accomplish as agents of social change. This is a refreshing approach that avoids the analytical cul-de-sacs that can burden work on urban movements.
Manuel Castells, in his influential work The City and the Grassroots (1983), set out criteria for defining what could be called an urban social movement, including a strong collective identity united through space or other shared identities and an emphasis on transformative politics. For Castells, urban social movements have to accomplish transformations in relations of collective consumption, or challenges to dominant interests, rather than simple reforms. In a time when neoliberal urbanism is defined by its ability to throttle or co-opt the transformative potential of urban movements, Castells’s formulation still influences which movements are noticed and how their effects are judged in a way that can make it harder to envision the routes of challenge that urban actors take to resist injustice.
Kato pursues a more open-ended analysis, based on a willingness to appreciate the potentialities and achievements of prefigurative movements and to think clearly and honestly about their failings. Chapter Six develops a typology of forms of social action that crucially includes elements such as market approaches, non-action, and other prefigurative approaches, with a thoughtful account of what they may accomplish and their constraints as forms of action (see table on p. 205). The Conclusion deals squarely with the limitations of the prefigurative approach and questions how urban farming in New Orleans will persist, and who will benefit, in a city where rapid change has taken place through violently exclusionary, racialized gentrification.
The prevalence of interview-based data over visual or ethnographic material is a limitation that can make the book feel repetitive in places, but the longitudinal and very careful analysis of the interviews, with an extended appendix on methodology, make it a useful text for research methods. Overall, Gardens of Hope will generate a lively discussion in classes on planning, urban greening, gentrification, and social movements, especially as it avoids casting urban farming as a transformative, “good” social justice movement. It takes seriously forms of action that are often overlooked, and it facilitates a grounded, thoughtful discussion of the complexities of urban action in relation to gentrification.