Urban Agriculture Policy Making in New York’s “New Political Spaces”

Abstract

U.S. cities have implemented policies to support urban agriculture (UA), often developed in “new political spaces” formed when conventional policy mechanisms are unable to resolve municipal problems. This article examines these processes in New York City, particularly aspects of UA that existing policies, plans, and research strategies have not fully addressed. Interviews with UA stakeholders and an analysis of the city’s UA policy-making processes show that resource needs, along with race- and class-based disparities within the UA system remain. We recommend several policy and research strategies for creating a more participatory, representative, and multifunctional UA system.

Keywords

action research food policy new political spaces New York City policy making urban agriculture racial disparities

Introduction

According to much of the planning and policy literature, urban agriculture has either been inhibited by insufficient government support, as Smit, Ratta, and Nasr (1996) found in cities in the Global South; confined through restrictive zoning (Brown and Bailkey 2002; Brown and Carter 2003; Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; van Veenhuizen 2006); or treated with benign neglect by city planners who have had neither the technical training nor administrative incentives to focus on urban food systems (Pothukuchi 2009; Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999, 2000). These and other constraints still exist in many cities, but municipal food systems planning and policy making has evolved quite dramatically over the past decade (Cohen 2012).

This evolution followed groundbreaking articles by the late Jerry Kaufman and his colleague Kami Pothukuchi about the planning field’s neglect of food and the potential for planners to develop integrated community food systems that advanced social, environmental, and economic goals (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999, 2000). Urban agriculture—as a particular type of land use, community space, and site of food production and distribution—figured centrally in their vision of how urban food production could support the broader aims of planning. Kaufman’s cofounding of a food interest group within the American Planning Association led to the adoption of a policy guide on Community and Regional Food Planning that recommended specific ways in which the integration of urban agriculture into sustainable regional food systems and specific food-related spatial planning activities could support public health, economic development, ecological improvement, and other urban needs (American Planning Association 2007).

City officials have come to recognize the potential for food production to contribute to more livable and resilient communities, and in the past few years many cities in North America have adopted supportive policies and programs (Neuner, Kelly, and Raja 2012). Cities have written urban agriculture plans (e.g., Minneapolis), included food production in citywide sustainability strategies (e.g., Baltimore), legalized the keeping of bees and livestock (e.g., Seattle), facilitated the integration of agriculture in new buildings (e.g., Vancouver), and provided city property for new urban farms (e.g., Boston). Various cities have amended zoning ordinances and building codes to legalize and support urban agriculture (Hodgson, Campbell, and Bailkey 2011).

Although many city policies address issues within the municipal boundaries over which they have direct jurisdiction, planning agencies increasingly incorporate urban–rural linkages and regional food systems in their food planning. In the past, the focus has been on support for periurban farming through land conservation (Brinkley 2012); however, in recent years cities have begun to address food transportation, processing, and distribution issues by supporting urban infrastructure such as farmers markets to meet the food access needs of urban communities while simultaneously supporting regional farmers (Cohen 2011). Procurement of food produced sustainably within the region has been a priority of cities like Los Angeles and New York (both of which recently adopted local food purchasing policies), as well as school districts across the country that are engaged in procuring local ingredients for their school meals.

In some cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, metropolitan planning organizations have incorporated food systems thinking in their regional plans. For example, Chicago’s regional GO TO 2040 plan (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning 2010) discusses not only preserving agricultural land but also promoting urban agriculture, farmers markets, direct sales from community gardens, and other forms of shortened food supply chains. The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s comprehensive food system plan (2011) incorporates urban and rural policies to promote regional sustainability. In New York, regional food and farming issues have been addressed through the city’s Watershed Agriculture Council, which supports sustainable farming practices in the city’s largely rural watershed and other policies to facilitate direct marketing of regionally produced food and nonfood agricultural products.

New York City (NYC) has been on the leading edge of urban agriculture planning and policy making (Cohen 2011). Still, even in supportive cities like New York, the relationship between agriculture and the city, as well as the role of city government in supporting and regulating food production, remains contested. As the economic recession strains city budgets, questions of whether and to what extent urban agriculture deserves municipal resources, and precisely what benefits cities get in return from farms and gardens, have become particularly salient. Moreover, urban farmers and gardeners vary in the degree to which they believe that government should be involved in their activities, as well as the type and level of resources (i.e., policy, financial, material, technical, etc.) that they need, adding another layer of complexity to efforts to build support for urban agriculture into municipal government.

This article presents selected findings of a two-year study on the state of New York City’s urban agriculture system, which consists of both government-driven, formal policy-making processes led by city officials as well as stakeholder-led efforts to influence policy, carried out by networks of advocates, gardeners and farmers, philanthropists, technical assistance providers, community-based researchers, and city officials.¹ It finds that despite the multiplicity of processes and recent policy innovations that have defined New York City’s urban agriculture planning and policy making, there is much room for improvement. It also explains how policy decisions about urban agriculture have at times been ad hoc, in some cases creating roadblocks to augmenting urban food production in New York City, privileging the needs of certain practitioners over others, and excluding some groups of farmers and gardeners from participation in policy-making processes. The article argues that as food production becomes more integrated into New York City’s landscape and social fabric, policy making will need to strategically address urban agriculture’s diversity and its multifunctionality. It concludes with recommendations for increasing municipal support of a multifunctional and democratically driven system and suggests roles researchers might play to this end.

Methods

This article reports on research conducted as part of Five Borough Farm, a project of the New York City nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space. The goals of the project were to document the state of urban agriculture in the city’s five boroughs (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Queens); create metrics, tools, and evaluation guides to enable the city’s farmers and gardeners to track their activities and impacts; and identify policy measures to strengthen urban agriculture citywide (see Cohen, Reynolds, and Sanghvi 2012). The research team consisted of seven researchers and design professionals, and one urban farmer who worked collaboratively between 2010 and 2012 to conduct research, develop policy and evaluation strategies, and depict New York City’s urban agriculture system through text, photography, and information graphics.²

The project was initiated by a small group of stakeholders, and commenced with a larger stakeholder workshop held in 2010 that brought together seventy-five farmers and gardeners, staff members from nonprofit organizations, funders, and researchers to discuss their respective goals, priorities, needs, and challenges related to urban agriculture and potentially supportive policies, as well as current and desired methods for tracking the impacts of their work. Findings from this workshop were distributed to all participants in February 2011, and informed the subsequent research activities, which included

a review of literature evaluating the impacts of common urban agriculture activities;

a review of New York City policy documents addressing the city’s food system, relevant sections of the City Charter, Administrative Code, zoning text, and planning documents, and reports about food and urban agriculture prepared by local NGOs;

a review of websites, reports, and other relevant documents from NGOs supporting urban agriculture in New York City; and

structured one- to two-hour interviews of thirty-one key informants, including individuals with unique knowledge about aspects of urban agriculture in New York City, as described below.

A purposive sampling strategy was used to select key informants from four stakeholder groups in New York City: (1) urban gardening and farming practitioners with diverse operations throughout the city’s five boroughs (n = 16); (2) representatives of nongovernmental organizations that provide support or advocacy for urban agriculture (n = 5); (3) representatives of foundations that had recently funded urban agriculture programs (n = 4); and (4) municipal and statewide government officials directly involved with urban agriculture activities in New York City (n = 6). Criteria used to select informants were diversity of location/borough, leadership demographics, and type of operation, the latter of which was based on a typology developed by the project team, and is shown in Table 1. The research focused on food- producing urban agriculture activities in publically accessible spaces. Educational gardens and demonstration gardens/farms were excluded from the research, as were private backyards and nonfood horticultural gardens.

Table 1.

Types of Urban Agriculture in New York City.

Type	Description
Community gardens	Gardens with plots or larger production area tended by community members, with the primary focus of their agricultural efforts the benefit of individuals and/or household use
Community farms	Decentralized or contiguous production areas managed by community-based groups and/or nonprofit organizations, with products sold and/or distributed within the surrounding neighborhood
Commercial farms	Decentralized or contiguous production areas managed by business owners who grow and sell food/products for profit
Institutional farms	Production areas located on the grounds of or near institutions (e.g., schools, hospitals, museums), with products grown on the farm used or sold by that institution
Educational gardens	Gardens located on the grounds of educational institutions (e.g., schools) and/or off-site gardens managed by educational institutions and used primarily for curricular or after-school education (e.g., science or nutrition education)
Demonstration gardens/farms	Gardens used primarily to demonstrate agricultural methods, local plants/crop varieties, animal breeds, etc., mainly for public audiences

The interviews explored characteristics of urban agriculture in New York City, as well as policy and evaluation needs as observed from key informants’ respective positions (i.e., practitioner, funder, support organization, or government agency staff). Practitioners also completed an online questionnaire about their farming/gardening practices prior to the in-person interview. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed for consistent and divergent themes. Preliminary findings were shared formally with two working groups (one on policy, one on metrics) consisting of five to six practitioners, nonprofit organization representatives, and government agency staff that gave feedback on the policy and metrics recommendations, respectively. Design Trust staff also met informally with a number of city agency officials to obtain further input on the feasibility of the policy recommendations. This feedback was incorporated into the final report. The authors’ participation in New York City food policy making, advocacy, and planning processes also informed the research.³

The second phase of the project (in which we are not involved) also includes efforts by The Design Trust to develop an online tool that farmers and gardeners can use to gather data that demonstrate the impacts of their activities.

Urban Agriculture Policy Framework

Urban agriculture policy has been developed through a variety of government-driven approaches in what Hajer (2003) describes as classical modernist political institutions, with public agencies and legislative staffs taking the lead in making policy decisions. These decisions may take the form of regulations, agency programs, budgets, and local legislation, or nonbinding white papers, policy plans, and strategic planning documents that ultimately influence the development of laws, regulations, and programs. Municipal agencies may also engage nongovernmental stakeholders in more collaborative decision-making processes, which are typically consensus-oriented and deliberative (Healey 2003; Ansell and Gash 2007).

Policy networks also exist outside the government-initiated efforts that are typically part of classical modernist policy making. Hajer (2003) describes these as “new political spaces” that are formed when more conventional policy mechanisms are unable to resolve problems. These networks may involve government and nongovernmental stakeholders, including partnerships among agencies, the private sector, NGOs, and the community (Innes and Booher 2010; Agrawal and Lemos 2007). They may also include community-based entities involved in the co-management of public resources such as community gardens on public land (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balgh 2011), or oppositional activities aimed at shaping policy at various scales, including “everyday resistances” to existing policies (Wekerle 2004). Stakeholders also influence policy by generating knowledge, identifying problems, proposing solutions, and producing design prototypes that can guide the decision making of city officials (Binz-Scharf, Lazer, and Mergel 2011). These networks of practice can be entirely outside government or include municipal agencies and officials. They can produce and contribute formal data or informal insights to the decision-making process. In the domain of urban agriculture, these new political spaces can include the deliberations of food policy councils, projects organized by nonprofit organizations, networked guerilla gardeners, or citizen science projects.

There is significant overlap among the individuals involved in both government and stakeholder-led policy making, as well as frequent movement between conventional and new political spaces. As Wekerle’s (2004) study of food justice efforts in Toronto has illustrated, the activities and strategies of different individuals and organizations are often fluid, amorphous, and networked across different interest groups, sectors, and scales. Groups may join together to address particular issues, reconfigure as needed, or disband when problems are resolved. Formal policy processes can respond to informal networks, and networks of advocates can be oppositional while simultaneously participating in formal policy processes. As discussed below, similar patterns can be observed with respect to policy making for urban agriculture as well.

Urban Agriculture Landscape in New York City

New York City has had a long history of food production, as well as debate about both the place of agriculture in the city, and municipal regulation of various agricultural activities (Blecha 2007; Tremante 2000; Eizenberg 2008, pp. 42–51; see also Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004). As in many U.S. cities, urban gardens and livestock husbandry provided important sources of food for poor New York City residents during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and World War– and Depression-era gardens were used both to address urban hunger and to divert food from the conventional agricultural sector to U.S. and allied military efforts abroad (Hayden-Smith 2009; Hynes 1996; Lawson 2005).

Urban agriculture waned during the 1950s and 1960s throughout the United States, but it resurfaced in the early 1970s as a venue for community development as well as social and environmental organizing. During the economic crisis of the late 1960s and 1970s, in particular, many African-American and Latino gardeners in New York City organized the cleaning and planting of vacant lots in their neighborhoods, and organizations such as Green Guerillas, founded in 1973, also helped foster community revitalization and empowerment through gardening (Lawson 2005; “New York City Community Garden Coalition,” n.d.).

Following the lead of Green Guerillas and other community-based organizations, then–New York City Mayor Koch’s administration created “Operation Green Thumb” (now called GreenThumb, which is a part of the Department of Parks and Recreation) in 1978 to provide technical support to community gardeners and to assist in their management of city-owned garden sites. Additional governmental programs that have supported urban agriculture in New York include the Garden and Greening program of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and Cornell University’s Cooperative Extension program in New York City.

These programs notwithstanding, government agencies have not always been supportive of urban agriculture in New York City. In 1999, then-mayor Giuliani’s administration attempted to capture the increasing value of the real estate occupied by many gardens and use the city-owned properties to construct affordable housing by auctioning them off for development, setting off a fierce battle between gardeners and the Mayor.⁴ Though most of the gardens in question in the 1999 battle were purchased by two nonprofit organizations (The Trust for Public Land and New York Restoration Project) and thus preserved from development, community garden preservation and permanency remains a contentious issue between gardeners and municipal government.

Today, New York has one of the largest urban agriculture systems of any U.S. city. As of 2011, there were more than seven hundred farms and gardens citywide that grow food (Cohen, Reynolds, and Sanghvi 2012).⁵ This network reflects the diversity of the city’s form and demographic makeup. The gardens play a variety of social roles and also operate related programs including farmers markets, educational and training activities, public events, and food and agriculture advocacy efforts, operating in various physical spaces (Cohen, Reynolds, and Sanghvi 2012).

New York’s urban agriculture system also includes a network of technical assistance providers, advocacy organizations, philanthropies, and private businesses that provide financial, technical, and material support to gardeners and farmers, while also contributing to community and social development (Ackerman 2011; Cohen, Reynolds, and Sanghvi 2012). Programs at different levels of government assist urban agriculture practitioners by supplying land, soil, compost, water, site preparation and sanitation services, and technical assistance. In addition to service agencies, elected officials have been involved in proposing policies designed to strengthen urban agriculture, as described below.

Collaborative and action-oriented research activities focusing on urban agriculture, many of which are grassroots initiatives started by activists, have also emerged in New York City over the past few years. One project, Farming Concrete, has engaged community gardeners throughout the city in documenting the weight of their season’s produce to provide baseline data about the productive capacity of community gardens (West 2010; Gittleman, Jordan, and Brelsford 2012). A community-based organization, 596 Acres, has conducted collaborative mapping of vacant publicly owned land to help residents identify potential sites for gardening.⁶ Individuals have initiated small-scale research projects to collect data on the storm water management effects of a rooftop farm in Queens (e.g., Seeing Green), the nutrient density of vegetables grown on rooftops (e.g., FarmingUp), and low-cost hydroponic growing systems (e.g., Boswyck Farms).⁷ These relatively new efforts join longer-standing data collection and research activities, such as gardeners’ evaluation of production methods and seed varieties to improve their practices, program evaluations provided to funders, and community food assessments.

Urban Agriculture Policy Processes in New York City

Policy making and planning are interrelated. A plan can recommend changes to regulations, rules, local laws or other policies pertaining to future development of the city. Policies adopted through legislation can also address zoning, housing development, transportation, and other issues typically in the purview of city planners.

Policy Making by New York City Government

New York City is a mayor-council form of government with a fifty-one-member City Council led by a speaker who is chosen by the majority party of the Council.⁸ The mayoral administration is led by deputy mayors in charge of commissioners who manage city agencies. In addition, a Borough President governs each of the city’s five boroughs. The Borough Presidents have decision-making authority over land use, capital projects, and borough budgets.⁹

It is not uncommon for elected officials, particularly those seeking higher office, to use their positions to advance policy proposals that extend beyond their charter-mandated responsibilities and authority. Within the past several years, three New York City elected officials have issued nonbinding policy white papers and strategic documents (none adopted as a formal plan) that address urban agriculture:

The Manhattan Borough President’s FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System, issued in February 2010;

The New York City Council Speaker’s FoodWorks: A Vision to Improve NYC’s Food System, which was a more detailed food policy report, issued in November 2010 (After releasing FoodWorks, the City Council passed several local laws to implement a number of the urban agriculture-related policies described in the document.); and

The Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability’s April 2011 update to its four-year-old sustainability strategy, called PlaNYC 2030.

Stakeholder-Driven Policy Making

Numerous nongovernmental networks have also been deeply involved in urban agriculture policy making and planning in New York. For example:

The New York City Community Garden Coalition has taken the lead in advocating favorable terms for occupying city owned garden sites, testifying in favor of long-term or permanent tenure at public hearings, and networking with other urban agriculture organizations to promote stable tenure for gardens (Hernandez 2010).

The Food Systems Network NYC has educated its members about relevant city food policy so they can advocate for policy positions as individuals and through the organizations and businesses they represent.¹⁰

Black Urban Growers, a citywide network, has convened annual conferences to address issues of concern to Black urban- and rural farmers and gardeners.¹¹ Members also network with urban food practitioners and advocates in other cities, and remain connected through social media and by speaking at national conferences. These strategies provide a forum for local-, regional-, and national-level organizing and advocacy focused on food and agricultural policy related to racial equity.

Other organizations affect policy even though their missions are focused on improving farming practices, designing new educational programs, providing member services, and conducting research. These range from informal networks of chicken keepers to larger nongovernmental organizations that disseminate information about gardening and farming practices and own or manage agricultural sites. At times, these groups may also form strategic alliances to engage in policy advocacy, such as a 2010 partnership forged between the New York City Beekeepers Association and the nonprofit Just Food to urge the City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to legalize beekeeping in New York City (Brunstein 2009).

Findings

Policy needs for urban agriculture in New York City derive from the goals that urban farmers and gardeners have for their operations, the intersections between these objectives and those of government agencies, and challenges that present obstacles to urban agriculture overall. In this section, we highlight some of these goals and challenges as expressed through the Five Borough Farm interviews.

Goals of Urban Agriculture Stakeholders in New York City

As in many cities, New York’s urban agriculture system consists of diverse participants with multiple goals that extend beyond growing food. Urban agriculture practitioners in this study described food production as a means to achieve multidimensional outcomes, confirming goals and benefits that have been well documented (e.g., Kaufman and Bailkey 2000; Draper and Freedman 2010; Eizenberg 2012; Reynolds 2011). These include public health (improving food access and community food security, and increasing awareness about healthy eating); education (providing environmental education, teaching about social justice in the food system, increasing connections between food producers and consumers/eaters); youth, community, and economic development (improving job readiness of neighborhood youth, creating safe spaces, providing a model of profitable urban food production, creating jobs); and environmental improvements (reclaiming vacant lots, increasing community green spaces, cultivating environmental stewardship).

Practitioners in this study pointed out that achieving their goals and remaining true to their organizational values requires their programs and businesses to be financially viable, socially responsible, and to maintain ecological integrity. This in turn requires a dynamic set of abilities including developing sound business models, engaging in participatory decision making, taking steps to include a variety of stakeholders in the operations, and using sustainable gardening and farming practices.

Interviewees from supporting organizations, foundations, and government agencies, as well as individual practitioners, also outlined many ways in which urban agriculture activities are consistent with the goals and objectives of a number of municipal agencies, and how urban agriculture is both supported by, and helps achieve, government agency mandates. These include improving public health and access to healthy food, increasing the amount of fresh food in schools, enhancing public safety, creating jobs, and preserving open space. These points illustrate the interrelated goals of many of New York City’s urban agriculture stakeholders and underscore the fact that policy measures to support these activities affect not only practitioners and their direct beneficiaries (e.g., neighborhood residents, youth participants), but also organizations, and city agencies whose programs and/or municipal authorities include one or more aspects of urban food production—from oversight of city-owned land and waste management to employment, education, or public health.

Policy-Related Challenges Facing New York City’s Urban Agriculture Practitioners

Like urban farmers and gardeners in many cities, practitioners in New York City face a common set of resource constraints. According to interviewees in this study, these include

access to growing spaces and longer term tenure on city property;

sufficient financial and material resources (e.g., compost from city agencies, funds to compensate employees);

access to municipal programs (e.g., youth employment funds, transportation for seniors) that enable community members to participate in gardening programs; and

technical assistance and agency support with respect to farming and gardening practices; planning and project management; and basic business management skills such as accounting, tax planning, and data management.

In addition to these common challenges of farming or gardening in the city, practitioners in New York City face several overarching challenges that relate to community outreach and networking; disconnection from planning and policy making; and race- and class-based disparities, as described below.

Community outreach and need for networking opportunities

Although the urban agriculture system in New York City is a dynamic network of individuals and groups, many practitioners aspire to be even more connected with their communities and with other practitioners, and desire opportunities to involve more surrounding neighborhood residents in their farms and garden activities. One community farmer explained,

[A] big challenge is just getting . . . consistent community member participation, especially since we’re not in a residential neighborhood. That’s a big goal of ours . . . ultimately we’d like this to be something that is run by the community, but it’s pretty challenging. Given our [location], but also just [because] it’s hard to get people engaged.

A number of practitioners also want to be more closely connected to other farmers and gardeners in the city, with some expressing an interest in exchanging with rural farmers who could share information about commercial production. For instance, a commercial urban farmer commented,

To me, communication is huge; it’s just invaluable for me to go and sit down with a farmer . . . that’s been doing it for thirty years— I don’t really have that in the city. People don’t really come from the same commercial concept. . . . I have to go to Long Island or upstate to find that.

To address the need for financial or material resources, farmers and gardeners also want to be better networked with philanthropic funding sources and city agencies that could provide such support.

Disconnection from planning and policy making

Some practitioners, as well as supporting organization representatives, felt that farmers and gardeners needed better opportunities for involvement in the policy-making process, claiming that community members are often excluded from the process or included only nominally in policy decisions affecting their neighborhoods. One gardener explained,

For two years I served on [a] Food and Fitness task force and [through that process most funding was] going to prevention. [But some should] to go to gardens that are doing health work—because this is health work. . . . [Then], I came to a gardening meeting . . . and there was a brochure about healthy eating in [our neighborhood]. . . . [The task force leaders] had done this whole [report but] they hadn’t factored in any gardens in the food conversation. The conversation was about stores, supermarkets and bodegas. So when I read it, I said, “Wait a minute, isn’t there another part of this?”

Some practitioners also voiced the opinion that city agencies do not sufficiently appreciate the benefits of the grassroots community organizing related to food, agriculture, community safety, or environmental remediation in which their gardens and farms are involved, and as a result fail to take advantage of their expertise and networks in the delivery of agency services.

Race- and class-based disparities

According to several stakeholders, there are significant race- and class-based disparities in New York City’s urban agriculture system. One interviewee in this study characterized the system as “two distinct communities.” On one hand, according to this interviewee, are groups with significantly more financial resources, stronger relationships with influential groups, and/or a white leadership, which have created, or have been able to take advantage of, funding opportunities or policy support to expand their operations. On the other hand are less connected groups, many of them led by people of color, which often struggle to raise funds to cover their basic operating costs and thus experience more difficulties in expanding and leveraging political support for their urban agriculture operations.

As one institutional farmer stated,

There’s two very, very unique and distinct aspects of this urban farm movement that’s going on. . . . One is very middle class and white, and one is not. One is of color and very low income. And they are . . . very separate. Unless they are brought together, I don’t know that the success of either is going to continue.

In a city with a complex history of racial segregation, race- and class-based inequities, these observations are perhaps unsurprising. Indeed, numerous recent studies have documented disparities in food access (Kwate et al. 2009; Morland and Filomena 2007), public health (Karpati et al. 2004), and exposure to toxins, air pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation (Sze 2007) in New York City.¹² Still, the recognition of disparities within New York’s urban agriculture system itself gives pause to the idea that urban agriculture necessarily leads to positive outcomes for all involved. Several interviewees were hopeful that urban agriculture could be a mechanism for political and social change to reduce such disparities, though they also pointed out that these could become more acute unless steps are taken to overcome systemic inequities.

Analysis and Discussion

Given the goals and needs of New York City’s urban agriculture system detailed above, how can municipal institutions respond most effectively, and how can new political spaces figure into addressing these issues? How might such configurations address some of the disparities in New York City’s urban agriculture system, such as those based on race and class, which need to be addressed at individual, institutional, and systemic levels? In this section, we suggest several possible strategies for city officials, nongovernmental stakeholders, and the research community, broadly defined, to address these issues, with the understanding that specific measures to strengthen the sustainability of urban agriculture must be complemented by overarching planning and policy-making processes that ensure equal participation and influence of historically underrepresented groups.

Planning and Policy Processes to Strengthen Urban Agriculture in New York City

Individuals within New York City urban agriculture organizations have relationships with policy makers that enable them to have a voice in policy decisions, and groups have been involved in policy development as advisors or advocates. However, there has been no process or institutional structure for groups to convene about plans or policies, or to recommend policy development on an ongoing basis. One theme running through the interview responses was the need for greater recognition of the value of urban agriculture on the part of New York’s municipal government, and a long-term commitment by the city to support urban agriculture.

City agencies are periodically able to build support for new responsibilities, like urban agriculture, that traditionally have not been within the purview of city government. Within the past decade, a number of new social and environmental issues, from climate change to food access, have been placed on city policy agendas, with accompanying agency programs and policies, even though they often are cross-sectoral, lack clear homes within city government, and have few policies or regulatory tools, and traditionally have not been understood as municipal concerns (Mansfield and Mendes 2012). A key question is how these policies and programs get supported by municipal agencies operating within bureaucratic structures that include narrow mandates, rules and conventions, and limited budgets that constrain such initiatives.

Often, agencies adopt new programs and policies as a result of new federal and state mandates or an external shock like a natural disaster that triggers a government response. For example, New York City used federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to create the aforementioned GreenThumb program in 1978 to provide technical support to gardeners and to assist in their management of city-owned garden sites in specific low-income neighborhoods in the wake of urban fiscal crises of that era. This program remains as one of the main entities coordinating and providing technical assistance for urban agriculture in New York City today.

Urban competitiveness is another reason cities choose to broaden their agendas (Beal 2011), particularly if new state or federal dollars or philanthropic funds are available to launch or expand popular programs. Competition to be viewed as leaders in issue areas like food often causes cities to copy programs and policies from other municipalities considered economically successful (McCann and Ward 2012; Allen and Cochrane 2007).

Building the political support to demonstrate the value of a new program, and its links to existing agency missions, involves the work of policy entrepreneurs, the actors within and outside government who help to define problems, mobilize public opinion, and formulate and promote policy solutions. Often policy entrepreneurs are part of governance networks composed of a wide array of stakeholders, including agency staff, activists, business leaders, nonprofit organizations and ordinary individuals, who work together to shape policies and programs (Bulkeley 2005; Rhodes 2007). These networks can step in with new and adapted practices and organizational forms that provide governance in complex policy areas like urban food that are “institutional voids,” with no existing rules, norms, procedures, or objectives to guide policy development (Hajer 2003). As a strategy for coalescing support behind particular policies, governance networks will sometimes draw connections between and “join up” niche policy issues that have fewer and weaker constituents with a policy field like economic development and job creation that has wider and more influential political support. To the extent that the urban agriculture system in New York City is composed of multiple stakeholders, not just farmers and gardeners, this form of policy making is already taking place in the city (as noted above) and could be scaled up to address additional policy needs.

Create an urban agriculture plan

Indeed, many of the challenges identified in this study relate to topics that are conventionally the domain of city planning and the legislative process, including the allocation of space for new urban farms and gardens; a long-range funding plan for the agencies that support urban agriculture practitioners; municipal programs to support youth development, food production, and nutrition education services provided (often through volunteer labor) by urban gardens and farms; and strategies to integrate urban agriculture with other complementary city programs, such as those to control storm water discharges,¹³ improve transportation,¹⁴ and manage waste.¹⁵ The development of a city urban agriculture plan could be a vehicle for stakeholder involvement, and formally adopting such a plan—as well as the land use changes needed to provide space for food production—would better enable stakeholders to hold the city accountable to the commitments in such a plan.

Create an urban agriculture advisory board

To advance planning, we recommend the creation of a new venue for deliberation about urban agriculture policies in the form of an agricultural advisory board external to city government and composed of farmers and gardeners, organizational representatives, and city officials to help review the programs, policies, and budgets that affect urban agriculture. Such a space might also advise policy makers, practitioners, funders and other stakeholders on strategies to strengthen and expand urban agriculture. There is ample precedent in New York City government for such advisory bodies, which have addressed issues ranging from waterfront planning (New York City Charter, Chapter 56, § 1303 Waterfront Management Advisory Board) to solid waste disposal and recycling (NYC Administrative Code Subchapter 4 Section 16-317).

To ensure fair representation of all urban agriculture practitioners on such a board, and thereby address one aspect of race- and class-based disparities in the urban agriculture system, the process for selecting advisory board members should itself be developed in consultation with diverse practitioners and stakeholders. Such a process might follow those used by some community-based planning and food policy councils that have resulted from collaboration between city agencies, nonprofit organizations, grassroots community groups, and individuals representing underserved communities. For instance, the HOPE Collaborative, an organization in Oakland, California, focused on improving public health and reducing health disparities through “community driven and sustainable environmental change” actively recruited more than four hundred residents in the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods in its planning process. This resulted in community members taking an ongoing and active role in the organization’s work (Herrera, Khanna, and Davis 2009; HOPE Collaborative 2011). The Oakland Food Policy Council (OFPC) developed alongside the HOPE Collaborative, and HOPE members have been involved in the OFPC’s ongoing work to translate community priorities into policy recommendations (McClintock, Wooten, and Harper Brown 2012). Though Oakland (with just under four hundred thousand residents) is a much smaller city than New York, the processes used by these two organizations to engage typically underrepresented groups might be adapted to larger cities in forming an urban agriculture advisory body intended to benefit all city residents.

Other strategies to ensure fair representation might include attention to the demographic composition of the advisory board and whether this accurately represents the demographics of the urban agriculture system (as well as the city overall); sensitivity to structural obstacles to participation (e.g., time of meetings, literacy requirements, familiarity with the policy-making processes) and steps to address these in the board planning process; and monetary compensation for participation for low-income residents. Finally, the agencies to which the urban agriculture advisory board would eventually report should be open and committed to changing policy-making practices recommended by the board, thus avoiding practitioners’ observations reported in this paper that government agencies sought community input in early stages of policy formulation but disregarded it when it came to finalizing policies.

Guidelines for enlisting participation in urban agriculture policy making

Since working relationships are often forged through social networks or unplanned encounters, and through the new political spaces in which contemporary policies are often developed, it is inevitable that agency staff get to know certain practitioners better than others. The relationships formed between practitioners and agency staff are valuable to both sets of stakeholders because they foster collaboration and cooperation, but they also disadvantage practitioners without the time, social, educational, and/or financial resources to establish these types of relationships. Guidelines for enlisting public participation in policy making about urban agriculture beyond the requirements of open meetings and public comments, particularly systems for ensuring representation of New York City’s diverse communities and neighborhoods in these processes, would go a long way toward eliminating the disadvantages experienced by less connected organizations. These might include

agencies/agency staff reaching beyond the networks with which they are familiar to identify and include leaders in underserved communities when formulating new policies related to urban agriculture;

development of a clear and transparent operational policy on the degree to which participants can make decisions about urban agriculture policies and processes;

city-sponsored information sessions about how policy making occurs, including which agencies and individuals oversee specific aspects of urban agriculture (e.g., garden tenure and infrastructure, community safety) that may be of concern to city residents.

Facilitate networking for urban agriculture practitioners

Another theme in the interviews was that urban agriculture practitioners desired enhanced opportunities to network with each other and with regional farmers. City agencies could help with this in a number of ways, including providing or supporting community organizing and outreach trainings and offering advice on developing educational programming. This support would enable gardens and farms to bolster their active memberships, building a cadre of individuals to care for and manage these spaces, increasing the number of community residents involved in growing food, and contributing to the social, educational, and health benefits that urban agriculture provides.

Further, a number of agencies, in partnership with appropriate organizations, could also help farmers and gardeners connect and exchange information through urban–rural growers meetings or other networking strategies. These groups include extension services, the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, farmland preservation and farmers market organizations, and agricultural education and training programs. Processes would also need to be put in place to ensure the awareness of such events among all urban agriculture practitioner groups, and to encourage participation by practitioners who often have less access to events due to time and financial constraints. To this end, agencies could gain insights about how to reach the full diversity of New York City urban agriculture practitioners through consultations and trainings provided by groups focused on dismantling racism and classism, as noted above.

Address institutionalized inequities

Numerous community-based and larger organizations in New York City have track records of addressing race- and class-based inequities. The city could enlist the assistance of these groups to provide advice about how its agencies can minimize disparities in New York City’s urban agriculture system in both the short and long term. Specifically, city agency processes could be informed by consultation with national or citywide antioppression training organizations, as well as grassroots community groups whose urban agriculture activities center on food justice, community empowerment, and antiracism. Ensuring that all farmers and gardeners have full access to information about funding opportunities and agency programs would help support their missions.

Addressing concerns about funding disparities would also require seeking out and assisting groups historically unsuccessful at winning grants and contracts, and supporting capacity building in these organizations so that they are better able to compete for funding opportunities. Allocating funds within city grants to cover the costs of grant management is one form of such assistance. City agencies could also work with funders to provide support for board development and other forms of institutional development among urban agriculture organizations that have been historically underfunded, particularly those organizations led by people of color.

To enable urban agriculture to advance social justice, city agencies and philanthropic organizations would need to provide greater support for and recognition of minority-led urban farms and gardens and urban agriculture organizations. This requires agencies and funders to review the processes they use to identify, select, and provide funds to organizations, as these processes may inadvertently make it difficult for smaller, minority-led groups with less extensive organizational infrastructure to compete for grants, land, city supplies, and other resources. In particular, funds should be provided to enable urban agriculture groups to gain access to growing space, a key resource for farms and gardens. At present, gardens and farms must go through an often-complex process to secure control of city properties. Simplifying and facilitating community control of land for urban food production would make it possible for more community organizations to maintain existing gardens and farms and to expand urban agriculture.

Research in the “New Political Spaces”

Finally, as government agencies in New York City work to balance the needs of urban agriculture with other agency priorities and stakeholder concerns, researchers from several sectors can also play important roles in policy making by engaging in processes that yield key information while increasing collective research capacities and enabling practitioners to better participate in policy and planning processes. In the urban agriculture system, researchers include a wide range of individuals. In addition to those housed in academic and government agency settings, they include those who work with nongovernmental organizations, farmers and gardeners who track information about their practices and programs for their own uses and to fulfill funder requirements, and researchers who may be part of a partnership or diffuse network of individuals engaged in collecting data on a specific aspect of urban agriculture.

Researchers in various sectors have specific skill sets, working relationships, access to community member participation, and other resources (e.g., research equipment/software, dedicated research time, data storage systems, access to information). These are often complementary. Akin to the ways that various groups may form strategic collaborations to advocate for policies related to food justice, as described by Wekerle (2004), or to support urban agriculture, as observed in New York City, individuals or groups of researchers along with government agencies may also join together to address specific urban agriculture research needs. Planning and policy researchers can play a particularly valuable role by drawing on the field’s tradition of collaborative planning to develop and facilitate collaborative approaches to urban agriculture and food systems planning (Innes and Booher 2010; Booher and Innes 2002).

Here we suggest three collaborative approaches that could enhance researchers’ contributions to urban agriculture planning and policy making. The three approaches are similar but emphasize different aspects of collaboration and use different methods to achieve collaboration.

1. Researchers could solicit the involvement of stakeholders to develop the most salient research questions for both government-driven and stakeholder-led planning and policy-making processes. Some questions may be about agricultural production or marketing, such as estimating the potential commercial value of urban food production under different scenarios. Others may be more germane to research on the planning process itself, such as whether and to what extent planning for urban agriculture differs from other municipal planning and policy processes, and what roles various stakeholders can or should play in such processes. Although soliciting stakeholder input on the development of research questions (or policy making) is a common practice, stakeholders should also be engaged at strategic points throughout a study (e.g., during preliminary analysis, development of study recommendations) to ensure the democratic validity of the research.¹⁶ Involving stakeholders in the research process may also legitimate and facilitate implementation of the findings.

2. Collaborations between government, academic, and nongovernmental researchers could include innovation and refinement of new research processes to collect data on urban agriculture that pertain to city agency mandates, missions, or authorities. Combining agency authorities and resources with nongovernmental researcher capacities (e.g., reach within the community, explicit focus on urban agriculture research) might facilitate timely collection and analysis of high-quality data, including those collected using processes developed by nonacademic researchers. Aggregation and analysis of these data at citywide and/or regional scales could inform policy making and provide practitioners with research-based information about the contribution of their food production activities to some of their broader goals (such as increasing food access or improving public health in specific, measurable ways). While this approach may at first appear to replicate established planning and policy-making research through which agency or academic researchers collect neighborhood-level data and aggregate the findings, the emphasis on collaboration between different types of researchers, as well as the roles of nonacademic researchers in innovating research processes, offers possibilities for public participation in yet another aspect of planning and policy making related to urban agriculture.

One example of how this could be implemented in New York City is in assessing the suitability of public vacant land for food production. Two studies mentioned in this paper have identified land that is potentially available for the development of new urban farms and gardens, and the city has made its database of vacant land publicly accessible. To make this database useful, it must include an assessment of soil quality, shading, or other elements critical to determining whether parcels are in fact suitable for urban agriculture. Researchers in other cities (e.g., Oakland, CA, Portland, OR) have completed such studies, and these could be replicated in New York City through collaboration between government agencies and nongovernmental researchers who possess specific skill sets and access to necessary resources and professional networks.

Another example of research that could be conducted collaboratively by governmental and nongovernmental researchers is assessment of the extent to which urban agriculture sites, compared to other urban green spaces, are able to stem the flow of stormwater to the city’s sewer system. New York and other cities are investing billions of dollars for so-called green infrastructure (green spaces, other permeable surfaces) to reduce stormwater flows, but there is a dearth of information on whether urban farms and gardens are suitable for this purpose.

3. Action-oriented or participatory action research pertaining to urban agriculture could involve researchers from various sectors. Participatory action research is a specific set of epistemological approaches and frameworks that typically involve the participation of community or organization members; are oriented toward a specific action that these stakeholders wish to take to address a particular problem or situation; and seek to educate and empower all research participants (Herr and Anderson 2005, p. 3; Reason and Bradbury 2008, pp. 1–6). Engaging a broader spectrum of researchers through action-oriented or participatory action research would yield a more complex set of findings and impacts, and potentially more effectively inform policy making than what might be uncovered by a single group of researchers.

One example of this is research conducted in Oakland, CA, which engaged community residents and academic, organizational, and agency researchers in a multimethod study of food systems and the built environment. Each group of researchers brought specific skills, social locations, and working relationships to the research process. The findings continue to inform stakeholder-driven efforts to develop local policy initiatives to support urban agriculture, including a framework for a public health element in the city’s General Plan, and work with the city and county government to institutionalize resident-centered neighborhood planning processes (HOPE Collaborative 2011). Participatory action research may be an effective framework to collect data on many aspects of urban agriculture, while other research needs may be more appropriately addressed using more conventional approaches, even if the intent of the research is to inform policy or other decision-making processes. As an example, the authors of this paper have undertaken further research to document race, class, and gender disparities within New York’s urban agriculture system and the urban agriculture movement more broadly, a project that also involves documenting the work of women and people of color to advance social justice through urban agriculture, and further explores the roles that researchers may play to these ends (Reynolds and Cohen, forthcoming).

Conclusion

Our research has documented a diverse and robust urban agriculture system in New York City, with a wide range of practitioners interested in attaining multidimensional goals that extend beyond food production. The farmers and gardeners in New York face basic challenges of insufficient financial and material resources, but study participants also expressed the need for increased opportunities to network with other practitioners and participate more fully in policy making, and for policies to reduce race- and class-based disparities within the urban agriculture system.

Urban agriculture planning and policy making in New York is as diverse as the city’s farms and gardens. Various government entities have put forth conventional policy plans, some of which have been enacted into law or put into effect by city agencies. But planning and policy making is also occurring in nontraditional spaces of interaction among practitioners, advocates, technical assistance providers, researchers, government officials, funders, and other individuals and organizations with a stake in the future of urban agriculture. These cross-sectoral networks and collaborative problem-solving processes come together at strategic moments, whether around a proposed local law, or an effort to collectively measure the productivity of gardens, and then may be reconfigured or disbanded.

We have argued that collaborations are essential for effective and legitimate problem solving and that they open up possibilities for participation in the planning process by a much broader range of participants. These include urban agriculture practitioners who influence policy through their farming and gardening interventions, even if they are not formally part of the policy-making process. They also include researchers of all types, from university professors to weekend gardeners, who are involved in documenting, mapping, analyzing, designing, and innovating the urban agriculture system with goals ranging from strengthening practices to influencing public policy.

Recognizing that urban agriculture planning and policy making occurs through informal connections, in addition to classical modernist processes, does not, however, do away with questions about how research will actually continue to inform these processes. Which stakeholders are called upon to inform policy formulation and planning, in what form, and when, remain important questions. And balancing tensions between the time needed to conduct quality research and analysis, on one hand, and the frequent need to produce information expediently to respond to community and agency priorities, on the other, are also critical in terms of bringing theory to practice.

In cities with large and diverse populations, such as New York, new political spaces must be designed to be innovative and inclusive, not exclusive and thereby disempowering. A challenge, then, is to strengthen ongoing communication and collaborations between diverse urban agriculture stakeholders so that planning and policy making optimizes interpersonal connections and multiple forms of knowledge with a goal of strengthening the economic, environmental, and social integrity of the system overall.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our research assistants, Spencer Cox, Zoe Hamstead, and Katherine Nehring, for reviewing and commenting on versions of this paper. The analysis and conclusions are solely those of the authors.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this project was funded in part by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and supported by the Design Trust for Public Space.

Notes

Author Biographies

Nevin Cohen is an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at The New School. His research focuses on the development of urban food policy, the use of urban space for food production, and planning for ecologically sound urban food systems.

Kristin Reynolds is an independent researcher and a faculty member in Environmental Studies and Food Studies at The New School. Her work focuses on action research, critical pedagogy, and community-based and scholar activism as strategies to advance social justice in food and environmental systems.

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