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Abstract

In this article, I draw upon more than three years of research with black urban gardeners and farmers in Cleveland, Ohio to explore the contours of a specifically black agrarianism in the city, or what I am calling a black agrarian imaginary. I argue that this imaginary, enacted through an ongoing production of space that stakes a claim on the right to difference, emerges from and draws upon a diasporic and ancestral agrarianism (most proximally from the American South) to build a more self-determined urban food system while also contesting prevailing notions of what does and does not belong in the city and who gets to make those decisions. Black growers in Cleveland assert the right to difference—to produce the city as oeuvre—as a way to build and establish a more self-determined, just food system.

Keywords

Black agrarianism Cleveland urban political ecology spatial justice land use

…blackness is integral to the production of space. (Katherine McKittrick 2006: xiv)

Introduction

There is a small neighborhood tucked in between a metro line and a commercial corridor on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, often referred to as the Forgotten Triangle. In 1976, several dozen homes burned down in a fire of unknown origin in what had until then been a densely populated neighborhood with ties to industrial labor. Historical redlining practices precluded residents in this majority-black neighborhood from homeowner's insurance. As a result of both the fire and ongoing processes of deindustrialization, the spatial reorganization of people and labor, and deepening racial projects across the city, this neighborhood was transformed, with increasing numbers of abandoned, demolished, and burned down homes (see Kerr, 2012). It became a dumping ground for hazardous and household waste while grass, bushes, and trees grew untamed, producing a wilder aesthetic than is usually found in urban space.

In 2007, the Ward 5 Forgotten Triangle Master Plan (FTMP) suggested that the abundant vacant land in that neighborhood would be ideal for growing “street trees,” with the idea that a tree nursery would contribute environmental remediation as well as “create an attractive setting for existing housing and future development” (UDCNEO, 2007). In an area with sparse housing and abundant vacant land, the FTMP reasoned that the “area has become remarkably green and wooded, seeming almost rural in places…providing residents with a feeling of being out in the country, while in the middle of the city” (UDCNEO, 2007: 12).

A tree nursery represents the production of logical and functional urban natures. As per the FTMP, “a tree nursery is an orderly, well-cared for landscape, one that looks intentional, rather than haphazard. This appearance of order…would help to discourage dumping and other illegal activities, while establishing an attractive residential setting” (UDCNEO, 2007). Additionally, nursery employees could monitor the surrounding, presumably disorderly, spaces, while the newly produced orderly landscape would establish a precedent for appropriate activities and an accepted environmental aesthetic. The racial undertones in the language of “well-cared for” versus “haphazard” and “order” versus “illegal(ity)” call not only for urban natures that are tame, legible, and economically productive (see Scott, 1998), but that might transform the neighborhood in such a way to meet the FTMP's goal of “neighborhood regeneration” and “housing development” (UDCNEO, 2007: 1).

The proposed nursery was never implemented. Instead, three childhood friends from the Kinsman neighborhood (which includes the Forgotten Triangle) with backgrounds in farming and business founded the Rid-All Green Partnership Farm with a vision for a different kind of urban space: one that would in fact be coproduced by both human and nonhuman nature. The former toxic dumping ground is now a seven-acre urban farm that also hosts youth education programming and summer internships, community gatherings, the city's largest composting facility, and a forested wood lot. Rid-All was founded on the idea that what you do with (or grow in) a space can produce both healthy people and healthy communities. These farmers believe that the health of their community is mirrored in the health of the soil and that through Rid-All, they can build something positive in an under-resourced community:
It's about giving back to life and…creating a fertile area for people to be in, for plants to live in, because we live in an ecosystem. We’re all a part of it. We share the same air every day, we share the same sunlight, and the conversation has to be more about how do we become more connected than we do divided.

This site of transformation—including the literal transformation of food waste into compost—embodies what Alex Loftus describes as “reworking the socio-natural relations through which everyday environments are produced and experienced” (2009: 326). This work simultaneously pushes back against state-led urban reconfiguration in favor of allowing black residents to “shape place in their pursuit of food” (Reese, 2019: 8). The production of marketable healthy soil through the breaking down of surplus foodstuffs and other organic material exemplifies how metabolisms within the natural environment are implicated in human social interactions and structures. It also demonstrates a reworking of capitalist relations through urban agrarian interactions, enabling urban farmers to engage in and negotiate market relations—at least partially—on their own terms. While the tree nursery might have appealed to discursive boundaries that delineate a particular aesthetic, the production of a specifically black agrarian space continuously complicates and challenges prevailing conceptions of what belongs in a city, including the associated processes of the production of space.

This article focuses on two components of a counter-hegemonic praxis embraced by black urban growers in Cleveland, Ohio. The first is the revival and production of marginal and neglected urban spaces by black farmers and gardeners. My analysis builds upon an urban foodscapes framework (Miewald and McCann, 2014; Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015; Morgan, 2015) to consider how race and geography articulate together with the production of space and nature (Brahinsky et al., 2014; McKittrick 2006; White, 2018). Urban food production with a focus on producing black space is thus seen as part of the process not only of “acquir(ing) food but also (of) experienc(ing) one's community in the process” (Reese, 2019: 8), or, in Lefebvrian terms, “chang[ing] life” and “chang[ing] society” (2009: 186). I focus on the persistent drive for self-provisioning in food (and, ultimately, a more self-determined food system) by black urban growers despite socio-spatial and economic barriers. This focus provides a lens on how black geographies intersect with a dominant capitalist logic, which continues to drive land-use decisions and perpetuate a development paradigm privileging exchange value. The production of black spaces in the city (Hawthorne, 2019; McKittrick, 2011) represents a counter-hegemony to the “historically unprecedented processes of concentration and centralisation of capital on a world-scale” (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010: 177–178).

The second component is the influence that a southern agrarian heritage has on the production of space, specifically on black urban agrarianism. In other words, how do black diasporic geographies and cultures instantiate a particular production of space in Cleveland? I argue that this black agrarian heritage informs a production of space that not only collapses dichotomous thinking about what does or does not belong in the city, but collapses space and time, comprising black histories and imagined futures across the diaspora (Fiskio et al., 2016; White, 2018).

The production of space by and for black people is a significant motivation for many black growers in Cleveland and is influenced by their experiences and collective memories of time spent on southern farms and gardens. With few exceptions, most black Clevelanders I interviewed spoke of parents or grandparents who had migrated to Cleveland during the Great Migration,¹ while a few were born in the southern states and moved to Cleveland as children themselves. Among those born in Cleveland, agrarian influences are described as either direct (e.g. skills taught and learned directly from a parent, relative, or elder), indirect (motivation by an ancestor who was a skilled grower), or part of a collective memory of black agricultural experience, both positive and negative (slavery in the US; agricultural knowledge and practice across the global black diaspora; agricultural work or labor including sharecropping, tenant farming, subsistence farming, or cooperative farming.) This heritage influences not only the decision to engage in urban food production, but also the agrarian vision enacted by black urban growers. This is a vision for the future of community: of safe, beautiful, healthy spaces that provide mental, emotional, physical, and bodily nourishment for those who inhabit them.

Throughout this article, I show how the production of alternative urban natures represents both a politics of difference and a set of rights claims, while simultaneously contesting dichotomous or exclusionary understandings of space. While the right to the city can be understood in many ways, this article focuses on producing the city as œuvre, a continuously negotiated and contested socio-spatial product. The ancestral influences on urban growers and liberatory reclaiming of land and agriculture (Rickford, 2017; Tornaghi, 2017) are deeply engrained in black agrarian practices, aligning in part with “peasant configurations” in other places (van der Ploeg, 2010: 2). Collective and individual memories of a black agrarian heritage bring form to a vibrant and potentially powerful black agrarian imaginary, a concept and epistemic frame that I have put words to, but that emerged from hours of conversations, interviews, observations, and experiences with black growers in Cleveland over years of research. It pulls from black diasporic agrarian histories (Fiskio et al., 2016; Reese, 2019; White, 2018) and alternative imagined futures (Kelley, 2002) to invite different ways of living in, experiencing, and conceptualizing of the city as a socially embedded and inhabited space (Hawthorne, 2019; Lefebvre, 1996; Passidomo, 2016).

Black geographer Katherine McKittrick asserts that “geography, the material world, is infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing”—a material world “embedded with Uganda, Sri Lanka, slave castles” (2006: ix). McKittrick's epistemic intervention emphasizes how a specifically black spatiality exists across black diasporic histories. This aligns with the articulation of a black agrarian imaginary that exists as and draws from a seemingly collective black experience and/or memory of urban food production. Journalist Kirsten West Savali describes the importance of black land, history, and place when she writes, “The land swaddles the bones of our elders. Our histories are rooted deep beneath surfaces (made) rich with Black blood” (Savali, 2020: np). The black agrarian imaginary relates to land, labor, economies, and urban development, but is also embedded in the affective, spiritual, imaginative, and especially emancipatory aspects of food production and the production of space.

I situate myself in this work as a white female scholar dedicated to applied and translational research and engagement. I lived and worked on the east side of Cleveland for over four years, collaborating with residents on several different community-based initiatives and grant projects focused on food justice, food sovereignty, youth empowerment, black arts and culture, and community development more broadly (see also Lindemann, 2019). As I describe above, the epistemic and theoretical frames I present emerged organically from the black gardeners and farmers I worked with and interviewed, and the trajectory of my research was continuously informed by the broader context of these interactions and my community-based work in Cleveland.

The production of space and the right to difference

In Cleveland, over 30,000 parcels of vacant land lend a somewhat rural feel to neighborhoods across the city. In some neighborhoods, entire blocks are left fallow, while in other areas, vacant parcels are interspersed with houses and other structures, forming constellations of green space within this once densely populated industrial city. Vacant and abandoned “untamed” landscapes that do not at all resemble common-sense imaginaries of the traditional American city are commonplace in Cleveland, as they are in other cities such as Buffalo and Detroit. While the abundance of land alone does not produce an agrarian imaginary, it does represent a potential to produce different spaces (and spaces of difference) across the city. The historical geography of Cleveland contributes to a growing agrarian consciousness that is deeply influential in the production of social, ecological, and cultural urban landscapes.

Food in the margins of the city

Modernization—specifically the urbanization of people and capital—has consistently framed certain rural activities as pre- or unmodern, including agrarian livelihoods (Classens, 2015; Mayes, 2014; Thompson, 2010). Despite this, urban food production has persisted even in industrial, post-industrial, and so-called modern economies. This can be seen as a way to reduce the relative cost of labor, the subsidization of forced underconsumption by capital. But it runs deeper than that. The creation and maintenance of environmental and agricultural space through urban gardening and farming, backyard animal production, and other forms of agrarian practice is a tacit claim to difference within urban spaces (Evans, 2007). It is a way of appropriating space to create environmental and social value in addition to economic or financial value, to use urban space to meet the needs and desires of marginalized denizens.

Black urban growers often operate in what might be thought of as subversive or interstitial food spaces. This signifies alternative modes and networks of food production that occur either tacitly or explicitly “on the margins of spaces dedicated to ‘conventional,’ ‘private,’ authority-sanctioned, or ‘normal’” food production activities (Galt et al., 2014: 134) within a hegemonic capitalist industrial food system. Subversive and interstitial urban food practices challenge dominant modes of conceptualizing nature in cities, including urban landscape management, food production, and consumption, and the socio-spatial relations embedded in these processes (Galt et al., 2014; McClintock, 2014). A socio-spatial production of nature, informed by a black agrarian imaginary, directly opposes capitalist logics of nature (homogenous, exchangeable, and commensurable), imbuing land with history or memory, community, diasporic identity, and hope.

Envisioning capitalist logic as incomplete or fractured (Gibson-Graham, 2006) shows how alternative food practices can empower actors to produce space in dissident and destabilizing ways. This framework can be extended to theorize a subversive or interstitial production of nature that questions power dynamics over resources, access, and control. While the hegemony of capitalism is in part constituted by counter-hegemonies, the former is always and necessarily produced by a logic of racism and processes of racialization (see Robinson, 2000). An understanding of racial capitalism in the United States positions the production of interstitial space as a lens through which to consider the racial politics of uneven urban governance over time: the simultaneous neglect, hypersurveillance, overpolicing, and fracturing of black spaces and bodies (McKittrick, 2006; Safransky, 2014; Wilson, 2007), and what a black agrarian imaginary might contribute to reimagining black futures and how that intersects with black geographies (Kelley, 2002; McKittrick, 2006).

Throughout my work in Cleveland, I spent significant time with Gladys, a gardener from the Hough neighborhood, during community meetings, planning sessions for a “Race, Food, and Justice” conference, and during a community collaborative food and arts initiative (Lindemann, 2019). I also conducted two semi-structured interviews with her in 2015 and 2016. Gladys insisted that black people “need mass land ownership” but that it is unlikely to happen through official channels. She continued:
There are over 3300 acres of vacant land available for us to utilize—not contiguous plots but sprinkled throughout; a little portion of our 40 acres is right next door. On my street, there are seven lots. I’m claiming them, I don’t care…if I have to guerilla garden, I don’t care. That's a food system that can be created. They’re not going to build any more houses [in this neighborhood] so we can take over these plots of land, put food on them…

Hough has experienced a significant decline in average home values, which plummeted from about $80,000 in 2004 to under $12,000 in 2015, and averaged just over $25,000 in 2020 (WRLC, 2021), one of the lowest rates in Cleveland. This loss of value stems from a model of urban development that is intertwined with a specifically American racial capitalism and the associated histories of housing segregation, redlining, labor disciplining (including the exodus of industry), and socio-spatial marginalization more broadly (Lederman, 2019; Squires and Kubrin, 2005). Racial capitalism uses racial difference as a social, spatial, and political organizing principle within processes of neoliberalization (Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014; McKittrick, 2006; Roberts and Mahtani, 2010), and racialized historical geographies of Cleveland are embedded in these forms of exclusion and marginalization. Processes of neoliberalization over the last several decades have replicated previous patterns of uneven urban development, exacerbating inequality and reifying black growers’ desire to work outside formal systems of development.

A counter-hegemonic production of space and nature is in part a response to prevailing ontologies of nature in both cities and rural spaces, which influence everything from the configuration and landscaping of gardens, parks, and other green spaces (Evans, 2007; Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000), to the networks of public transportation, air and water quality (Gandy, 2002; Monstadt, 2009; Swyngedouw, 1996, 1997), and the urban food system. Embracing different knowledge systems evokes Arturo Escobar's (1999) “anti-essentialist” political ecology, a recognition that “nature is differently experienced…and…differently produced by different groups in different historical periods” (Escobar, 1999: 5). Capitalist, non-capitalist, and indigenous ways of knowing, experiencing, and producing nature, while not homogenous within themselves, represent different “regimes of nature” (Escobar, 1999: 5). Discursive formations around proper land use or “what counts as nature, where it is allowed to be” (Evans, 2007: 132), who is allowed to be there, and what they are allowed to do (Finney, 2014) are an integral part of control over and access to resources. An alternative praxis centering rights for those who have long had them denied is embedded in the black agrarian imaginary.

This interlaced analysis provides a starting point from which to contest “the naturalness of capitalist domination” and capitalist (production of) nature (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 121). A political ecology lens on land and food production in Cleveland challenges the hegemony of the industrial-capitalist food system in urban space as a socio-politically neutral mode of agricultural production and market interaction. Through this analysis and the associated praxis of black growers, industrial food and capitalist market relations are epistemically decentered, allowing for self-determined agrarian relations of production, as well as the possibility of multiple and differentiated alternative food production practices (Lefebvre, 1996; Mayes, 2014; Wittman, 2009). Equity-oriented foodways of and for black communities (Alkon et al., 2013; Fiskio et al., 2016) must include multiple possibilities for provisioning beyond market access to food.

This anti-essentialist view of urban life works to integrate groups—specifically disenfranchised urban residents—in a struggle for social justice, rather than separate or isolate them based on differential access to and participation in urban space (see Young, 1990). Indeed, the demolition of vacant structures across Cleveland has cleared thousands of parcels of land (WRLC, 2015, 2018) to the point where, according to Miles, a grower in the St Clair Superior neighborhood, “you can see (vacant land) everywhere.” Miles cited abundant green space for its potential to “change ideas about how to use vacant space and vacant lots,” and predicted that residents might find new purpose in their lives, realizing that they have the power to do something with their surroundings. Miles even suggested that such an awareness, and the meaning one could find in it, “might just save someone's life.” This broad vision for the potential of people in their everyday lives to transform themselves and their surroundings—to “remak[e] the world”—demonstrates the potential for (and belief that) radical change can be born of commonplace desires (Loftus, 2012: ix; White, 2018). This prefigurative politics focused on human and nonhuman transformation collapses divisions between people and their environment: a mutually constituted social nature.

The “conditions of possibility for sensing [an] alternative world” are often most acute in urban spaces (Loftus, 2012: x). Persistent worldwide urbanization helps to set the stage for a radical contestation of hegemonic social, spatial, and political relations. While processes of global urbanization deserve a more multifaceted and in-depth analysis than space allows here, this article addresses global economic restructuring under neoliberal regimes of governance, and its impact not only on urban populations, but on widely held assumptions about what constitutes an urban lifestyle.

The remaking of the world

Through continuous processes of transformation on multiple scales, through a diversity of agents, with varied and often contradictory outcomes, the production and remaking of urban natures is partly a response to restructuring of capital globally and the multi-scalar impacts on the economies, spaces, livelihoods, and politics of urban residents. Across the globe, twentieth century urbanization has catalyzed widespread transformations across landscapes, including depeasantization and land loss. Urbanization in the US included the subsidization of suburban growth, once again embedded in American racial capitalism through racist housing and mortgage loan practices. The transformation of agricultural land helped to facilitate access to suburbia for rural and urban inhabitants, while also allowing for different forms of rural development, including prison construction. In the United States, land loss for black farmers is deeply embedded in the same racial capitalism that once violently bonded black bodies to the land. Black farmers have suffered from racist neglect and discrimination by governmental agencies, especially the United States Department of Agriculture and related organizations such as Cooperative Extension (Mitchell, 2001; Reid 2007). In the United States in 1910, almost 219,000 black farmers held just under 19 million acres of land (USDA Census of Agriculture, 1910); by 2012, collective holdings for black farmers had declined to 3.6 million acres (USDA Census of Agriculture, 2012).

Global economic restructuring has changed the possibilities of livelihoods and subsistence across the urban–rural continuum. According to Araghi, hunger is caused by “people's inability to purchase food as a market commodity and the loss of their direct access to the production of their means of subsistence (i.e., depeasantization)” (2000: 155). The migration of black southerners to northern cities brought hundreds of thousands of people who had lost access to the production of their means of subsistence, many of whom carried with them generations of agrarian knowledge but were folded into an industrial workforce. Widespread transformations in geographies of labor, production, finance, and trade in the twentieth century led to restructuring not only of state economies, but of markets at all scales. As a result, previously subsistence-oriented populations have become increasingly exposed to capitalist market forces (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010; Araghi, 2000).

Agricultural production has been central to these transformations, particularly with development efforts imposing a market logic on peasant producers in low-income countries across the world. Patterns of induced migration among black farmers (McKittrick and Woods, 2007) in the US reflect similar trends of land loss and shifts away from subsistence livelihoods in favor of agricultural mechanization in the south (rendering labor less valuable) and the industrialization of the urban north (Woods, 2017). These shifts in political economy (including technological changes) were and are central to black geographies across the US and provide crucial context to the black exodus from southern states and migration into northern industrializing cities. The persistence of agricultural practices during and after the industrial period can be understood as an attempt to reduce the cost of urban living, but also as a claim to self-determination in food provisioning (see McClintock, 2010; Minkoff-Zern, 2013).

With few exceptions, urban households operate in a “purchasing environment,” with a level of market exposure that only adds to the vulnerability of low-income urban populations (Cohen and Garrett, 2009). Low-income groups, for whom food comprises a higher proportion of household expenditure, are particularly exposed to market forces. These include the factors that influence the placement of stores, the price of food, and the availability of nutritious options (Kwate, 2008; Zenk et al., 2011). In predominantly black neighborhoods on Cleveland's east side, the median household income hovers between $10,500 and $18,000, compared to just over $30,000 for all of Cleveland (Center for Community Solutions, 2019). Households in these neighborhoods rely disproportionately on federal food assistance and emergency food services. This draws into question the “completeness” of market penetration in cities (Cohen and Garrett, 2009), highlighting the inherently uneven processes of development. This includes inequitable food geographies, especially systemic food apartheid, and uneven access to the necessary means of subsistence, whether that is adequate, affordable, and accessible food markets, access to employment, transportation, or to the resources for self-provisioning in food.

The widespread movement of predominantly rural people into cities and city regions brings with it questions not only about what kinds of nature are produced in cities (Castree, 1995; Gandy, 2004; Smith, 2008), but about which—and whose—produced nature belongs in cities. The question of who gets to decide what is appropriate for which urban spaces impacts and shapes urban lives. Not unlike capitalist ideologies that push for commensurable and exchangeable commodified land, the ideal urban aesthetic is often articulated through a lens of legibility and order, a vision that conflicts with any attempt to produce space differently or to remake the world according to ones needs or desires.

Dawn and Lou, a brother and sister, had planted peach, cherry, and apple trees, in addition to several vegetable crops with a gently chaotic aesthetic in the three plots they farmed. In 2015, one of Dawn and Lou's neighbors began to claim that their garden was “ugly and messy.” This person called her councilperson every day for over a month to complain, according to Lou, who believes that it was because of these efforts that the City did not renew their land lease; they were instead asked to dismantle the garden, including uprooting the trees they had planted. The space that they had produced was a composite of the community in which they live, with found and donated materials comprising much of what they built in their garden. Lou observed that while, “there aren’t a lot of good things in this neighborhood… there was this [garden where] people could come together and have access to this.”

Louise, who gardens on Cleveland's east side, explained some of the history and rationale behind planting fruit trees, which take years of stewardship before yielding a crop, on the land:
Cleveland used to be called Forest City. Where is that forest now? If you go through the city, you can still see where the fruit trees are… or where they used to be. You used to be able to go from one side to the other of the city and eat the whole way there. We want to change the way the city looks…to bring some of this stuff back in.

This vision for a different kind of city is often subverted by prevailing understandings of what belongs in urban space, or how social natures are produced in the city.

Smith (2008) argues that nature, in an urban context, takes on two seemingly opposite positions: one good (aesthetically pleasing, a reprieve from the stresses of modern living) and one bad (unruly, unkempt, or even scary—and therefore “something to be feared, controlled, or conquered”) (Classens, 2015: 232). That perceived unruliness sits in opposition to the dominant urban ideal, which is perhaps what motivated Dawn and Lou's neighbor to complain. On the other hand, as some growers have articulated, it is specifically the “less manicured” aesthetic that they strive for: a way of using untamed nature to disrupt the order and logic of (capitalist) urban space.

Louise owns almost two acres of land that she and her late husband purchased in the early 1990s. The lot was originally used for overflow parking for a business they owned, but she has since turned it into a garden. Several fruit trees, garden beds with greens, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cabbage, and other produce, and an herb spiral built from old bricks and other found materials all sit on her land. Her space is well cared for but does not at all replicate the manicured natures often found in city parks and residential lawns. The aesthetic of the garden, together with the improvements upon the land (a hoop-house sheathed in heavy plastic, a pergola built from tree limbs, an adobe mud and straw shed, and a large compost heap) represents a hybrid approach to agrarianism. Louise includes modern improvements to extend the growing season, principles of permaculture that integrate agro-ecological methods to capture and reuse energy and resources, ancestral knowledge from her upbringing and continued familial connections in Mississippi, and the knowledge that other residents have contributed to her garden through their work.

Louise, Dawn, Lou, and others like them persist in their attempts to remake the world around them despite (or perhaps because of) the continued neoliberalization of the city, the ideological impacts of this on both policies and residents, and the material effects this has had on their lives. The story of Dawn and Lou's community garden—the loss of their land and their struggle to be heard by the City demonstrates a key problematic behind claims being made on and to the city from marginal spaces. Much like any radically democratic ideal, there is no promise that power relations will be restructured in favor of more equitable relations, or that such claims will be heard (Purcell, 2002). In other words, urban agriculture and alternative food production do not necessarily equate to new conceptions or configurations of nature or space in cities.

Amina, who knows Dawn and Lou from meetings of community gardeners commented about the loss of their garden:
The councilperson went along with [the complaints], instead of going over there. I mean, I know people vote and stuff. But they were not doing anything wrong. And their space was nice. I could see if they had a bunch of garbage and trash, but it wasn’t like that. It was just so defeating. So I’m looking at, if they could do that to them, they could do that to any of us. The councilman, he's the person, the go-to guy. And that's unfortunate.

The neighbor whose complaints resulted in the loss of their land in effect was asserting the dominant view of the urban, which was then reified by the choice of City Council to not renew their lease. This, in effect, denies “the possibility of a [more] complex negotiation between the city and its inhabitants” (Zeiderman, 2006: 211). Dawn and Lou did not lose their land because of pending development but rather because of a prevailing vision for how humans and nonhuman nature should articulate together in the city.

In a broader sense, alternative land use practices do not automatically subvert the inequalities embedded within capitalist spaces of production and consumption (McClintock, 2014; Saed, 2012). Not all food-based activism will successfully challenge the dominant structures of racial capitalist space and food systems (McClintock, 2014). Had the above garden been recognized by those in power as a site of food production, a source of sustenance for the neighborhood, a space where children came to learn, play, and be free—and been valued as such—perhaps it would not have been so easily removed from the city's urban foodscape.

There are tensions inherent to any counter-hegemonic socio-ecological struggle, evident in the multiple overlapping and often-contradictory meanings, functions, and rationalities in the production of space (Loftus, 2009; McClintock, 2014). Even the most radical alternatives to the conventional food system can simultaneously reproduce elements of the old system (Galt et al., 2014; McClintock, 2014). In other words, urban food provisioning in response to the global restructuring of capital or the withdrawal of social supports and state services can both validate the neoliberalization of space while also laying the groundwork for reconfigurations of capital, social relations, the labor force, and relations of production.

To wit, politicians, city governments, and wealthier residents have begun to integrate urban food production into a larger understanding of land use and an urban spatial imaginary, albeit in very different ways. The benefits of such production systems highlighted by these actors are varied—and contested—but often revolve around three goals: the potential for positive health and economic outcomes, access to specialty foods for the more affluent, and social and economic relief during economic recessions (Bellows et al., 2003; Guthman, 2008; Nugent et al., 2000). Many cities, including Cleveland, have changed zoning laws and instituted programs to encourage and help residents produce food in the city, including Chicken and Bees legislation. Ohio State University Extension, a part of the federal land grant system, offers related trainings and programs. Urban egg and honey production represents a niche market of hyperlocal food production that is unlikely to constitute the majority of a self-determined and equitable food system. On the other hand, urban agriculture policies often become politically attractive during times of economic downturn, when there is little other development pressure for urban land. These policies allow urban growing to subsidize low wages and provide a rationale for the inequitable distribution of food within cities, implicitly enabling the neoliberal capitalist state as it reorganizes itself to affirm the logics of individual responsibility, efficiency, and productivity (Saed, 2012). This model of urban food production helps to (re)produce cities as neoliberalized sites of individualism while simultaneously laying the groundwork for capital accumulation and growth (Béal, 2015; Brenner and Theodore, 2002). The cooptation of urban agriculture as a productivist and commodified practice, or as a “tool for financial gains under the guise of an environmental agenda” (Eizenberg, 2012: 767) competes with indigenous or traditional modes of food production and alternative knowledge systems.

Notwithstanding, in advanced capitalist economies, where a portion of the population contends with low wages or un(der)employment but a high cost of living, spaces of non-hierarchical difference represent a politics of possibility and geography of survival for these marginalized and disenfranchised groups (Alkon and Mares, 2012; Galt et al., 2014; Mitchell and Heynen, 2013; Young, 1990). The production of nature for accumulation under a capitalist model subsumes nature under its logic (Smith, 2007, 2008); however, the politics of possibility created through a framework embracing the city as a use value or as untamed second nature integrates agricultural practices and socio-environmental metabolisms as a part of an integrated urban socio-ecological whole (Saed, 2012).

Southern agrarian heritage

In Glenville, which neighbors Hough to the northeast, Amina is an urban gardener with roots in Arkansas, where her grandfather grew up. Amina and her neighbors “all grew up with a garden.” This practice took hold in response to both a lack of accessible food options and to the “down south, up south” ties that emerged from the migration of thousands of people from southern areas to Cleveland (Adero, 1993; Wilkerson, 2016). Seeing, understanding, and experiencing the spatially uneven and racially determined character of development in the city—especially the geographies of food access—has informed the work of many black urban growers: to call upon knowledge and histories of urban food production. Amina recalled a connection to southern agricultural practices throughout her entire life:
We all grew up—with my mom canning and all that kind of stuff, so it's not foreign, it's just to be reintroduced back into the family. I know how to do all of that, I learned it by helping my mom. And then when we would go to Arkansas, we had to help. So yeah. It's just there, but when you live in the city, when things change, you get that convenience, and you forget. And that's what—I forgot.

The idea of memory—both remembering and forgetting—is a powerful motivator for many black growers in Cleveland. Sofie related the oppression and other negative experiences many growers faced in southern states to the collective sense of attachment or detachment from the land they used to work and steward:
You have a generation of farmers in the south that lost their land. You know about that Black farmers thing. So, when their descendants moved to the north, their memory is about detachment from the land. So, you have a people who have been detached from the land.

Kim, the director of an environmental nonprofit, evoked the idea of collective memory or consciousness that is somehow embedded in the genetics of those whose ancestors farmed.
I think we carry genes and we carry memory. I believe in that. And then you just have a naturalness sometimes. I might not ever be a green thumb. My great-grandmother could green-thumb all day. And I remember that. I think we have some memory of that.… Somebody did say, “We just have to remember where we came from.” This is just going back and remembering or relearning something that we already know.

This aligns with Gramsci's contention that people are a “précis of all the past” (1971: 353), the amalgamation of different and varied histories of social relations and knowledge systems. An equitable and just urban food system depends upon the socio-ecological context, which is partly constituted by a diversity of local, experiential, and bodily knowledge. For black growers in Cleveland, all of these are embedded in past and present black geographies (McKittrick, 2006). During the summer of 2016, Louise and I spent two days putting up the harvest from her one-and-a-half-acre urban garden. We processed and canned tomatoes, peppers, collards, garlic, and cabbage. During these two days in Louise's kitchen, she told countless stories about canning food with her aunts, cousins, grandma, and mother in Mississippi during her youth. After her family left Vicksburg for the north, eventually settling in Cleveland, Louise frequently traveled “back home” to the family house for the summers, to participate in harvesting and preserving food. The practice of putting up the harvest is not only about ensuring that families have a reserve of food over the winter, but also about building relationships, sharing stories, and spending time together. Louise told me that “it takes many hands” to do this work. That is, working the land, growing food, harvesting and preparing food, and feeding your community is not the work of an individual, or even of several individuals, but rather it is the work of an entire community together. Louise—who is now in her eighties—could not remember the exact recipes or processes of canning, but our day canning together facilitated her travel to Mississippi from her kitchen in Cleveland, demonstrating the nonlinearity of black geographies in informing material lives. Like Amina, for whom knowledge about food production is being “reintroduced back into the family,” Louise's embedded memories connect her to black history, places, and ancestry, all of which emerge in her agrarian practices and how she imagines alternative black futures.

The production of space, informed by a black agrarian imaginary in Cleveland, draws upon an epistemology of mutually constituting ideals and places: urban–rural, past, present, and future. These are influenced as much by so-called northern (industrial or post-industrial) conceptions of what constitutes a modern lifestyle, as well as a diverse array of contributing epistemic frames, from Clyde Woods’ “blues epistemology” to the Afro-surrealist praxis described by Robin D.G. Kelley and Franklin Rosemont (Kelley, 2002; Rosemont and Kelley, 2009; Woods, 2017). In arguing for a “new epistemology of the urban,” Brenner and Schmid observe that geographical binaries (urban/rural, North/South, etc.) are no longer appropriate or useful descriptors of spatial unevenness, as “divergent conditions of wealth and poverty, growth and decline, inclusion and exclusion, centrality and marginality” exist simultaneously at all spatial scales (2015: 151–152). This nonbinary concept, following McKittrick, supports an understanding of black geographies and a black agrarian imaginary that are not time or place bound.

For black growers in Cleveland, bringing agrarian histories into the present is in part achieved by the practice of gardening, but also relies upon ancestral ties and sharing collective memories. Patrice described her piece of this collective history:
My grandmother is from Fairfield, Alabama. She claimed Cleveland because she was actually here longer than she was there. She moved up here when she was 19 years old. They had a garden [in Alabama]. I don’t know what all they grew in their garden, but my great-grandmother's house—the family house—it's a house on the corner. […]As my grandmother grew up, [there] wasn’t a house next door, it was just their land. So, they had their garden, they had chickens, and I mean, even now they still have fig trees. I think they have a plum tree back there, and they have the pecan tree. When my grandmother had gardens [in Cleveland] when I was little, I would always run home from school so I could help in the garden.

My desire to really start to grow and nurture things, have a garden and all that, sparked and reunited in me when my grandmother passed away in 2011. The first thing that I did when she passed away, […] I initially planted flowers, a rose bush, Black-eyed Susans—that was her favorite flower—so I went that route. And it just… for me, just doing that…it helped me keep my mind on my grandmother, but also it was a way of me paying homage to her, without being heavy in my grief. It was a way to work through that.

So, then the following year, I said, “Well, I’m going to expand this thing. I’m going to try to grow some tomatoes!” My grandmother loved tomatoes. I’m going to try to grow some tomatoes, some bell peppers, so I…bought some transplants. I tried doing that out of pots and I was pretty successful. During that time is when my son was already involved [in a school agriculture program]. So I said, “let me start going to the meetings, I can learn some new things.”

Patrice's ancestral history comprises a small part of a collective agrarian identity that is not a singular linear history, but rather extends across the black diaspora and across generations, within an individual's family, as well as in the families of black subjects around the globe. Historical knowledge and practice are complemented by continued learning and adapted to new spatio-temporal contexts to become, like Louise's garden, hybrid forms of agricultural praxis.

The rural in the urban

Urban agrarianism has long contributed to repurposing urban land for subsistence and market-based food production. While practices differ between and across classes, genders, racial groups, political sectors, or other socio-spatial divisions, an urban agrarian imaginary has permeated on many levels, enabling and legitimizing different urban practices and engagements in the eyes of growers (Mayes, 2014). The in-migration of southern black populations into Cleveland transformed fully transformed the city. The collective memory and black geographies embedded within the black agrarian imaginary represents the translocation of a different urban agrarian vision. Louise was 12 when she moved with her family to Cleveland. She recounted her impressions of the produced nature they found when they arrived in Cleveland. She and her parents “didn’t see the same kind of gardens they had in Mississippi—everything was manicured.” Many families, including hers, lived in dense urban areas with little or no space for food production and often without access to their own land. Louise did not start growing her own food in Cleveland until later in life, but neighbors and community members innovated, turning backyards, tree lawns,² or front porches into gardens. She told me, “If you go and look in the backyards of many of the houses that are still standing, even if they are vacant and abandoned, you will see the fruit orchards that people planted decades ago.” These relics of urban nature from her parents’ generation remain in the collective consciousness of many black growers I interviewed. Fruit trees and edible landscapes were functional as well as aesthetic—representing a vision and hope for the future; efforts to remake newly adopted spaces to resemble more closely those left behind.

As in other cities where the demographic character has been shaped by the Great Migration and other migration patterns, black agrarianism across the food movement in Cleveland is rooted in a historical past steeped in agriculture and land stewardship. Gladys refers to black growers in Cleveland intermittently as either indigenous farmers or peasant farmers. The socio-cultural and spatial movement of the Great Migration brought together specific knowledge systems about how people relate to and in nature, about food production and cultures, as well as the desire for more just economic systems and equitable living conditions (Zeiderman, 2006) in response to the persistent white supremacist plantation economies that many were fleeing (Wilkerson, 2010; Woods, 2017). The legacy of predominantly black southern knowledge about nature has not always been visible in northern cities, indeed often it is repressed or rejected as backward or unmodern. I do not romanticize the agricultural histories of slaves and their descendants, who fought constantly for food and the right to grow their own food, existing in a constant state of undernourishment, despite being “intrinsic to the development of the agricultural sector” in the US (White, 2018: 3). As Somers (2008: 4) points out, the rights and privileges of many have been subsidized by and subsisted on the construction of “people considered neither fully human nor even partial rights-bearers,” while the “stateless Others”—racialized and marginalized groups within the United States—have had to continually fight for survival and full recognition as rights-bearing citizens within American society. Indeed, these two struggles have often gone hand in hand.

Precisely because of histories of slavery and sharecropping, as well as the desire to leave behind the traumatic histories of black ancestors, many black Americans reject participation in agricultural activity (White, 2018). For those who do work the soil, the heritage of being bonded to the land makes the struggle for self-determination all the more important. Many black growers reclaim the traumatic history of slavery and sharecropping by staking claims on their right to produce expansive more-than-urban natures: to change the city and, in so doing, remake their own lives, both present and future.

Amani, who kept a garden to teach her children when they were young, highlighted the contradictions in these two perspectives in a conversation with Kim:
Amani: I was remembering that I have two aunts. And they worked for affluent families, and she would get off the bus and my mother would meet her at the Rapid [Metro] but she would walk in the woods and stuff and pick herbs and stuff like that. And I remember her sister saying, “Why she doin’ that crazy stuff, [there]'s a grocery store. People don’t do that anymore!” You know and she always believed in picking them, she would make medicine, she would use some of them, I remember goin’ to her house, she would have them dried out to use in the food. There's so much that she had that our family saw as, “Leave that alone, this is the city!”

Kim: Yeah, that's all slave work, like people say, “Don't touch that!”

Amani: So, you forced yourself to lose it. So, when I first became an adult and I had children and was into being a midwife and all that. I was trying to pull up some of that stuff, like, “I remember her doin’, what was she doing? What was that flower she was tryin’ to show me?” To where you saw it as, it's so different. To where you don’t want to… it's kinda like, some of us, we were around it and we were like, “We don't want to think like that. We don’t wanna be a part of that.”

One way of thinking depicts self-provisioning in food (kitchen gardens, urban agriculture, or foraging wild plants) as backward and unappealing, something that does not belong in the city and that is eternally attached to an oppressive history of slavery. In this narrative, the grocery store represents a status symbol signifying distance from an agrarian (slave) past. As Amani describes, however, these representations are incomplete, and don’t reflect the complexity of history, memory, and how it is infused in the present. The epistemic frame represented by a black agrarian imaginary is rooted in history, while also reframing and reclaiming history in the production of present and future black geographies.

During a meeting of black growers in Cleveland, Gladys commented:
A lot of stuff has to be placed in a historical context. Many of the reasons we are at the position we’re at is from being shut out of certain markets. Redlining and all these other things that have happened in our communities: lack of access to loans, when other peasant farmers—like Martin Luther King says—were getting access to loans, Black farmers wasn't getting that.

Studies in Chicago and Philadelphia show that a significant proportion of practitioners in urban agriculture from the 1970s to the 1990s migrated to the city during or right after World War II (Taylor and Lovell, 2015; Vitiello and Nairn, 2009), indicating that an urban agrarian consciousness has been strengthened by these migration patterns. My research points to a trend where “first generation” black migrants embraced a personal and ancestral agrarian praxis, bringing knowledge and vision with them. Children of these migrants, however, were more likely to reject gardening or farming. One research participant described these tendencies as “a kind of generational divide where it was seen as something backwards” for the second generation, but that “this generation—the third generation—is trying to get back into it.” She continued, “I didn’t learn how to garden. I didn’t want to learn how to garden. But now that knowledge gap (between generations) has to be closed.”

The tendency of the children of migrants to reject agrarian practices parallels assertions about urban agriculture as not modern, as belonging only in rural spaces, or simply as backward. Indeed, Zeiderman (2006) describes a thread in urban social theory that describes influence of city life on rural migrants to urban areas, as well as the expectation that incoming residents would cope with life in the city or adapt themselves to the city rather than the other way around. This interpretation of the city-as-subject negates the possibility of a social production of space, portraying instead a domineering urban context to which outsiders must acclimate. Static and unyielding understandings of the urban erase the possibility of embodied and place-based knowledge systems, or knowledge embedded in black geographies, and negate the possibility of alternative or liberatory urban futures.

The black agrarian imaginary is a liberatory vision, stemming in part from socio-ecological concerns for direct participation in and even control over urban metabolisms at the bodily scale and the community or city scale (Heynen et al., 2006; Shillington, 2013). Such an understanding of social and spatial justice builds toward an embodied praxis, a multi-scalar production of emancipatory and liberated urban natures (Pulido, 2000; Taylor, 1997). Gladys touches upon this when she describes her vision for community control over space: where food growing in vacant lots would lead to beautiful and safe spaces that would therefore not be overpoliced or oversurveilled. Don, who farms in a pocket of the city tucked in between three different highways, owns the land where he grows food and runs environmental educational programs for black youth. He describes a vision for a production of space that questions the dominant epistemic frames held by traditional institutions that are “aimed at perfection, rather than at the imagination or the arts, where, even if it might not look perfect to someone else… these are projects in some stage of imagination or completion.” He explained:
Someone else might not be able to see your vision, but you have it all figured out in your mind and are arriving there at your own pace. The weeds are probably there for a reason. It might not look perfectly manicured and tame, the way OSU Extension would want it to, but they are there for a reason. If you can imagine it, then that is your success and that's what you are manifesting.

Ashanté Reese writes that these types of “lives and stories…call attention to the ways individual residents make sense of and navigate the food system, make ways out of no way, and live lives that do not start or stop at the door of the supermarket” (Reese, 2019: 133). This farmer's vision for urban nature represents both the contested nature of knowledge production and an alternative vision for the production of nature.

Political ecologies within and across urban and rural space offer different and sometimes unconventional understandings of the production of urban nature and alternative urban food spaces (McClintock, 2014; Robbins, 2011). In addition to recognizing the possibility of different or multiple knowledge systems and anti-essentialist epistemologies of nature, this framework reconceptualizes the interdependence and mutual constitution of urban–rural geographies and lives (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Zeiderman, 2006). Reflected through the black agrarian imaginary, this points to socio-natural processes occurring across socially or politically constructed boundaries that are not delimited by dichotomous markers of space or bound by linear time. Embedded within the praxis of black urban growers is a tacit critique of and dismantling of categories such as urban and rural, past, present, and future.

Black Americans who fled the bodily trauma of racial capitalism in the southern US including racial terror, material dispossession, and economic and agricultural restructuring were often displaced into hostile environments that demanded assimilation. Those who transplanted their agrarian experience and knowledge enacted a production of nature that pushed back against the hegemony of a white supremacist and productivist system, a production of nature that was rooted in a historically intimate relationship to the land. The black epistemic frames that I evoke here—ways of knowing, experiencing, and producing nature—are in many ways rooted in historical and geographical struggles for the right to difference in the city. Black migrants who planted gardens in cities often faced discrimination but used this and other “southern” socio-cultural and ecological practices to endure new forms of discrimination (Zeiderman 2006: 220) and to demonstrate the value underlying an agrarian ideal within urban space. The embodied knowledge and history of this praxis are implanted in urban soils across the country and exemplified in the black agrarian imaginary, both latent and explicit. The coalescing of southern agrarian and ancestral heritages with black growers’ lived experiences in Cleveland lays the groundwork for new understandings of how black geographies are continuously reworked and reimagined.

Conclusion: producing black urban space differently

A focus on food systems points to many of the ways in which racial and spatial underprivilege intersect, producing urban inequities that impact low-income communities and communities of color more intensely than many other groups (Billings and Cabbil, 2012; Heynen et al., 2006; Reese, 2019). Within neighborhoods of color in Cleveland that do experience food insecurity and food apartheid (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Allen, 2008; Billings and Cabbil, 2012), alternative food futures must also embrace the right to difference: a plurality of epistemological framings to inform a more just production of space. The black agrarian imaginary undergirds the work of black subjects in marginalized and interstitial spaces that produce urban natures as a totality, the differentiated unity of humans and nonhuman nature. The production of an ontologically unified space aligns with many of the practices that emerge from within the margins of the food system in the interstices of capitalist socio-economic relations. This is the praxis of a black agrarian imaginary.

So-called vacant parcels are regularly left to fallow for years after structures have been abandoned and demolished (McClintock, 2010, 2014), contributing an element of rurality within Cleveland's urban space. Urban land is often more intensely impacted by heavy metal contamination, including lasting residue from decades of industrial production, and lead from car emissions and paint, which creates unique challenges in repurposing urban land for agriculture (Elliott and Frickel, 2013). Notwithstanding, local government, civil society organizations, community groups, and individuals work to repurpose the land left in the wake of capital's creative destruction (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Pedroni, 2011), demographic shifts, and population loss.

Across these efforts, epistemologies of value, development, and economy are always at play. Municipal vacant land reuse programs are not without contradictions, and rarely represent an unadulterated vision of the city as œuvre, valued “for and through its use” (Passidomo, 2014: 395). Many land-(re)use practices align more closely with a state/capitalist valuation of land and vision for urban development. Indeed, the term “vacant” reinforces the idea that parcels of land are fungible and devoid of social relations or historical geographies. Rather than as œuvre, the “city as commodity” is one of many “dehumanizing effect(s) of capital”; the commodification of space, or the creation of homogenous space as exchange value, necessarily divorces human from nonhuman nature and the mutual constitution of that “differentiated unity” (Lefebvre, 1996, 2009; Marx, 1976; Passidomo, 2014: 395). Depeasantization and land loss in rural areas are mirrored by land insecurity through rent extractive economies and lack of land tenure as well as the capitalist domination over the production of nature in urban spaces. Capitalist economic development is still prioritized by governing bodies, and resources—especially land—are limited to those with the means to acquire them.

Alternative visions for urban space are articulated through a determined and dynamic imagining of alternative urban futures, which persists in the face of dominant market ideologies and increasingly austere urban governance structures. Black urban growers produce spaces marginal to and in the interstices of the capitalist project. And yet these spaces simultaneously represent a counter-hegemony with the power to shift prevailing notions about the city, processes of urbanization, and the role of black geographies and black bodies in both of those. The persistence of black agrarianism across urban space in the face of deepening capitalist relations is notable and persists despite continued oppression through racial projects and displacement impacting these communities. Urban processes and metabolisms instantiated through practices of food provisioning often emerge from within the cracks of modern capitalist relations. Black gardeners and farmers in Cleveland, OH constitute an important countermovement to the increasingly neoliberal, individualist, and austerity-oriented socio-spatial and economic structures of our times.

Highlights

Urban food production in predominantly black spaces in Cleveland, OH draws upon cultural and diasporic heritage emerging predominantly from states in the American South as a way to reimagine urban space and build more liberated futures.

Black growers in Cleveland are responding to the hegemonic dominance of capitalist development in the city with a counter-hegemonic praxis of the right to difference in the city.

Food production—more broadly—works to collapse dichotomous understandings of urban and rural that simultaneously invites different ways of living and being in the city

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Kimberly Foreman for the tenacity of her environmental justice and anti-racist work and for how informative she has been to my own work.

Declaration of conflicting interests

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

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article

ORCID iD

Justine Lindemann

Notes

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“A little portion of our 40 acres”: A black agrarian imaginary in the city

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The production of space and the right to difference

Food in the margins of the city

The remaking of the world

Southern agrarian heritage

The rural in the urban

Conclusion: producing black urban space differently

Highlights

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References