A landscape of opportunity? Vacant land,community gardens,and neoliberal green fixes in San Diego

Abstract

Urban agriculture is increasingly promoted within urban sustainability agendas as a multifunctional response to food insecurity, climate change, and socio-spatial inequality. In many U.S. cities, these efforts are framed by an “opportunity narrative” that imagines an abundance of vacant land and assumes communities are equally capable and willing to transform it. While this framing has gained traction in post-industrial cities like Detroit or Baltimore, it has also informed policies in rapidly growing cities such as San Diego, where community gardens have been championed as tools for improving environmental and public health outcomes. This paper critically examines the political ecology of land access for urban agriculture in San Diego, arguing that celebratory narratives around community gardening often obscure the structural inequities that shape where and how food can be grown. Drawing on city planning documents, spatial data, and original fieldwork—including site audits, surveys, and interviews— we analyze how low-income and racialized communities confront legal, institutional, and economic barriers to accessing and maintaining land to collectively address food insecurity via community gardening. We argue that San Diego's urban agriculture policies exemplify a neoliberal “green fix”, where greening is used to enhance urban development potential without redistributive investment. Responsibility for food access is shifted onto marginalized communities, while land remains treated as a speculative commodity. This depoliticized approach positions gardening as benign civic participation rather than a practice embedded in struggles over land, race, and justice. By troubling the assumption that vacant land is inherently available and universally accessible, the paper contributes to urban political ecology scholarship and calls for a land justice framework that foregrounds equity, secure tenure, and community self-determination in the making of urban green space.