Urban agriculture and the sustainability fix in Vancouver and Detroit
Samuel Walker
Vol. 37, No. 2, 163–182,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1056606
Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street
Room 5047, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada
(Received 19 June 2014; accepted 17 March 2015)
Abstract :
Both Vancouver, British Columbia, and Detroit, Michigan, have significant and growing urban agriculture movements. In this article, I follow recent work investigating the connection between urban agriculture and neoliberalization to determine how these local governments have used urban agriculture in narratives of economic development to selectively pursue a sustainability fix. I analyze how different regimes of local governance have influenced the urban agriculture movements, leading to local, hybridized fixes that adapt to different material and discursive contexts in each place. I argue that in both cities, urban agriculture has radical potential as a grassroots response to economic and environmental injustice, but has also been enrolled as a device by the local state in which the primary goal of sustainability planning becomes enhanced economic competitiveness. Pursuing an agenda of food justice requires examining the larger context and effects of municipal involvement with food movements.
Keywords: Detroit; food justice; neoliberalization; sustainability fix; urban agriculture; Vancouver
Introduction
Vancouver, British Columbia, and Detroit, Michigan, are 1,962 miles away from each other in traditional Cartesian space; in the conceptual economic and social space of the world’s cities, they are even farther apart. Although both are North American cities colonized by Europeans, they are currently located in very different socioeconomic space. Detroit is renowned as one of the world’s former industrial giants, where the American Dream of automobile-centric urban sprawl was born. It has seen all of the major American urban transitions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries play out in microcosm: industrialization, unionization, the rise of the middle class, racial segregation, suburbanization and white flight, post-industrial economic decline, race riots, the neoliberal retrenchment of the 1980s and 1990s, the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s, and perhaps even a glimpse of America’s urban future with the city filing for Chapter Nine bankruptcy on 18 July 2013, becoming the largest American city ever to do so (Sugrue, 1996/2014)
Vancouver stands in stark contrast to the shrinking Eastern city of Detroit as a rapidly growing Western city (Figure 1). While Detroit is often highlighted as an example of a city with very low population density (though see Clement, 2013, pp. 66–67), Vancouver’s dense downtown residential development makes it a star example of planners’ recent obsession with density (Quastel, Moos, & Lynch, 2012). Today the cities of Vancouver and Detroit have similar populations (603,502 and 701,475, according to the United States 2010 Decennial Census and Canada 2011 Census respectively), but must be placed in their regional context. Detroit’s metropolitan area is the 14th largest in the United States, with just under 4.3 million people, and although Vancouver is Canada’s eighth largest city, it boasts the third largest metropolitan area with 2.1 million people (2011 and 2010 Censuses). Additionally, the City of Detroit itself is 142.87 square miles, while Vancouver has only 44.39 square miles (Statistics Canada, 2012; United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore, measurements of density focusing on the city as a whole do not fully capture the urban form of these cities, with Vancouver having average levels of density and single family housing outside its downtown core and Detroit having many dense areas scattered across its metropolitan area, with sprawl and depopulation being two sides of the same coin (Clement, 2013, pp. 66–67)
Vancouver has actively pursued “world city” status, especially since the late 1990s. Hinging a booming tourism industry and a globalized real estate market on the aesthetic attractions of its Pacific Northwest environment has made Vancouver a global consumption city (Siemiatycki, 2013). Regularly high rankings on interurban league tables measuring sustainability and livability are an asset highly valued by the City government, which has actively marketed Vancouver as a place ideal for a cosmopolitan upper class. This trend largely reflects the decrease of resource-based economic activity in the Lower Mainland and the rise of consumption-based—and to some degree, creativity- or knowledge-based—industries. While often presented as a paragon of 21st century urban planning and development (Harcourt & Cameron, 2007), Elliot Siemiatycki (2013) shows that the much-praised model of Vancouverism ultimately rests on significant and often unjust changes in the urban economic order.
hanges in the urban economic order. This juxtaposition begs the question, what do these two cities have in common? One commonality to be explored here is their growing urban agriculture movements.1 In the
summer of 2013, newspapers in both cities excitedly proclaimed the new trend (Gabriel, 2013; Harbottle, 2013; Hotte, 2013; Satyanarayana, 2013). Additionally, both cities were featured as case studies in a report by the American Planning Association on urban agriculture (Hodgson, Campbell, & Bailkey, 2011). In this article I ask: how is urban agriculture promoted by the state as a sustainable solution to the very different social, economic, and environmental problems faced by these two cities? Drawing on Nathan McClintock’s (2011, 2014) theorization of urban agriculture’s radical/neoliberal “Janus face” and While, Jonas, and Gibbs’ (2004) concept of the “sustainability fix,” I aim to better specify the role of the state and interurban competition in driving urban food production’s incorporation into strategies of neoliberal urbanism. I briefly examine the different historical trajectories that have led to urban agriculture’s recent visibility and illustrate how the local state has selectively enrolled it as part of an urban sustainability fix. Through a comparison of urban governance and document analysis of Vancouver’s Greenest City 2020 Action Plan and Detroit’s Detroit Future City, I argue that while the current conditions of possibility for the urban agriculture movement are decidedly neoliberal, more attention needs to be paid to the role of differently neoliberalizing states in directing the growth of the movement. In the discussion, I address the relevant differences and similarities of how this process occurred in each place. Here I draw out the way that the “strategic selectivity” of local states (Jessop, 1990) leads sustainability policies like urban agriculture to be adopted as fixes that are both discursive and material, seeking to both position cities favorably in competitive place-marketing and to address the material political economic circumstances structuring urban development. This approach brings together regulation-theoretical approaches to the sustainability and environmental fix— which tend to emphasize the political economic crises shaping (and being shaped by) state action (e.g. While et al., 2004)—and the more discursive and policy-focused work on the sustainability fix and policy mobilities (e.g. Temenos & McCann, 2012). The cases of Vancouver and Detroit show that pursuing an agenda of food justice requires examining the larger context and effects of municipal involvement with food movements
Theorizing urban agriculture
In this section, I draw on insights from urban political ecology and environmental economic geography to provide the theoretical groundwork for my empirical investigation. Specifically, I draw on the literature on urban agriculture and neoliberalism (McClintock, 2011, 2014), the urban sustainability fix (While et al., 2004), and the environmental fix (Castree, 2008a, 2008b).
Full text :
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق