In contrast, "urban greening practices such as urban agriculture, community gardens, and other interventions into local food systems received no mention in the 2007 version of PlaNYC." This omission occurred despite the fact that New York is home to "one of the largest networks of urban community gardens in the world."
Campbell asks, "why were urban forestry and agriculture treated so differently in the sustainability plan?"
While there are parts of the book that suggest Bloomberg was willing to leave the urban gardening movement high and dry, the real reasons and the politics at play in urban greening are more complicated. Certainly, from the onset, decision-makers involved in PlaNYC had a commodified view, describing the value of trees from an investment standpoint, while there was a perceived gap in any metrics regarding the value of urban farms and community gardens. Campbell was able to document how, over a number of tense seasons and against considerable odds, activists, researchers and everyday citizens replaced that gap with the measurable science and data that was missing.
Because of the "sales pitch" approach by advocates of PlaNYC 2030, the stakeholders in this form of "green growth" were very distinct, and the process of deciding who gets to set the agenda was considerably influenced by NYC's business elite. In the context of this difficult onset, grassroots activists, urban farmers and community gardeners throughout NYC organized and prepared a successful challenge to the forestry-led agenda by 2011. Campbell's journalistic book shines an intense light on various developments in PlaNYC2030 from 2007 to its more urban agriculture-friendly revisal PlaNYC 2.0 in 2011 to its continuing implementation up until 2015.
Urban agriculture while "entirely absent" from the first PlaNYC, was not at rest, and until there were serious and ratified goals set regarding the production of local food, activists were agitating for change.
Campbell found this touchpoint interesting enough to carry the book, and I think it does. The book is a very thorough biopsy of a time period in which a gargantuan effort was undertaken to transform a city. Without a strong challenge from social justice and grassroots urban agriculturalists, the Bloomberg legacy might have resulted in a very different picture.
The book supplies excellent charts in this book before even the close of chapter one, extensively comparing the urban forestry network in chart-form with that of the urban agriculture network. "I pay particular attention to how ideologies of environmentalism, sustainability, and neoliberalism overlap or compete," the book"s author declares in the introduction, and I believe she bears this claim out.
In examining the absence of food policy and planning in the PlaNYC 2007 strategy, we learn that food policy in those days was seen as something too vast, complex and too controlled by the private sector for any city government to bring under their jurisdiction. At the time, small-scale community gardens were not the only ones who felt leery of Bloomberg's plan. By the time the revised plan PlaNYC 2.0 rolled around in 2011, it was however positively influenced by food policy goal-setting changes. However, it was a hard road to arrive at that juncture. As well, some of the more mainstream critiques of Bloomberg's "sustainable city" initiative during the establishment of PlaNYC 2.0 insisted that the sustainability planning did not consider "the hinterlands and global commodity food chains" on which the cities were dependent. Other critics felt that sustainability plans in their current form did not challenge the political-economic structures of cities sufficiently to create real change. While PlaNYC pandered to commercial interests and received a huge amount of funding from NYC's business elite, it was also a model of independent municipal problem-solving and in many ways ahead of its time by tackling climate change and urban heat issues head on.
Not surprisingly, PlaNYC 2030 began with an idealistic but uniformed leadership driven by Bloomberg's dream and the project's considerable funding. In the early days, "sites were viewed by decision-makers as just green spaces on the map that could receive hundreds of thousands of trees." As a result many advisors quickly "took issue with the numerical tree planting goal and correctly argued that emphasis should be placed on creating healthy, native, multistory forests" because many sites for these early tree planting proposals had "nothing to do with feasibility."
By chapter six, Campbell has led us through some interesting years and forward in time beyond the Bloomberg years and into the de Blasio mayoral era. The de Blasio era was a time when the emphasis on social programming became more central than the trees. However, by this point in time, NY's urban grassroot's gardening movement had gone into gear. Here Campbell describes in detail the establishment of vast and entrepreneurial rooftop garden operations in NY. The demographics of the gardeners, the backyard chicken program participants and the beekeeping programs in NY are well-chronicled and reassuring reading regarding how some of these sustainability initiatives are playing out.
However, the impression that poor neighbourhoods and the people who live in them can be upgraded en mass did take its toll on NYC. It is well-known that treeplanting can beget gentrification. A number of ground-level garden sites were negotiated sites, for instance planted in movable beds, with the understanding that the site was not able to be affordably developed at that time but in the future would be turned into housing. This discussion is to me the most interesting, because the idea that the urban poor are intended to improve and move, or to continually shift to make way for development as a sort of civic duty, is highly problematic.
Fortunately, over the years of the PlaNYC 2030 sustainability implementation, there was a lot of emphasis on research. As well as research groups, activist groups such as 596 Acres sprung up, assisting in the visualization of those hundreds of vacant urban acres that required farming. Rooftop farm entrepreneurs as well played a role in urban food agriculture and their gardens were also included in the 2011 PlaNYC 2.0 revision.
Ultimately the urban agriculturalist won their point, and urban agriculture became ensconced within the 2030 goals. These goals included the assessment of land availability and suitability for urban agriculture, the creation of citywide urban agriculture program, and the ensured permanence of community gardens. The development of rooftop agricultural greenhouses, a determination of the capacity of the regional foodshed, and the development of state strategy for farmland and food production were also included. Barriers to food composting in community gardens were eliminated and agreed-upon goals to expose all city students to farms and gardens were also established. By cultivating student and citizen access to agriculture and relationship with an urban farm, a generational literacy in food production is today fostered. These were only some of the changes and goals set out in the document, many of which have been implemented, and their positive impact is clear.
The final chapters including one titled "Constructing the "greener, greater city" describes how there is no longer a lack of data now but "a proliferation of academic research and citizen-led science on urban agriculture..." and examines how much the planning implemented under public health rather than competitiveness functioned as programs for the sake of social justice. Soil testing, contaminant-free healthy and fertile soil and other ensconced PlaNYC 2030 sustainability values are also discussed.
How have things fared post-Bloomberg? The millionth tree was inevitably planted with great volunteer engagement. Even though de Blasio moved away from tree planting and slated over a dozen garden sites for development, "urban agriculture is on an upswing" regardless of city governance.
In closing Campbell looks to the urban farm movement future with hope that this movement can achieve "the critical mass necessary to scale up and affect citywide policy and natural resource management." Her challenge lingers long after the last page of the book.
Campbell, LK. (2017).City of forests, city of farms: Sustainability planning for New York City's nature. Cornell University Press.
