Then as a young adult, she worked with other farms and Veritable Vegetable, a women’s cooperative and organic vegetable distribution company, all of which resulted in “a lot of influences around cooperative economics, cooperatively owning land, collectively owning land and managing land in that way” . Robinson continues to turn to these influences in conducting the work of the organization. In 2011, Urban Tilth staff visited Boston and the Dudley Street Initiative, a successful example of using a community land trust to provide affordable housing and gardening opportunities under a governance structure of community management. For Robinson, community land trusts can be an important means for residents to have actual control of neighborhood resources and to maintain the possibility for these community members to stay in their homes. “If we do all this work around food and whatever and then the population that we are trying to serve gets pushed somewhere else, what’s the point?” . While land trusts inspire many Bay Area urban agriculturalists, there are still relatively few land trusts working with urban gardens, in part due to the high costs of regional real estate. While trusts have shown interest in supporting urban gardeners, they are also interested in maximizing their impact with limited funds. The exception are small housing trusts and community development corporations, which have placed gardens on their land such as the 55th Street Garden in Oakland formerly run as a market garden by the People’s Grocery and now functioning as a community plot garden owned by the North Oakland Land Trust, a member owned intentional community owned by the Northern California Land Trust called the Mariposa Grove in Oakland, and the Tenderloin People’s Garden run by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation. The Oakland Community Land Trust is currently developing a plan to better support urban agriculture, “Our primary role will be to acquire and provide secure access to land for residents and organizations looking to grow their own produce. Recognizing that fresh food options can be scarce in East and West Oakland,round plastic plant pot active urban agriculture and community gardens can serve as a healthy and locally accessible source of vegetables and fruits for neighborhood residents. OakCLT will support the gardening efforts of land trust homeowners, as well as residents and organizations already engaged in agricultural activities”.

McClintock suggests that urban gardens can resist capitalism by using the state and the state’s property. Gardeners can facilitate not only the reclamation of land as commons, but also the promotion of new commons such as genetic material in seeds and cultural culinary traditions . Cultivating the Commons, an action research and education project included the use of land inventory and emphasized public land explicitly. Through advocacy with the HOPE Collaborative and Oakland Food Policy Council, the Cultivating the Commons authors put the responsibility of providing land for production on the City of Oakland. As one gardener stated, “I think the use of public land is meaningful in a kind of normative way. It’s important to have this idea of creating these sort of common spaces” . The Edible Parks Taskforce is an example of attempt to reclaim public commons for community self-determination. This approach has particular traction in contemporary society and also has its constraints and detractors. In addition to gardeners discussing collective management and collective ownership, many gardeners speak to the material, perceived, and lived experiences of engaging non-capitalist value production. Projects create opportunities to reconceive ‘work’ as being outside a wage labor relationship, elevating the importance of social reproduction and promoting non-consumer based, collective experiences that sustain gardeners in various ways. In describing the goal to create housing and gardens on collective land, Tree explained, “And I think everybody should kind of like reclaim that space, that frame and that thought of sustaining ourselves, sustaining each other to building community.” . Another gardener described the difference between public parks as commons and their project, “Just that notion of saying like, this isn’t a store, it isn’t a business, it’s not a house, it’s not a park. I mean it’s interesting because the only form of commons that we have in the city are parks right? But the way you can relate with a park is in very limited ways. Like the park is maintained by the city for you to like walk through and enjoy, but after it closes you have to leave. La Mesa Verde, for example, instituted a system of “community guilds”, a concept borrowed from permaculture, which refers to a horticultural association of biotic and abiotic elements designed to work together to help ensure mutual survival and growth.

For LMV organizers, a guild can provide the space and structure for increased community support and sharing, a fundamental element of commoning. While coordinated sharing events are still in the future goals of the program, participants already use these networks for informal sharing. Program staffer, Patty Guzman, noted, “One family started seeds and brought seedlings to share with all the families. Others have brought cherry seedlings, nopales. Definitely with the fruit harvests we see a lot of sharing – avocado, chayote, peaches.” . Guzman also noted that some guild leaders have gone above and beyond the expectations she originally had. She described one leader of a Spanish-speaking guild on the East Side of San Jose: “She really pitched in for her members. She already knows them outside the class and so she works to help them even if they don’t come to meetings. Like if a participant’s husband doesn’t want her to go to class, would get her the information or plants outside of class time” . Many LMV gardeners are initially attracted to the program by the desire to increase self-provisioning of health food at home, but similar to the WinklerPrins and Souza study of Brazilian home gardens, LMV families demonstrate the links between household self-provisioning and informal economies of exchange. The labor of unpaid self-provisioning is conducted when gardeners’ time is not occupied with wage labor or other household tasks. Gardening, like other household labor and reproductive labor can be viewed as simply an essential support to capitalist economies . But as feminist economic geographers JK Gibson-Graham claim, this view excessively limits our ability to understand the non-capitalist elements of these practices . In other words, LMV gardeners are creating economic networks based on sharing, co-operation and mutual aide. These non-commodified practices promote alternative forms of valuing work and, as such, are alternatives to capitalist class processes. As I have described, gardeners have multiple claims to their practices and experiences of commoning.

Commons, or commoning, is comprised of three animating ideas. First, the commons provides a space or framework in which people are encouraged to reimagine how a community or resource is managed – promoting deeper and wider participation in decision making of those impacted. Second, the commons offers a definition of land access that moves away from private or state ownership. And finally, the commons affirms the production of non-capitalist forms of value. By using both concepts of commons that put pressure on the state to support urban gardens and those who see the power of urban agriculture as going beyond the limitations of a liberal state, the questions of how we reimagine urban governance and economic networks are emphasized. By encouraging forms of social relations based on increased participation and mutual aid, by challenging how land is used and distributed based on development priorities, and by refocusing their attention on producing non-capitalist forms of value and non-waged forms of labor, urban gardeners see their projects as part of the global movement for growing urban commons. Similar to those concerned with communal management for particular parcels of land, urban gardeners have connected their work to the greater struggle for gaining power in urban governance at large. Many gardeners work to try to gain community land management and in so doing gardeners connect their work to other justice oriented urban social movements including housing justice, economic justice, and the like. For these gardeners,25 liter round pot the central question becomes whether gardening is a movement with food production as an ends or as a means towards a larger scale of community organizing. Many urban scholars have documented the growing popularity of urban social movements since the late 1990s. Mayer argues that organizing has continued along three lines. First, urban movements have contested the patterns of neoliberal urban governance and growth politics. Contemporary urban space in the US exists in a constant state of contestation between capital, whose desire is to promote the greatest exchange-value, and urban movements that want to enjoy the use-value of the land . Mayer describes urban movements that contest the corporate control of urban development, accumulation by dispossession, gentrification and displacement. Movements have resisted new entrepreneurial policies, privatization of public goods, and gentrification through different strategies such as placed-based coalitions and symbolic disruptive actions . Second, urban movements continue to fight the dismantling of the welfare state, uniting along lines of social, environmental and economic justice. Third, the anti-globalization movements across the world manifest in the global north in cities where globalization’s impacts can be seen ‘touching down’ through outsourcing, privatization, and other impacts. Purcell concurs and adds that these movements are coalescing around a broad spectrum of issues to work to democratize cities and global processes in resistance to neoliberalism.

I would argue that in this same vein, today’s Occupy Movements express many of the same sentiments of outrage with the impacts of the dismal state of the economy and the highly unequal power dynamics that have lead to this situation. In fact, in Seeking Spatial Justice Soja speaks to primacy of the right to the city as a right to occupy and inhabit space.Haleh Zandi, of Planting Justice in Oakland, advocated that gardening could connect land and housing justice. She is inspired by the idea of “being able to partner with folks whose homes are getting foreclosed on, not only saving those homes from being foreclosed upon, but protecting those people’s rights and figuring out different financial solutions for them, but also building gardens in their homes, so that way, it’s like the banks aren’t taking people’s land and people’s homes and we’re committed to sustainable home environments where we’re not always eating food from 1,500 miles around the world. So, it’s connecting to the international movement for food sovereignty and land sovereignty, but really relevant to what’s happening systematically within the U.S.” . Similarly, in San Francisco, Markos Major of the former Growing Home Garden, saw their primary role, as volunteers in a garden focused on homeless, as “more about social justice… holding the space. We hold the space and people come in like these individuals and gentlemen and other people come and hang out and have a safe space.” . In reflecting on Growing Home’s social justice mission and prospects for continuing their work as they were being evicted, Major considered if only focusing on gardening alliance was strategic, “you know we’re not all the same, that’s the other thing we’ve realized I think. We’ve taken the relationship with Urban Ag alliance as far as we can. It [social justice] is really important and it’s unfortunate that it’s not a priority” . For Jeffrey Betcher of Quesada Gardens, gardening should be part of a movement for community organizing. He identified himself as a community builder, not an urban agriculturalist, although he has gardened and helped many others start gardens for over a decade. Betcher worries the current San Francisco urban agriculture movement shares similar obstacles to the Environmental Movement, namely its whiteness and focus on particular outcomes. Betcher argued, “… if were connected to urban community development and social justice movements, it wouldn’t look that way… People come to me as though of course I agree that if we plop a garden down, we’ll build community. And I have to say gardens don’t build community, people build community” . He went on to describe a garden project that he led that was conceived of and funded by people outside of the community, “if people can be involved at the beginning and really have the agency, can go in and say ‘ok this a shared resource, what do we want to do, it can be anything’. But now I have to go in and say, ‘You should know that if you choose a garden there are gonna be incentives for that’, and then the conversation goes in that direction” .