The success of both CSF and CRP can be at least partially attributed to their privileged cultural, class and ethnic positions. If race, class and ethnicity are encoded in bureaucracy both in the degree of difficulty to navigate and the unconscious expectations of its gatekeepers, then it can have significant effects on who has access to power structures. Privilege is itself a method of creating invisibility. In my interview with Jon Kindleberger, the Community & Economic Development Agency employee who has worked closely with Desi to gain approval within the City for the Community Rejuvenation Project’s paid murals, he made it clear that Desi’s extraordinary ability to pull together different stakeholders – including those in power – played a major role in getting the commission. Kindleberger discussed the process for getting approval to put up a mural on the side of a Smart & Final store on a busy street which had been heavily tagged, repeatedly.Foucault’s concept of governmentality dovetails neatly into the more modern concept of neoliberalism; in each, citizen-subjects are asked to play an active role in their own self-government . Foucault’s conception of governmentality was often interpreted as the work of an all-powerful centralized State, a misinterpretation which Matthews emphasizes. Instead of an all-seeing state, the conception of a fractured state fits much more neatly into neoliberal conceptions of the state. The neoliberal trend within city governments in the past decades to outsource essential city functions such as garbage collection to a corporation is clearly recognized and documented. But is the pattern of governments ceding control of basic functions such as graffiti abatement or park maintenance to nonprofits part of the same trend? Does the fact that nonprofits have a mission to serve the public good make this a comparison invalid? Pudup and Peck and Tickell would say that voluntary and third-party initiatives focused on moral responsibility and changing behaviors or improving selves are directly related to processes of neoliberalism.

As state sponsored policies and programs designed to minimize public risk declined since the 1970s, large pots plastic programs focused on encouraging individual responsibility flourished. With this shift of responsibilities, many questions arise: Are the publics served by cities and nonprofits necessarily the same “public”? How does access or representation change when city functions are assumed by nonprofits?Bureaucracy sets a framework for much of the material work and contested imaginings I examine in the dissertation. It sets a structure which groups can try to work against, adapt themselves, or to which they can demonstrate alternatives — but they are always inextricably in relationship with the City’s bureaucracy. It sets the limits on the field of action and many of the discursive possibilities as well. All of the organizations examined have a main goal of increasing social good through attempts to change the material behavior of citizens. Both the gardens and aerosol art projects funded did so with the express promise of creating more ideal subjects, by encouraging the consumption of healthier food or decreasing the occurrence of tagging on public property. These smaller behavior changes, and the physical changes to the city meant to encourage them such as gardens and murals, change the landscape of the city in ways that are meant to specifically combat “blight,” in both its economic and physical forms. The “zones of obscurity” discussed in the previous chapter are tools employed to accomplish these transformations of blight spaces through: strategic ignorance; classification as a tool to create invisibility; ways that race, class and ethnicity are overlooked yet encoded in bureaucratic processes; and the inability of those within bureaucracy to see bureaucratic processes clearly. These are both active and passive, conscious and unconscious ways in which difficult relationships are navigated. Should we view public-nonprofit collaborations as a new form of neoliberalism? Although these collaborations are presented as new and progressive solutions, I think in large part they replicate the overall neoliberal push in local governments since the 1970s. A key question is whether the publics served by cities and nonprofits necessarily the same “public.” I would argue that although they attempt to be the same public, nonprofits simply do not have the reach nor the mandate to ensure the full participation of all aspects of society, and when they attempt to employ city-mandated community outreach in good faith , they necessarily only reach a small slice of the public.

Access and representation cannot help but shift under new control of space, usually towards those publics who choose to engage with the nonprofits. The City must maintain at least an attempt at protecting the rights and access of all of its citizens; the nonprofits are less compelled to do so. Governmentality links race, space and power, using the tools of blight classification and neoliberalism. Bureaucratic imaginings have material effects and co-produce space, often reinforcing racial divides with or without the intention to do so because these imaginings occur within an already existing framework of structural racism and privilege. In the next chapter, we see how our bureaucratic framework was applied on the ground in a city-nonprofit collaboration. We examine in more ethnographic detail the Urban Farm project that arose from Union & Fitzgerald City Parks, and how material changes to the landscape impacted neighborhood race and class divisions.The first identified gardening movement was a response to the Panic of 1893 and included Detroit’s mayor encouraging individuals to plant “potato patches,” to great success . The city of Detroit cultivated 455 acres of vacant land and provided seed potatoes to 945 families, after which the idea of potato patches were replicated in several large cities throughout the country . Even in this earliest instance of a gardening movement as a solution to a crisis, we see the beginnings of gardens as a form of discipline and the production of subjects. The movement’s organizers conceived gardens as a form of “work relief” and a way to instill self-respect and independence among the poor . By “instilling self-respect,” a phrase that frequently arose during the next century of gardening movements, they meant cultivating an Anglo-Saxon work ethic along with the cultivation of potatoes. Gardening was deeply intertwined with race and class anxieties over immigration and overcrowding during the 1890s, which were deemed a threat to social order and national identity. A gardening proponent in 1910 argued that gardens were used “to teach [the poor] in their work some necessary civic virtues: private care of public property, economy, honesty, application, concentration, self-government, civic pride, justice, and the dignity of labor and the love of nature . . .” . Many of these benefits would still be cited by community garden boosters of today, perhaps using slightly different terms; the most relevant to the study at hand is the first listed, “private care of public property,” seen at Union Plaza Urban Farm. Gardens were repeatedly seen as a crucial “buffering mechanism,” softening the blow of economic collapse as social service networks were strained to their breaking point . Other surges of national gardening occurred successively in response to twentieth century crises. During World War I, patriots were encouraged to create Liberty Gardens through a massive national marketing campaign. Relief gardens were created as a response to the Great Depression, with some individual plots created and others set up according to an “industrial plan,” which attempted to mimic factory work with the goal of preparing gardeners for such work when it became available, a clear use of gardens in the creation of capitalist subjects. Individual allotments during the Great Depression were intended to instill responsibility and independence and help delay application for direct poor relief .

The most recent community gardening movement has occurred since the seventies, which Pudup argues is not coincidental with the simultaneous emphasis on neoliberal ideologies and the decreasing role of the government during this time. A key part of neoliberalism is to cultivate an ethos of individual responsibility, and the trend towards nonprofits taking over key functions of state and city governments, as I examine in this dissertation, plant plastic pot is an important part of this ethos. Community gardens can be a perfect example of “when voluntary and third sector initiatives organized around principles of self-improvement and moral responsibility stand in for state sponsored social policies and programs premised on collective responses to social risk” . While community gardens today are often portrayed as an apolitical space of unalloyed positive benefit or a space of resistance against an industrialized food system, historically they have repeatedly been used as sites for the creation of desired subjectivities in the maintenance of the status quo. It is certainly possible that a garden can be of positive benefit to community members, a way of resisting an industrialized food system, and simultaneously a method of subjectification which reinforces the positions of those in power. I would argue that the Union Plaza Urban Farm Project achieves a complex mix of all three results.When City Slicker Farm decided to use gardens to address perceived socialills in West Oakland, the model they turned to was what they call the Community Market Farm. Vacant lots were fenced with posted volunteer hours and farm apprentices would plant beds using biointensive methods to produce high yields of nutrient-dense vegetables. The produce was weighed and measured, and then distributed at a weekly Saturday donation-based sliding scale farm stand. A tension over access was there from the beginning, built into City Slicker Farms’ chosen model where gardens were fenced for most of the week and only accessible with the mediation of someone from the nonprofit, yet still labeled “community” space. Rosenthal became the first Executive Director, and the nonprofit eventually created seven community market farms in West Oakland, mostly on land loaned to the nonprofit. Eventually, City Slicker Farms also created the Backyard Garden program to train residents to cultivate their own gardens. The mission of City Slicker Farms is “to empower West Oakland community members to meet the immediate and basic need for healthy organic food for themselves and their families by creating high-yield urban farms and backyard gardens.” The Union Plaza Urban Farm project eventually became the largest of these community market farms. In 2006, as recounted by City Slicker Farms’ Executive Director Barbara Finnin, the nonprofit was approached by West Oakland’s Councilperson, Nancy Nadel, who proposed a unique collaboration between City Slickers and the City of Oakland. The farm would create a special relationship between the city and a nonprofit, essentially allowing the nonprofit to take over apark owned by the city, which was unprecedented. Nadel offered City Slicker Farms control of two parks, Union Plaza & Fitzgerald Parks, in a traditionally low-income area of West Oakland near several scrap metal recyclers.Several times in the interview, Phrine referred to the idea that the City wanted the space “clean.” Nadel, based on the idea that this was a “blighted” area, gained City Council approval to use public Redevelopment5 funds to allow City Slicker Farms to turn a city park into a market garden; the produce would then be distributed free or sold on a sliding scale to neighborhood residents using their existing farm stand model. The Oakland City Council unanimously passed a resolution on March 31, 2009 allocating the redevelopment funds to create a community market farm at Union Plaza, administered by Oakland Parks & Recreation .6 As recounted by Barbara Finnin, City Slickers realized that they were entering into a neighborhood where tensions ran high between older and newer residents, across race lines, and along class divides. Before deciding to pursue the urban farm conversion, City Slicker employees met with local residents and park users to ask how they would feel about an urban farm in Union Plaza. CSF formed a Community Advisory Panel to involve local residents. As we will see later in the chapter, CSF employees themselves had varying perspectives on whether communities were actually engaged. However, they decided that the project would be more beneficial than detrimental to the neighborhood, and would transform the nonprofit’s vegetable production capacity by increasing their area of garden space by 40%. Finnin sums up the nonprofit’s rationale in this way: “This is a park where people are seeing problems and it’s an opportunity for actually community-building.