The primary goal of this paper is to understand whether there is a connection between the growing practices organizations and businesses use and the themes present on websites, especially those associated with justice. This paper quantitatively grounds further discussion of the discursive realities of urban agriculture in the second paper, “Thinking and doing justice: urban agriculture in San Diego County.” Using three case studies chosen based on their online discursive representations , socio-spatial settings, and growing characteristics, I examine how local urban agriculture organizations, including soilless and soil-based, define and practice justice. This paper takes a reflexive approach to justice that moves away from “politics of perfection” and is embedded in spatial justice and a progressive sense of place that is “open and receptive to diversity and plurality” . Specifically, I assess the role of distribution, participation, and recognition in justice narratives and practices, paying special attention to the socio-spatial settings they are embedded in locally. Analysis centers around the role of land, labor, and capital—all of which are used in urban agriculture in various degrees and forms. Using a spatial perspective that acknowledges the importance of place and context, I explore the role of these three factors in producing opportunities and barriers for the three organizations to achieve justice, highlighting disparities in access, ownership, and management among them. Building on these case studies, the final paper, “Connecting the dots: local urban agriculture commodity circuits,” in collaboration with Dr. Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, use multi-locale ethnographic analysis to explore the complexities and nuances of justice across the three case sites’ entire commodity circuits. Here, we examine the complex symbolic and material lives of the urban agriculture commodities at these sites and the unique,square plant pots locally articulated networks of human and non-human actors that support them. These networks embody different, but often overlapping, urban political economies and political ecologies that materially and discursively shape food production, distribution, and consumption.

We juxtapose vignettes from various nodes along each case’s commodity circuit to understand the place-based socio-natural relationships, including those related to class and race, that scaffold urban agriculture commodities and invite readers to “connect the dots.” Together, the three papers present a thorough account of the idiosyncrasies of justice in the growing, and increasingly diverse, urban food movement in San Diego County. They acknowledge, but ultimately abandon divisive narratives that make a priori assumptions regarding the connection between growing method and justice and instead unravel the question of how different forms of urban agriculture contribute to justice. As will become clear in the coming chapters, justice is more complicated than an abstract concept or measurable outcome – it is a process that is constantly unfolding within and across space.Urban agriculture has a rich history in the United States, evolving from a 20th century strategy for self-sufficiency to a radical and alternative approach to food production in the 1960s and 70s . Today, urban agriculture is a highly-commoditized feature of the urban landscape and represents a growing sector of the green economy . It is also more diverse than ever – traditional, soil-based practices like community gardening and farming on vacant, urban lots are now accompanied by small-scale, technologically-advanced, soilless forms of food production like hydroponics and aquaponics that enable food to be grown on rooftops, in greenhouses and abandoned buildings, and in mobile shipping containers. These physical distinctions are also accompanied by interrelated variances in “scope, scale, type of access and for whom, participants, and goals” . For instance, the participants undoubtedly influence the narratives and goals of an urban agriculture project, whether it be environmental sustainability ; human health and well-being ; distributive justice and economic autonomy ; challenging historical legacies of privilege and marginalization ; and/or participation in the new food economy . Recently, researchers of urban agriculture have begun paying attention to actors’ motivations and the narratives underlying them . However, this literature focuses almost solely on actors operating in the traditional networks of urban agriculture practice , paying little attention to recent and innovative approaches to urban agriculture that incorporate technology.

This research provides an inclusive account of the narratives, specifically online web page content, of urban agriculture sites and organizations in San Diego County – a county with a rich agricultural tradition that possesses both soil-based and soilless forms of UA. We use a novel, computer-mediated method that reveals hidden trends and avoids unproductive researcher biases. The result is a map of discursive relationships that transcends what we call politics of technology in which the narratives, and ultimately goals and motivations, of urban agriculture sites are taken for granted based on their growing methods. This politics of technology, which classifies certain forms of growing as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based upon their use of technology, is misleading. Instead, we argue that there is nothing inherently good or bad about urban farming methods. To support this claim, in this chapter, I examine the motivations and goals that are highlighted in the narratives presented on the websites of San Diego’s main urban agriculture organizations. The primary focus here is the ways organizations represent themselves and their work to the general public, including volunteers, policy makers, and potential funders. In subsequent chapters, I will turn my attention to the practices of these organizations in an attempt to draw connections between discourses and on-the-ground activities. This means more inclusive research that recognizes the many forms of urban agriculture, including new soilless configurations. For the purpose of this research, we define soilless urban agriculture as urban food production in greenhouses and in/on buildings that use hydroponic, aquaponic, or aeroponic technology. This definition expands the idea of “ZFarming” – referring to farming on zero acres including “rooftop gardens, rooftop greenhouses, indoor farms, and other building-related forms” – by focusing less on the location of urban agriculture and more on the production process. It excludes vertical and rooftop farms that do not incorporate hydroponics, aquaponics, or aeroponics and avoids vague monikers like ‘innovative’ or ‘high-tech’ . The physical descriptors associated with soil-based and soilless urban agriculture differ in the literature .

Using the term ‘soilless’ allows us to untangle our classification from those already established in the urban agriculture literature and draw attention to actors, technologies, and spaces commonly missing in definitions of urban agriculture. Soilless urban agriculture is an emergent feature of the urban agriculture landscape throughout the Global North; however, it is still in an “early innovation phase” . Little scholarly literature exists on soilless urban agriculture save for a few examples on stakeholder perceptions , descriptions of practices and novelties , and assessments of environmental and economic impacts . What research does exist tends to conflate it with entrepreneurialism . Rooftop agriculture is gaining recognition for its community and social justice benefits ; however, growing food on rooftops represents only a small aspect of technological innovation in urban agriculture. Urban agriculture is also practiced in greenhouses, warehouses, and shipping containers with or without the use of soil. Further, soil-based rooftop gardens may not carry the same stigmatization as those that use soilless technologies. Recently, researchers have examined the contributions that aquaponics can make to urban food sovereignty in Milwaukee and Melbourne ; however, this type of research is largely lacking. Here, we attempt to correct the direction of the current research agenda. Just as the seminal critique by Born and Purcell challenged the politics of scale that privilege local food production as inherently better without critical inquiry into actors’ agendas, we challenge the politics of technology in urban agriculture that privilege certain production methods as ‘inherently better’ without examining actors’ narratives and practices. Researchers have examined politics of technology in the context of the design of information technology, exploring the construction of ontological differences between “technology” and “human work” . Latour has also grappled with ethical arguments around technology,plastic pots for planting arguing that it is how we engage with technology that tips the moral scales. We ultimately build on Born and Purcell , arguing that there is nothing inherently superior about any given urban growing process and confusing the means by which food is grown in the urban setting with the ends that growing food in cities aims to achieve is fallible. The use of advanced technology in urban agriculture requires a reflexive, critical examination regarding the diversity of participants, narratives, and practices in urban agriculture. This research is preceded by a growing body of literature that examines the motivations of actors involved in urban agriculture in cities throughout the Global North . Recent research on urban agriculture organizations and businesses throughout Canada and the United States provides an interesting national context, identifying a series of motivational frames based on survey responses including Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical frames . This research reveals some interesting patterns, but unfortunately does not include technologically-advanced forms of growing. This investigation of motivations links productively to an analysis of the topics underlying urban agriculture narratives. Indeed, narratives around health, sustainability, justices, and more, often are driven by and drive motivations; however, as researchers note, examining advertised narratives and stated motivations is not a substitute for examining practices – see discussion of justice by Cadieux and Slocum . To that effect, this research is but a step in the process of understanding urban agriculture in San Diego County. Our research takes a different approach from its predecessors who have used both qualitative and mixed method research designs. Inspired by the ‘digital turn’ in Geography , we identify the narratives underlying urban agriculture using an innovative, computer-mediated quantitative method that combines natural language processing, dimensionality reduction, and data visualization.

This approach recognizes that “socio-techno-cultural” artefacts like website content create digital geographies linked to, but independent from, physical location. Here, Tobler’s first law of geography – “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” – is transposed to the digital world where all content produced by urban agriculture growers and organizations is related, but near things are more related discursively than distant things. We chose this approach for its ability to unveil hidden patterns in advertised content that may go unnoticed in other approaches such as surveys and interviews and avoid the politics of technology.The analytical methodology we pursue in this study relies on the delineation of ‘canonical knowledge structures’ representing common and generally accepted ideas about urban agriculture within the academic literature. To that end, we employed topic modelling, specifically latent Dirichlet allocation . This method is a popular choice for distilling themes from a collection of documents referred to as a corpus . A corpus may consist of any group of texts including peer-reviewed literature , grey literature, blog post , and social media posts like tweets . LDA identifies common word associations among the documents and performs statistical extraction of latent topics . In addition, a set of topic loadings is computed for each document . In effect, a “hidden structure” is thus inferred from the corpus by the algorithm. The granularity of the model, i.e. the number of topics, is a crucial consideration and input parameter, balancing model fit and interpretability . The topic model provides the top words and top phrases associated with each topic, which can be used to develop a descriptive label for each topic. To build our reference model, we first determined a source of “canonical” knowledge on urban agriculture. Suitable, recognized content on urban agriculture exists in many forms including scholarly literature, federal and state program information, planning documents, and nonprofit sector descriptions, among others. We chose to focus specifically on scholarly literature which gains canonical status through the peer-review and editorial process and represents the diversity of discourse around urban agriculture. Articles span diverse fields including ecology, geography, sociology, urban planning, chemistry, and engineering. Using the Web of Science database, we topic-searched journal articles containing noun phrases of ‘city’ and ‘urban’ in combination with the nouns ‘agriculture’ and ‘farm*1’ which returned 1,414 records including the article title, abstract, and keywords. We did not use a geographic criterion for our search. This search was performed on September 11, 2017. Still a relatively new subject in academic inquiry – the oldest item in the corpus dating back to 1959 – literature on urban agriculture has proliferated in recent years.