Facilitating Urban Agriculture for Social Integration?

Melissa Murphy (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)

Urban agriculture (UA) initiatives offer an arena for individuals to act socially and shape the built environment. Municipalities often promote UA for social and environmental reasons. Socially, UA can contribute to food access, social meeting, and public health. Environmentally, UA can engage residents in spatial maintenance and use. Tied to multicultural integration, reduction of crime, and attractivity new developments, many presumptions exist regarding UA’s social benefits. This article joins a growing body of literature that critically considers how UA can contribute to social relationships across difference. UA’s reliance upon members means that they function as club goods, which can be associated with a variable degree of exclusivity. At the same time, engaged “clubs” contribute to spatial maintenance, as exploited in the neoliberal shift of urban space responsibilities from municipalities to volunteers. These tensions bring into particular question UA in public space, where UA might contribute alternatively towards bettering urban spaces for the general public and/or to excluding public users.

Understanding UA as a commons, the article offers an operationalization of subtractive and network effects that can contribute to existing literature about public space as well as UA. Subtractive effects show how few may benefit to the detriment of others, while network effects describe links that benefit a broader and more heterogeneous public. These concepts are deployed analytically in a comparison of how three Northern European municipalities facilitate UA and arbitrate between different interests. Drawing upon case studies from specific UA initiatives, the article illustrates how facilitation approaches support or detract from the different effects. Questions are posed over the extent that each municipality’s support, stipulations, and regulations work towards empoweringresidents and creating communities across diverse publics through UA. The article describes the need for conscientious facilitation of UA in areas where integration and social networking are intended outcomes.