Navigating Fault Lines in the Food Solidarity Economy

Community-Supported Agriculture: Fault Lines

Community-supported agriculture at heart sustains small farms and agricultural producers through the collective sharing of risk and benefit: everyone shares the bounty of a bumper crop just as everyone shares the burden of a bad harvest. This solidarity relationship can be a lifeline for small farms that might otherwise go out of business after a bad year or are trying to diversify crop production through more holistic farming. As an alternative to conventional agriculture, CSAs have also been shown to offer savings for consumers while lowering carbon footprints by prioritizing local, organic, and fresh food.8 CSAs have greater spatial flexibility than many other organizations. Unlike food co-ops, CSAs do not need to invest in brick-and-mortar storefronts or maintain daily staffing at each drop-off location. And unlike community gardens, CSAs do not require prolonged access to arable urban land. In the majority of cases, the CSA farms themselves are located outside of cities and generally need merely to find temporary urban locations that are convenient for deliverers to transport the weekly food boxes and for consumers to pick them up. Drop-off locations consequently can and do shift each season, as does CSA membership, but community connections build up over time such that farmers and members shape one another in deep ways.

How, we ask, does the spatial distribution of CSAs across New York, Philadelphia, and Worcester reflect racial and socioeconomic status geographies? In Map 12, we plot the locations of CSA drop-off points against the distribution of white population within New York City and Philadelphia. We subsequently do the same for Worcester in Map 13.

The spatial distribution of CSA drop-off points in our larger cities, Philadelphia and New York, reveal a definite pattern. Map 12 shows evidence of racial fault line patterns in both cities, with most of the drop-off points located in relatively white neighborhoods. With few exceptions (5 percent in Philadelphia and 7 percent in New York), drop-off points are absent from heavily concentrated Black neighborhoods (i.e., where Black residents constitute at least two-thirds majority). Once we layer in data on poverty, we gain some more intersectional insight.

Table 3 shows how CSAs are distributed with respect to household income scaled relative to poverty levels.9 The patterns are starkest in Philadelphia—58 percent of CSA drop-off locations are in the most affluent neighborhoods. This suggests that CSAs are disproportionately used by higher-income populations despite the abundance of mainstream market food options available to them. A similar, albeit more muted, imbalance exists in New York. This pattern of CSAs catering to upper-middle-income households gained additional support in our qualitative conversations with leaders within the CSA movement who suggest that even inside lower-income neighborhoods, a disproportionate number of CSA members are probably those with higher incomes who do not reflect the median income profiles. In such neighborhoods, grocery stores can be of such poor quality that CSAs are the far better option for more affluent consumers seeking fresh produce.10

The CSA data for New York City and Philadelphia reveal a strong majority pattern in terms of race and socioeconomic status. The majority of CSA locations are in majority white neighborhoods, and membership is also drawn from upper-middle-income households. In Map 13, we map similar data for Worcester and find different spatial patterns that demonstrate how the size of a city can shape solidarity economy practices.11

The smaller size of Worcester appears to influence not only the scale of its CSA sector but also the character of CSA relations extending beyond the city boundaries. As Map 13 and Table 3 indicate, Worcester has only eleven CSA drop-off locations within the city limits that bring produce from six CSA farms outside the city. These cluster around the city’s center and are spread relatively evenly across neighborhoods having different racial concentrations. In addition to these drop-off locations, three CSA farms, including one urban residence that produces microgreens, provide home delivery. Those home-delivery services are not shown in Map 13 because they do not have a fixed distribution location in the city. Worcester’s small size makes such delivery practices more feasible than they would be in the larger urban scales of New York City and Philadelphia. Worcester’s smaller size also influences residents’ relationships to nearby CSA farms. Beyond the CSA drop-off locations within the city, there are also several CSA farms located outside the city that serve Worcester residents. Map 13 shows twelve CSA farms within fifteen miles of Worcester’s city center. Interestingly, only two of these deliver CSA produce to the city (either to drop-offs or home delivery). The others instead draw city residents directly to the farm or to drop-off locations outside the city. The picture shifts when we expand the radius. Most of the farms that deliver CSA produce into the city are actually located farther away. Of the nine additional CSA farms between fifteen and twenty-five miles of the city center, all but three deliver food to the city, and three have two or three drop-off locations, indicating the importance of urban residents to supporting their operations.12 For those who can afford it, proximity to farmland makes it easier for city residents to drive directly to nearby CSA farms, while farms farther from the city rely on drop-off locations or even home delivery to be accessible to city consumers. The smaller city size of Worcester affects the way that rural–urban divisions play out, something we also expect to be the case for smaller-sized cities elsewhere in the United States.13

Returning to our larger cities of New York and Philadelphia, data and maps reveal a stark pattern of racial and socioeconomic status segregation in the CSA sector. The fault line pattern visible in broader society is evident even though the spatial flexibility of the CSA model makes it possible for farmers to choose drop-off points in any neighborhood, including low-income communities and communities of color. In practice, we find CSA drop-offs are disproportionately located in affluent white regions. There are several reasons why this might be the case. The first has to do with the economics of the CSA model. The CSA model works well for a multiperson household that would otherwise spend twice as much on a weekly selection of produce at the grocery store, since the share offers savings in comparison to market rates. CSAs, however, are structured around members investing lump sums at the beginning of the season. For instance, in 2023 the Chelsea CSA in New York offered a twenty-two-weekly share for $625, and while this is one of the few CSAs in the city that offer a sliding scale upon application, the reduced rate is still a significant sum of $525. Lower-income households are less able to afford large lump sum payments like these.

A second set of reasons has to do with the cultural dominance of particular foods within the alternative food system. The CSA model requires a transformation of eating habits. By design, CSAs grow ecologically relevant and seasonally specific foods, not necessarily foods that local residents are already familiar with. To alleviate the stress that comes with asking people to change their palate and eating habits according to the growing season, CSAs often offer recipes for less well-known vegetables in weekly boxes. For instance, an early June vegetable box (enough for two to four people) from Chelsea CSA contains Chinese napa cabbage, garlic scapes, red curly kale, salvia edible flowers, and mizuna, among other products. These offerings may not accord with the diets or culinary practices of many, and learning to prepare them takes time and effort, something that acts as less of a constraint on more affluent households. Further, this type of CSA food production frequently differs from the grocery needs and preferences of many Black and Latinx households.

A final set of reasons has to do with the relational networks connecting farms to urban communities. In our discussions, CSA practitioners commonly reported selecting drop-off locations based on personal connections. One CSA practitioner in Worcester, for example, reported using personal friendships to establish drop-off points at two local universities and a gastropub. But relying on such connections often inadvertently reproduces underlying social divides. The racialized history of agriculture, including the dispossession of millions of acres owned by Black farmers and the imposition of barriers to land acquisition for nonwhite farmers, has resulted in rural farms being largely white operations, especially in northern states.14 Due to racial and socioeconomic status fault lines running through broader society, white-owned CSA farms have fewer social networks in Black and Latinx neighborhoods to establish drop-off sites. Thus, while CSAs bridge divides between urban and rural communities (most sharply in Worcester, since many urban consumers go straight to the farm itself for their shares), they are less effective at bridging racial and socioeconomic status fault lines within cities themselves.

For the reasons we’ve outlined above, CSAs are an element of the solidarity economy that is particularly likely to both reproduce and be reproduced by race and poverty fault lines. CSAs, like other elements of the so-called alternative food movement such as local farmers’ markets, are often perceived as spaces of white privilege, and for good reason.15 But is whiteness intrinsic to the CSA model? A look at both the historic origins of CSAs and their evolution in urban spaces, including in the cities we’ve studied, would lead us to say no. Though it is not often acknowledged, there are historical links between the CSA model and struggles for Black liberation.16 The introduction of the CSA model in the United States can be traced to Alabama and the innovations of Black agronomist Booker T. Whatley. As a professor of agriculture at Tuskegee University, Whatley witnessed the community’s neglect of local farms and the difficulties many Black farmers faced in accessing governmental loans to support their farming operations. To promote the survival of Black farms, he developed what he called “Clientele Membership Clubs” in the 1960s to connect small farms with local market networks.17 Whatley’s version of the CSA is instructive: it gives us a different historical starting point for imagining how the CSAs might be enrolled into a food solidarity economy as a different political project.

Modern Black and Brown farmers in our case study cities and across the country are working to carry forward that tradition. Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York, for example, centers Afro-Indigenous farming techniques along with the CSA model and leads intensive institute training to reverse the decline of landowning farmers of color.18 Inspirational farmers of color are having more justice-based dialogue with shareholders about the produce that works for different racialized communities. In New York City, Black Yard Farm Collective and Rock Steady Farm are two examples of BIPOC-led farms using CSAs to connect to low-income communities in the city. In Philadelphia, FarmerJawn is a Black-owned farm doing similar work promoting land justice and tackling food insecurity within communities of color experiencing poverty. Likewise in Worcester, Nuestro Huerto was an innovative CSA involving a local Latinx church congregation (Iglesia Casa de Oracion) to the benefit of a community surviving in an otherwise toxic environment.19 All three cities show us how some CSAs are growing against a majority trend in the sector. They know the problem and are busy at work doing something about it.

These examples illustrate how CSAs, like other solidarity economy practices, can intentionally redress race and socioeconomic status fault lines by diversifying the networks of people they connect. Such counterexamples teach us that neither the fault line pattern nor whiteness are intrinsic to how CSAs function. So even when we see a strong fault line pattern (in that the majority of CSA participants are both white and upper-middle income), we can see the emergence of counterpatterns by Black- and Latinx-led farms and organizations running CSAs to encourage equity and food sovereignty in disadvantaged urban communities. Such CSAs are evidence of a pattern in which communities defend themselves against food apartheid by building a solidarity-based economic practice that can actually be traced back to an old tradition like Whatley’s buying club.

We next turn to community gardens, which reveal a contrasting pattern to the majority trend of CSAs. Community gardens are no less marked by fault lines, but for them, it is communities of color that predominate as participants.

The Other Side of the Fault Line: Community Gardens

Gardening in urban environments is a practice as old as urbanization. Since the late nineteenth century, interest in community gardening in U.S. cities has come in waves reflecting shifting needs and different societal functions. During the Great Depression, gardening was incorporated into relief programs as a source of subsistence and as an antidote to idleness. During the world wars, “war gardens” in WWI or “victory gardens” as they were called during World War II were used as supplementary food sources while conventional agricultural supplies were redirected to the war effort abroad. Much of today’s community garden movement nonetheless has its roots in the new urban activism of the 1970s and 1980s, when communities turned to gardening as a grassroots response to deindustrialization and as a way to connect to the land, provide food, create community cohesion, and revitalize derelict urban spaces.20 Since then, participation in community gardening has ebbed and flowed with mainstream socioeconomic conditions, with the most recent spikes of interest coming after the 2008 recession and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

Within this history, community gardens vary in their mission, functions, and products. Community gardens are commonly organized either collectively or via individual/household allotment, governed with varying degrees of formality, sometimes with help from local government, but at other times starting on abandoned land for which the gardeners lack a title. Some gardeners participate as a hobby, whereas others rely on gardens as a major food source. Some grow ornamental plants, but most grow food for themselves or to share with the surrounding community. Some gardens reflect deep commitments to education, food justice, and racial empowerment, whereas others are less politically engaged.

Across this diversity, the community garden emerges as a space in which everyday solidarity expresses itself organically, with gardeners sharing space, tools, labor, produce, and knowledge. Gardens also provide important noncommodified community space for learning and socializing. Community gardens decommodify the production and consumption of fresh produce and shift the control of land directly into the hands of communities. There is a strong trend of food production in community gardens in the cities we consider. In New York City, our community garden database shows that 72 percent of all community gardens are used to produce food. In Philadelphia, Domenic Vitiello and Michael Nairn estimated that 60 percent of community gardens were food-producing in 2008.21 More recent studies suggest the percentage is even higher.22 In Worcester, 91 percent of community gardens are overseen by the Regional Economic Council (REC), whose main purpose is to employ youth in BIPOC and low-income neighborhoods in the production of organic produce.23

What is striking of course is the location of community gardens and their importance, particularly in low-income communities. Table 3 shows us how gardens are especially prevalent in low-income communities and trickling to a paltry few in the very wealthiest. In New York City, the majority of food-producing gardens are in neighborhoods near the poverty line. In Philadelphia, over half of the city’s food-producing community gardens are in neighborhoods with annual per capita income of $18,000 or less.24 What’s more, we find that these percentages are increasing: between 2010 and 2019, the number of community gardens in low-income New York City neighborhoods has grown faster than in other neighborhoods, while the number in the wealthiest neighborhoods has contracted. This trend points to the importance of gardening as a solidarity economy practice that responds to needs for fresh foods and social space in the most marginalized communities. Map 14 maps community gardens against income to show the prevalence of community gardens in low-income communities, a visual complement to Table 3.

These maps show that the overwhelming majority of community gardens in New York and Philadelphia are located in lower-income neighborhoods. Furthermore, in both cities, the distribution of community gardens is virtually the inverse image of the CSA distribution, at least when considering the near-poverty threshold. In New York, 68 percent of CSAs are in neighborhoods with median income above 200 percent of the poverty line, whereas 68 percent of community gardens are in neighborhoods below that threshold. In Philadelphia, we find a similar inversion: 76 percent of CSAs are in neighborhoods with median income above 200 percent of the poverty line, whereas 75 percent of community gardens are in neighborhoods below that level. While the same comparison doesn’t work as well for Worcester given the different spatial pattern of CSAs, it does fall right in line when it comes to community gardens, and this much is true across all three cities: the majority of community gardens cluster in neighborhoods near the poverty line.

Given the high correlation of race and poverty, there should be no surprise that racial patterns are evident in the data. In Maps 15, 16, and 17, we map community gardens against data on Latinx and Black neighborhoods. In both Philadelphia and New York, approximately 85 percent of gardens are located in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are people of color. Many of these are in neighborhoods where the racial composition is especially concentrated.25 In Philadelphia, approximately half of the gardens are in neighborhoods where over two-thirds of the population is Black. By contrast, barely 10 percent of community gardens are in neighborhoods where the population is two-thirds white.

This general pattern is largely replicated in Worcester. There is a definite clustering of gardens (40 percent) in neighborhoods with a population that is majority people of color. While the parent organization Regional Environmental Council’s main objective continues to be food justice as one aspect of social justice, the gardens themselves have been opportunistically located on unused municipally owned land.26 Despite having a large West African immigrant population from Ghana, there are no neighborhoods in Worcester that are majority Black, and gardens do not appear to correlate with significant Black populations in Worcester.

What explains the spatial distributions of community gardens? In contrast to the location of CSA drop-off points, which might vary from year to year, community gardens tend to be fixed in place in city space and more rooted through time. While CSA drop-off points may function for a few hours each week, gardens invite attention, interaction, and care across every season of the year. Given that land can be hard to come by in densely populated areas of a city, it makes sense that we would find more community gardens in areas of the city where open land is more available. In all three cities, these tend to be lower-income areas that have experienced redlining, deindustrialization, and other racialized forms of organized abandonment.

As discussed in chapter 2, redlining practices both were produced by and helped reproduce racially segregated and progressively more impoverished cities. With an exodus of industry and people from cities, tens of thousands of vacant lots were left in their wake, especially in previously redlined areas. Disproportionately located in low-income neighborhoods of color, many of these vacant lots turned into dumping grounds and dangerous sites for illegal activity, as depicted in our introductory vignette about Norris Square. At the extreme, in Philadelphia, where the struggle with poverty and deindustrialization has been particularly prolonged and acute, there were still an estimated forty thousand vacant lots as recently as 2010.27 In what are otherwise highly adverse poverty conditions, the availability of vacant land has enabled resourceful neighborhood residents and activists to convert blight into collective possibility in the form of gardens.

The concentration of community gardens in low-income neighborhoods correlates to the deprivation and economic need arising in such neighborhoods. As Vitiello and Nairn suggest, gardens in lower-income areas serve different functions in their communities than gardens in higher-income areas do.28 They offer invaluable green space that lower-income families otherwise don’t have access to. Additionally, the food grown in such gardens tends to play more essential economic roles in the extended families and social networks of gardeners. As alluded to earlier, community gardens tend to offset the lack of savings and disposable income in low-income communities by substituting community-grown produce for food items that would otherwise be purchased from grocers, if at all. As one local garden coordinator in Philadelphia stated, “I cannot convince a high quality grocery store chain to open stores in Southwest, nor can I lure the education or jobs we would need to keep strong business in our community, but I can grow a seed.”29 Put simply, one reason gardens are prominent in low-income communities is that the land is available for them to meet food needs otherwise not met within the conventional economy.

In addition to the economic benefits outlined above, cultural factors contribute to the concentration of gardens in low-income neighborhoods of color. Many gardens tap into food-growing traditions within Black, Latinx, and immigrant communities. They provide opportunities to grow culturally specific foods that can be difficult to find in local grocery stores. Moreover, many of these communities have been heavily shaped by the racialized migration patterns of the previous century and retain ties to the agrarian practices of their forebears, whether those be drawn from the southern United States or the countryside of Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, or any number of other world regions. Several studies have drawn particular attention to the histories of community gardening among Puerto Ricans specifically.30 Latinx community gardens, such as the Norris Square gardens described in the introduction of this book, have been noted not only as places where culturally important foods such as tomatillos, purslane, and okra are grown but also as community gathering places where social events (birthday parties, quinceañeras, community meetings, and picnics) are often held.31 Their very publicity and rootedness in the neighborhood helps to shore up a sense of cultural community. Given the culturally specific values that gardens provide to particular ethnic communities, it makes sense that gardens would be concentrated in those ethnic enclaves. In New York this relationship is reflected in the heavy clustering of gardens in the Dominican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the Bronx.32 In Philadelphia similar patterns are evident in the dense clustering of gardens in the mostly Puerto Rican barrio located in the Kensington area of Northeast Philadelphia.

This same connection between gardening and culturally appropriate foods finds a different expression in the many gardens operating in Worcester, particularly in the Main South area dominated by the Latinx community. The REC’s gardening initiatives grew from a decades-long commitment to environmental justice concerns, but its gardening program has increasingly become attached to forms of economic innovation. The REC helps to promote and organize a farmers’ market in the Main South community and was among the very first in the state to accept government food aid. In addition to this long-running market, the REC has experimented with BIPOC youth-led entrepreneurship. The example of REC in Worcester, and other initiatives above in New York City and Philadelphia, speaks to a consistent undercurrent of work and organizing culminating in community gardens concentrated in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

All three of our cities have seen the rise of vibrant multiracial urban agriculture movements led by a new generation of Black and Latinx urban growers who are highly attuned to solidarity economy principles. Their neighborhoods are often the sites of food justice activism that directly seeks to build and defend community gardens in neighborhoods of color. As activists and popular educators, many of these growers embrace a new form of Black agrarianism that ties racial justice to land justice and food sovereignty and that emphasizes gardens and farms as educational spaces where plant-growing is elevated as a healing practice for communities worn down by white supremacy and anti-Black racism. For some, the transmission of African ancestral farming and culinary wisdom to Black youth is perceived as a necessary part of liberation and intergenerational renewal.33 This movement is building up systems of encouragement and support for community gardening in Black and Latinx communities. Specific gardens have become important educational and advocacy hubs with regional reach.34 The gardens generated by these movements aim not merely to fill unmet economic needs; they are deliberate efforts to empower otherwise marginalized communities and assert local control over land and food systems.35 You won’t see these as much in white neighborhoods because they don’t face the same systems of oppression that motivate the action.

The high concentration of community gardens in low-income neighborhoods of color is suggestive of what we term “the bulwark pattern,” but it does not imply that all such gardens are actively and self-consciously confronting racial capitalism. Nor does it mean that community gardens don’t perform race and socioeconomic status in exclusionary ways.36 In our interviews, we have heard stories of Black gardeners skirting the white-dominated gardens in their own neighborhoods and traveling significant distances to join Black-led gardens where they feel more at home. There is also evidence that community gardens can contribute to forms of “green” gentrification, wherein the greening of a neighborhood attracts developers and new, more affluent populations who displace established residents. Studies of New York City gardens, for instance, have found positive correlations between proximity to community gardens and growth in both property values and per capita income.37 In interviews, some gardeners have openly acknowledged this tension, as one leader of a mostly white community garden in South Philadelphia describes:

There’s been an influx of young people and the space is limited because [the neighborhood] is now built out. It wasn’t like when we were starting when there was a lot of vacant land, there were also vacant buildings. That’s just all gone. . . . Every lot has been filled with some kind of housing. Now, the only thing people have been building here is single-family luxury housing. So where there used to be a lot of empty lots in the neighborhood, there aren’t anymore. . . . The garden has certainly made this neighborhood more desirable. . . . In some ways, we were the first of the gentrifiers.38

Another Philadelphia example reveals how race and socioeconomic status divisions can transform garden and neighborhood space over time. The Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden is a landmark garden located in a formerly disinvested but rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of South Philadelphia. Founded in 1976, the garden initially brought together what one founder described as “an uneasy mix of younger ‘pioneers’ and older African American and ethnic residents and business people.”39 Over time, however, the neighborhood gentrified and whitened, and so too did the garden. As older members left, the garden struggled to recruit younger African American gardeners, including from the lower-income public housing units across the street. As reported by the African American pastor of the local Methodist church, Black residents do not feel welcome in the garden. One 2020 study of the garden describes the dynamics at play:

As the Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden has whitened over time, its role in the community has transformed from a social space for residents to replicate their cultural practices to a niche, hobby-centric space for people to grow exciting food and experience advanced agricultural and culinary techniques. At the garden’s conception, African American gardeners used the space to continue honoring their agricultural roots. They grew culturally relevant foods and pioneered the yearly barbeque. A southern flair characterized the early barbeques, and attendees enjoyed a whole roasted pig and a potluck-style meal. . . . Nowadays, the event has become significantly more “high brow”: chefs have taken over food preparation, though people still bring their own supplementary dishes. . . . The changing role of the garden reflects the whitening of both the community and the garden and suggests why African Americans do not feel comfortable being members.40

The Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden has done really valuable work, including contributing to the creation of the local land trust. The garden was once an important intercultural space where growers of different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds intermingled, grew, harvested, and dined together. Over the span of a few decades, though, it has changed into a physical manifestation of racial and socioeconomic status fault lines. Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden is now a space where Black gardeners no longer feel as welcome as they once did and where older liberal-minded white gardeners find themselves unsure of what they are doing wrong. The lessons are multiple and highlight complexity rather than easy critiques or eulogies. Progress does not move in a uniform direction, and the evolution of entities is shaped by multiple neighborhood-level changes (i.e., wholescale racial and socioeconomic status compositional changes). Another lesson to be learned here is that the fault line patterns we have identified in this book can unintentionally reinscribe themselves into places and relationships that are endeavoring to move beyond division. A single community garden cannot be expected to fight off transformations at the level of entire blocks and neighborhoods. For this reason, cognizance of deep divisions needs to be an active, continual part of solidarity practice.41

We’ve seen previously how community gardens can serve as sites of culture preservation and bulwarks for communities marked by disinvestment. We’ve also seen how they can be rich contact zones and learning spaces where growers of different backgrounds and identities develop solidarities and build awareness of food justice. Here, however, we find a cautionary tale about how gentrification and intertwining power dynamics of socioeconomic status, race, and culture can present barriers to the diversification of gardens. We also witness a different sort of edge zone dynamic where some gardens do not merely form along the edges of demographically distinct neighborhoods but also function (advertently or inadvertently) as cutting edges of neighborhood transformation and displacement. All of this speaks to the way that community gardens themselves are always about more than just food. The fight for community gardens is more often than not a fight for land; land is central. It is the basis for types of oppression including imperialism, redlining, displacement, and toxic abandonment, but also redevelopment.

Food Fight: Resist, Build, Transform

We have thus far argued that CSAs and community gardens tend to fall on opposing sides of racial and socioeconomic status fault lines that cut through contemporary U.S. cityscapes. The implication is that such fault lines also cut through the solidarity economy. As we observed at the outset, however, these are patterns, not destinies. Fault lines indicate tendencies, not necessities. There is nothing inherent in these solidarity economy forms that alone suffices to make them vehicles of food justice. True solidarity economy requires intention, learning, and enduring effort. Inevitably, community gardens and CSAs are influenced by the particular geographies and social fields in which they operate. The underlying forces of racial capitalism are larger than any single initiative. For this reason, the labor of transforming fault lines and building solidarity food economies necessitates the forging of connections among initiatives and across sectors.

In all three of our research sites, citywide networks and support organizations provide connective tissue for the urban agriculture and food justice movements, helping to shift the operations of the food solidarity economy from the neighborhood level to the urban scale. Drawing from their experience primarily in Boston, Penn Loh, Boone W. Shear, and Julian Agyeman describe an emerging food solidarity ecology in which networks of food growers, institutional purchasers, and composters work to develop socially just and transformative food economies.42 In each of the cities we consider here, similar efforts that work across different organizational forms, places, and communities with a mind toward transformational change in food systems are already underway.

Consider, for instance, the role played by a New York nonprofit organization named Just Food. Maintaining a network of over 120 CSA groups and thirty community-run farmers’ markets, Just Food has made CSAs a centerpiece of its campaign to uplift New York’s historically marginalized communities who have been victimized by food systems and urban divestment. Critical of food apartheid and embracing of the food sovereignty paradigm, Just Food seeks to directly address the inability of low-income families to invest in CSAs by working with farmers to accept low-income shareholders receiving government food aid.43 This means working with farmers to get them through a labyrinthine and expensive bureaucracy (with specialized $1,200 machines to process benefits, a dedicated phone number, etc.) and to ensure government resources for small local farmers unable to afford all of this infrastructure. Just Food also devotes resources to community food-education programs (like Community Chef Training), to incorporate plant-based diets that fit into the cultural preferences of communities of color. Acknowledging the affluence and whiteness of the mainstream CSA movement, the organizers at Just Food seek to bridge and transform racial and socioeconomic status fault lines by supporting CSAs in areas where food apartheid occurs. Their efforts not only help to expand the presence of CSAs; they also help ensure that the focus remains on equity and healthy food as rights, not privileges.

In Worcester, REC oversees sixty community gardens. REC’s executive director, Steve Fischer, explains the organization’s philosophy as follows: “You resist the things that need resistance, you engage with the things that deserve engagement and where things are at and where people are at, and then you try and also create alternatives at the same time, but those three things have to be concurrent. I don’t think one is more important than the other. They’re important concurrently.”44 As we will discuss further in chapter 6, this sort of “build and defend” philosophy is vital for efforts to realize the solidarity economy’s emancipatory potential. A decade later, the REC is continuing that fight, campaigning for community gardens connected to farmers’ markets, food justice, youth employment, and community development in low-income communities of color. The organization says that “the land provides us with a place to stand.” Food is what nourishes us and provides us with a context to build new social relationships, other economies, and other cities. In this sense, food justice is always about more than just food or gardens.

In Philadelphia, a citywide coalition of support organizations helps to sustain urban agriculture in the city. This coalition includes Soil Generation, a grassroots Black- and Brown-led cooperative of growers; the Neighborhood Gardens Trust, a nonprofit land trust that has preserved over fifty community gardens across the city; the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, whose Garden Justice Legal Initiative offers pro bono legal support and advocacy to community gardeners and market farmers in the region; the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society; and a local network of academic researchers.45 Operating individually and collectively, these actors have played crucial informational and coordinating roles. They foster connections among the city’s gardens and farms and steward information flows between the grassroots and municipal levels, alerting local growers about relevant policy discussions and threats to their gardens and farms, coordinating collective actions to protect untitled gardens, and helping to communicate to policymakers the value of urban agriculture for neighborhood health.

In pursuing this work, they have helped to establish urban agriculture as a potent constituency that city government is accountable to.46 One particular way they have made urban agriculture politically relevant is through data management. Having constituted itself as the Philadelphia Garden Data Collaborative, the coalition generated and maintains the city’s most comprehensive geospatial database of community gardens. Central to its management of this database is a commitment to ensuring the data are only used in the service of gardeners and not in ways that exploit the vulnerability that comes from precarious land situations. The data, for example, have been used to identify and map gardens most at risk from gentrification and most in need of protective actions. Sometimes the initiative comes from a support organization like the Neighborhood Gardens Trust. Other times, initiative comes from an individual garden, such as we saw with the Iglesias Garden, which reached out to the data collaborative for assistance in identifying, mapping, and contacting gardens across the city that are similarly threatened by U.S. Bank liens on land parcels.

Without these networking organizations, crafting solidarity cities would be much harder. They provide the connections that make solidarity at the urban scale possible. As the above examples illustrate, networking ecosystems vary across urban contexts. The sort of networking performed by REC in Worcester, for instance, is quite distinct from the roles played by the Philadelphia Garden Data Collaborative. What they have in common is the way they foster solidarity across and not merely within particular gardens. While they operate at a higher level, they do not necessarily transcend racial and socioeconomic status fault lines. The networks are often themselves agonistic sites where different stakeholders holding different positions, identities, and histories contest and negotiate definitions, agendas, strategies, and tactics. These contestations include ongoing struggles to place food justice at the center.

In this chapter, we have shifted attention away from the solidarity economy as a whole and toward the spatial footprint of individual sectors of the food solidarity economy. The fault line patterns identified here provide a spatial context for understanding a politics of solidarity, including both the challenges and the opportunities of generating solidarity relationships across significant social divides. While our principal focus is on the “where” of the solidarity economy, the questions we asked at the outset of this chapter are fundamentally political ones: Who is involved in these efforts? Whose agenda is being pursued here and to what end? The potential of the solidarity economy’s normative commitments hangs in the balance. For us, the where and the how are intimately tied to place. Exploring these patterns more closely and in relation to specific sectors allows us a better understanding of divergent possibilities. As most U.S. cities have become even more segregated over the past half century, we should not be surprised that fault line patterns persist in urban landscapes, dividing cities by race and socioeconomic status. Nor should we be surprised that solidarity economies bear the imprint of such divides and the historical forces that have given rise to them.

In our study, we find food solidarity economy sectors are marked by underlying patterns of segregation. Our spatial analysis of CSA drop-off points reveals how social networks connect rural farmers to white middle-income consumers even as lower-income neighborhoods of color fall largely outside of CSA service areas. If CSA membership tends to fall on whiter and more affluent sides of racial and socioeconomic status fault lines, we have shown how community gardens reveal a contrary pattern. In each of the cities we studied, community gardens are heavily concentrated in communities of color and lower-income communities. The particular prominence of food-producing gardens in such communities and the unique cultural functions that gardens serve there underscore the significance of gardens as constitutive elements in the livelihood and survival strategies of many low-income populations.

In one sense, these spatial patterns are diagnostic, offering insight into the location of solidarity economies and the tendencies among different sectors. The fault line pattern provides a sober assessment of how race and socioeconomic status division continue to be inscribed into the food solidarity economy. But in another sense, fault lines are important because they help us to identify those settings where racial capitalist patterns do not hold, alerting us to places where communities attempt to repattern the urban landscape by means of solidarity. This chapter shows, for example, that certain CSAs deliberately seek to locate themselves in areas where residents attempt to build connections between the alternative food movement, communities of color, and those living with low incomes. Through examples like the efforts of the REC in Worcester and the Neighborhood Gardens Trust in Philadelphia, we can see community gardens that aim not just to provide a space of material and psychic survival but to be nodal points in an effort at system change.

The principal message of this chapter is not that the spatial distribution of CSAs and community gardens reproduces the fault lines that run through the rest of society. Without losing sight of the reality of fault lines, we tell a story in which a food solidarity economy movement aims to transform the spaces and relationships that meet our most fundamental needs. The examples we’ve reviewed in the latter half of the chapter enjoin us to consider how both community gardens and CSAs can acknowledge, engage, and unmake the hierarchies and divisions that shape the contexts in which they operate. These fault lines, unlike geologic ones, are not set in stone. The point is not to accept, ignore, evade, or simply rise above them. The aim is instead to transform them—to both fight for and build a solidarity food economy. In this process, other patterns come into view that we will consider in the chapters that follow. In this chapter, we’ve seen how both CSAs and community gardens can serve as bulwarks against food apartheid, food and land insecurity, displacement by developers, and a food system disconnected from local ecosystems. We have highlighted the efforts of urban Black agrarian movements to build new networks of Black and Brown people at the center of the fight for local food sovereignty. We have encountered food initiatives that generate spaces of contact and mutual learning due to their physical locations in border zones between differently constituted communities. In the next chapter, we address this idea of border zones more fully as it pertains to the cooperative sector.