You know, the vegetables are great up there, everything is so beautiful. And you come down, I think we get ours last off the truck” .A Latina wearing denim overalls raises her fist. In the other hand she grips a trowel. Flanking her left, an African American woman triumphantly holds up two ears of corn in one hand and grips a shovel in the other. To her right, an Asian American male wearing hip sneakers cradles a basket of brightly colored fruits and leafy greens. Behind the three, a sunburst rises from behind the silhouette of an urban skyline. People’s Grocery’s stylish logo, like that of several other food justice and urban agriculture organizations, evokes old-school Black, Brown, and Yellow Power bravado with Third World agrarian revolutionary aesthetics , hiphop cartoon superhero stylings, as well as the illustrated cornucopias that once plastered fruit crates and California booster posters . The small gardens run by organizations such as People’s Grocery are tucked away in the margins and interstices of an urban landscape of asphalt streets, houses of wood and stucco, and buildings of brick and concrete. While they produce only a minimal amount of fresh produce for residents living in Oakland’s food deserts, square flower bucket they have been central to raising awareness in the flatlands about food justice, nutrition, and urban sustainability.

By interlacing discourses of food, health, economic development, a safe built environment, and social justice, these organizations are explicitly drawing attention to the uneven distribution of resources in Oakland and the interconnectivity between the health of flatlands citizens and their ability to produce and access food. Like the powerful image depicted in the People’s Grocery logo, the mission statements of these organizations articulate food justice as a radical, urban, multi-ethnic movement committed to improving access to healthy food in the city’s flatlands. A discourse of equity, empowerment, sustainability, localization, health, and community figures centrally. Urban agriculture lies at the heart of their common mission to ensure equitable access to healthy food in Oakland’s poorest communities. Many of these organizations provide flatlands residents with fresh produce either via community supported agriculture subscriptions,61 sliding scale farm stands, or farmers’ markets. Most conduct some form of garden-based education, either directly with schools, building gardens that are used for hands-on learning about biology and nutrition, or by bringing community members to the gardens for workshops on sustainable gardening techniques. Others help community members build gardens in their backyards and provide one-on-one gardening mentorship. Some organizations also teach people how toprepare the food they grow or how to plan a balanced diet. The majority of these programs operate in West Oakland .While the mission of organizations such as these is clear, their multiple historical roots are less evident, buried and intertwined over the course of decades. In the previous chapter, I focused on the manifold ways in which capital shapes the urban environment, and more specifically the ways in which a lack of access to healthy food in the Oakland flatlands has been spatially demarcated and “produced” through a historical combination of redlining, racial covenants, deindustrialization and white flight, and construction of the freeway system and BART.

A complementary understanding of urban agriculture as a movement that explicitly responds to the inequity of food access demands a similar historical exploration. While a detailed, exhaustive history of urban agriculture in Oakland merits an entire book, my intent here is to build on the flatlands history laid out in Chapter 2 by tracing the various histories that converged to create the vibrant food justice-oriented urban agriculture movement we find in Oakland today.62 As I argue in the dissertation’s introduction, this kind of relational history is fundamental to understanding why urban agriculture has taken root at a particular historical conjuncture. In addition to uncovering the origins of urban agriculture in Oakland, this history also provides an analytical framework for understanding urban agriculture in other places. Several interconnected themes emerge over the course of this history. First, the growth of urban agriculture has relied on alliance-building across racial, ethnic, and class lines. In most cases, movements led by people of color succeeded in drawing attention to their causes and scaling up programs only through allying with white liberals, progressives, and radicals. This does not belie the authenticity of grassroots movements of color or call into question their intrinsic power or ability to mobilize for change. Rather, it is an indicator of the difficulty of marshaling material resources in devalued “lumpengeographies” such as the flatlands, as well as of the extent to which the struggles of people of color have been rendered invisible to white America. This leads to a second central theme: scalar politics. Through these multicultural alliances, urban agriculture activists were able to contest the material implications of flatlands devaluation in new political arenas. This “politics of scale”, according to Cox , entails the expansion of a local struggle to new extra-local “spaces of engagement” precisely to defend “spaces of dependence”, or the social relations specific to a particular place that mediate everyday life. Third, both the multi-ethnic alliances and cross-scalar politics allowed—and to a certain extent were prerequisite to—financial support.

In many cases funding came in the form of grants from private foundations and government agencies, providing not only much-needed money, but also a badge of legitimacy in the eyes of local government as well as other funders. Finally, urban agriculture’s growth as a movement—along with the trickle of capital that fed it— can clearly be linked to its increasing institutionalization. Urban agriculture has increasingly been advocated and practiced by small non-profit community-based organizations or non-governmental organizations . The rise of the “non-profit industrial complex” corresponds to the shifting urban political economy of the American city in the era of neoliberal rollback of the welfare state and roll out of non-profits, charities, and volunteerism to fill in the gaps . I contend that these four themes running through the story—alliance-building, crossscalar politics, funding, and institutionalization—were crucial to the current momentum surrounding urban agriculture in Oakland and ongoing efforts to scale it up. They also show that urban agriculture is more than simply community gardening. Rather, it is a networked alliance of people advocating food production in the city for different reasons. It is not just a bunch of dogooders practicing a form of lifestyle politics in an effort to mend the individual metabolic rift, nor is it just grassroots activists clamoring to crush corporate food system in an effort to protecting against social metabolic rift. There is a politics to scaling up that only a relational history can reveal. Understanding these four themes helps to explain how urban agriculture is dynamic, emerging as the culmination of multiple histories and relationships at a particular time and place. This perspective helps us move beyond the simplistic and dichotomous interpretations of urban agriculture that dominate both the academic literature and discussions on the street. Furthermore, understanding that the spread of urban agriculture has depended on the mobilization of multi-racial, cross-class alliances will be crucial to navigating the micro-politics of scaling up urban food production in the future. Rather than addressing the importance of these themes systematically , I have opted to tell the story in a more or less chronological fashion, flagging these themes as they arise at various points throughout the history. The chapter proceeds as follows. In Part 1 I focus on three seminal moments of radical activism that laid the groundwork for today’s food justice movement. I begin with the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program that began in 1968. This is a cornerstone of Oakland’s food justice story, black flower bucket arising in direct response to the devaluation of the flatlands described in the preceding chapter.

I then jump ahead to the Environmental Justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s, before discussing how EJ gave rise to an urban greening movement built on a foundation of racial and social justice. In Part 2, I explore how various groups converged on urban gardening as a strategy for social change, building on a long history of Bay Area gardening by school children, immigrants, and community groups, and tapping into a large network of sustainable agriculture education programs. In Part 3 I return to the current efforts by urban agriculture organizations in Oakland. I conclude in Part 4 by examining ongoing initiatives to scale up and institutionalize urban agriculture through local food policy and planning. Before proceeding with this history, I first want to offer a caveat. Throughout this history I focus primarily on the work of various organizations involved in urban agriculture in the East Bay flatlands. Indeed, on a certain level, this chapter serves as an institutional history of urban agriculture in Oakland and the East Bay. Unfortunately, this approach runs the risk of placing too much emphasis on organizations and their founders at the expense of the hundreds of women and men, organizational staff and volunteers, or community members with no affiliation whatsoever, whose visions, ideas, and labor were ultimately responsible for the real changes that took place. Given the grain of analysis, I have tried to include so-called key players. As a result, in the case of organizations, I risk giving too much credit to the figureheads and not enough to the numerous individuals who supported them materially and intellectually.Two decades later, the environmental justice movement in the East Bay arose in response to the disproportionate impact of toxics and air pollution on communities of color, particularly in the Oakland flatlands. Environmental contamination in Oakland followed the same spatial patterns as the poverty and racial segregation outlined in the previous chapter; the city’s industry has always been concentrated in the flatlands next to the Bay and adjacent to the Port, has been the epicenter of these struggles over air quality. Asthma rates for children are seven times higher in West Oakland than in the rest of the state due to the concentration of diesel exhaust and industrial fumes. Indeed, in West Oakland in the early 2000s, per capita exposure to diesel particulate emissions was five times higher than other parts of the city, and industries there released more than seventeen tons of toxics annually, almost as much as had been released by the facilities in the rest of the city . Poor people of color lacked the political clout to demand the enforced regulation of these industrial polluters. Furthermore, white, middle-class environmentalists tended to overlook “unnatural” urban areas, as they were more concerned with wilderness, open space, and the San Francisco Bay itself than the urban environments surrounding it . Drawing on the toxics movement that gathered momentum in the early ‘80s in the American South, the EJ movement mobilized a multi-racial coalition of various groups focusing on toxics, land use, transportation, public health, and job safety to hold industry and local governments responsible for systematic discrimination against low-income communities of color . Since the late 1980s grassroots organizations in the East Bay, often with the help of local environmental think tanks and policy “intermediaries”, have successfully fought polluters in the streets and courtrooms over the flatlands’ soils and the skies above, demanding protection for the health of the area’s residents. The campaign by People United for a Better Life in Oakland around the issue of lead poisoning, for example, won the creation of the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, which provides free lead screening. In another East Oakland case, a community group concerned with the health in the neighborhood surrounding Verdese Carter Park, the former site of a battery factory, successfully petitioned the EPA to force the factory’s parent company to remove 17,000 tons of contaminated soil and remediate dozens of contaminated homes in the vicinity . In the early 1990s, West Oakland residents, led by Chappell Hayes and the Clean Air Alternatives Program succeeded in forcing CalTrans to halt the rebuilding the Cypress Freeway through residential neighborhoods after its collapse in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and to re-site it through industrial areas . Later, a coalition of activists called West Oakland Neighbors was able to challenge the expansion of the Port of Oakland, winning the creation of waterfront green space and the re-routing of diesel trucks . In the early 2000s, the Chester Street Block Club Association and the Coalition for West Oakland Revitalization, working alongside Greenaction, succeeded in shutting down the Red Star Yeast factory, a facility that released over 33,000 tons of toxic emissions annually .