The Williamson Act, also known as the 1965 California Land Conservation Act, allows local governments to assess rural lands at lower rates in exchange for ten year agreements to keep land in open space or agricultural land use. This legislation was based on the recognition that the property tax rates are one of many barriers to for landowners engaging in imagining urban farms on their land. AB 551 passed through the California legislature with bipartisan support, but still requires counties who choose to opt in to create local policies that will facilitate private landowner participation. On August 7th 2014, San Francisco became the first county and city to implement AB 551 .For supporters the legislation aims to reduce a barrier in approaching landowners who may be interested in allowing urban farming on their property – the economic disincentive of paying market value property taxes for a land being used for agriculture which does not create the same revenues as other uses. Eli Zigas, SPUR Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager, acknowledges this legislation will not create a sufficient financial advantage to outweigh other options but it will reduce the costs to an owner which may soften their hesitation to a partnership with gardeners. Zigas claims this will not impact a large number of current or potential urban farms, maybe a few handfuls per city: “It’s a carrot to bring someone to the table,round pot but only in a few situations will it be enough to bring them to the table” . But Zigas argues it will make a difference for the projects it will impact.

One such project is the Urban Permaculture Institute, which is located on private property owned by local doctor Aaron Roland, who is currently committed to allowing the garden to continue on his land in order to improve food security and health food consumption within the city. Roland was quoted as saying, “There’s a huge opportunity cost in letting your property be used for a garden. I’m delighted that the property has some use, but I’m paying over $6,000 year for the privilege of saying no to high offers to sell it” . Garden projects in different parts of the Bay have been inspired by the legislation and are attempting to work with local officials towards implementation. Zach Lewis, of Garden to Table in San Jose, is hopeful that this will continue to build a good reputation and means for local developers to allow short to medium-term use of properties for farming . Landing strategies include the narratives and arguments by which gardeners understand and describe the importance of their work. Urban gardeners contextualize, make meaning of, and communicate their work through discursive framing. They appeal to how others understand their gardens as part of social movements, as part of urban policy and initiatives, or otherwise. Thus strategies of change have a strong discursive character . Studying these emerging discourses of possibility provides windows into potentially new forms of “common sense” that gardeners wish to see become dominant as means to transform the urban socioecological landscape . Gardeners bring these discursive framings into strategic dialogue with each other when practices are produced, reproduced or changed. Through this dialogue discourses may mutually support, compete, or exist in parallel in spaces, both activist and broader social society.

The negotiations between discursive approaches, while dynamic, sediment in certain trajectories. Overtime particular movement discourses become dominant. The discursive landing strategies present in Bay Area garden projects are beginning to compete in advocating for particular visions of gardener and community power in the urban context. Three recurrent discourses emerged from my dissertation research: commoning, community land management, and resiliency. This chapter contributes to what Fairclough describes as a need to shift from critique of structures to critique of strategies. I describe the emerging and competing landing strategies on the discursive level and their normative consequences . The chapter explores how the concepts of commoning, community land management and resiliency are articulated and enacted, providing insight into the struggles for and between discursive framing of land politics of gardeners. To conclude the chapter, I examine how the discourses, while intended to be complementary ultimately are beginning to diverge and compete over the question of how to approach developmentalist trajectories. Regardless of their tenure arrangement, a frequent theme amongst gardeners has been the discussion of the potentials for, or the actually existing, commons achieved through gardening. For gardeners, commons generally meant the practice of an alternate model for socio-economic organization. I identify three emergent claims in gardeners’ meanings of commoning: collective land management, collective ownership or the absence of ownership, and the affirmation of non-capitalist forms of value. Commons are also discussed as material realities that gardeners are attempting to enact, as important symbolic narratives of how to reimagine our contemporary context, and as heart-felt spaces of care and growth, similar to New York Gardeners studied by Eizenberg . Resisting a framework that claims functional land management can only occur through public or privatized ownership , research into common pool resources has highlighted diverse institutional arrangements of collective resource management and property rights . While Ostrom provided a more economically rational analysis of collective behavior, others have explored the political and moral dimensions of a potential commons social movement . De Angelis describes the commons and the communities that manage them as the necessary foundation for the new political discourse, a discourse that is politically motivated towards global justice and democracy.

This commoning is explicitly in resistance to enclosure and new waves of primitive accumulation . McCarthy argues that there has been an increased call from both critical academics and a variety of social movement actors for reclamation of the commons. These calls vary greatly according to their attention to detail in mechanics and structure, or mapability onto Ostrom’s analytical description of common pool resources . Their common thread is the emphasis on collective forms of ownership and resistance to the commodification and privatization characteristic of the last thirty years of neoliberalism. The commons is being expressed as a preferred strategy to both create productive, hopeful alternatives and to oppose a myriad of problems caused by global capitalism . For many post-neoliberal, anarchist, and autonomous-Marxist scholars and activists, the study of the commons is exciting because it represents both an act of resistance and a space for the prefiguration of new worlds . Commons is not just a noun but a verb, “a crucial socio-spatial process in the struggle for a better world” . Commoning,round plastic planter a term Linebaugh came across in his research on commons, describes production that is embedded the ecology of a place and collective labor process that is independent from that state .For De Angelis, Linehaugh’s description of commoning requires that we see this process as expressing the interconnectedness and inseparability of “autonomy, community, life flow, and ecology, … all at once while struggling for livelihoods” . Not only does commoning present a challenge to enclosure, it is also the opportunity to produce new forms of relations beyond capitalist forms . In this sense, commoning is an act of destructive creation, “the destruction of these very capitalist relations and the correspondent creation of new forms of commoning predicated on different value productions” . Some garden activists and theorists describe gardening outside of dominant economic and state structures. Carlsson and Manning work outside the state-private dichotomy and describe gardening as a “nowtopia” intended to “reclaim and reinvent work against the logic of capital” . The authors describe the work of a southern-born, Bayview resident engaged in the Quesada Gardens, who through gardening with neighbors created a common language and practices that counter the values of private property and individualism. Eizenberg offers a model of analysis of organized garden projects breaking outside neoliberal property hegemony. He builds on the idea of new ways of “doing politics” by using Lefebvre’s analytic of space as comprised of material , perceived , and lived to refocus our understanding of gardens as a space of commons. Through a study of gardens in New York, Eizenberg argues actual existing commons persist through these three interrelated elements: gardeners claiming physical space, gardeners producing alternative forms of knowing, and gardeners experiencing a multitude of emotional responses in the living environment that open space for marginalized cultures and identities. The development of these commons is in tension with existing neoliberalisms within the city and demonstrates the ability of gardeners to pose a threat as a growing social movement. Eizenberg argues, “by introducing alternative practices and values to capitalism, the commons are been closed and the dominant mode of production is challenged” . Many gardeners discuss the material, perceived, and lived experiences of promoting collective management.

From the perspective of Tree from the former Free Farm, collective work in a garden can mean a significant difference from more individualistic gardening environments, “We promote the communal style of gardening, we all work together for the common good rather than dividing it up into individual plots and everybody having their own plot”. For Tree the expectation that gardeners would create commons through land redistribution is unrealistic, but garden projects can provide space for inspiration and learning the skills to work together as a movement. A vacant lot gardener described this communal style as “based on communal land holdings, people working together, people deciding by consensus what is going on this land.” . Working through processes of group decision-making and setting governance structures or styles, gardeners are faced with the opportunity to experiment or refine practices aimed at making decision-making more horizontal or otherwise shifting how land use decisions are made on a site. As an occupy gardener recalled while discussing prefiguring social change, “skills are really important, like learning how to collectively manage a piece of land by the urban farming”. Karl Linn, the founder of Peralta Commons and Community Garden, expressed that commons like the garden are necessary for people “to build shared spaces that enliven their senses, express their visions, and strengthen their connection to the natural world” . He described the construction of various commons spaces throughout his career: “in the process of constructing each commons, neighbors came to know one another more deeply… developed participatory processes that drew more members of the community into the creative process and broadened the base of neighborhood involvement” . The garden is embraced as a territory in which to relearn more collective decision-making and share governing power. Murray argued that Occupy the Farm provides an example of activists developing counter institutions of commons management, going beyond movement-focused prefigurative politics. The farm is a “site in which to actualize the ideal of self-organizing communities of free equals” . Gardeners also discussed their experiences and perceptions of the work of creating forms of ownership outside of the public-private binary. The Diggers of 1967 and the mid seventeenth century provided inspiration for several projects in their resistance of the enclosure of the commons. Tree describes that his commitment to an openness in the garden to all those in need was inspired by both sets of diggers, “Poor people just went out and started growing food and they were preaching the idea of the Earth as a commons, the idea of getting away from private property. And that was filtered down through San Francisco diggers in 1967, who I ran into when I was younger and was inspired by that.” . Movement Generation, in its work training and inspiring many gardeners across the Bay, calls for “new or radical uses of physical and public spaces, including establishing new public spaces based on commons rather than private or state control.” . The claiming of a commons, the acts of narrativizing a resistance to private property and holding commons as its antithesis have emerged as important commitments to numerous gardeners, even if the material relationship to their land was one of leases, temporary use agreements, or insecure occupation. Communal ownership through the model of community land trusts inspired gardeners at projects such as the Urban Permaculture Guild and Urban Tilth. Doria Robinson, a third generation resident of Richmond and director of Urban Tilth, explained her history of growing up. She joined her grandfather, a minister of a black church, which started a ranch in Fairfield as part of their mission.