UC Berkeley

Early hopes for the dramatic and significant expansion of Urban Agriculture (UA) in the East Bay Area to help mitigate the metropolitan metabolic rift were not borne out. Using Critical Race Theory, Industrial Ecology, and Urban Political Ecology, I explore this phenomenon by examining the operations of four nonprofit UA organizations: Spiral Gardens, City Slicker Farms, Urban Adamah, and Urban Tilth. I conclude that a simultaneous valorization and stigmatization of farm work (Field Hand Labor) and the absence of engineered municipal material support infrastructure for agroecological urbanism (the Cybershire Imaginary) curtail food sovereignty, and yet these organizations nonetheless perpetuate politics and moral economies that suggest Chayanovian differentiation and repeasantization based partly in a legacy of Black Agrarianism (the Urban Agrarian Question).