Green Gentrification and the Urban Agriculture Fix in Denver, Colorado

• In Event: 1577 - Food and Agriculture

Abstract

Partially in response to the Great Recession urban activists, policy-makers, and planners looked to urban agriculture to revitalize the economy and build community. With cheap land prices, urban agriculture moved into historically low-income and working-class neighborhoods. This article asks how are spatial inequality in the form of accessing land, urban agriculture, and gentrification tied to specific historical moments? My case of Denver, Colorado reveals that an “urban agriculture fix,” while in the short term benefitted urban farmers, also helped to valorize certain neighborhoods. In response, wealthier and whiter residents started moving in. I argue for the centrality of crisis in producing particular forms of green gentrification and push for a greater analytical focus on the exact green gentrification mechanisms that lead to displacement as well as the stages in the gentrification process where urban agriculture plays a distinct role. Because of the analytical dilemma posed by the unevenness of gentrification, this article traces the relationship between urban agriculture fixes as responses to political economic events and as a discursive and interpretive process to argue that displacement is not a natural outcome associated with alternative food initiatives. It stems from and becomes entangled in the path dependencies and contradictions set in motion by preceding crises. Understanding these entanglements is the first step in determining how local food and urban agriculture initiatives can confront the growth imperatives of the neoliberal city.

Author

• Joshua Sbicca, Colorado State University