Does gentrification threaten, spur, or succeed urban agriculture?

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA) has explored its relationship with gentrification and urban development more generally, producing contradicting hypotheses. One of the limitations of the existing scholarship stems from the lack of systemic, empirical examination of the relationship, especially the cyclical nature of the UA popularity, due to the prominence of in-depth case studies research methods employed by much of existing urban agricultural research. Using GIS to combine spatial and socio-economic data for 145 gardens and farms that was active at one point during 2000-2025 in Washington, DC, this case study tests hypotheses on the relationship between gentrification and UA in the city that experienced rapid gentrification in the early 2000s; does gentrification threaten, spur, or succeed UA? We find limited evidence that gentrification threatens longevity of the gardens, and the terminated gardens are not concentrated in the gentrifying areas. There is a notable clustering of the establishment of new gardens in the gentrifying areas during the height of the gentrification, though this happened in the city-wide expansion of UA practice. We also explore additional factors that could explain variability in UA emergence and longevity, and find that the longest-operating gardens are located in predominantly white, wealthier areas of the city, affiliated with local or national government agencies, with community gardens demonstrating greater mean and median longevity than other forms of urban agriculture. Based on these findings, we propose a new set of hypotheses for when UA emerges, where in the city, and why some sustain while others wither.

Author

• Yuki Kato, Georgetown University