From Powerless to Unified: Growing Cohesive Chicago Neighborhoods with Tomatoes

• In Event: Growing Crops in Difficult Places: Struggles to Produce in Human Landscapes

Abstract

Growing tomatoes is difficult under any circumstances, but particularly in a small plot of land on the South Side of Chicago where sunlight is filtered by buildings and the metal content of the endemic soil is high enough to make the fruit unsafe for human consumption. But the biological constraints aren’t the half of it. The challenges the Chicago Botanic Garden faced as it bridged the gap between its North Shore location and constituency and the diverse urban neighborhoods to its south were horticultural in part, but they were social and political in whole. A botanical garden born from the much older Chicago Horticultural Society in 1968, by the 1980s, the Chicago Botanic Garden and its staff already had decades of experience working with people in urban Chicago. In 1982, Rebecca Severson was hired to lead the garden’s new community horticulture project, Green Chicago, which built community gardens throughout the city. She was valued “for more than her gardening skills,” but rather her “talent as a community organizer.” And while the City of Chicago was supportive of the Green Chicago program’s efforts, unlike the relationship between community garden programs and cities elsewhere, Severson was constantly fighting to build partnerships among her gardeners—within garden projects and across the city—to build a community gardening movement. Hoping to forestall the kinds of crises she was watching within community garden systems across the nation, Severson dug in, devoting her time to only three or four gardens per year, where she built relationships, trust, and partnerships in communities and with organizers for whom community gardens provided “bright spots” among the multifaceted challenges of generational poverty and systemic racism.

Author

• Reba Drey Luiken, University of Minnesota