As chapter 5 will detail, longitudinal spatial analysis demonstrates that between 1980 and 2019, P-Patch gardens have become more accessible overall; moreover high-poverty neighborhoods in Seattle were originally further from the PPatch gardens than their lower-poverty counterparts, but that relationship has flipped over time such that proximity is greater for low-income communities today. Finally, in response to the “persistent skepticism” about gardens as a private use of public land, as Frank Kirk’s quote above describes, the P-Patch program leaders systematically incorporated public spaces into design and redesign plans for the gardens. In my analysis of PPatch Post newsletters, the code design for community was only applied twice for issues in the 1980s, but this code came up more and more often in the 1990s and especially from 1998 onward. New gardens were built with public features like benches or picnic tables, and such elements were added to the older gardens as they were renovated—especially when those gardens won Neighborhood Matching Funds to improve their spaces. Because of the civic infrastructure in Seattle, including numerous channels of communication between garden advocates, city officials, and other residents as well as the availability of public resources for garden development, P-Patch gardeners were able to maintain legitimacy for their organization and for the use of public land for urban agriculture by aligning their activities with widely shared values and public priorities. The priorities of city officials and P-Patch gardeners were not always perfectly aligned, however. As mentioned earlier, two P-Patches on public land were threatened by development in the mid-1990s. Gardeners first pressed their interests through the city’s bottom-up governance infrastructure, but it soon became clear they would not prevail through insider strategies .

While Seattle’s political opportunity structure is usually amenable to resident interests, indoor plant table competing resident demands—and the growth machine’s drive for increasing exchange value—exerted strong countervailing influence in these cases. When insider strategies proved futile, the garden advocates pursued outsider strategies to organize public opposition to the development plans. In this period of mobilization, Seattle’s civic conventions promoting distrust of elite control and expecting neighborhood involvement in decision-making helped form a discursive opportunity structure for framing the threat of garden loss in a way that would resonate well beyond the gardens. When the gardeners at the Mount Baker P-Patch learned that their city-owned lot was slated to be auctioned off for housing development, they joined with the local neighborhood association to come up with an alternative plan. With a grant from the Neighborhood Matching Fund, they conducted design charettes with P-Patchers, representatives of greening organizations, and other residents. The final product, a plan for Bradner Gardens Park, interwove P-Patches with numerous other uses such as a basketball court, family picnic area, public art, and native planting demonstration gardens. Advocates for Bradner Gardens Park presented the plan to city officials, and also visited the meetings of neighborhood associations from across the city to gain their endorsements. They built up legitimacy for the Park proposal through the civic infrastructure of Neighborhood Matching Funds and neighborhood association endorsements, and they framed their proposal as the epitome of neighborhood planning, civic participation and collaboration among diverse groups in a community. City leaders remained steadfast in their desire to see housing on the site, however, so the garden advocates devised an initiative to prevent the auction. With the help of a former were reneging on their previous deal.The argument that the city could not be trusted helped to whip up opposition to the proposed move, and it also resonated with one council member who reportedly didn’t care about PPatches but was moved by the argument about fairness.

Ultimately, council members did approve a plan to move the garden, but only on the condition that gardeners were given a better replacement site and logistical and material support for the move. These concessions made a big difference for the future direction of the Interbay P-Patch, which is a thriving community garden and destination for neighborhood residents today. In both of these cases, Seattle’s garden advocates were able to strike a nerve for the general public by framing the city’s plans as a betrayal of the self-government expectations they held, and by arguing that these moves needed to be resisted in order to hold the government accountable to its citizens. Ultimately, in both cases, council members originally opposed to the gardeners’ requests ended up voting in their favor. The garden advocates’ leveraging of Seattle’s civic conventions is evident in analysis of documents and interviews from the three cities, which shows that the code for fairness or justice was more than twice as common in Seattle as in Philadelphia and more than three times as common as in Milwaukee. The bulk of these codes applied to documents in the period of October 1995 to September 1996, when the Bradner and Interbay resistance efforts were broadening from insider strategies into outsider strategies involving criticism of the city and mobilization of both gardeners and the public. These examples demonstrate how social movement mobilization was effective in Seattle and accomplished long-term preservation for many of the city’s gardens. However, the movement mobilized in the mid-1990s was framed around a symptom—development threats to specific gardens—and not around the underlying economic dynamics driving garden displacement. While all of the gardens on public land are effectively permanent thanks to movement organizers’ victory in passing Initiative 42, gentrification has continued apace in Seattle; among the many low-income residents who have been displaced due to rising housing costs are gardeners who can no longer afford to live near the sites they helped to build, including Bradner Gardens Park.

In this way, the local garden preservation movement in Seattle draws a clear contrast with that in Philadelphia, where garden loss is framed in connection to the broader context of structural racism, neighborhood disinvestment, and growth machine logic that threatens vulnerable people as well as vulnerable spaces.This chapter has demonstrated multiple ways that civic conventions structure opportunities for garden organizations to legitimize their activities and to build broader support for urban agriculture as a land use. Civic institutions that support public input into policy making have served as political opportunity structures to legitimize urban agriculture as a land use desired by residents. Civic ideas can serve as a discursive opportunity structure that garden advocates can leverage to frame the need for social movement mobilization in support of threatened gardens, whether or not these spaces have gained legitimacy through formal policy channels. When a city’s civic conventions include infrastructure for bottom-up governance, this infrastructure provides a political opportunity structure for supporting resident demands such as space for community gardens and urban agriculture. A participatory governing process can rationalize garden development in accordance with broader public interests and concerns while building legitimacy for community gardens as a land use. Garden organizations in Seattle and Milwaukee have bolstered the legitimacy of their gardens by taking advantage of civic conventions conducive to bottom-up governance, including the civic infrastructure of grant programs for resident-initiated projects and accepted channels for communicating resident desires. In these cities, conventions for bottom-up governance provided a political opportunity structure to legitimate urban agriculture as an activity in line with broader public priorities. The same political opportunity structure did not exist in Philadelphia, where PHS established legitimacy for its Philadelphia Green program as a provider of city beautification services and a catalyst for neighborhood reinvestment, with less emphasis on the importance of fulfilling resident desires for growing space. Instead, gardens in Philadelphia struggled to gain legitimacy in the eyes of city officials even as many such spaces were used and valued by neighborhood residents. The city’s redevelopment efforts led to the loss of numerous gardens in the early 2000s, plant growing stand when city officials treated these spaces as “vacant” rather than land already under legitimate use. With PHS having legitimized its garden support activities as temporary measures to promote redevelopment, the organization was not positioned to challenge the loss of gardens through that very redevelopment. Indeed, due to PHS’s dependence on city contracts for greening services and its association with the city’s social elite, the organization stood to lose legitimacy in any open confrontation with public officials. When PHS did not mobilize its gardeners to challenge the city’s land use policies, another organization did. Situating the pattern of garden removal in the historical context of dispossession and racial injustice, Soil Generation has mobilized the city’s growers to push for greater community control over land use decisions. Their framing legitimizes urban agriculture as stewardship of land long abandoned by property owners and the city, while delegitimizing the city’s development plans by drawing on widely shared cynicism about the government’s effectiveness and trustworthiness. This cynicism has provided a discursive opportunity structure in which calls for ongoing mobilization to ensure government accountability have resonated widely. In coalition with other groups organizing for economic and racial justice, Soil Generation has gained legitimacy as a genuine representative of the interests of gardeners and communities of color in the city, and the organization has sustained outsider strategies to pressure the city government to transfer land ownership to community gardeners. Discursive opportunity structures in Seattle have similarly supported social movement mobilization when gardeners sought to preserve gardens and public officials resisted.

Widely shared ideas about the value of civic participation underlay the development of the P-Patch nonprofit, its successful cultivation of volunteer labor over decades, and its mobilization to stave off garden loss and achieve permanence for the P-Patches. As in Philadelphia, civic ideas about distrust of elites contributed powerfully to the local discursive opportunity structure; by framing Initiative 42 as a necessary bulwark against city officials selling off parks, P-Patch advocates won broad public support for their proposal and secured stronger protections for the city’s gardens than public officials were initially wiling to enact. In contrast, Milwaukee’s civic conventions hold more of an assumption of good governance on the part of city officials, and the local discursive opportunity structure has been far less favorable to social movement mobilization. Garden advocates have achieved longer term land access and more permissive zoning policy through insider political strategies, but many gardens in Milwaukee remain classified as a temporary use. Without an organized effort to engage gardeners in civic action, and without a widely held belief in the need to mobilize to hold the government accountable, the city’s garden advocates seem to lack the tools to pressure city officials into making more gardens permanent. In terms of urban political economy, insider strategies that frame urban agriculture’s value to align with the city government’s priorities will likely reflect growth machine logic. Land use policies that elected officials will happily pass, such as small matching grants to support green space improvements and ordinances allowing beekeeping, tend to increase use value for residents in ways that do not undermine the potential for increasing exchange value as well. To achieve permanent tenure for community gardens and urban farms means removing the land from the city’s development portfolio—something that runs counter to the standard motivations of most city officials. The cases of Philadelphia and Seattle demonstrate how garden advocacy organizations have mobilized social movement activity by drawing on discursive opportunity structures to successfully frame the need for garden permanence as part of a wider struggle to preserve resident interests in the face of potential political corruption. Alongside these more confrontational efforts, organizations in both Philadelphia and Seattle also used insider strategies for some of their efforts to legitimize gardens. As Chapter 4 will explain, growth machine logic endures as a powerful force in shaping the framing, policy, and practice of urban agriculture in all three cities.A city’s civic conventions form an important piece of the organizational environment in which community gardening programs develop and define themselves. Yet what is possible for urban agriculture in any given city is also contingent upon its political-economic context. As urban political ecologists would describe it, ideas about appropriate uses for urban space combine with material flows and conditions, as well as ideas governing the legitimacy of governments themselves, in order to determine the actual production of urban socio-nature . In this regard, the distribution and character of urban agriculture in any city is influenced by local economic pressures, the sources and extent of public resources, and political factors at larger scales such as the laws and activities of state and federal governments.