GROWING THE GRASSROOTS
ON GRASSROOTS URBAN AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION AND LOCAL POLICY FRAMEWORKS IN GLASGOW AND AMSTERDAM
An Urban Studies Master’s thesis By Mischa M.J. de Bruijn University of Amsterdam
ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT
Keywords: Urban agriculture Grassroots innovation Governance Policy
Urban food system
Submitted on June 18th 2020
Word count: 8746
Food system change is increasingly negotiated on the urban scale. Responses to the ‘urban food question’ are coming from planning and policy making, but also from socially and ecologically innovative grassroots practices like urban agriculture (UA). Although it is generally acknowledged that UA benefits from a supportive political and institutional environment, the notion of support is rarely unpacked. In particular, what’s missing is an oversight of the policies and governance strategies that cities (can) employ to support UA and how this enables and/or constrains urban growing practices. This article addresses the tensions between top-down and bottom-up conceptions of and solutions to the urban food question, by examining how the policy frameworks of Glasgow and Amsterdam enable and constrain grassroots UA innovation (GUAI). The comparative analysis shows that in Glasgow, a highly implicit and socially normative policy approach is present, which can best be characterised as ‘tentatively facilitating’. The most salient categories of its impact for urban growers are land security, financial stability and market opportunities. Amsterdam’s policy approach is more explicit and can be characterised as ‘pro-actively incentivising’. Despite a greater visibility and diversity of UA, this assertive governance approach also amplifies the framework’s normative bias, which frustrates GUAI’s ideas and practices. To build a typology of best and worst practices, more systematic comparative research into strategies and outcomes of UA governance is called for.
1
I.
INTRODUCTION
Confronted with interlocking social, climatic and ecological crises, and a lack of political decisiveness on the national and international level, major cities around the world now increasingly find themselves pioneering sustainable transition. Whereas in the past, issues of food security have mostly concerned cities in the Global South; in the last decade, a new socio-political and ecological reality has developed that has forced cities in the Global North to fundamentally rethink their food systems (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010; Sonnino et al., 2014). Thus, one of the frontlines of the struggle for sustainability is the ‘urban food question’ (Morgan, 2009): the issue of how to feed urban residents adequately and responsibly in a time of rapid urbanisation, globalisation and looming climate/ecological disaster. While some are chiefly concerned with the fragility and spatial inequalities associated with highly globalised urban food systems (the chain of actors and processes involved in producing, processing, distributing and selling food), others focus on the moral and health aspects of our food consumption and again others insist on the climate impact and environmental degradation that industrialised agriculture causes. This complex interplay of interpretations and motivations has simultaneously precipitated the rise of urban food planning and of a globalised food justice movement that advocates new urban foodscapes, of which urban agriculture (UA) is one of the main exponents (Morgan, 2015). These two strands of food system innovation reflect contrasting approaches to urban sustainability: one provoking change from the bottom-up (grassroots) and the other from the top-down. This study is situated in the field of tension between the two approaches. Although it doesn’t have to be, UA can be a catalyst for civic action and is therefore associated with bottom-up activist movements propagating issues such as the urban commons and food justice (Reed et al., 2018). In addition, urban scholars have proposed UA as a nature-based solution for sustainable city development (Artman and Sartison, 2018). Interestingly, within transition management literature, it has also been conceptualised as a form of grassroots innovation, because it envisions different urban futures and takes place in a social economy rather than a regular economy (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). The potential of the grassroots to generate sustainable urban solutions remains understudied however (Hossain et al., 2016; Shove and Walker, 2010). Alongside innovative
grassroots praxis, concerted efforts are being made on the urban and regional level to govern a sustainable food system transition via institutional instruments such as Food Policy Councils and Food Charters: a process in which UA is often involved as a stakeholder (Hardman and Larkham, 2014; Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015; Morgan, 2015). Therefore in some contexts, UA is said to be shifting from a ‘politics of protest’ to a ‘politics of co-governance’ (White and Bunn, 2017). But this is not automatically a win for all UA, as these new governance processes are characterised by dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (Prové et al., 2019). In other words, UA’s legitimacy and it’s position within urban food systems, is continuously negotiated. The socio-political dynamics of urban food system governance bring conflicting conceptions of sustainability to the surface. More precisely, they point towards the discrepancy between the narrow elite-versions of sustainability, which tend to centre around carbon reduction, and the much more radical and holistic grassroots interpretations involving concepts like food decommodification, ‘food as a commons’ and food justice (Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015).
What lacks is clear oversight of the policies and governance strategies that cities (can) employ to support UA and specifically, how these enable/constrain the development of grassroots UA. Do they work in tandem or in opposite directions? What are best practices for policy makers who wish to support urban growing? Only one study has compared cities’ governance strategies of UA in Europe, but with a narrow focus on communal urban gardens (van der Jagt et al., 2017). Research into policy and governance of UA is especially important because, despite its growing popularity in the Global North, UA often still occupies a precarious physical and political space in the city. As it unfolds unregulated, policy vacuums are often addressed ad hoc and unevenly (Meenar et al., 2017; Mok et al., 2013). Although supportive political and institutional frameworks are crucial for the legitimacy of UA (Artman and Sartison, 2018), it is often not specified what kinds of support are most needed, or most appropriate, for which types of UA. This is likely to be dependent on the city-specific context that urban growers operate within (Prové et al., 2016).
What I aim for in this research, is to increase our understanding of the differences in top-down and bottom-up conceptions of and solutions to the urban food question, by examining how different policy frameworks enable and constrain the development of
2 grassroots UA innovation (GUAI). Due to the increasing
academic attention for cities as spaces of deliberation on food system change (Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015) I focus on local policy processes. This research takes the form of a qualitative comparative case study between two progressive European cities - Glasgow and Amsterdam - that in recent years have actively engaged the issue of sustainable food system transformation, through grassroots praxis as well as policy making. By characterising and contrasting these cities’ policy approaches, I aim to unpack what it means to ‘support’ UA. In the next section, I will elaborate on my conceptualisation of grassroots UA innovation, based on Seyfang and Smith (2007). Then, in section III, I draw on existing academic literature to chart how local policies and governance arrangements could affect the development of UA. From this, I distil some guiding concepts for the case studies. After presenting the results per city, the discussion will go deeper into a comparison and draw out the implications of policy intervention for GUAI, and for UA in general.
II.
GRASSROOTS URBAN
AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION
Urban agriculture is not a homogeneous phenomenon working towards a unified goal. Instead, it’s a constellation of different types of food growing activities, ranging in scale from small individual plots to multi-acre urban farms in parks or urban peripheries and including innovative growing methods such as ’no-dig’, ‘vertical farming’, ‘aquaponics’ or ‘forest gardening’. It has been claimed to contribute to urban sustainability (La Rosa et al., 2014) as well as the conservation of rural hinterlands that would otherwise be developed as farmland (Wilhelm and Smith, 2017). It has been proposed as a nature-based solution to diverse issues such as food security, biodiversity, air quality and storm water management, but also for strengthening communities and improving urban resilience (for an overview of benefits see Artman and Sartison, 2018). Though some of these aims and benefits can be mutually reinforcing, it is also conceivable that they contradict each other: for example because growing spaces accommodate less biodiversity or store less carbon than other types of green space.Although there are other driving forces behind UA, it is often associated with movements advocating urban food system transformation (Chatterton, 2016; Morgan, 2015; Moschitz et al., 2018). According to some scholars, this makes it a form of civic action that challenges
dominant ways of producing and consuming (Reed et al., 2018). As a counterweight to these claims, critical geographers have questioned whether UA truly represents a radical form of sustainable urbanism by suggesting that it implicitly justifies the neoliberal organisation of society and its existing social inequalities, by filling the voids that are being left by austerity policies (Holt-Giménez and Wang, 2011; Tornaghi, 2014). As such, community gardening practices constitute a safety net of sorts, rather than a truly alternative urban food system. In an attempt to make sense of these internal contradictions, McClintock (2014) concludes that UA can be both radical and neoliberal at the same time.
In any case, we cannot uncritically assume the radical potential for food system change; it’s important to get into clear focus which types of UA are really pushing towards alternative urban foodscapes. A useful concept for this is ‘grassroots innovation’. Seyfang and Smith define it as “[…] networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom–up solutions for sustainable development; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved.” (2007: 585). Whereas conventional business-led innovation focusses on technology and ecological modernisation (Merrifield, 2013) – leaving larger structural forces unchallenged -, grassroots conceptions of sustainability are fundamentally different. They envision new urban futures, often beyond the capitalist present (Chatterton, 2016), featuring concepts like (re-)democratisation, ‘commoning’ and community economy. These types of niche innovation are situated in a social economy rather than a regular economy, because they are driven by different values. Specifically, they trade off social, ecological and economical values differently. The idea that grassroots innovation may be one of the most promising sources of fundamental food system change is supported by empirical research showing that UA initiatives governed from the bottom-up have the greatest potential to realise inclusive, democratic space (Bródy and de Wilde, 2020; Crossan et al., 2016) and that grassroots organisations put most pressure on traditional corporatist food agendas (Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015). Nevertheless, it has been pointed out that the potential of the grassroots to generate innovation has been understudied and largely disconnected from the mainstream transition management literature (Hossain, 2016; Seyfang and Smith, 2007). Particularly, too little attention has been paid to the social and ecological innovations that the
3 grassroots embody (Shove & Walker, 2010). This points
towards a bias in the conceptualisation of what ‘greening the city’ means in prevailing sustainability narratives. By focussing on grassroots UA innovation (GUAI) here, I aim to bring alternative visions of urban sustainability centre stage.
III.
PLANNING AND GOVERNING
URBAN AGRICULTURE
Acknowledging GUAI as a valuable source of urban food system innovation highlights the importance of understanding how emerging efforts to try and govern urban food systems take GUAI into account and how a new landscape of barriers and opportunities for urban growing is created. But by posing this question I make an assumption, namely that policy matters for GUAI at all. Perhaps policies ultimately prove inconsequential, because the grassroots will find a way to develop regardless of any top-down attempts to gain any traction on it. This view is propagated by some who claim that a radical re-imagination of sustainable urban futures by grassroots UA ‘works best’ outside of legal or institutional frameworks (e.g. Mancebo, 2016).
However, there is plenty of research showing how legislation and regulations affect UA. The most frequently mentioned constraints for UA in academic literature fall under institutional factors; especially those associated with a lack of governmental support which ‘puts UPA low on the local policy agenda’ (Artmann and Sartison, 2018, p. 1937). A lack of support problematises UA’s legitimacy, which works through into many of the big challenges that are inherent to UA, like access to land (Wekerle and Classens, 2015). Despite growing appreciation of and support for UA from planners and policy makers, we still have a very limited understanding of the kinds of policy options and their effects on UA. As a coherent policy strategy is often lacking, policy vacuums for UA are being addressed unevenly and ad hoc by different cities (Meenar et al., 2017). From this flow uneven outcomes. Local governments that inadequately respond to the multi-dimensionality and diversity of urban growing practices in that city, are likely to do more harm than good (Jarosz, 2008; Siegner et al, 2020). Planning literature has identified three main ways in which existing planning practices can enable or constrain UA. Firstly, through enabling ordinances, like zoning, which determine where UA can take place (Voigt, 2011; Makmey, 2013). Secondly, through the regulation of production, such as rules about keeping bees or backyard farm animals. And
thirdly, through fiscal policy instruments, such as fees and tax abatements (Meenar, 2017). The fact that different policy instruments and established planning practices can have intended and unintended consequences for UA points towards the issue of policy framework explicitness because, as Okner (2017) argues, the lack of explicit UA policy, is also policy. However, barriers are not automatically taken away by making policy to support UA. UA is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, embodying visions of urban green space, infrastructure, food production, urban livelihood and community building. As such, UA projects place different accents in terms of their social (improving communities, education, (mental) health), ecological (stormwater mitigation, improving air quality, soil regeneration, biodiversity) and economic (urban livelihoods, source of income, building alternative food system) drivers, and thus can be associated with different barriers and opportunities. More legal protection for individual style allotment growing will likely not do much for GUAI for example. Therefore, in addition to explicitness/implicitness, another important dimension of policies’ influence on UA development is the normative orientation of the policy framework (Okner, 2017). In other words: how is UA itself framed through policy? What kind of narrative is being created about food growing in the city? Is it leisure, education, social work, or first and foremost an economic sector? The literature reviewed so far relies mostly on experiences in the United States -perhaps because a severely polarised federal government there has accelerated the shift of food policy making towards cities and states. Much less is known about local UA policies in a European context, where the research focus is more explicitly on UA governance than it is on regulations and planning practices (Bródy and De Wilde, 2020; Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015; Prové et al., 2016; 2019; Van der Jagt et al., 2017; White and Bunn, 2016). In particular, comparative research has pointed out that cities’ governance strategies should reflect the city-specific challenges and opportunities that UA deals with (Prové et al., 2016) and crucially, that it should move beyond a rigid top-down approach (van der Jagt et al., 2017). In this light, substantial attention has been given to the emergence of new governance-beyond-the-state-processes for food system innovation, including phenomena such as ‘food policy councils’ and ‘food charters’. A food policy council typically consists of different institutional stakeholders and is essentially an advisory board facilitating local or regional food system cooperation and transformation. They may or may not
4 include representatives from local government and they
may or may not use a food charter to create a common mission statement (Hardman and Larkham, 2014). In any case, these platforms for deliberation are also subject to power struggles and dynamics of socio-political exclusion and inclusion, the interplay of which creates a specific set of opportunities and constraints for UA, benefitting some types more than others (Prové et al., 2019). This resonates with Bródy and de Wilde who conclude from their case study of communal gardening in Amsterdam that whether UA is empowered enough to “[…](re)claim urban space as ideals of community economies, solidarity networks, food justice and citizen education”, or that it becomes subjected to (neoliberal) urban revitalisation strategies, is contingent upon the dominant governance actor(s) involved in that space (2020: 255). In other words: whether UA’s radical potential is realised, depends on how growing spaces are governed.
The research question I will be trying to answer is: “How do local policy frameworks enable and constrain the practices of grassroots urban agricultural innovation (GUAI)?”. Following Okner (2017), I will pay special attention to 1) the degree of explicitness/implicitness and 2) the normative orientation (social, economic, or ecological) of local policy frameworks. These will serve as guiding concepts in an otherwise largely inductive qualitative method. Secondary to my main research question, I will also chart how GUAI is involved in emerging food governance- and policy making processes to anticipate on fast-unfolding policy developments.
IV.
RESEARCH DESIGN AND
METHODOLOGY
CASE STUDY DESIGN
A comparative case study design suits my research because it allows for a detailed qualitative description of grassroots innovators’ experiences of the local policy processes that impact upon them in different urban contexts. The cities of Glasgow and Amsterdam were selected as divergent cases of policy making. Glasgow is just beginning to scratch the surface of urban food governance. Long plagued by public health issues and urban decline, it has now begun developing new local policies that aim to create a more sustainable, healthy and socially fair urban foodscape. These ‘emerging policy pathways’, partly incentivised by legislation from the Scottish Government, have the potential to boost the Glaswegian grassroots UA movement (White and Bunn,
2016). Amsterdam has a more developed and explicit framework in place for UA, actively stimulating more initiatives. These different policy stances make them interesting to contrast, because it allows me to evaluate in detail what the consequences are of pro-actively incentivising UA through policy. I adhere to a holistic case study design as set out by Yin (1989), which means that I see the ‘UA grassroots network’ in each city as a separate, indivisible case, from which I draw a strategic selection of interviewees.
DATA COLLECTION AND SAMPLING STRATEGY
I relied on multiple sources of data to triangulate my findings: chiefly stakeholder interviews (N=18) and a policy document analysis. Although more sources were consulted, an overview of the most important data collected in both case studies is given in Table 1 below. Data collection in each city was strategically divided in three stages to be able to get the most out of each interview. First, I started with extensive desk research and policy document analysis, to orient myself and get a good understanding of the most important (policy) developments for UA in recent years. In Glasgow for example, the report ‘Roots to Market’ by a local NGO (Propagate, 2018) was very helpful to get started. This preparatory phase helped me to get to know the field and draw a well-considered first sample of interviewees from the UA grassroots. In Amsterdam, where the grassroots UA ‘scene’ is much more diversified than in Glasgow, I drew a first sample by listing all initiatives on the local platform VanAmsterdamseBodem and evaluating them against my definition of grassroots UA innovation. The second stage of data collection involved conducting semi-structured interviews with grassroots UA practitioners. These conversations all revolved around three broad questions. What do(es) you/your organisation do? How important is the policy environment for UA in general? How does it impact your practices?). At the end of each interview, I asked them to suggest others that operate on the interface of UA and policy. This snowball sampling strategy proved very effective for networking. Upon approaching saturation, meaning no further insights were yielded from new interviews, sampling was stopped. Thirdly, I gradually shifted focus from the grassroots to policy making. Prepared with information from desk research and previous interviews, I could then critically examine emerging policy developments. My increased familiarity with the subject and a sensitivity for cases in which
5 policy has appeared to be ambiguous or inadequate,
allowed me to probe deeper and be more efficient in my interviews with policy makers and civil servants. The conversations with policy makers focussed on how they themselves would characterise the policy environment for UA in their city.
Table 1. Overview of data collected for case studies
ANALYSIS
Although a few guiding concepts did inform my theoretical sensitivity (explicitness/implicitness and normative orientation of the policy framework), I took an approach that resembles grounded theory. From the outset, I started with a broad research question without fixed concepts, but by iterating data collection, analysis and additional reading, I could increasingly refine my research approach. Corresponding to the principle of ‘constant comparison’ (Strauss, 1987), by transcribing and analysing data immediately after collection, new insights could be incorporated into the research design to probe deeper and extract more valuable data . Two preliminary case study reports (in January and in April 2020) helped me to make sense of the emerging codes and categories and start developing some connections between them. A final round of selective coding involved reviewing all previously collected data and reintegrating those materials into a coherent framework. Code trees for both cities can be found in the Appendix.
V.
RESULTS: THE GLASGOW CASE
EXPLICIT VS. IMPLICIT POLICY FRAMEWORK
The main piece of local policy that UA benefits from at the moment is called Stalled Spaces (GCC, 2011). This scheme, launched by Glasgow City Council (GCC), is not intended exclusively for UA purposes, but is aimed at urban regeneration in general. The Stalled Spaces officers, one of whom I spoke to, assist community groups in acquiring access to bits of vacant or underused urban land and help them to organise themselves
properly in order to become eligible for funding. The program also supplies some start-up funding. This has worked out well for UA, as multiple interviewees attest, since it has helped to kickstart more than a hundred community gardens (POLICY MAKER1).
Another type of policy support that was mentioned is the Community Asset Transfer: a procedure anchored in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015, but nevertheless implemented on the local level. This instrument supports communities (typically of place rather than of interest) who want to (temporarily) take over ownership of assets such as land or buildings. This can be done either in the form of a lease, or through a direct transfer of ownership or management responsibility. When these assets are owned by the Council, a transfer of land to a growing community can also work in GCC’s favour, as they are then relieved of their duty to maintain and upkeep the land. Unfortunately, the transfer hasn’t ‘really come to Glasgow yet’, as one policy maker puts it (POLICY MAKER2), meaning that it isn’t in widespread use, perhaps because the amount of maintenance and responsibility involved are off-putting for many communities. Digging deeper, there are other types of policies that can create opportunities and/or constraints for UA in a more indirect manner. These are mainly food-related policy development in area’s such as public health, public procurement or poverty. Examples are the Food Policy For Glasgow Schools and the ‘Food Pledge’ both intended to stimulate more healthy food in the city, especially among youth. However, these policies were not perceived by any of the growing practitioners to have opened up concrete opportunities for urban food growing, so it remains unclear what the impact has been on grassroots UA. Meanwhile, the lack of policy(support) sustains barriers for their further development. For example in the way public procurement orders are put out, as they prohibit small-scale urban growers to bid for them (GROWER1 and GROWER6). The policy context in Glasgow is therefore defined as much by the legislation in place, as it is by the lack of it; making it a largely implicit policy framework. Grower interviews Policy maker interviews Policy documents Websites & other documents Glasgow 6 4 7 4 Amsterdam 6 2 3 3
6
NORMATIVE ORIENTATION OF THE POLICY FRAMEWORK
Not all types of UA are supported or regarded equally in the Glaswegian policy framework. Policy makers attest that at least historically, the focus has been on allotments and community gardens (POLICY MAKER1, 2 and 4). Allotments, growing spaces where people (against an annual fee) can lease an individual or shared plot, are protected by legislation and are in high demand. There are 32 of these sites in Glasgow and some of them have been maintained since the Victorian era. Grassroots activities can take place here, but allotments are often highly regulated and typically do not embody the social and ecological innovation of the grassroots. Community gardens, by contrast, are mostly of an informal and often temporary nature. They can occupy vacant, derelict or underused sites in the city and food growing is often used as a means to a social, educational and/or (mental)health-related goal. But within the grassroots UA network, there were also practitioners who are trying to make a living by selling the local food produced by themselves or other urban growers. These ‘market gardeners’ have to be savvy entrepreneurs to navigate the opportunities and constraints posed by a highly implicit policy framework. They generally experienced a lack of support and so their development was seen as very much ‘despite the policy’ (GROWER 1 and 6). The Stalled Spaces programme for example is only accessible for ‘communities of place’ and not for ‘communities of interest’, meaning that a collective of people who are not tied to a specific locale, often fail to successfully stake a claim to urban land. In the case of an Asset Transfer, communities of interest also have a harder time defining
themselves and claiming legitimacy. In effect, there has not been a successful case yet (as far as I know) of market gardeners being supported by this scheme, nor by any other type of policy in Glasgow. This conceptual bias echoes in many conversations, where interviewees mention that traditionally, the focus of policy makers and civil servants has been on the public (mental) health and community building side of UA, rather than about food security, stimulating urban livelihoods, or reaching climate/ecological goals. One civil servant made this view explicit:
“So the interesting thing about urban growing is not that its fantastically carbon saving, right. It doesn’t alleviate the levels of food poverty much either. But it does: A. develop a space in the city that’s hopefully, functional, practical and beautiful, and B. it’s a social space. And for many reasons, communities benefit as much from that as they do from anything else: as a meeting place, as a social place. […]so whilst they might grow vegetables, that’s a side issue to the community growing thing. That’s why people grow vegetables, often not because they like vegetables...” – POLICY MAKER1
EMERGING GOVERNANCE DEVELOPMENTS
Although policies for UA specifically and food in general, are still in their infancy, many promising developments are fast unfolding in Glasgow. Two main policy/governance processes can be identified.
Firstly, the Glasgow Food Growing Strategy is currently being written. As the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015) mandates under section 9, each Scottish city must develop a local growing strategy. This should make it easier for aspiring urban growers to find and access land and to give them more information about what’s already happening in Glasgow in this respect. However, a civil servant involved in writing the Growing Strategy has also been sceptical about the added value, because, as he says “we’ve been doing these things anyway” (POLICY MAKER2). Interesting is how extensive community consultations and cooperation with the Glasgow Community Food Network invites grassroots actors in shaping the policy. According to one interviewee, pressure from the grassroots has helped to extend the Food Growing Strategy beyond its initial focus on allotments and communal gardens (GROWER3). This signifies grassroots policy making. Secondly, a key actor within urban food policy making is the Glasgow Food Policy Partnership, established in 2014. This consortium of stakeholders from the public,
Photo 1. Growing space tended by the Greenheart Growers in Parkhead, East-Glasgow. Photo by author.
7 private and voluntary sector are imagining and
negotiating how Glasgow could transform itself into a ‘Sustainable Food City’, referring to a UK-wide campaign. The UA grassroots are represented in this partnership chiefly by the Glasgow Local Food Network: a bottom-linked community organisation. The partnership spearheads the Glasgow City Food Plan. This ambitious holistic framework aims to anchor local and sustainable food growing firmly into policy. This policy integration ensures continuity in the event of a political power shift. Although the city Council is a member, the policy partnership stresses that this food plan is explicitly not of the Council, but of all Glaswegians.
These developments show that UA is riding a favourable political tide with a progressive SNP-led Council and Scottish parliament in control of the policy agenda. According to one Glaswegian councillor, there is now a growing political awareness of food where there used to be almost none. However, she also points out it is a slow progress because it’s such a small world of people: “[…]that’s still very much in progress and I think that will trickle down and have an impact. But I don’t think we’re there yet. I certainly don’t.. I talk about food a lot, but I’m always talking to the same people. Everybody knows each other and knows what we’re trying to do and how important it is, but I just don’t think its broken out more widely yet.” – POLICY MAKER4
ENABLING/CONSTRAINING EFFECTS OF THE POLICY FRAMEWORK
Local policies enable and constrain GUAI in a few different ways, according to practitioners. The domains are listed below in the order of their salience for the context of Glasgow.
Land access/security
The most frequently mentioned theme while discussing the barriers and opportunities under the policy framework in Glasgow, was access to safe and arable land for a sufficient amount of time. While vacant and derelict sites are abound in this post-industrial city, it is notoriously hard to find out about ownership rights. This has proven particularly hard for the grassroots to manage without any mediating organisation. Although many successful land lease agreements have been made with the Council, housing associations and other private real estate owners, there are also examples abound of how precarious UA practices still are. In particular, a coordinator from South Seeds recalls an incident where
attempts to establish contact with a land-owner failed, but where the owner, upon finding out about gardening practices on his site, had the place instantly bulldozed without deliberation or notification (GROWER4). The Stalled Spaces programme has demonstrably facilitated land access for community gardens, but it still regards UA as a temporary use of space. The only places where UA is a permanent and legally protected type of land use are allotments. What’s more, Stalled Spaces does not help growers to overcome the widespread issue of soil contamination. Growers work their way around it by building raised beds. While growing temporarily and in raised beds may work well enough for most community growing projects, this policy environment inhibits market gardeners disproportionately, who require more land (security) in order to make the necessary investments in soil regeneration, equipment, etc. The Community Asset Transfer procedure offers opportunities here, but to date has not yet provided results for the grassroots UA movement.
Financial stability
The second major way in which the Glaswegian policy framework influences UA is through its impact on the financial stability of projects and enterprises. Again, Stalled Spaces has had a positive influence in this regard by supplying some start-up funding, but most funding streams are beyond local control. The Scottish Climate Challenge Fund for example has supplied many gardens with considerable start-up funding. However, once established, most growing projects have had to cope on their own. As a Stalled Spaces officer points out, this has resulted in many cases of abandoned or overgrown sites, as there were insufficient funds to maintain them (POLICY MAKER1). A mental health organisation for ethnic minority women, called Saheliya, experienced this first hand. The Climate Challenge Fund allowed them to set up a market garden a few years ago, but the insecurity of funding led to a shortage of staff to maintain it. It is currently no longer in use.
Many organisations involved in grassroots UA therefore spend a considerable amount of time locating resources to be able to continue their projects, but also to ensure their own jobs. Sometimes they get lucky, but they can never get complacent, because most funding is doled out on a one-year basis. Funding can dry up unexpectedly - and it has in recent years - causing project coordinators to compete with each other for the same funds. The dynamic of funding dependence is articulated by one
8 interviewee who points out that there needs to be much
better coordination if the UA grassroots movement is to progress as a whole:
“[…]we should build climate resilience and we can’t be dependent on funding. Funding of course that is reducing because of the economic times we live in. Now the number of organisations that are looking for funding is increasing and it creates this really competitive environment where organisations that are based in the same area are chasing the same pots of funding through really similar projects and not working together. It just makes little to no sense to me. So we need more collaboration actually. So okay, we need more secure sources of funding, but actually we need better collaboration and partnership working[…]” – GROWER3
Market opportunity
Also frequently mentioned by the grassroots is the unfair competition that commercial-oriented urban growers are facing under the current policy framework. Traditional farmers operate in economies of scale and are often heavily subsidised at that. Grassroots UA is too small scale for these agriculture funds, but as enterprises they also have a hard time accessing the funds that voluntary sector UA organisations use. Feeling left out, interviewees from market growing enterprises Locavore and the Greenheart Growers suggested tax abatements or changes in public procurement policy would help (GROWER1 and 6). If the latter would permit them to bid for a smaller part of an order, that would make it easier for them to get a
foothold in the food economy and start competing with bigger players.
Governance
GCC, like most local governments, has a certain organisational structure which tends to silo-working within departments. ‘Neighbourhoods and Sustainability’ are responsible for parks and allotments and are tasked with producing the much anticipated Glasgow Food Growing Strategy. However, the implementation of Stalled Spaces falls under ‘Development and Regeneration’. Stalled Spaces officers trying to acquire a lease for a piece of land, have to do that via the department of Neighbourhoods and Sustainability or via City Property. For a community asset transfer, there are again different people involved. While interviewees mention that GCC seems willing to support them, the lack of interdepartmental cooperation complicates that. A streamlined governance of UA seems to rely on the personal relationships that the grassroots have formed with civil servants over the years.
VI.
RESULTS: THE AMSTERDAM
CASE
IMPLICIT/EXPLICIT POLICY FRAMEWORK
The policy framework in Amsterdam is much more explicit than in Glasgow. The municipality of Amsterdam offers support for UA mainly via start-up funding (for both individuals and entrepreneurs), but also offers some information and an open map on their website, showing current projects (see Photo 2). The urban planning department regards UA as a legitimate form of land-use, giving it a more stable character (POLICY MAKER 2). One of the major designated area’s for UA is ‘de Tuinen van West’, but other smaller plots can be found all over the city. The policy framework seems very conducive to UA: one particular website lists more than 70 highly diverse UA projects, often
with innovative
Photo 2. Still from the Amsterdam municipality’s interactive map showing a diversity of UA across the city. Retrieved from https://maps.amsterdam.nl/stadslandbouw/?LANG=en
9 approaches to growing and directly linked to
sustainable urban development
(vanAmsterdamsebodem, nd.). Although these do include neighbourhood initiatives, most community gardens and allotment sites are not included there. The municipality’s approach to UA is anchored in its ‘Food Vision’ (MoA, 2014). However, almost all interviewees pointed out that many things from that document have not been successfully implemented. For example, the ‘Food Information Point’, a central coordinating platform for UA, has never been realised. Additionally, funding for UA comes principally from existing greening budgets and these have not been increased. These budgets help with start-up funding, but do not support urban growers in the long-term. After the start-up phase, enterprises are expected to be self-sufficient with well thought-out business-models. At the same time, traditional farmers can count on longer-term financial support by the government and other resources, which is by many grassroots urban growers perceived as unfair. How can they compete with that? Some interviewees are cynical about this: there’s a lot of talk about green ambitions, circularity, climate change mitigation and doughnut economy, but there doesn’t seem to be much concrete action to support UA. Some feel like token projects: they do receive attention, but mainly to show how green Amsterdam is.
“[…]I do feel that the Gemeente likes to say that there’s all these great projects going on and they bring all kinds of delegations out to see what’s happening, but nothing changes. It doesn’t make it easier for new farmers to start up projects and you feel a bit like a token project sometimes.. just being used to show.” – GROWER4
NORMATIVE ORIENTATION OF THE POLICY FRAMEWORK
The Food Vision makes clear that the municipality is politically conscious of the issue of food in the city. But despite the start-up funding that’s available for growing enterprises, the document shows a clear normative orientation towards the social, educational and (mental) health aspects of urban growing. It defines the position of UA in Amsterdam by stating that the added value of UA lies “not so much in its food growing capacity, but mainly in it’s potential to create awareness about healthy and sustainable food and to improve social cohesion and the physical attractiveness of the city” (MoA, 2014). A civil servant later added that UA can best be seen as a tool for behavioural change towards more sustainable modes of consumption (POLICY MAKER2).
Overall, many practitioners state that UA is not being acknowledged and valued as a serious mode of food production nor as a nature-based solution for sustainable city development [GROWER2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). Practitioners point out that they are delivering essential services to the city, such as carbon sequestration, improving air quality and biodiversity, restoring soil quality. As such, they are contributing towards the city’s climate goals, but they feel that is insufficiently acknowledged by the policy framework. Or at least that this is not translated into concrete support. From their dealings with the municipality, they conclude that its rigid silo-structure fundamentally denies the holistic approach to urban sustainability that the grassroots embody, by trying to pigeonhole initiatives into demarcated categories like ‘food production’, ‘community work’, or ‘urban greening’.
EMERGING POLICY AND GOVERNANCE PROCESSES
Two major food policy and governance processes are unfolding at this time, and both signify the increasing cooperation between the grassroots and traditional stakeholders in the Amsterdam metropolitan food system.
Firstly, the Food Policy Council MRA (Amsterdam Metropolitan Area) has been working towards increasing cooperation and sustainable food system change since 2017. They are closely tied to both grassroots networks such as the commons movement, as well as ‘Voedsel Verbindt’, a platform which represents the more traditional food system stakeholders. The Food Policy Council MRA’s manifest for a more sustainable regional food system has been signed by many (big and small) food stakeholders, including two provinces and big banks, but not the municipality of Amsterdam. Although the municipality seems willing enough, there is a complicated dynamic between them, the provincial governments and other stakeholders, which was not further specified (POLICY MAKER1)
At the same time, the municipality is also developing its own vision and strategy on urban food and UA via the Food Strategy. The Strategy would anchor UA more firmly into the local policy framework, and connect concrete points of action to it so there is more stability in the case of political regime change. The municipality is using working groups for input, in which the grassroots are also represented. However, some interviewees (GROWER3, 5 and 6) were very sceptical
10 about these co-governance processes, because they
didn’t feel that the framework within which these processes were happening, allowed for ideas that were truly innovative or different from the industrialised and commodified food system currently in place. Having taken part in the working groups for the Food Strategy, they lamented the lack of democratic procedure. They saw the most promising governance developments coming from the bottom-up, manifesting for example in an activist movement trying to prevent real estate development in de Lutkemeerpolder, or the MoMa’s ‘Grondverbond’.
ENABLING/CONSTRAINING EFFECTS OF THE POLICY FRAMEWORK
The domains below are listed according to their salience for the context of Amsterdam.
Governance
It is remarkable how overwhelmingly grassroots practitioners voiced their frustrations about the governance style of the municipality and how that constrained their practices.
Firstly, they pointed out that the policy framework is highly fragmented: not integrated across domains nor implemented equally across departments. This makes outcomes of UA-related activity unpredictable. In particular, the municipality often seems unable to appreciate the holistic nature of UA which requires them to look across silo’s. One practitioner who advocates more ‘edible’ green infrastructure managed by community groups, points out that civil servants in the social domain do not understand what is meant by soil building and infrastructure and conversely, people from the department of infrastructure cannot accommodate the social element into their work (GROWER3). This lack of policy integration leads to ambiguities, as the case of the Lutkemeerpolder shows. Here on the western fringe of the city, the development of a new business park threatens de Boterbloem, one of Amsterdam’s oldest biological farms. Located on the valuable land between Amsterdam and Schiphol airport, this urban farm has felt the constant pressure of real estate. “It’s very well making green urban policies, but as soon as your project is seen to cost money instead of making it, you’re done”, says GROWER5. Several practitioners referred to this case because for them, it symbolised the municipality’s stance on UA: it’s nice to have, except when there’s money to be made.
Secondly, only one practitioner experienced the municipality to be cooperative (GROWER1); frustrations with the governance style of the municipality were the rule rather than the exception. Some characterised it as patronising (GROWER6) and other highlighted the lack of communication and accountability as dossiers are easily passed on to others without notice. As an interviewee explains, this destroys crucial social capital as the informal relationships with civil servants are broken:
“Their dossier will be passed on to someone else so these are all personal relationships that take ages to build... To have for example a regular relationship with someone that you speak to on a regular basis, who you can get to call you and to answer their telephone, that’s like huge. And when they change people it’s like you have to start all over again.” - (GROWER3)
Land access/security
Although urban planning considers UA a legitimate use of urban space, finding land of sufficient size for UA is still a major hurdle in Amsterdam, where land is increasingly scarce and expensive. The lack of growing space constrains both the scaling up of existing projects and the creation of more growing enterprises. Some of my interviewees considered themselves lucky to have acquired the land they have (GROWER1, 4 and 6), and they mentioned multiple examples of aspiring urban growers who moved out of Amsterdam for the lack of opportunities there. That’s why some say destination and zoning plans need to change to allow more room for UA. Crucially, these spaces need to be secured for the long-term, as many entrepreneurs right now are on temporary contracts and some have had to move quite a few times. Some, like de KasKantine have successfully adapted to this nomadic reality (GROWER2), but others, like the Amstergaard project in the city centre, explicitly refuse to be temporary (GROWER6).
Financial stability
In contrast to Glasgow, the municipality of Amsterdam has made funding available for both private and entrepreneurial forms of UA, resulting in the creation of many different UA initiatives over the last few years. It also means that growing enterprises, including the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, can benefit from start-up funding. However, as one practitioner explained, this does not help you to sustain your business in the long run:
11 “[…] a lot of these projects are struggling just because you
need to keep investing in the projects or at some point you need to take some salary out in order to live. Everyone’s got something kind of going on the side, where they can earn money and […] that’s just policy of the Gemeente and they say ‘well, if it doesn’t work after the first year then something is wrong with your business model, or you need to get a loan’.” - (GROWER4)
The expectation that CSA’s or other types of UA enterprise, once established, can cope on their own if they have a well enough thought out business model was a big frustration for many grassroots actors. According to some, this was proof that a neoliberal governance style is still dominant in Amsterdam that fundamentally frustrates grassroots UA (GROWER3). Not only did it seem unfair to them that ‘traditional farmers’ do get continuous financial support and they don’t, but it also points towards a denial of the many additional social and ecological services that UA provides to the city. Other types of UA, situated in the voluntary sector, do not generate their own income and are therefore dependent on municipal subsidies and other additional funds. As these funds are limited, a dynamic of competition is created for voluntary sector-UA, similar to the Glasgow situation.
VII.
CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
The comparison between Glasgow and Amsterdam reveals interesting differences and similarities in the way policies can enable and constrain the development of GUAI. Firstly, regarding the explicitness of the policy framework, it comes forward from my analysis that UA in Glasgow still takes place in a highly implicit context without a whole lot of support for GUAI practitioners. However, there was a strong belief among the grassroots that they could manage themselves ‘despite the policy’. In Amsterdam, by contrast, there was much more explicit attention for the phenomenon of UA in policy and different policy instrument are made available to support it. Despite the great diversity and visibility of UA practices, there was also a great sense of frustration with policies and – in particular, with the Municipality of Amsterdam. Practitioners lamented the ‘lack of vision’, the ‘words-but-not-deeds’ and above all the rigid silo-structure of the municipality which fails to accommodate the more radical and holistic ideas embodied by GUAI. Policies were seen as stubbornly neoliberal rather than actually helpful, making the grassroots network there more sceptical and rebelliousin comparison with its Glaswegian counterpart. The practitioners’ low regard of policy in both cities echoes Okner (2017) who also notes the disconnect between policy making and UA practice in the United States. Secondly, I found that both cities share a particular normative orientation toward UA. Its benefits for communities, education, (mental) health and creating an attractive city scape are emphasised, rather than it’s ecological (stormwater mitigation, improving air quality, soil regeneration, biodiversity) or economical (urban livelihoods, source of income, building alternative food system) aspects. Although the two cities place different accents, UA is framed in very similar ways. The social bias in UA conceptualisation by policymakers works through into the way GUAI manifests itself. Although the Stalled Spaces programme in Glasgow and the Food Vision of Amsterdam have demonstrably helped to kickstart many UA projects, GUAI remains restricted in it’s potential to scale up or play a significant part in both urban food systems. Market gardens, Community Supported Agriculture and other formats of commercially oriented UA feel this restraint disproportionally in terms of land access, market opportunities and fair competition.
Thirdly, what the grassroots desire is to be heard and taken seriously, so they can co-govern healthy, sustainable and socially fair food system change. Promising governance and policymaking is emerging in both Glasgow and Amsterdam. Specifically, governance-beyond-the-state processes, such as the Glasgow City Food Plan and the Amsterdam Food Strategy, allow the grassroots a seat at the negotiating table for food system change. Overall, GUAI practitioners in Glasgow were more optimistic about these processes, perhaps because they haven’t had disappointing previous experiences, like their Amsterdam colleagues have had after the Food Vision of 2014. Furthermore, the Glaswegian grassroots could successfully communicate a unified voice via the Glasgow Community Food Network: that with the help of a few food champions, has pro-actively managed to claim a firm position in food policy making processes. Nevertheless, Glasgow seems a step behind Amsterdam in regard to progressive UA policy making, because many of the elements in the City Food Plan and Food Growing Strategy are already implemented in Amsterdam. Yet, Amsterdam makes clear that more support from policy does not directly translate into a more empowered grassroots movement. Resonating Bródy and de Wilde (2020) and Van der Jagt et al. (2017), a crucial element lies in the way governance is
12 being shaped; who the dominant actors are and how
inclusive the governance space is.
Both cases show that GUAI represents a highly diverse set of practices and ideas related to urban growing, community building, ecological consciousness and social activism. As such, it embodies radically different visions of urban food systems and urban foodscapes, which respond to the urban food question. Governance and policy making processes in Glasgow and Amsterdam also express a growing political interest in the topic of urban food, driven by similar concerns. Until now, research has not explicitly connected these two (bottom-up and top-down) strands of food system innovation. Responding to calls for research on the enabling/constraining effects of emerging UA policy (Meenar et al., 2017; Mok et al., 2013), this research has shown that policy frameworks in Glasgow and Amsterdam do not work in tandem (yet) with GUAI practices. While there are synergies to be found in the increasing ‘spaces of deliberation’ (Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015), facilitated by food policy council/partnerships, UA is still chiefly seen as a social or educational tool, rather than a vital part of the local food system. In Glasgow, the implicit and socially normative policy approach can best be characterised as ‘tentatively facilitating’: land security, financial stability and market opportunities were the most salient categories of its impact. Though some policy arrangements were perceived as supportive, grassroots practitioners emphasised the lack of policy support in place, especially for market growers. Amsterdam’s policy approach was more explicit and can be characterised as ‘pro-actively incentivising’; this was expressed in a greater visibility and diversity of UA practices. However, Amsterdam’s assertive approach also amplifies the framework’s normative bias, which frustrates GUAI practitioners. They overwhelmingly point out the municipality’s inability/unwillingness to accommodate their views of urban sustainability and some even suggest UA policy in Amsterdam is little more than a ‘green’ marketing tool. The contrast between these two cities points towards the equivocal nature of UA governance: while policies can help to facilitate UA, they can simultaneously undermine the grassroots. A few lessons can be drawn from this for urban food governance and policy making. Firstly, cities should acknowledge the diversity of practices that UA entails. There are more flavours than just community gardens and allotments. Secondly, policies need to be light-touch enough so that barriers are taken away, and more are
not created in the process by over-regulating. This means taking into account the barriers and opportunities that are specific to an urban context (Prové et al., 2016). Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, whether the voice of the grassroots will be represented in new emerging food systems, depends on the way they are included and taken seriously as co-governance actors, especially in the area of food. This research has been a first step in a research agenda aimed at characterising and evaluating different policy approaches to UA. I have focussed on the way GUAI-actors perceived and experienced the effects of policy frameworks, but I have made no attempt to quantify this. Through document analysis and multiple stakeholder interviews I have been able to validate most of what has been said, but further (mixed-method) research could be done to measure and compare the developments that have taken place in the grassroots movement. For example by investigating how many urban farming jobs can be attributed to new policy developments. Another shortcoming of my research approach has been the potential bias in the snowball sampling method that was used to chart and sample the GUAI network. By trying to find grassroots actors with good knowledge of policy developments in their city, this research perhaps unjustifiably favours the more politically engaged and outspoken urban growers, even among GUAI. Furthermore, although Glasgow and Amsterdam were selected as contrasting cases in terms of their policy approaches, they are by no means the most divergent cases out there. In a time where urban food governance is fast emerging, I call for more comparative research on policy frameworks and UA. Which approaches are most successful in generating an inclusive environment for UA practices? Do other urban contexts (e.g. more or less densely built) require different strategies? By systematically comparing strategies and outcomes, we can begin to build a typology of best and worst practices for cities who want to support their urban growers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to sincerely thank the urban growers, policy makers, civil servants and all others who made time to talk to me and gave me a tour of their gardens. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Luca Bertollini for his supervision and counsel and lastly to Mandy, for her continuous support throughout this tumultuous year.
13
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APPENDIX
Code tree Glasgow
