Stacking functions: identifying motivational frames guiding urban agriculture organizations and businesses in the United States and Canada

Abstract

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture's broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives impact how urban agriculturalists practice UA and that political orientations and discourses differ across geographies, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes.

The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

“…This is of particular importance for food-insecure households and in food deserts (Algert, Baameur, & Renvall, 2014 ;McClintock & Simpson, 2017 ). A variety of research supports this claim by showing that urban agriculture practitioners save household money by supplementing some of their produce expenditures (K. H. Brown & Carter, 2003 ;Corrigan, 2011 ;Gray, Guzman, Glowa, & Drevno, 2013 ).…”

“…Some practitioners see their urban agriculture activities as an explicit rejection of the capitalist, corporate food system ( McClintock, 2010 ;McClintock & Simpson, 2017 ;White, 2011 ). Others use urban agriculture as a mechanism to appropriate urban space (Thibert, 2012 ), demand the right to the city (Purcell & Tyman, 2014 ), and create new commons (Eizenberg, 2012 ;Roman-Alcalá, 2015 ).…”

“…We briefl y discuss these in greater detail below (for a more detailed overview of planning's role in fostering urban agriculture, see Butler, 2012 ;McClintock, Wooten, & Brown, 2012 ;and Mukherji & Morales, 2010 ).…”

Types of urban agricultural stakeholders and their understandings of governance

“…One clear finding from such social-ecological research is that urban agriculture is multifunctional (Lovell 2010, McClintock andSimpson 2018); it provides a wide range of ecological, economic, and social benefits, such as promoting biodiversity (Lin et al 2015) and building community (Carolan and Hale 2016). These wide-ranging benefits have attracted diverse stakeholders whose participation in urban agriculture is motivated by complex values and subjectivities (McClintock 2014, Classens 2015, and whose participation ranges from farming and community gardening to food-related nonprofits and university outreach and engagement (Colasanti et al 2012, Walder andKantelhardt 2018).…”

“…These wide-ranging benefits have attracted diverse stakeholders whose participation in urban agriculture is motivated by complex values and subjectivities (McClintock 2014, Classens 2015, and whose participation ranges from farming and community gardening to food-related nonprofits and university outreach and engagement (Colasanti et al 2012, Walder andKantelhardt 2018). For example, McClintock and Simpson's (2018) study of 251 urban agriculture organizations and businesses in 84 U.S. and Canadian cities reveals the diverse values motivating these stakeholders. Their study used a mixed-methods approach to group participants into six "motivational frames" that share similar values and motivations, such as eco-centric stakeholders and entrepreneurial stakeholders.…”