Document Type

Post-Print

Publication Date

4-2017

Subjects

Urban agriculture, Urban gardens, Nonprofit organizations, Principal components analysis, Community organization

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.

Description

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10460-017-9784-x.

DOI

10.1007/s10460-017-9784-x

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/19771

Download

Share

COinS