COMMUNITY GARDENS AND POLITICS OF SCALE IN NEW YORK CITY

In the winter of 1998-1999, the city of New York put 114 community gardens on the auction block, scheduled to be sold in May 1999. Shortly after the auction was announced, community gardeners and an array of social and environmental activists began to formulate strategies for preventing the auction. In doing so, garden advocates confronted a neoliberalization of urban space (Peck and Tickell 2002) under the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In order to overcome barriers to collective organizing posed both by the actions of city officials and by the spatial dispersion of gardens and gardeners across the five boroughs of New York (Figure 1), garden advocates drew on myriad strategies to link their efforts at different spatial scales. After sketching the context for the public auction that precipitated the garden controversy, we introduce a conceptual framework for examining the struggle to save the gardens as a politics of scale in which garden advocates contested the fragmentation of social urban space wrought by the application of neoliberal policies. The controversy over community gardens between the Giuliani administration and garden advocates has been examined before, with a focus on how the incommensurability between use and exchange values affected the terms of debate over the fate of the gardens (Schmelzkopf 2002). In this article we concentrate on the proposed (and canceled) public auction of 114 gardens in May 1999, with special emphasis on the issue of scale in grassroots politics to shed further light on this complex political conflict. (1) AN UNEVEN HISTORY OF GARDENS New York City residents began building community gardens in the early 1970s as a means of creating small patches of green amid the crumbling walls that characterized the urban blight that afflicted the city at the time. In community gardens, neighbors shared common green spaces where they could grow food to supplement their grocery budgets and plant flowers and trees to beautify their respective locales. Community gardens took root in nearly every neighborhood, and gardeners have spent thirty years creating a mosaic of green in spaces that were once havens for prostitution, drug use, abandoned buildings, and litter (Nemore 1998) (Figure 2). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Although urban gardens had been operated with government assistance in New York during World Wars I and II and the Great Depression, the social setting for the gardens of the 1970s was different from that of earlier gardens, for it was characterized by social unrest and urban disinvestment (Kurtz 2001). On the eve of the community gardening movement, fires raged in the Bronx, corruption reigned in the Police Department, and disinvestment propelled in part by postwar white flight created an air of uncertainty. The city fell into bankruptcy in 1975 as lenders refused economic support and the White House famously declined a federal bailout (AbuLughod 1999). In this uncertain setting, citizens took the initiative to build gardens without government assistance and on oppositional terms. Community gardens were often guerilla operations in which gardeners would occupy vacant lots without permission (Librizzi 2001). A group called the "Green Guerillas," for example, threw water balloons filled with seeds over the fence of a vacant lot at Houston Street and the Bowery in Manhattan and then petitioned the city to open the vacant lot as a garden. Community gardens were often built on vacant plots of land that had been abandoned by their owners as the city literally crumbled (Schmelzkopf 1995; Nemore 1998; Schukoske 2000). It is estimated that by 1985 New York City had more than 1,000 community gardens (Hynes 1996; Ferguson 1999). [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] After investing significant time and labor in the development of community gardens as squatters throughout the 1970s, gardening advocates lobbied the city for formal recognition of the work they were doing. …