Urban Agriculture in the Margins

 By Michael Ableman

In a Chicago Starbucks at 9:00 a.m., women wearing pink and lavender spandex line up with men in white shirts and ties and a crew of firefighters from the 30 East division to order their macciattos and lattes and Americanos. Everyone has a cell phone attached to the side of their heads, chattering away as if their whole lives existed somewhere else.

Outside the large glass windows that keep us cool and clean and safe, the Cabrini-Green housing project looms like a sixteen-story prison complex, its buildings entirely enmeshed in wire, walls blackened by smoke and windows broken and boarded up. Built in the fifties to warehouse poor, unemployed, and primarily black residents, it has worked no better than similar experiments across the country and gained a national reputation for poverty, violence, and desperation.

In the shadow of Cabrini-Green, two 1-acre plots of land are protected with 10-foot-high chain-link-and-concertina fences. A closer look reveals that one of the plots boasts forty varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Striped German, Green Zebra, Black Russian, and the rest of Ken Dunn’s tomato plants grow in the composted remains of apple- and cherry-pie filling, and the uneaten arugula salads and filet mignon from local high-end restaurants. Dunn has laid 1,000 tons of compost on this site over a sealer layer of clay and wood chips, just a fraction of the 15,000 tons of urban waste disposed of in this city each day. As I walk between the sweet, pungent rows, the ground springs back like a sponge, and if I closed my eyes and plugged my ears, it would feel like I was walking on the floor of a virgin forest.

The tomatoes don’t seem to mind the constant noise or bad air or the poverty that surrounds their little island. The plants are tall and robust and absolutely loaded. Their world is rich in nutrients and reflected warmth and light from the pavement and surrounding buildings. They thrive on the attention of local chefs who are thrilled to tell their clientele that the tomatoes on the menu were harvested down the street, that they picked them up on the way to work.

There are no red barns or silos here, no fields crowded with corn or pastures dotted with cows or sheep. Amid tall skyscrapers, crowded sidewalks, and expansive parking lots, green life finds the margins where soil has survived. Urban farmers seize available light and space under a veil of uncertainty, never knowing when the plans for a new high-rise or retail complex will get approved and the land they farm will be buried under the next necessary or frivolous building.

Dunn’s little tomato forest may exist on the edge, but it is not alone. All across this country there are little sanctuaries like this, most of them community gardens where urban residents—often immigrants from agricultural parts of the country and the world—can grow the seeds and the foods of their rural roots. On abandoned lots, between buildings, on narrow slivers of land along streets and sidewalks, every city now has elements of guerrilla gardening, where trash and rubble are traded for food and flowers.

Beyond the community-gardening movement, a handful of professional farmers like Ken Dunn have tapped into an even more compelling possibility: the idea that unused urban lands can generate jobs and serious quantities of food. These farmers are challenging the common misconception that food must be grown far from where most people live. Instead, every neighborhood in every city could have its own farm with orchards and greenhouses and a public market. These could become the new town squares, balancing the hardscape of buildings and pavement with fertile soil, lush plantings, and fresh foods. Local residents could take part during their breaks from work or at the end of the day. There could be classes and workshops on cooking and growing, as well as celebratory meals making use of the farm’s yield. In this scenario, urban citizens might expand their definition of honorable work to include farmers, who, instead of laboring on the distant margins, are welcomed into the fabric of the urban tapestry.