By Sarah Moore(2), Latin American Studies and Geography, University of Arizona

Published: Urban Geography, 2006, 27, 2, pp. 174–192. Copyright © 2006 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.

Fig. (above). Urban League involvement in community gardening. Source: CUL, The Columbus Urban League: 1917–1967, Columbus, OH, Columbus Urban League (pamphlet).

(PDF version available)

INTRODUCTION

“Community gardens were slow to take root in Columbus. But now that they have….” Columbus Dispatch (April 18, 1999, p. J1)

“Our goal for gardens this year is 1000. Last year we had 507.” Columbus Urban League (March 16, 1933b)(3)

In an article appearing on Sunday April 18, 1999, in the “Home and Garden” section of The Columbus Dispatch, a journalist claimed that community gardens were slow to “take root” in Columbus, Ohio. Despite the clever pun, the information was, at best, partially correct. Though they may not have caught on as quickly in present-day Columbus as in other large cities, community and subsistence gardens have a long history in the city. At its height, community subsistence gardening covered at least 600 acres in the metropolitan area, including more than several hundred gardens in the American Addition (an historically African American, working-class community) alone.

Given the historical intensity of gardening as an urban land use in Columbus, how could the Columbus Dispatch posit community gardening as a new phenomenon in 1999? How could this history have been erased from public memory to the point that contemporary gardens are seen as a novelty? In response to these questions, I argue that two related discursive practices are at work. First, a discourse of the “urban” itself was codified largely through urban studies programs of the period, of which the Chicago School has had the most enduring influence. I call this codification the urban normative, a discourse that ruralizes subsistence garden landscapes, contrasting them to more recognizable “urban” spaces. At the same time that this view of “the urban” was gaining hegemony in both academic and planning circles, a second discourse, the crisis narrative of the urban subsistence garden, emerged to explain the existence of such “rural” practices in the city in terms consistent with this urban normative.

Presenting subsistence gardens as crisis responses rather than normal urban landscapes also has important effects on how the city itself is imagined and produced. First, it subordinates this spatial practice, following Lefebvre (1991), to an imaginary of “authentic” urban landscapes, rather than accepting such practices as constitutive of the urban itself. This preserves the abstract notion of “the urban” while dismissing the lived experiences of the city.

In neglecting this lived experience, a crisis narrative of the garden resorts to constructed imaginations and forms of the city that separate it, in an essentialized manner, from the rural and natural (except as decoration). The privileging of abstract notions of the urban over daily life and the separation of productive nature from this urban imaginary is supported by the crisis narrative of subsistence gardening, allowing for a seamless co-optation of urban gardening into development discourses. This follows a more general practice of what Gibson-Graham calls “capitalocentrism” (1996), the discursive process through which, “Capitalism becomes not an uncentered aggregate of practices but a structural and systemic unity, potentially co-extensive with the national or global economy as a whole” (p. 255). In order to explain practices or spaces (like household non-commodity production) that seem at odds with capitalism, theorists and practitioners must co-opt them either by subsuming them to the reproduction of the social totality of capitalism or by characterizing them as temporary “crisis” situations, which will be rectified through the evolution of capitalism itself. The same process applies to the unified notion of the urban, from which alternative landscapes, such as those of subsistence gardening, are systematically excluded by representing them as “crisis” measures.

This discursive colonization of garden landscapes by a crisis narrative eventually made such spaces both less visible and less viable in the city. The potential rupture between the urban normative’s production of the city as an anti-natural space driven by capitalist development on the one hand and the existence of urban community subsistence gardens on the other is deferred by the crisis narrative of the garden. In doing so, the crisis narrative of urban gardening actually strengthens the urban normative, just as crisis narratives in the broader political economy can strengthen rather than weaken the discourse of capitalism as an organic totality (Gibson-Graham, 1996, p. 257). While it is prone to “diseases,” it is also capable of recovery and this malleability means that it will always emerge, “regenerated and in novel manifestations” (Gibson-Graham, 1996, pp. 8–9).

This is not to say that the City of Columbus never recognized gardening as a legitimate urban practice. During WWI and the Great Depression, like many places, city departments such as the Columbus Council of Social Agencies encouraged gardening on vacant lots. Newspaper articles and editorials heralded gardening as a noble activity. However, the city’s colonization of extant practices as “relief measures” resulted in the loss of local autonomy and control in garden spaces. This paper illustrates these processes of physical and discursive colonization of urban subsistence gardens and the disappearance of such landscapes from the City of Columbus through a study of the American Addition, an African American area northeast of the central business district.

The analysis is based on a close reading of several archival sources. First, the collected papers of the Columbus Urban League from 1900 to 1960, housed in the Ohio Historical Society, were thoroughly examined for references to gardening projects in the city. Second, articles and editorials from popular newspapers of the period 1910 to 1945, particularly the widely circulated and well established Ohio State Journal, were collected and analyzed. Next, this information was supplemented with City of Columbus Planning Commission reports, bulletins, and general plans from the same time period. Other archival sources included deed records from the City of Columbus, and Sanborn maps across the period. Textual materials were read for both substantive historical information and for narratives associated with urban subsistence gardens.

The paper begins with a discussion of the urban normative, its roots in Chicago School theories and its planning applications. Next, I turn to a history of urban subsistence gardening in Columbus, with particular reference to the gardens of the American Addition. Third, I describe the processes through which these spaces were physically colonized through the increasing involvement of municipal authorities and social agencies. Next, I explore the representations of gardens in both planning literature and popular press, demonstrating how a crisis narrative of urban gardening enabled a concomitant discursive colonization of garden spaces. The conclusions suggest that though current academic histories of urban ecology appropriately focus on community autonomy in the city, they too commonly accept the crisis narrative of gardening and, in the process, recreate and enforce the simplifications and erasures of the urban normative.

THE URBAN NORMATIVE

Material and discursive practices that constitute “the urban” are rooted in hegemonic notions of what cities should be. These practices and landscapes constitute what I call the urban normative (McCann, 1997; Schein, 1997), a set of institutions, representations, policies, and spatial practices that creates and is reinforced by a normalized and naturalized urban landscape.

The urban normative is not a static concept, as urban practices and places change over time and space. Here, therefore, I consider some major ideas from the urban studies of the Chicago School of Sociology, the hegemonic approach to the “urban,” which developed during the period under discussion, and whose dominance in urban studies was directly linked to the codification of the urban normative responsible for the eventual erasure of subsistence gardens from the landscape and memory of Columbus.

The Chicago School is often cited as the origin of urban studies in the United States and its continuing influence on urban geography and urban studies more broadly is well documented (Gregory, 1994; Short, 1996; Dear and Flusty, 1998, 1999; Beauregard, 1999; Jackson, 1999). It comprised several sociologists working at the University of Chicago as well as graduates of the school who worked at other universities during the 1920s, 1930s, and into the 1940s. Several Chicago School scholars, including Roderick McKenzie, Louis Wirth, Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Homer Hoyt, have had lasting effects on the constitution of the urban as an object of study and planning (Gregory, 1994; Dear and Flusty, 1998).

Additionally, there were direct ties between the City of Columbus and the Chicago School. As a graduate student at Chicago, Roderick McKenzie wrote his dissertation on Columbus and published it in important sociology journals after graduating. Furthermore, the Columbus Urban League often relied on researchers from the Ohio State University Department of Sociology for guidance and policy recommendations. Several OSU dissertations published and used to formulate the policies of the Columbus Urban League during the first half of 20th century relied, in turn, on Chicago School analyses (Mark, 1928; Minor, 1936) and at least one dissertation from a later period that concerns the American Addition specifically (James, 1979) also uses the same analytic.

The group in Columbus, Chicago, and other urban centers, studied city life using statistical and ethnographic data in an attempt to produce a “unified body of reliable knowledge” in urban sociology, one in which, “sociological treatises on the city may thus be sifted and incorporated into a coherent body of knowledge” (Wirth, 1964, p. 83). Related to this was the school’s ecological notion of the “city as an organism,” an integrated whole that was internally coherent, bounded, and knowable (e.g., Park, 1967; McKenzie, 1968; for a critique of the city as organism metaphor, see Roberts, 1991).

In “Urbanism as a way of life,” Wirth (1964) highlights the rise of the city as a harbinger of a “distinctively modern” period adding that, “[n]owhere has mankind been farther removed from organic nature than under the conditions of life characteristic of these cities” (Wirth, 1964, p. 60). He posits that it would be possible to consider the city and the country as two distinctive poles; the urban-industrial and the rural-folk, around which all of human society is organized (Wirth, 1964). In these passages, Wirth defines the city as the opposite of rural and natural space. Ogburn, another Chicago School sociologist, puts it very succinctly, “Cities are the most artificial habitat man has yet lived in” (Ogburn, 1937, p. iii). He continues, “The environment of a city is radically different from that of the farmer and of the hunter … It is only within the past few generations that significant proportions of the human raced have lived in the strange environment of cities, to which they have not become adapted satisfactorily …” (Ogburn, 1937, p. iii, my emphasis).

This vision of the urban landscape largely excludes nature and has much in common with the Progressivist ideals (of the hygienity/purity of nature and its distinction from urban life) influential in both popular thought and city planning in the early part of the 20th century (Haraway, 1989; Cronon, 1991; Gandy, 2002). City life as dirty, frightening, immoral, and unhealthy was contrasted with country life as its healthy and moral opposite (Greed, 1994). This was manifest in many of the garden city movements of the 1920s and 1930s as well as earlier parks movements (Davis, 1996; Gandy, 2002).

This view also contrasted a pure and beautiful (and beautifying) nature with landscapes of work (Williams, 1973). The idea of decorative, pure, unpopulated nature had the tendency to erase people who worked or lived on the land from the landscape (Williams, 1973; Willems-Braun, 1997). By separating nature into the decorative (which belonged in the city to help citizens cope with the unhealthy and alienating aspects of city life) and the cultivated (which belonged in rural or countryside areas), scholars, planners, and builders of cities made them spaces that, “discouraged an economic life in which the individual in time of crisis has a base of subsistence to fall back upon” (Wirth, 1964, p. 81). Here Wirth touched on two important ideas in the study of urban subsistence gardening. First, he defined economic life in the city as necessarily exclusive of subsistence practices, and second, he associated subsistence activity with crisis situations rather than “normal” urban economic growth. In doing this, Wirth also constructed capitalism as a singular form, denying the possibility of its coexistence with other forms of economic relationships, in the process characterizing subsistence landscapes as underdeveloped rather than alternative forms of urban development (Gibson-Graham, 1996).

For Wirth, the essentially capitalistic nature of the city also had marked influences on the urban identity and the relationships of urban residents.

This, and the numbers of people with whom an urban resident would interact explain what he calls the “schizoid character of urban personality” (Wirth, 1964, p. 71). In Chicago School analyses, the relationships of the urban dweller were tied to competition, mutual exploitation, and other market characteristics.

Further, urban identity is tied here to participation in industrial capitalism, which is most evident in the city. This view largely excludes the unemployed as important actors in the production of urban space, as well as ignoring “noncapitalist commodity production” and denying “the existence of non-capitalist class processes as positive and desirable alternatives to capitalist employment and exploitation” (Gibson-Graham, 1996, p. 170). This conception naturalizes spatial segregation, between urban and rural landscapes and the urban citizenry and rural “folk,” rather than interrogating the historical and spatial processes that led to and reinscribed the exclusion of certain landscapes and people from urban representation and practice. The hegemonic view of the city developed by the Chicago School thereby constructs a “whole” that excludes urban subsistence gardening and its practitioners. Such a characterization poorly fits the landscapes of Columbus, Ohio, during the same period.

URBAN SUBSISTENCE GARDENING IN COLUMBUS

The City of Columbus and its outlying areas supported a number of garden areas before the Great Depression. In 1917, Mayor Karb called for the protection of backyard and vacant lot gardens from vandals and/or runaway livestock saying, “Persons interfering with the gardens in any way should be locked up” (City of Columbus, 1917b, p. 53). That same year, the yearly report of the Department of Public Safety claimed that gardening, “[held] an important place in the activities of the department.” Further, the same report describes gardening as, “a stimulus to the individual as well as to the community” and claims that, “[I]t promotes thrift and good health to say nothing of utilizing the vacant lots for neighborhood beautification instead of allowing them to become weed patches” (City of Columbus, 1917c, p. 127). According to O.C. Hooper’s 1920 history of Columbus, in 1917, “extraordinary efforts were made to increase the number of vacant lot and backyard gardens, which for some years had been a means of partial local supply” (p. 68).

This statement, in the most comprehensive history of Columbus to that point, highlights two important facts. First, the spatial practices of vacant lot and backyard gardening existed and were important to the local food supply “some years” before the United States was involved in World War I and cannot therefore be classified only as war gardens. Second, increasing the number of these gardens was a specific focus of city land use policy. Later reports from the Public Safety Department make it clear that vacant lot gardening continued to be an important activity after the war (City of Columbus, 1922, 1928b).

In the predominantly African American neighborhood of American Addition, such practices existed from the time that the first residents arrived during the 1900s (James, 1979) through WWII. In combination with keeping hogs, chickens, and cows, residents grew beets, carrots, corn, beans, cabbage, tomatoes, and other vegetables. The gardens were first planted in backyards and on vacant lots and later extended to larger communal plots. The plots were then distributed to families and individuals and were used for growing vegetables for immediate consumption and for canning for the winter. From the beginning, then, this neighborhood supported gardens as a way of living in urban space.

Between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War I, the African American population in Columbus grew rapidly, with the largest growth occurring between the censuses of 1910 and 1920. Much of this migrant population settled in the Northeast Division, particularly in the area platted as the American Addition (Fig. 1), approximately 3.5 miles from the central business district. It was initially a racially restricted area, somewhat unimaginatively named the “White Addition” by an individual realtor. It was renamed when the Ohio Wesleyan University took over title to the land and decided to sell to anyone who had the money to buy plots (James, 1979, p. 21). Through a combination of African American immigration and “white flight,” the area was 91.2% African American by 1925.

The City of Columbus literally grew to surround this area before annexation and the city services that it came with were seriously considered. This partial integration is manifest in many collections of city records. The American Addition area was excluded from planning maps and city directories published from 1930–1940, despite the fact that many area residents worked and spent their leisure time in central Columbus (James, 1979).

PHYSICAL COLONIZATION: CITY AND SOCIAL AGENCIES

With the onset of the Depression, a complex network of institutions became involved in promoting gardening in Columbus. Columbus formally established the Council of Social Agencies, of which a Committee on Gardening was part, in 1931. Heads of various social agencies sat on the committee and helped one another acquire land and funds and distribute plots. Firms or citizens donated use of their land to the council. Then, management of each area was assigned to specific social organizations. The Urban League, a social agency aimed at providing social and economic opportunities for local African Americans, was charged with management of areas serving the American Addition.

City officials often took their cue on gardening practices from state or federal agencies. In 1933, for example, national Federal Emergency Recovery Act (FERA) guidelines and suggestions, supplemented with specific information about Columbus from the County Agricultural Extension Department, were published in “Some Possibilities for Self-Help in Columbus” by the Garden Counselor in the office of Public Works. The chapter on “Production of Food by Means of Co-operative Gardening” described three types of non-commercial gardening in Columbus: (1) conventional privately owned gardens; (2) vacant lots made available through the City Recreation Department to families/ individuals who submit applications; and (3) large tracts of land that are subdivided into plots and administered by the City Recreation Department, the City Division of Relief, the Community Fund, and other social agencies.

From 1929 through 1936, community gardens were administered by various social agencies that took applications and assigned each household a plot measuring approximately 50 feet by 75 feet. Citywide, it was estimated that 60% of gardeners were white while 40% were minorities. It is likely, however, that these proportions would be inaccurate in the gardens surrounding the American Addition because: (1) over 90% of the residents in the area were African American and (2) the Urban League provided assistance almost exclusively to African Americans. All of the gardens were operated in the same basic way with registration and distribution handled by the Urban League.

Other inputs, such as seed packets, were available through the city and other groups for those who could not afford to pay for them. Often, the City of Columbus or Clinton Township, of which this area was a part, helped to plow garden tracts in preparation for planting. Work on the gardens dominated the Urban League’s neighborhood groups from February when plots were applied for and assigned through September when the final harvests were completed (Fig. 1). Supervisors were hired to patrol the area 24 hours a day during the busy season and to make sure that people were abiding by the rules established for working in the gardens (e.g., pathways had to remain clear and the plot had to be used for growing vegetables rather than laying fallow). In the fall, the Urban League organized canning classes. Several women, and a few men, learned how to can vegetables and meat for their own consumption over the winter and for donation for distribution throughout the community (CUL, 1935a). The specific number of plots available through the Urban League varied throughout the period, but the majority of them were located in three areas (Fig. 2): (1) a larger tract on Fifth and Joyce avenues that supported up to 247 plots (Fig. 3); (2) a tract on Woodward and Woodland that supported up to 122 plots; and (3) a tract on Woodland and 17th that supported up to 54 plots. In addition to these, smaller tracts were also available in other locations. As shown in Table 1, the years of highest use were from 1932–1936. Availability of land depended largely on the willingness of individuals to donate the use of private holdings, although this was not the only determinant. Management of the plots and institutional arrangements were also important factors in both supply and demand.

In 1931 and 1932, before federal involvement, the League noted that the response to the garden project was “great among the needy public” (CUL, 1931, 1932). While the League began with 156 plots in 1931, they were able to add to this in 1932, due to a large donation of use of land by a local real estate company (James, 1979). In 1933, the use of 25 additional acres throughout the city was donated to the League by a Columbus real estate firm. That same year a private citizen donated use of a 60- to 70-acre plot just outside of the city, for the growing of common produce that was to be distributed and the residual of which was to be canned for winter storage (James, 1979). The increase in available land, though, was not enough to ensure the success of the Urban League’s garden project in 1933. The League’s goal was to provide garden plots for 1,000 unemployed families that year, almost doubling the 1932 amount (CUL, 1933a, 1933b, 1933c, 1933e). In May of that year, however, there were only 482 gardens available through the League (CUL, 1933d). The group blamed this on the number of agencies sponsoring gardens throughout the city, the unwillingness of the mayor to invest in “experimental activities,” and the failure of city officials to turn over designated land to the groups (CUL, 1933d, 1933e).

Fig. 2. The American Addition and community gardening plots.

In 1934, the gardens were run under the National Subsistence Homestead project, a New Deal program designed to support groups interested in cooperative food production. The number of garden plots managed by the Urban League remained close to the 1933 amount (CUL, 1934a, 1934b, 1934c, 1934d, 1934e; Table 1). In 1935, it became obvious to the Urban League and other agencies that demand for garden plots would exceed the land available and discussions ensued about land acquisition and the use of fertilizer to make available land more productive (CUL, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c). Indeed, demand for plots was high (671 applications), but because of governmental policy that required garden users to be on federal relief roles, only 518 of these applications were approved, “leaving 153 families without the prospect of augmenting their income by growing their own food” (CUL, 1935b). This led the Urban League to criticize the program as insufficient and impeded by government red tape (CUL, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c). This was a point of frustration for the Urban League and sparked discord between them and local FERA officials (CUL, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c).

Fig. 3 . Plot divisions in the garden at Joyce and Fifth (CUL).

In 1936, the federal government withdrew its financial support from the garden project and the citywide Garden Committee tried to establish a $1.00 fee for each plot to offset the financial loss. The fee was eventually reduced to $.50, but even so, only 208 families registered for plots through the Columbus Urban League that year (CUL, 1936). Further limits on available land were caused by landowners desiring payment for the use of their land; where before the use (if not ownership) of the land had been donated without charge. Having become dependent on federal support for garden projects, the Urban League was unable to sustain them after it was withdrawn. Garden plots declined over the next few years, such that in 1941 the League assigned only 196 gardens, all located in the Joyce and Fifth Avenue tract, rather than the 400–520 it had before 1936 throughout the study area (CUL, 1941)(4).

TABLE 1. NUMBER OF GARDEN PLOTS SUPPLIED BY THE URBAN LEAGUE

The Columbus municipal and Clinton Township governments took over the material landscape of subsistence gardens in the area, aided by federal initiatives that described these gardens not as an everyday part of the urban environment that they had been since the area was settled, but rather as a “relief” measure to be pursued until normalcy could be reestablished. As I discuss in the next section, this discursive colonization and subsequent erasure of urban productive nature could also be found in public opinion at the time.

DISCURSIVE COLONIZATION: REPRESENTATIONS OF GARDENS

According to the Columbus Ohio State Journal, “300 Families beg[a]n work in Godman Guild Gardens” in May of 1930. These gardening activities took place on 40 acres of land that had been donated to the Godman Guild in 1917 as war gardens. The supervisor touted these gardens as “promot[ing] healthful recreation, thrift, and selfconfidence amongst plot holders.” The article goes on to describe the area remarking that cabbages, beans, tomatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, mangoes (bell peppers), and “even peanuts were, growing right in the heart of the city” (The Ohio State Journal, 1930, p. 3). In 1931, several area newspapers covered the donation of 40 acres near the American Addition by J. W. Williams for use by unemployed African American families (The Ohio State Journal, 1931; The Columbus Dispatch, 1931). The land was to be used to grow vegetables for the, “consumption of needy families only” (The Ohio State Journal, 1931, p. 3). In 1932, the amount of land in the city devoted to large-scale community subsistence gardening increased with a 278 acre donation on April 1 and a 375 acre donation (to be used for thrift gardening) on April 3 (The Ohio State Journal, 1932a, 1932c). At the same time, at least two editorials on gardening projects appeared in local papers. On April 2, an editorial entitled, “Back to the Soil” stated:

Similar points were stressed by another writer:

Here, the author envisioned “tabloid gardens” that would supply everything that a family might need, “short of a few dry goods,” claiming that these gardens failed earlier, but now that there was high unemployment and low wages, such a plan might be more feasible.

The “drive for more municipally supported gardens than ever before” was started by the city recreation department upon order of Mayor Worley in February of 1933 and that month applications for new permits “pour[ed]” into the department (The Ohio State Journal, 1933a, p. 2). The City of Columbus, whose goal it was to establish 5000 plots, believed that the gardens would yield at least $125,000.00 worth of produce for the unemployed (The Ohio State Journal, 1933b). The communal nature of these plots and its alternative form of accumulation was not lost on the public who described some of the projects as “Garden ‘Communism’” (The Ohio State Journal, 1933c). In 1934, newspapers reported that gardens would cover 600 acres and would help 6000 heads of families.

Even when coverage of garden projects waned after 1934, the virtues of gardening for economic independence and self-reliance were still noted: “If more of the families which have a surplus of time would apply some of the waste time and energy to the end of a hoe handle, they would be contributing something to their own welfare” (The Ohio State Journal, 1935, p. 5).

In 1937 and 1938, gardening was depicted in a different way. Some claimed that while people were probably right in saying that gardening does not pay economically, they were a source for great joy (The Ohio State Journal, 1937a, 1937b). Others echoed the idea that gardens were tended for the sheer pleasure of gardening and would pay off if they were not abandoned for other summer recreational activities (The Ohio State Journal, 1938a, 1938b).

The above examples outline the broader trend in newspaper coverage of urban subsistence gardening in Columbus, which rose in the early 1930s and then declined sharply after 1935–1936. While this numerical shift is telling in and of itself, it is more telling to consider how these gardens were described. In the early 1930s gardens were considered important for promoting, “health, thrift and self confidence” and the relationship between subsistence agriculture as a relief measure and the political economic crisis was the focus (The Ohio State Journal, 1932d, p. 5). Further, it was suggested that in the Depression many families learned that, “the agency of a garden” was one way that a family could, “tie itself over in a period of adversity and unemployment” (The Ohio State Journal, 1932d, p. 4). Together, these editorials seem to support the six goals of gardening established by the “Self-Help in Columbus” published by the Garden Counselor in the office of Public Works. According to this manual, such efforts were important because they: (1) provided work for the unemployed; (2) helped to maintain the morale of idle men; (3) produced vegetables for summer consumption; (4) produced some vegetables for storing, processing, and distribution by relief agencies in the winter; (5) encouraged self-support among the unemployed; and (6) gave the unemployed an opportunity to contribute to their selfpreservation (CUL, 1933e).

Gardens do, of course, add to food supplies, but they are also important to provide the unemployed with work, maintain their morale, encourage their self-support, and let people contribute to their own self-preservation. In these descriptions, subsistence gardening is a stopgap measure for unemployment created by a(n) (abnormal) crisis in the world economy. The Great Depression provoked interest in and support for urban subsistence gardening as a way of supporting people who were not able to acquire typical urban employment in capitalist firms. However, because it was depicted as a relief measure such practices were only supported until the “crisis” was perceived to be over. By 1937 and 1938, gardening activity was discussed only as a leisure pursuit and subsistence gardening was not mentioned.

This shifting emphasis away from gardening as a subsistence activity also occurred within the Columbus Urban League. When the American Addition Neighborhood Improvement Association was formed in 1929, the Urban League encouraged Additioners to continue extant gardening in the area. Before the citywide garden project was organized, the Urban League was already holding meetings on gardening and canning. As part of the city-wide project, however, the League encouraged the spread of gardening as a form of relief in a crisis that hit the African American population of Columbus particularly hard. The Urban League explained that although African Americans comprised only 10% of the population in Columbus, they represented 37.6% of the unemployed. There were two ways in which the people could help. They could help to solve, “the unemployment and social maladjustment of the [African Americans] by (1) urging their companies to employ [African Americans] for odd-jobs or permanent employment; and (2) cooperating in the securing of vacant lots for vegetable gardening” (CUL, 1936, p. 1). This statement marks a two-pronged approach to resolving the joblessness of the Depression that is reflected in the work of the Urban League during the 1930s. Urban gardening, in this view, was a remedy for “social maladjustment” illustrated by unemployment. In the 1930s and after, the focus of the League turned more toward industrial employment and away from subsistence gardening. Subsistence gardens are rarely mentioned in meetings of Urban League committees after 1936, concomitant with their disappearance in the urban landscape.

During the decade 1930–1940, there were times that the federal government, the City of Columbus, the public, and social agencies such as the Urban League supported subsistence gardening as a legitimate urban practice. However, rather than broadening the definition of urban space itself to include such practices, this support was always rhetorically tied to the crisis of the Depression and portrayed as an emergency measure. The Urban League, on the one had, helped to expand an urban landscape built on subsistence gardening as a spatial practice and the non-commodity production and non-capitalist class relationships that it depended upon. At the same time, though, it was recasting these practices and the resulting landscapes as relief measures rather than an alternative type of urban development. The “normal” preexisting practice of gardening became a “relief measure” and vanished, both from public memory and from the landscape itself, with the passing of the crisis.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: THE CRISIS NARRATIVE

As is true of the popular portrayals cited above, histories of urban subsistence gardening in the United States often support the notion that urban subsistence gardening is not a normal part of the landscape by characterizing it as a crisis response (Bassett, 1981; Warner, 1987; Huff, 1990; Landman, 1993; Hynes, 1996; Cozart, 1999; Hanna and Oh, 2000). The suggestion that subsistence gardening as a practice is linked to crises in the capitalist economy reinforces the notion that such a practice does not produce a normal “urban” landscape.

Despite the fact that some academics and/or policy makers pay attention to cultural or spatial aspects of gardening, descriptions of the history of urban gardening in the United States follow remarkably similar paths (e.g., Kahn, 1982; Warner, 1987; Hynes, 1996; Schmelzkopf, 1996; Hanna and Oh, 2000; Kurtz, 2001). First, the beginning of urban gardening in the United States is associated with the Panic of 1893: “As a result of the Panic of 1893, Detroit initiated a unique form of unemployment relief by setting aside vacant city land for community gardens in which people were encouraged to grow staple crops” (Kahn, 1982, p. 13; Warner, 1987, p. 13; Hynes, 1996, p. xi; for similar statements, see Hanna and Oh, 2000, p. 209). Next came the food shortage associated with WWI: “To cope with rationing and high prices, city dwellers planted thousands of community gardens…” (Warner, 1987, p. 17). After that came the Great Depression: “Again during a crisis, this time the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans turned to community gardens” (Kahn, 1982, p. 14). And finally, there was World War II and the Victory Gardens movement (Kahn, 1982, pp. 14–15; Warner, 1987, p. 19; Hynes, 1996, p. xi; Hanna, 2000, p. 209). These histories give the overall impression that the existence of urban subsistence gardening is driven by economic depressions or war shortages, or in other words, crises in world economic/political systems.

This is not to say that the practice of subsistence gardening in the city has not been more popular at certain times than at others. The example in this paper also shows sharp increases and decreases in the number of subsistence gardens in Columbus from 1906 to WWII. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that Schmelzkopf’s (2002) explanation of conflicts over community gardens in New York, in which she discusses the ways in which gardens are the site of struggles over rights to the city, is very compelling. The city’s strategy of couching the debate in the rhetoric of the market economy to dismiss gardening as a valuable/viable land use offers a complementary study to the one presented here.

The emphasis on writing the history of urban subsistence gardens within the causal framework of political-economic crises, however, obscures their prior existence and ignores the fundamental question of how and why an extant urban land use was replaced and written out of the history of the city. Lack of critical attention to this question supports and is supported by the aforementioned urban normative. In this way, the invisibility of subsistence gardening is perpetuated, not only by local representations, but also by the very histories that seek to understand, and often endorse, the practice.

In contrast, this paper reveals the discursive and material practices through which urban community subsistence gardens became incommensurable with urban space. These gardening activities highlight an alternate history of Columbus, one that includes the development of both non-market social relationships (collective land use and management) and cultivated green space (for food production). These stand in contrast to land uses emphasized in the city’s planning literature, which tend toward market-based land development (buildings) and decorative natural amenities (flowers and trees; Annual Report of the Mayor: City of Columbus, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928a, 1930, 1932; Annual Report of the Planning Commission: City of Columbus, 1927; Annual Report of the Public Recreation Department: City of Columbus, 1917a). Contrary to Wirth’s claim that subsistence activities and city life were incompatible, these gardens show that city spaces are variable and do not necessarily exclude such activities. During the Great Depression, Columbus city departments, through cooperation with the Columbus Urban League, took responsibility for large-scale garden projects building on extant community practices in the American Addition and elsewhere. These large-scale projects were characterized by the city, the public, and the Urban League as relief projects, a characterization that depicted subsistence gardening as a crisis landscape. When the “crisis” subsided, city and public support for garden projects was withdrawn, the Urban League switched its focus away from gardening, and the colonized garden landscape, now more dependent on the city and social agencies of Columbus for economic and organizational support, largely disappeared.

I argue that the representation of these spaces as crisis landscapes helps to perpetuate, rather than challenge, an urban normative that excludes both productive nature and non-capitalist commodity production and communal relationships. As urban development institutions and local social agencies colonized the existing landscape of subsistence gardens, the fate of these marginal areas became tied to the development goals of the city. Possibilities for alternative spatial practices and urban spaces were eliminated as neighborhoods were molded to mirror/support the urban normative. Through time, this erasure became so complete that the Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper that once covered citywide gardening projects, could claim that community gardening was new to the area in 1999.

This history of Columbus landscapes drives home a further, more general, point. Just as the urban gardens of the American Addition existed in contradiction to the urban normative, so too, myriad such landscapes continue to exist around us in the city, serve to dethrone these persistent narratives, and reveal the complex character of urban socionature. As in the emerging literature on contemporary community gardens, future work should begin where the vanished gardens of the American Addition leave off, among working people remaking nature in the city.

Footnotes:

(1) I sincerely appreciate the support of the National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship during the time that I was researching this article. Additionally, I am grateful to the Department of Geography at the Ohio State University for the academic support it offered me as a visiting scholar. Thanks also to Paul Robbins for his encouragement and for his incisive comments on this article. John Pickles, Rich Schein, and Sue Roberts all provided useful comments on previous drafts of this paper. Finally, this research could not have been conducted without the Ohio Historical Society, where much time and effort is given to preserve the many histories of the city.

(2) Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sarah Moore, Center for Latin American Studies, Marshall Building 280, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721; e-mail: samoore@email.arizona.edu.

(3) Many items cited in this paper come from the manuscript collection of the Columbus Urban League, which is housed at the Ohio Historical Society, call number MSS 146 Box 13. Hereafter it is referred to as CUL in in-text citations. CUL followed by a date refers to specific documents found in the archives, while CUL refers to the untitled loose notes and papers found in the collection.

(4) Woodland and 17th Avenue had been built on by 1942, and the American Addition plots are not mentioned in the Urban League papers after 1936. The site at the corner of Woodland and Woodward was never built upon, though it changed hands twice. It is currently owned by the Gee-Gee Equipment Company and zoned as commercial land. One building existed on Woodland and 17th Avenue between 1928 and 1958, when it was bought and transformed into a gasoline/service station by Standard Oil. It is now owned by BP Exploration and Oil. Eventually, though, garden activity waned and the area was left as vacant industrial land. The land at Joyce and 5th is still the site of a city water tower and has continued to be owned by the municipality (all ownership data taken from Office of the Franklin County Auditor, 2004).

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