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Cultivating the sustainable city: urbanagriculture policies and gardeningprojects in Minneapolis, MinnesotaUrsula Langa
a Department of Geography, Environment & Society, Universityof Minnesota, 414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave. S.,Minneapolis, MN 55455, USAPublished online: 21 May 2014.
To cite this article: Ursula Lang (2014) Cultivating the sustainable city: urban agriculturepolicies and gardening projects in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Urban Geography, 35:4, 477-485, DOI:10.1080/02723638.2014.916142
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2014.916142
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URBAN PULSE
Cultivating the sustainable city: urban agriculture policies andgardening projects in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Ursula Lang*
Department of Geography, Environment & Society, University of Minnesota, 414 Social SciencesBuilding, 267 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
(Received 1 March 2013; accepted 4 March 2014)
In the past 20 years, municipal governments across the United States have increasinglytried to incorporate environmental efforts into city business and policies. Urbansustainability has become the key concept around which such activities are organized.Official sustainability plans are most often implemented through indicators andmetrics. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, urban gardening, in a variety of forms, has beenthe focus of ongoing citizen- and NGO-led environmental efforts, as well as municipalmeasures of sustainability. Here, debates around the recent adoption of a city urbanagriculture policy, as well as a program to encourage the installation of raingardens inneighborhoods across the city, reveal some of the rich variations in gardening practicesand spaces. These far exceed the relatively narrow official focus on sustainabilityindicators. Better understanding how urban sustainability initiatives might work with,but also move beyond, indicators may provide directions toward wider visions ofsustainable urban life.
Keywords: urban sustainability; urban agriculture; gardening; yards
In the last three decades, in large and small cities across the United States, urbansustainability has been taken up by city councils, mayors, and regional planning autho-rities. Though details vary widely, urban sustainability is now often mobilized throughsustainability plans focusing on sustainability indicators. These plans and metrics fre-quently overlap and dovetail with ongoing citizen- and nonprofit-led environmentalprojects. In this essay, I examine the unfolding relationships between city governmentsustainability plans and urban gardening in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Urban gardening, ina variety of forms, has been the object of significant sustainability focus: the City ofMinneapolis recently adopted an urban agriculture policy including changes to city codes,and NGOs have been promoting residential raingardens to improve water quality. Both ofthese efforts are quantified as part of formal sustainability indicators tracked by the city,but the official vision of how urban gardening might fit into broader notions of asustainable city remains limited. Better understanding and critically evaluating relation-ships among sustainability plans, indicators, and ongoing projects may provide newdirections toward moving forward on sustainability goals. The environmental effortsdiscussed below unsettle dominant understandings of what urban gardening is all about,and more broadly, how the city itself is constituted. A sustainable city that is moremeaningful to urban residents may need to provide a broader sustainability repertoire,in addition to—and beyond—a focus on quantifiable indicators.
*Email: [email protected]
Urban Geography, 2014Vol. 35, No. 4, 477–485, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2014.916142
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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Urban sustainability, as a planning and policy concept, first emerged in the UnitedStates in the early 1990s in cities such as Seattle, Santa Monica, and San Francisco(Portney, 2003). Policymakers and citizens in these cities adapted international discoursesabout sustainable development within their own locales. Cities especially drew on theThree E’s’—Environment, Economy and Equity—as a means to capture the multifacetednature of sustainability as a guiding concept, and drew inspiration from the UnitedNations Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development[WCED] (The Brundtland Commission), 1987). Cities in the United States and beyondcontinue to use this framework as a basis for sustainability efforts. The sustainability planhas become the most common tool for cities to articulate, adopt, and address sustainablecity goals. These plans are generally built around a set of sustainability indicators, whichare presumed to measure the outcomes of efforts to become “more sustainable” jurisdic-tions. Seattle was one of the first cities to initiate a major sustainability indicators projectin 1996, also incorporating public participation in the project development process. Somecity sustainability plans are integrated in broader city comprehensive plans (Corson, 1993;Kline, 1995; Portney, 2003).
The institutional arrangements for incorporating sustainability within existing urbangovernance vary across time and place. Separate city departments or offices were oftenintroduced in some of the earliest cities to adopt sustainability. For example, the City andCounty of San Francisco set up an innovative Department of the Environment in 1996,charged with coordinating efforts toward sustainability goals throughout city governmentand over 5 year increments. This separate department grew directly out of citizen-ledefforts to articulate a Sustainable City Plan for San Francisco in the early 1990s (City andCounty of San Francisco, 2012; Sustainable San Francisco, 1995). In cities which adoptedsustainability policies in later years (including the City of Minneapolis), a more integratedapproach often dominates: sustainability goals are integrated across city departments,often overseen by a coordinator and small staff usually housed in an existing departmentsuch as public works.
Urban agriculture policy in a sustainable Minneapolis
In Minneapolis, municipal sustainability efforts have focused primarily on developing andtracking sustainability metrics. The City Council formally adopted sustainability as a keyprinciple in 2003 (City of Minneapolis, 2003). The primary goals of this initial resolutionwere to first establish a process for articulating sustainability goals in the form of a“Minneapolis Sustainability Plan”, and then to integrate this plan as a chapter into theCity’s comprehensive plan. In this original resolution, a selective list of projects andprograms undertaken by the City of Minneapolis since the mid-1990s portrays the City asalready working toward “green” goals, including: citizen involvement in environmentaltask forces; brownfield reclamation projects; adoption of Smart Growth Principles toguide planning and land use decisions; water quality improvements and protection ofwatersheds through storm water management improvements; improving energy efficiencyin buildings and fleets; maintaining and improving parks, open spaces, communitygardens, and urban reforestation efforts. A series of actions were then identified to buildon these past environmentally oriented projects. These included developing a program toidentify and track key sustainability indicators and 10-year targets for those indicators, aswell as amending ordinances such as the City’s zoning code to be consistent with thesustainability plan. In this 2003 resolution, sustainability is deployed as an umbrellaconcept intended to synthesize and guide environmental decision-making in a more
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coherent way, and eventually to “integrate the Three E’s, Environment, Economy andEquity (social justice); coordinate efforts; garner buy-in; and increase the effectiveness ofour ongoing programs and investments” (City of Minneapolis, 2003). A small office wasestablished that currently houses three staff, including a Sustainability Coordinator.
Sustainability indicators dominated these efforts in Minneapolis, but a separate sus-tainability plan was never produced. In 2005, the City held a series of public roundtablediscussions to inform the selection of approximately 24 indicators, and a focus onsustainable growth was incorporated into the City’s comprehensive plan (2009).1
Minneapolis sustainability indicators have been modified periodically, and remain roughlygrouped around the initial concepts of health, environment, and social equity. Since 2007,26 indicators have been tracked annually in a series of reports, including A Healthy Life(e.g. obesity rates, infant mortality, and teen pregnancy); GreenPrint (e.g. measures ofalternative transportation trips, airport noise, and pollution in urban lakes, streams andrivers); and A Vital Community (e.g. socioeconomic statistics such as homelessness,violent crimes, graduation rates) (City of Minneapolis, 2012a).
Urban gardening in the sustainable city
In the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in urban gardening. The roleand potential of gardening within the city is presently seen as integral to making local andhealthy foods more accessible, mitigating the negative impacts of urbanization, loweringcarbon emissions, and encouraging emerging forms of community and sociality in urbanspace; all of these benefits resonate with sustainability goals. Within this recent shift inattention toward gardening in the city, urban agriculture now dominates the discussion.Detroit is perhaps the most celebrated example of hopeful discourses on the redemptivepossibilities of urban farming. As will be seen below in the case of Minneapolis, urbangardening can productively be seen as a diverse field of motivations, practices, andunderstandings of city life. The shifting landscape of the perceived purpose and practiceof gardening raises questions about how urban residents and policymakers might shapemore sustainable urban environments. For example, urban gardening initiatives often havethe potential to impact multiple sustainability indicators and measures in the case ofMinneapolis, such as tree canopy coverage, number of raingardens, and number of food-producing gardens. Indirectly, measures of cleaned-up brownfield sites and access tohealthy food may also involve gardening.
Urban agriculture policy and city codes
In 2008, Mayor R.T. Rybak, in conjunction with the Minneapolis Department of Healthand Family Support and the Minneapolis Sustainability Office, embarked on an effortnamed Homegrown Minneapolis to rethink the role of the City in supporting and shapinglocal food systems. Dovetailing with sustainability indicators, the initiative studied andcompiled recommendations for policies to create a “healthy, local food system”(Minneapolis Urban Agriculture Policy Plan, 2011, p. 4). The Homegrown Minneapolisreport (2009) required the City to put together the first “Urban Agricultural Policy Plan”.Committees were assembled to translate the aims of the plan into zoning code amend-ments. Two years later, the City Council adopted the Urban Ag Policy Plan (2011). Theassociated text amendments defining, clarifying, and regulating how food might be grownand sold within the City were adopted in 2012. Historically, growing food was largelywritten out of legal and regulatory understandings of urban land use when the first major
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comprehensive code was assembled in 1963. The key function of the current Urban AgPlan was to expand allowable food production, processing, and commercial exchange inthe city through amendments to Minneapolis city codes. This largely relaxed relevantregulations governing urban space, but also involved identifying and defining urbanagriculture practices and associated material requirements in terms of land uses, gardeningstructures, and activities. For the current Urban Agriculture Plan, discussions aroundadding new definitions and amending existing code took the better part of 1 year, andpreoccupied community gardening enthusiasts, food justice advocates, and organic andlocal food activists in the area.
The Urban Agriculture amendments to city codes reinforced some existing under-standings of urban environments, and challenged others. Receiving much of the attentionand press, these definitions now include several types of large-scale food production.Market gardens are defined as “establishment[s] where food or ornamental crops aregrown on the ground, on a rooftop, or inside a building, to be sold or donated;” Urbanfarms include “establishment[s] where food or ornamental crops are grown or processed tobe sold or donated that includes, but is not limited to, outdoor growing operations, indoorgrowing operations, vertical farms, aquaculture, aquaponics, hydroponics, and rooftopfarms” (City of Minneapolis, 2012b).2 For both market gardens and urban farms, theability to sell fresh produce at the site where food is grown (on a limited number of daysper year) was a major change. The definition of these new land uses was celebrated andwidely promoted by the City and gardening advocates as allowing increased opportunitiesfor economic development, and facilitating entrepreneurial drive across diverse populationsin the form of for-profit food production in the city. Additionally, the definitions recognizefor the first time that food production in the city may take a variety of physical forms—including commercial-scale aquaponics, hydroponics, and living roof systems.
Although smaller in scale and less frequently touted in press releases, growing food inresidential yards garnered much debate that points to the wide variety of urban gardeningscales, practices, and understandings on the part of urban agriculture advocates andmunicipal planners. Discussion and debate about small-scale gardening structures, suchas arbors, raised beds, cold frames, and hoop houses,3 were framed around multipleunderstandings of the purpose and use of residential yards. Regulations of yard spacesgenerally are located within one of two main municipal purviews/departments: (1) plan-ning (land use and zoning); (2) housing maintenance (outdoor upkeep such as overgrownlawns and broken windows). In both cases, outdoor space is defined as front, side, andbackyards—with different allowable uses and maintenance guidelines for each. Frontyards are significantly more limited in the range of allowable uses, and backyards muchless regulated. The planning department’s purview over yards is complaint-driven, and theenforcement of maintenance regulations is a combination of complaint-driven enforce-ment, as well as annual visual surveys done by the city.
Given this background about how yards are defined and regulated from the point ofview of municipal departments, debates underway about the proposed urban agriculturepolicy changes were constituted largely from two main perspectives. First, urban agricul-ture proponents tended to focus narrowly on the capacity of a single yard to produce foodbased on the best growing conditions (usually full sun)—regardless of regulatory distinc-tions based on front, side, and back. In contrast, city planners had broader conceptions ofyard uses, especially in front yards—evoking the preservation of view corridors andneighborhood character as potentially threatened by increased productive food gardening.These arguments against expanded allowable gardening structures, such as arbors orraised beds, included concerns and protests about “unsightly” disruption of the collective
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environment along the front of city blocks. Urban agriculture advocates countered thisresistance to expanding allowable structures and uses of front yards with very differentvisions of urban neighborhoods. In advocates’ views, agriculturally productive land couldexist in every yard, with a range of structural supports to maximize food production. Inthe end, the revised yard regulations do expand allowable urban agriculture possibilities,especially in front yards, with some compromise. Because the municipal planning andmaintenance departments are involved primarily when neighbors complain, it remains tobe seen how the revised urban agriculture policy may shift yard practices and norms, andhow this may be variegated across the city.
Raingardens in the sustainable city
In addition to food-producing gardens, the City of Minneapolis tallies the number ofraingardens each year as one sustainability indicator. Raingardens usually take the form ofa shallow depression planted with a variety of water-loving plants, and are designed tocapture rain water from downspouts or impervious surfaces such as driveways and side-walks. Ideally, these plants slow and divert storm water runoff, keeping the flows of waterfrom polluting storm sewer systems. Because the typical residential roof in Minneapolisuses asphalt tiles, it is advised that raingardens generally not be food-producing, due to thepotential for chemical residues in the water to be taken up by edible plants. Usually nativeplants are recommended, as they often tolerate local climates better without as muchneed for water or added chemicals. A particular urban environment is imagined throughraingardens—one that involves a reclamation of territory from “exotic” species such asturfgrasses, and one that redirects the movement of water and pollutants vertically at thesource, rather than horizontally across city landscapes.
In Minneapolis, one nonprofit organization, Metro Blooms, has been central to effortsto improve water quality through raingardens. The organization grew with initial supportfrom the City and local activists in the 1960s, and the focus has shifted from an emphasison beautification toward a direct engagement with water quality issues and strongerenvironmental advocacy in the past decade. Metro Blooms developed a series of work-shops in 2005 to educate and promote raingardens in particular, as one type of urbangardening that can contribute to better water quality. Metro Blooms now partners with avariety of government agencies and neighborhood groups. Their workshops are nowpromoted throughout the Minneapolis metro area, including website links and promotionby the City of Minneapolis Sustainability Office and Public Works Department. Becausethese gardens are often misunderstood as “messy”, “shaggy”, or unattractive by neighborsor passersby, an educational mission is often built into raingarden design. For instance,Metro Blooms gardens often include signage reading: “I am a raingarden. I capturerainwater to protect our water resources” (Figure 1). Metro Blooms’ and other literatureon raingardens assures homeowners that these gardens can be beautiful, can trap mosqui-toes rather than encourage them, and require little maintenance after plants becomeestablished. This points to the work necessary to address many residents’ anxieties andtheir reluctance to adopt this different form of gardening.
One of Metro Blooms’ ongoing initiatives, “Neighborhoods of Raingardens”, scalesup from a focus on individual residential properties to conceiving and encouraging rain-gardens at the scale of neighborhood. This has taken different forms in different neighbor-hoods, often determined by the partnerships among Metro Blooms, funding agencies, andneighborhood organizations. Two recent “Neighborhood” projects of differing scalesshow an evolving approach on the part of Metro Blooms regarding how neighborhood
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raingarden initiatives are communicated to residents, how individual raingardens aredesigned and installed, and the role of measurable outcomes. The first was a large-scaleproject of more than 120 raingardens, designed and installed in 2010. While the numberof gardens and associated storm water metrics reached the targets, the designers found thatresident involvement varied widely at all stages of the project—initial interest, design andinstallation, and ability and willingness to maintain gardens over time. Property ownershipstatus may have affected participation in the program, with approximately 53% of house-holds renter-occupied in this neighborhood (City of Minneapolis, 2010). Metro Bloomsdesigners felt renters may not have had as much involvement in outdoor spaces in generalto feel empowered or capable of maintaining the gardens. As one landscape designerelaborated, “We knew a lot about the watershed, but not as much about the people-shed”(Lang, 2012). Still, the project has made considerable difference in the appearance of theneighborhood’s yard spaces and the way neighborhood residents are experiencing them(Figure 2). One resident described it this way: “Even without everyone taking care of theirgardens, you see a different way of having a garden” (Lang, 2012). Metro Blooms nowfocuses volunteer days around seasonal maintenance, such as clearing mulch and debrisfrom raingardens and street drains in the spring.
In a different part of the city, a smaller “Neighborhood of Raingardens” project wasundertaken, with a decidedly different approach to involvement on the part of residents.Unlike earlier projects where volunteers dug up and installed gardens, residents wereengaged early on to work with designers and collaborate to help one another prepare andplant gardens. This focus on residents’ direct involvement in planting gardens andneighborly help was intended to foster feelings of ownership over their gardens and to“build community”. The goal is that over time others in the neighborhood will see howtheir neighbors were able to do their own raingardens, and be inspired to consider the ideathemselves. Measurable impacts, such as quantity of runoff captured by gardens of thisneighborhood project, were more modest than those in the larger-scale project describedabove, due to a smaller number of raingardens. However, Metro Blooms designers felt thedifferent approach led participants to master the techniques firsthand, perhaps feel more
Figure 1. “I am a raingarden: I capture rainwater to protect our water resources.” (Photo by author,April 2012.)
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confident about their own raingardens, and establish an informal support network amongstneighbors.
From an environmental advocacy perspective, the recognition of relationshipsbetween neighbors is increasingly important. “Community” is imagined as being“strengthened” and “built” through the encounters between people and gardens, and thishas become a central part of Metro Blooms’ discourses around their programs.Participants in the small raingarden project described above self-consciously joked atthe installation demo as they chatted and drank coffee on a chilly, early weekend morning:“Well, we’re getting off to a late start—but we’re building community. That’s what it’sabout, right?” (Lang, 2012). One year later in this smaller project, some of the raingardenshave languished and not received the care that would help them flourish. By the City’ssustainability metrics, they count as raingardens, but they might not be reaching the goalslaid out by Metro Blooms and the neighborhood organization.
Conclusion—sustainability beyond measure?
Both the urban agriculture and raingarden efforts discussed above disturb dominantunderstandings about what an urban garden—especially a garden in a residential front
Figure 2. Front yards featuring raingardens along a “Neighborhood of Raingardens” block,Minneapolis. (Photo by author, April 2012.)
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or back yard—is, and point toward alternatives. Embodied in the discourses that make upurban agriculture and raingardens are different imaginaries about how sustainability isunderstood, and how changing practices may reshape and contribute to a more sustainableurban life. In the case of raingardens in Minneapolis, the project discussed above showsthe importance of social relations in the long-term success and failure of sustainabilitygoals, as well as how the spatial scale of environmental interventions matters. In the caseof developing urban agriculture policies, the process of working out the definitions anddetails of city code amendments reveals sometimes conflicting understandings about howand where urban agriculture should take place. These debates and projects point to theimportance of better understanding the dynamics around sustainability efforts, beyond anarrow focus on quantification.
As cities work to try to imagine more sustainable futures, how can we informsustainability policies and learn from projects, such as encouraging raingardens, as wellas policies that expand allowable uses for urban spaces toward sustainability goals? Thepoint of this essay has been to show how such efforts are often considered part and parcelof urban sustainability, but the variation in understandings and practices may not besufficiently captured in sustainability metrics alone. Indicators and associated measure-ments can define targets, but may not provide adequate insights about how those targetsmight be reached in a particular place. Thus, identifying indicators and measurement isnot enough. What we need are not simply sustainability plans that lay out indicators andmeasurements, but studies that examine the processes and practices which recognizelarger visions of sustainable urban life.
AcknowledgmentThe author gratefully acknowledges Helga Leitner for insightful discussion and comments on earlierdrafts of this essay.
Notes1. The most recent Minneapolis comprehensive plan underscores the “Three E’s” approach to
sustainability, but contains no chapter or plan focused specifically on sustainability: “TheMinneapolis Plan for Sustainable Growth is a deliberate title. . .indicating that as Minneapolisgrows, its growth will be achieved in ways that promote our economic development, strengthenthe social and cultural fabric of the city, and value our natural environment and livability whilecreating conditions for economic opportunity for current and future generations” (MinneapolisPlan, 2009).
2. Definitions according to the 2012 City of Minneapolis zoning text amendments: Aquaculture:the cultivation, maintenance, and harvesting of aquatic species; Hydroponics: the growing offood or ornamental crops, in a water and fertilizer solution containing the necessary nutrientsfor plant growth; Aquaponics: the combination of aquaculture and hydroponics to grow food orornamental crops and aquatic species together in a recirculating system without any dischargeor exchange of water (City of Minneapolis, 2012b).
3. According to the 2012 Minneapolis zoning text amendments: An arbor is considered “alandscape structure consisting of an open frame with horizontal and/or vertical latticeworkoften used as a support for climbing food or ornamental crops. . . may be freestanding orattached to another structure”; a cold frame is “an unheated outdoor structure built close tothe ground, typically consisting of, but not limited to, a wooden or concrete frame and a top ofglass or clear plastic, used for protecting seedlings and plants from cold weather”; composting isofficially understood to be “the natural degradation of organic material, such as yard and foodwaste, into soil”; and a hoop house is “a temporary or permanent structure typically made of,but not limited to, piping or other material covered with translucent material for the purposes of
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growing food or ornamental crops. . .considered more temporary than a greenhouse” (City ofMinneapolis, 2012b).
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minneapolis.mn.us/neighborhoods/City of Minneapolis. (2012a). Sustainability. Retrieved 4 June 2012 from http://www.minneapolismn.
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