ABSTRACT
A Portuguese-Canadian retiree, originally from the Azores, singlehandedly cleans up an empty lot designated for luxury condominiums near his house in downtown Toronto and plants beans, corn, and tobacco. An Afro-Caribbean director of a food security organization transforms his suburban backyard into a demonstration farm cultivated by local youth. They grow callaloo, yams, and other vegetables for the Afri-Can Food Basket. A young, socially and environmentally conscious entrepreneur convinces urban homeowners to share their backyards with her to grow vegetables and herbs for sale at a farmers’ market. These projects and dozens of others like them springing up throughout cities of the Global North challenge our experiences of where food comes from and complicate our notions of private property and urban land use. Typically, within cities of the Global North, public lands have been the terrain upon which urban agriculture activists struggle ( Lawson 2005 ). However, in an era of continued public divestment and unimaginative, often regressive public land management, urban food activists are increasingly looking to the agrarian potential of privately owned land. This signals an evolution in the dynamics of urban food activism, as emphasis shifts from public to private land. This is no simple swap, but instead, as we describe below, food activists are increasingly engaged in actively challenging the material and discursive limits of private property and associated land uses in the neoliberal city.
