ABSTRACT
Urban community gardens have proliferated as localized strategies to manage impacts of neoliberalization, including social service cutbacks, reductions in food stamps, environmental degradation, and disinvestment. Urban community gardens as new spaces of engagement in central city neighbourhoods perform multiple functions. Community gardening in the neoliberal city is a challenging proposition. Increasingly, community gardens are established on vacant lots, transforming them from spaces of despair to new spaces of living for the residents of central city neighbourhoods. Community gardening across a city can be fragmented and limited to neighbourhoods where citizens have access to material and social resources, resulting in challenges to establishing larger advocacy campaigns. De-industrialization and urban renewal efforts in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the geography of urban agriculture in Milwaukee by disrupting predominantly black neighbourhoods and furthering uneven development.
