ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we consider two case studies of urban farms in the United States: the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, California, and Marra Farm in Seattle, Washington. These two spaces and the local and global politics and processes in which they are embedded reveal a great deal about current food systems and struggles for justice. Here we devote attention to the conscious strategies that immigrant and diasporic communities utilize to make place in these contested urban sites; we do this in order to argue for analytical practices grounded in subaltern experiences that focus on how space is continuously reinvented as place over time through the formation of place-based resistance and project identities (see Castells 1997, Peña 2003). This allows us to consider how public spaces are infused with memory and how identities are anchored in conscious strategies for “dwelling” in and reinhabiting transformational spaces.
