Critical Planning

This essay uses the lens of historical-structural analysis to examine how the history of municipal land use policies and urban agriculture in the U.S. informed the policy design of California’s Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones (“UAIZs”) and their resulting failure to increase land access and security for community food producers. It argues that UAIZs sit at the end of a long history of lot conversion programs that have been used for urban crisis management in the U.S. In this process, the essay examines the role that land insecurity has played in redevelopment and land commodification and financialization more broadly, how equitable urban agriculture requires both rearticulating the functions that community food production play in cities and reasserting the right not only to occupy but to manage land in a way that serves one’s community (land equity), and why practitioners and researchers need to reframe the questions they ask when designing food systems policies and research.