This chapter has demonstrated how the RHM has used maps to identify as a social movement, to transform the narratives related to urban agriculture,
it shows that mapping isn't just about logging locations on a grid (see next page)
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find and connect people who are carrying out urban agriculture activities. Urban agriculture mapping has made us aware of being a collec- tive body and, in doing so, has strengthened our work.
mapping can be utilized as a political tool that turns scattered urban gardeners into an organized social movement actively claiming their "right to the city." as Paula Restrepo writes.
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keep seeds from their harvests, few are related to SGs and even fewer articulate actions related to topics such as food sovereignty or autonomy, civilisational crisis or economic model crisis.
It’s interesting to see that gap in how urban farmers think about sustainability, while composting and waste management are easy for people to connect to bigger environmental issues, way fewer growers see saving seeds as a direct pushback against our current economic system
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safeguard the freedom of seeds.
Protecting "seed freedom" is an underrated part of urban sustainability overall
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Urban agriculture is probably overrated as a tool used to seek social justice. Some local gov- ernments regard it simply as a cure for misery and a way for low-income families to guarantee food security.
cities love to put urban agriculture onto low-income neighborhoods and call it "social justice," when in reality they’re just shifting the burden of food security onto poor residents instead of funding real structural change.
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In 2019, a national strike declared discontent with the Colombian government and its poli- tics. This situation was echoed in the Facebook group when administrators accepted a post that said: “For the defense of life, I march #21N (21th November 2019)”.
some people view urban farming purely as a hobby or gardening technique, while others see food sovereignty and agriculture as inherently political
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We highlighted the organic waste management map, which expressed how this is a strong urban agriculture practice.
Mapping out organic waste management is a smart move because it shows urban farming isn't just about growing food but it’s also about closing the resource loop and turning city scraps into compost to build a more circular local food system
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Seen in isolation, the farms mainly functioned with production objectives; seen collectively, they became understood as a network of communi- cative interactions that can give rise to collec- tive ways of inhabiting and contesting space in confrontation with neoliberal logic.
Looking at these farms together instead of as isolated plots really changes their impact especially when linked up as a community network, urban agriculture goes beyond just growing food and becomes a way to push back against profit-driven city development
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One of RHM’s most important actions was the collective mapping of Medellín’s urban farms in 2014. On a paper map made using only paper, scissors, pencils and glue, they located their farms geographically, accompanied by icons to record characteristics such as name, address, area, participants, activities and goals (fig. 1).
RHM used basic, accessible supplies like paper and glue to build this map, which shows that participatory urban planning doesn't need expensive GIS tech to accurately track local food networks and community assets
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Many people who engage in urban food growing and urban food system activi- ties come from economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Understanding this, local administrations try to demonstrate that urban agriculture can be part of a strategy to alleviate hunger and, at the same time, stop unplanned urban sprawl beyond the city’s boundaries.
since urban agriculture is largely driven by low-income communities, local governments often leverage it as a dual strategy to address food insecurity and contain unregulated urban sprawl
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While large populations need considerable amounts of food, modern cities have tended to reject local agriculture. Instead, they favour capitalist priorities that influence many other political and economic processes, accelerating both urbanisation and large-scale agriculture to an unhealthy and even dangerous level.
Restrepo argues that modern cities prioritize capitalist profits over local farming, and is eseentially driving urban growth and industrial agriculture to dangerous levels
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Climate justice soon became central to environmental justice scholarship and activism in the United States. 2
If climate disasters become more destructive because of inequalities that existed before the disaster, how much of the responsibility for protecting vulnerable communities should fall on climate policy versus policies addressing housing, poverty, and segregation?
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The following year, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, laying bare the ways that pre-existing injustices (including poverty, segregation, and substandard housing) magnify the impacts of storms and flooding, which will only grow worse with climate change. 2
Gonzalez uses Hurricane Katrina to show that climate-related disasters do not affect everyone equally. She argues that the effects of storms and flooding are intensified by inequalities that already exist within a community, such as poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate housing
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Climate displacement is an extreme manifestation of climate injustice.
Since environmental injustice can take so many different forms, how should governments determine what a “just” climate policy looks like? Is addressing unequal exposure to environmental hazards enough, or does climate justice also require addressing poverty, racism, political exclusion, and unequal enforcement of laws?
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They alleged: distributive injustice, in the form of disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards (such as toxic wastes and polluting facilities);22 procedural unfairness, due to the exclusion of underrepresented groups from governmental decision- making;23 corrective injustice, in the form of inadequate enforcement of environmental laws in low-income and minority communities; 24 and social injustice, because environmental degradation is closely linked with broader social ills (such as poverty and racism)
Gonzalez explains that climate justice developed from the Environmental Justice Movement, which focused on the unequal environmental burdens placed on low-income communities and communities of color. She identifies several different forms of injustice, including unequal exposure to hazards, exclusion from decision-making, unequal enforcement of environmental laws, and the connection between environmental problems and broader social inequalities etc.
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Struggles against exploitation and contamination is part of the history that can be found in stories, organizational documents, newsletters, and legal briefs
How does understanding the historical roots of environmental injustice change the way we think about environmental problems today? If environmental inequality developed through systems that existed for generations, can it be addressed without also addressing those larger historical and social inequalities?
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environmental justice communities were already living the legacy of climate related events and contam- ination from the fossil fuel industry
How can an environmental policy be beneficial for the environment but harmful or unfair to the people living in the affected community?
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The letter described six examples of how mainstream orga- nizations “continue to support and promote policies which emphasize the clean-up and preservation of the environment on the backs of working people in general and people of color in particular,” while ignoring cultural and survival consid- erations
some environmental policies have focused on protecting or cleaning up the environment while placing the economic or social burden on working-class people and communities of color.
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The letter, and the accompanying alliance among so many individuals and groups, made national news.
being affected by an environmental decision is different from finally having a voice in making that decision.
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It is our opinion that people of color in the United States and throughout the world are clearly endangered species. I
Communities of color have been fighting against environmental contamination and exploitation for generations, long before the Environmental Justice Movement became formally recognized in the late 1980s and early 1990s
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We suffer from the end results of these actions but are never full participants in the decision-making which leads to them.
They are describing how mainstream environmental organizations sometimes made decisions about these communities without actually including the people who lived there.
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Los Angeles, which symbolizes the city as antinature, really has long flourished as a mecca for thinking and writing about nature, and for telling this powerful story in particular that nature writing has so dedicatedly perpetuated.
People writing think pieces about LA isn't a new concept, what is different is writing about the gaps people have missed along the way.
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L.A. isnot “all imagination.” It has never been “your dream life,” so watch out for the blowback—for smog, mud, freeway gridlock, racial violence, poverty, homelessness, beach erosion, sewage spills, severe water pollution, and the fact that the rest of the West hates you for hoarding their water supplies.
Price expands the definition of urban problems beyond the environment. L.A.'s development has also produced social inequality and racial tensions etc, This connects directly to social sustainability as well because a city can't be sustainable if large portions of its population lack housing or economic security.
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L.A. is notoriously short on parks and other public spaces. It is a stronghold of the gated neighborhood. L.A. ranks first among U.S. cities for the number of millionaires and forty-first in philanthropy. Forty-first. Here, you can so clearly observe the tendency—magnified in my adopted town but hardly unique to it—to confuse ideals of personal liberty with an ideal of being free to accumulate capital and use it to do whatever you want.
Gated communities physically separate people from one another. This then reflects social and economic segregation, where wealthier residents can create private spaces instead of contributing to shared public infrastructure. But is this true freedom?
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initial thoughts : how does such a place with such a large population handle pollution, etc, and how is it similar (or different) to NYC?
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How do we make nature meaningful? “What nature means” tales are one last category of story I’ll suggest, and nature writing has shown great interest in this kind of story—in fact the quest for meaning has defined the genre’s very soul. Of course, nature writers have attached various meanings to a great range of places, animals, and plants. Yosemite? Majesty. A sacred place. The desert? Peace. Harshness. Clarity.
we often interpret nature symbolically, like how Yosemite represents majesty and sacredness, while the desert represents peace, harshness, or clarity, what is the the true relationship between humans and nature?
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. Every place has an active, very particular ecology, climate, topography, geology, flora, fauna.
no two places experience or relate to “nature” in exactly the same way.
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If you tell stories that follow nature through our material lives, you will see a lot of L.A.—the city’s warehouses, factories, commercial strips, and cultural centers, and its residential neighborhoods, some of which have a great deal more stuff than others.
nature translates into materialism, and challenges the conventional separation between “nature” and built environments. By tracing nature through L.A.’s material infrastructure, it shows that human development does not eliminate nature but it can also reshape neighborhoods, and more.
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L.A. sports a great deal of nature: the extensive beaches, mountains, and canyons that have always brought people here. A few nature-writing anthologies include a single rogue piece about finding wildness inside a city. If L.A. symbolizes “the end of nature” (to use Bill McKibben’s dangerously catchy phrase), it actually has more than enough real fodder for such tales, if you want to write about the sunset on Broad Beach in Malibu or the hawks soaring in Temescal Canyon or the dolphins leaping just offshore or how your heart soars like a hawk or leaps like a dolphin as you watch the sun set offshore from atop the trail in Temescal Canyon.
L.A. challenges the idea that cities are completely separate from nature, because even though L.A. is highly urbanized, it still has beaches, mountains, wildlife, and other natural spaces etc
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it’s the American megalopolis with brown air, fouled beaches, pavement to the horizon, and a concrete river. It’s sort of the Death Star to American nature lovers—the place from where the destruction of nature emanates
Price describes how nature and human development coexist and interact.
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he crisis in nature writing is one of our most pressing national cultural catastrophes. I love L.A. more than I hate it. I wasn’t supposed to. A nature lover from suburban St. Louis, I have enjoyed a fierce and enduring attachment to the wilds of the Southern Rockies. I was supposed to love Boulder, Colorado, where I settled after graduate school in the hope that it might be the perfect place—and it’s a town that every day adores itself in the mirror and confirms its perfection.
With the comparison of LA to CO, It shows the reader that just because a location HAS a lot of nature, that doesn't necessarily make it desirable to all.
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The long-established procedure has been to explore why one loves it or hates it, or both, and to proclaim loudly in the process that L.A. is the American dream or the American nightmare.
This is a similar viewpoint to NYC that many people have!
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yet commuters who have driven over it five days a week for ten years cannot tell you where it is.
Residents of LA may be taking for granted the nature that they have around them, as opposed to residents of other areas, they may take more pride in the nature that they are exposed to, etc
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