Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Until recently (the past 70 years) working-class urbanites in North American cities maintained their households by means of a combination of wage labor and self provisioning. Using several US cities as case studies, I will discuss how working people used informal urban farms to self-provision, form communities, engage in successful informal markets, all of which led to better health, more food security, and strong community networks. Seeing urban commons as unbounded territory that served to create a network of relations between people, animals, plants and microbes, this paper seeks to redefine “modern” cities to visualize more clearly flexible self-provisioning arrangements that created the historical seeds of what today is a burgeoning urban farm movement in the United States. Similar autonomous, spontaneous urban farming movements help explain how post-Soviet citizens survived the1990s without mass famine and how African urban dwellers survive frequent turns out of wage labor. Highlighting this history helps to point to a more expansive and sustainable understanding of modern cities.