Attempts at changing urban agricultural practice simply recreate the same hierarchies they attempt to dismantle. The 1AC will always recreate new and worse forms of gentrification while also demonizing projects of black and native foodways that have already begun the work.

Scholarship on contemporary Urban Agriculture (UA) projects reveals similar logics of Othering and civilizing at play in North American cities. Critical food scholars have written extensively on the ways in which alternative food initiatives ultimately support neoliberal capitalism (Alkon & Mares, 2012; Guthman, 2008c; Holt-Giménez & Shattuck, 2011; Weissman, 2015), arguing, for example, that organized UA efforts can contribute to neoliberal subject formation by shifting responsibility to the individual and away from collective mobilization against the corporate agri-food system (McClintock, 2014; Pudup, 2008). But the formation of the ideal neoliberal “foodie” also mobilizes a highly normative set of imaginaries and claims, many of which undergird racial-capitalist and settler logics of Othering. Many UA efforts draw on an agrarian romanticization of “going back to the land” and “getting your hands dirty,” while remaining blind to racialized and gendered histories of agricultural exploitation (Carlisle, 2014; Guthman, 2008a, 2008b; Rotz, 2017) and eliding questions of whose land they are actually “going back to.” These studies have also revealed how UA can reinforce hegemonic racial hierarchies, where well-meaning UA advocates intent on “bringing good food to others” (Guthman, 2008a) can re-inscribe paternalistic power asymmetries and colonial patterns of oppression of people of color (Lyson, 2014; Ramírez, 2015; Reynolds & Cohen, 2016; Rosan & Pearsall, 2017). Discourses of purity, mobilized in opposition to corporate, processed food, can also denigrate Indigenous and non-White foodways (Alkon et al., 2013; DeLind, 2010; Minkoff-Zern, 2014). Furthermore, the Whiteness of alternative food initiatives—and their capacity for racial Othering—is spatialized through what Saldanha (2007, p. 50) refers to as “viscosity,” or the tendency of “white bodies to stick and exclude others.” Several scholars have described how such viscosity has rendered alternative food spaces as White spaces (Alkon & McCullen, 2011; Slocum, 2007), where community gardens, for example, become exclusionary, despite their presumed ability to bring a diversity of people together (Bosco & Joassart-Marcelli, 2017; Drake, 2014). As White people begin to dominate agricultural spaces in older communities of color, the actual practice of UA can result in territorial appropriation. Even well-intentioned activists working under a banner of “food justice” or “reclaiming the commons” can unintentionally contribute to dispossession and displacement of people of color (McClintock, 2018; Stehlin & Tarr, 2017). Indeed, UA efforts by White people are often perceived as colonial by those they intend to “help.” Meenar and Hoover (2016, p. 10) quote an African American gardener who describes the urban farming efforts in a low-income area of Philadelphia as “a white, top down activity.” Similarly, Owens and Antiporda (2017, p. 165) describe how garden project failed in its efforts to fulfill a promise to construct “a garden on every corner” in historically Black West Oakland precisely because it “replicated the colonial ‘ideology’ of ‘improvement’ and risked appearing obtuse to the reality of displacement in the context of extreme gentrification.” Discussing a White-led garden project in Seattle, Ramírez (2015) notes a similar blindness to power asymmetries, as do Rosan and Pearsall (2017) in their study of UA in Philadelphia, exemplifying the “disavowal of the processes of dispossession” (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel, 2014, p. 5) fundamental to the racial formation of White settlers (Rotz, 2017). But even while many White urban farmers are actually sensitive to uneven power dynamics, their efforts often overshadow the existing UA efforts of non-White community residents. This has material impacts, as municipalities and funders alike tend to privilege large-scale, photogenic UA, thereby disproportionately shifting land, equipment, and grant funding away from organizations of color to these new urban farmers (Horst, McClintock, & Hoey, 2017; Reynolds & Cohen, 2016). Indeed, it is in such gentrifying neighborhoods that UA seems most visibly entangled in racial-capitalist/settler-colonial logics of Othering and dispossession. Clamoring to take advantage of the growing “rent gap” between actual and potential property values in disinvested neighborhoods of color, developers, landlords, and gentrifiers alike invoke a frontier imaginary that appeals to “pioneers” and “urban homesteaders” in search of cheap housing (N. Smith, 1996). Harkening back to the westward settlement of the United States by Whites granted “free” land under a series of Homestead Acts, such discourse reframes devalued inner-city neighborhoods as uncharted “urbs nullius” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 176), rendering “the present innercity population as a natural element of their physical surroundings” (Smith, 1996, p. xvi), while “evading Indigenous sovereignty and the modern presence of actual urban Native peoples” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 28; see also Jackson, 2009). In some cases, commercial developers and market gardeners, trumpeting promises of enhanced food security or sustainability, purchase or lease vast tracts of vacant land at fire sale prices in these neighborhoods, acquisitions that locals see as “land grabs” that do little more than enrich the owner at the community's expense (Paddeu, 2017; Safransky, 2017). Several authors have described this phenomenon in Detroit and other post-industrial cities where vacant land is abundant. But similar processes are visible everywhere, arising where land values are lower and—given the racialized nature of uneven development—where populations of color tend to be concentrated (Lederman, 2017; Pothukuchi, 2017; Rosan & Pearsall, 2017). Urban agriculture is caught up in racial-capitalist and settler logics of urban development precisely because it distinguishes “new development, rising home values, and a whiter residential population” from a neighborhood's “racially marginalized past” (Dillon, 2014, p. 1211), or as Pettygrove and Ghose (2018, p. 601) put it, UA works “to racialize revitalization as whiteness, in that it is a process meant to improve neighborhoods understood to be black.” Even if longtime residents tend gardens, the viscosity and visibility of White gardeners—growing food UA in their yards, community garden plots, or vacant lots—serves as a signal to future gentrifiers and investors that the neighborhood is on the road to being livable and green (McClintock, 2018). Urban agriculture, like other green amenities, is thus performative and often most widespread in some of the trendiest neighborhoods (Lebowitz & Trudeau, 2017; Lowell & Law, 2017; McClintock, Mahmoudi, Simpson, & Santos, 2016; Naylor, 2012; Quastel, 2009). As demonstrated above, UA has been entangled in processes of racial Othering and dispossession central to the racial-capitalist development of settler cities. But as noted in the introduction, UA can work in contradictory ways. In the next section, I draw on insights from Black geographies and Indigenous studies to illustrate how UA's emancipatory functions arise dialectically in response to the logics and material outcomes of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Many scholars have raised that alarm that a narrow focus on political economic structures, particularly those grounded in Marxian critiques of neoliberal capitalism, can foreclose alternative, anti-capitalist pathways (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Parnell & Robinson, 2012; Springer, 2014). Scholars of Black geographies have further warned of the scholarly erasure of Black epistemologies, ontologies, and material practices. Even when well-intentioned, a narrow focus on racial violence can reinforce racist differentiation by essentializing the Black experience as tantamount to death and dying, thereby reinforcing the role that “scenes of subjection” (Hartman, 1997) have historically played in normalizing violence against Black bodies and Othering Black spaces (Gilmore, 2002; Mbembe, 2003; McKittrick, 2013; Woods, 2002). Instead, these authors argue for a dialectical approach to understanding Black space that also includes the social movements that emerge in opposition to racial capitalism's assault on Black life. McKittrick (2011, p. 955), for example, asserts that Black geographies “hold in them useful anti-colonial practices and narratives” and “are not just about limitations, captivities, and erasures; they are also about everyday contestations, philosophical demands, and the possibilities the production of space can engender for subaltern subjects” (McKittrick, 2006, p. 121). Mirroring Robinson's dialectical understanding of the emergence of the Black radical tradition as a movement to reconstitute social bonds torn apart by racial capitalism (Melamed, 2015, p. 80; Robinson, 2000), Woods identifies a “Blues model of sustainable development” that arises in dialectical opposition to slavery and Jim Crow oppression (Woods, 2000, 2017). Similarly, critics have warned that studies of settler colonialism risk perpetuating the dominance of a singular colonial narrative that can silence Indigenous theorizing, thus reinforcing settler-colonial logics of erasure (Hugill, 2017). Rather than focusing solely on settler structures of oppression, Indigenous scholars have stressed the importance of examining everyday practices and other assertions of the multiple sovereignties that work in opposition to settler logics (Corntassel, 2012; Daigle, 2017; Simpson, 2014). To this end, the theory and praxis of Indigenous resurgence entails “recommitments and reorientations” to Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and practices (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005, p. 611). Action at the scale of the individual and household may scale up over time into social or political movements challenging the authority and territorial claims of the settler-colonial state (Daigle, 2017).