On November 15, 2019, urban farmers in Baltimore discussed their collective struggles at an event called “This Land is Not Your Land: Community Gardens and Land Precarity.” One year later, and amidst a global pandemic, two out of the four urban agriculture projects featured in the discussion were displaced from their land. In particular, the city of Baltimore has gradually swallowed up properties in the majority Black Poppleton neighborhood, leading to the displacement of Pop! Farm—a volunteer-run community garden and orchard established in the 1990s in West Baltimore. Using eminent domain powers and working with a New York–based developer, the prospect of razing historic buildings, boarding up community centers, displacing people, and allowing a thriving garden to become a derelict trash dump (purchased by the developer) became synonymous with “revitalization.”
Until the publication of A Recipe for Gentrification, attempts to link the role of food systems to these extractive...
University of California Press