I grew up with my fingers in the soil. For my first 10 years of life, I lived a half-hour from Moncton, in the back roads just past Irishtown nestled between trees and rivers. Greenery was the backdrop to my childhood; romping around our cabin-sized greenhouse was a daily adventure.
I only had a peripheral awareness of city life, and the ways growing food could contrast a community’s political definitions of space. It never occurred to me that the way my family gardened was a luxury of independence not available to everyone. Food is historically a very effective method of controlling a population, and limited access to healthy food remains a barrier preventing people from sustaining themselves and supporting each other.
What does a city garden look like? In urban environments— at least, community-decentered ones— it can seem like the landscape around you is increasingly built less with individuals in mind, as if your food security is more and more dependent on external systems you have no power over. Recently implemented tariffs by the U.S., for example, might highlight just how much your local grocer imports food from out-of-country. Global conflicts and increasing environmental catastrophes also threaten large-scale food chains. And hey, sometimes the 10-minute drive downtown for a single tomato is not worth it. On top of that, it is lonely.
So how do we return food security to the hands of the people? There is a growing interest in gardening as a way to reclaim independence from flawed and isolating systems, such as global food chains. One way to do this is the community garden. Sackville, to speak locally, boasts a community garden located on Charles Street a short distance from our beloved ‘cube.’ Love that thing. Folks here can rent raised beds to grow produce, contribute to their seed-sharing library, attend events, and more. These places are very important: as he writes in his article “Without permission: guerrilla gardening, contested places, spatial justice,” author Donnie Johnson Sackey shared, “Community gardens are sites of power because they return private spaces to the commons and make the spaces available for cultivation and sharing of food, knowledge, and community.” Places like these, Sackey explained, provide a community the space to come together that they may not have had otherwise. They can “empower marginalized groups by presenting opportunities for them to own and control space, especially in response to increasing gentrification.”
But there are still barriers presented by the community garden structure. Accessing a set location can be challenging without a car or public transportation, and renting beds might not be financially possible. Sackey added, “many cities have beautification laws, which make it quite difficult to plant native species, especially if the species are considered unsightly or weeds.” Community gardens may also contribute to colonization by encouraging the planting of “non-native, unsustainable crops while ignoring Indigenous, sustainable, and heirloom varieties.”
In 2020, initial waves of the COVID-19 pandemic urged many city-dwellers outside in search of the benefits that gardening can provide: enrichment, healthy food, fresh air, and community. This was the case for Sylvain Ward, a Moncton resident who built a garden in his front yard which included wooden archways for vertical growth. Yet following a complaint to the city of Moncton he was instructed to take the garden down, as it did not comply with zoning by-laws on the definition of ‘landscaping.’
This caused a stir on social platforms as people shared their support for Ward’s garden, many reaching out to the City Council. In 2021, the by-law was amended to include vegetables, herbs, and more. While a win for Moncton gardeners, many cities have not reached the same legislative success. This is where the ‘guerrilla’ in Sackey’s title comes in. As he shares, the term guerrilla gardening “likely originated in the 1970s from a group of New York City urban activists known as the Green Guerillas. Their aim was to transform debris-filled, vacant lots into greenspaces.” Through transforming urban spaces outside of ‘official’ municipal urban planning, the movement has spread across North America and beyond to varying levels of success, though often connected by similar ideas: If the people in power will not do it, we will do it ourselves.
While I am not saying civil disobedience is the answer, in the face of increasing disconnect to food systems and nature, maybe it is time to ask: where is my food coming from? Are there local alternatives that can support people I know? And what can I do, personally, to advocate for my community?
