Urban Arcadia - Part 1

RELIEF GARDENS

Relief Gardens, such as those planted in Detroit during the economic depression of the 1890s and those promoted by the W.P.A. during the Great Depression, provided welcomed sustenance to city dwellers in times of need. Presumably, an allotment for the poor, the urban garden became a liberating space for marginalized people to flourish on marginalized land. Such was the case in the 1990s at the South Central Community Farm in Los Angeles. Designed to act as a kind of relief garden for low-income, mainly immigrant families, the farmers in Los Angeles and in many major American cities successfully brought both new plants and new cultural traditions to the land.

Brooklyn, New York garden, 1930

Brooklyn, New York Garden, 1930

Japanese immigrants with American flag, New York, 1917

Syster Pat tends a Chicago community garden with immigrant children

An oasis in the city - South Central Farm, Los Angeles

Despite protests, South Central Farm was bulldozed in 2006 for development

URBAN ARCADIA: City Farming in Modern America

The Arcadian Myth has a deep history in ecological thought. Peaceful and idyllic, Arcadia has long been considered a perfect representation of nature. Indeed, an Arcadian tradition is at the heart of many political theories and social affairs from Jeffersonian political rhetoric to American settlement patterns. While Arcadian nature has always been significant, in the late nineteenth century it takes on a new importatnce. Amid the clang and clatter of change -- Industrialization, Urbanization, and Immigration -- America looked to the natural world to stabilize society. Americans collectively clung to the sublime as an antidote to change. Chief among the manifestations of Arcadia in the American imagination was the Nature Study Movement. While Americans of leisure bought country homes and visited national parks, others found nature in the urban world by reinventing traditionally rural activities for city life. From the Gilded Age forward, urban Americans planted small city farms and gardens for economic relief, education, and for love of community and country. What these urban plots reveal is the embrace of nature, not escapism, as a condition of Modernity. Indeed, we can trace the development of a particular brand of American Arcadia through the study of urban farming in America.