Radicalism, Re-‐appropriation, and the Roots of the Urban Garden History and Future of the Community Garden and Casita in the Bronx For more than a century, the urban green has enjoyed special status as the darling of planners and developers looking for an easy and unassailable strategy to inject beauty, salubrity and social welfare into depleted, overcrowded or underperforming urban landscapes. But the role of urban parks has changed dramatically over time. From the City Beautiful to the Garden City, open space was employed to serve an ideological function — mapping ideas of natural order, social class or utopian fervor (sometimes all three at once!) through space. As man’s dominion over nature, over his fellow man, and over the poverty and disease of yesterday found expression beyond the promenades of Olmsted’s romantic park-‐scapes and the greenbelts of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-‐morrow, open space took on other physical typologies, and found other ideological and social purposes to fulfill. One form that arose was the small-‐scale, community-‐centered urban garden. Becoming common in New York City in the ‘70s, these broke radically, both physically and ideologically, with the history of open space that had come before. They were often started illegally, and can be seen as an alternative to larger scale, city-‐owned and city-‐administered public spaces — many of which presented the same obstacles to ownership and accessibility that so often kept marginalized communities alienated from the city’s built environment, in general. The garden movement in New York became a way through which communities could define themselves and their place in the neighborhood, in the face of abandonment, economic catastrophe, and the forces of urban decay. While a wide variety of gardeners have inscribed themselves on the cityscape in New York’s poorer districts in the th latter part of the 20 century, one tradition of urban gardening stands out uniquely in its quest to carve an expression cultural identity from the physical spaces of the city: this is the tradition of the casita garden, inspired by the Puerto Rican casita del campo. Today, cities are once again mired in economic recession, and we are once again seeking ways to reinvent the landscape. After nearly two generations, small-‐scale community gardens have gained a degree of acceptance: driven by a fresh wave of environmental concern, cities are scrambling to green up, and New York is no exception. Small urban gardens are finally being protected — indeed, endorsed — by administrations. Still, groups must struggle to gain city sponsorship, and as they succeed, these once-‐radical spaces, which relied so heavily on individual pride and a unique sense of ownership, risk being appropriated and incorporated into the ranks of impersonal and generic open spaces they first arose to supplement. New policies toward urban gardening affect all types of community-‐operated green space, but create special challenges for the populations that gather within the city’s casitas — for these gardens are far more than green spaces or sites of food production for the communities they serve: they are social spaces, spaces of memory, spaces for uniting in the performance of culture.
The Problem of the Park “In orthodox city planning,” Jane Jacobs declares in her 1961 opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes.”1 With an urban renewal agenda sweeping the country and a nascent environmentalism beginning to influence discourse about landscapes both manmade and natural, Jacobs’ tongue-‐in-‐cheek jab was a twist on the tenor of popular opinion about urban life. Concern over urban conditions, rooted in the social welfare movements of the early 20th century, had found feverish expression in a mid-‐century wave of projects aimed at resolving the messy, chaotic city into clean, ordered vistas of health and prosperity. Known most famously for fiercely combating the crusading master planner Robert Moses in his numerous and influential revitalization initiatives that emphasized efficiency and modernity – especially automobiles and highway transportation – to the detriment, many now believe, of neighborhoods and communities, Jacobs was a groundbreaking figure.
1 Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. 90.