Food for One, but Not for All: Food Access and Collective Identity in the Urban Agriculture Movement

Abstract

The urban agriculture movement is part of a growing alternative agrifood movement that attempts to solve social, environmental and economic problems in urban areas by introducing more local, organic and sustainable food into urban food systems. One of the primary goals of the movement is to mitigate a lack of food access in urban areas, especially for underprivileged populations. In this paper, I explore the collective identity of the urban agriculture movement in a major northeastern city in the United States. Through qualitative research conducted on farms in the city, I examine the construction of collective identity among actors in the movement. Collective identity is a dynamic process that is a function of shared attributes, shared goals, and the development of communality within movement communities. I find that through this process of collective identity, certain actors in the urban agriculture movement build boundaries that exclude certain social groups from participating in the movement. Moreover, these boundaries are constructed along existing lines of economic and social privilege. In constructing these boundaries, urban agriculture communities fail to solve issues of food access, and instead exacerbate food related inequality.