Near the border of North Lawndale and West Garfield Park a mountain range of wood chips piled more than five feet high stretches over 1,800 square feet of a once vacant lot. In a few weeks, a Bobcat will come through to level the chips as the lot continues its transformation into a community garden. Across the street another smaller lot is undergoing a similar metamorphosis, although it is in a more advanced state: Tree stumps mark the perimeter, some painted with red, black, and green designs; tires to be turned into flower beds are stacked neatly nearby; a dune of brown, turfy coconut husks waits to be spread across the land to improve the quality of the soil.
Urban community gardens—where crops and/or flowers are cultivated for beautification and/or consumption—can seem quite similar no matter their social contexts. What really differentiates these gardens can come down to politics, manifested in things as overt as mission statements proclaimed by garden organizers and as subtle as the practices developed to keep green spaces free of pests and vandalism. Community gardens can represent long-term residents reclaiming abandoned and disinvested space or be a tool for newcomers to assert their presence in a community. But whether a community garden is developed by a well-funded nonprofit or a well-intentioned group of neighbors, the staying power of these projects depends on continued access to land—and land access is never not political.
While 360 Nation promotes selfdetermination and doesn’t want to advertise the locations of the gardens beyond the neighborhood, it’s definitely not isolationist. Floyd says building relationships with CPS, long-term residents, local churches, and even 24th Ward alderman Michael Scott Jr. will make the work more resilient.
Curran points out that community gardeners who don’t have legal standing to be on the land they cultivate have had success protecting their gardens by “making the space very political,” in the way Floyd described. If the garden is identified as a site that’s important to the community’s identity or as a site of resistance, “that becomes less attractive to developers because they know it’ll be a site of conflict if they try to destroy the garden.” But, she cautions, everything depends on the profit potential of the land. Informal agreements between landowners and gardeners can quickly turn sour when enough money’s on the line.
Assata’s Daughters didn’t give up on community gardening, though. They moved the entire gardening program to a second site in Washington Park. The owner of that lot, a longtime community resident, gave them permission to use the site after she saw them cleaning up vacant lots in the neighborhood. They’ve pitched more than 20 beds and brought in beehives. In addition to giving the harvest to the locals, they’ve also invited interested neighbors to cultivate their own plots. This summer, May says, they’ll be paying about a dozen youth $15/hour to work in the garden, too. “That’s an opportunity for them to engage in developing a resource for the community as part of a larger goal of radically changing social dynamics,” she adds.
The lot, which has required extensive remediation, is owned by Neighbor Space, a nonprofit land trust that acquires and preserves space for community gardens. Contaminated soil was excavated as far down as eight feet and replaced with gravel; compost and new soil were layered on top and the garden has a mix of ground-level and elevated beds.
