©2015 Luke Drake ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE DYNAMICS OF AN EXPANDING COMMUNITY ECONOMY: COMMUNITY GARDEN NETWORKS AND CLUSTERS IN NEW JERSEY By LUKE DRAKE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Geography Written under the direction of Kevin St. Martin And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The dynamics of an expanding community economy: Community garden networks and clusters in New Jersey By LUKE DRAKE Dissertation Director: Kevin St. Martin This dissertation examines the role of networks in producing community gardens. It does so by tracing the flows of knowledge, labor, and materials within individual garden sites, between gardens, and between gardens, institutions and other community groups. Given the attention it has gained for themes of sustainability, local food production, and community building, it is important to understand the network dynamics through which community gardens are started, grow, and change. To this end, my study has three research questions: Which places foster community gardens? How do internal dynamics govern community garden maintenance? Lastly, how do dynamics between community gardens affect the work of garden sites? This study centers on the case of community gardening in New Jersey, but it also uses national surveys in order to ground the case study materials in a broader context. The research methods began with a survey of 445 community gardening organizations in the U.S. and Canada, followed by discourse analysis of archival documents on community gardening in the U.S. from the 1890s to the 2010s. I then conducted 48 semi- structured interviews with people involved in community gardens in 19 municipalities. Due to my methodology of tracing network connections, five of these interviews took place in Australia to investigate a partnership with a community garden in New Jersey. I ii was also a participant-observer in the New Brunswick Community Garden Coalition and a member of a community garden for two years, one of which I served as the garden’s president. As part of this ethnographic work, I also conducted a participatory geographic information systems project. Together, these methods revealed a complex web of resource flows and the mechanisms through which they are configured. In theoretical terms, I rethink community gardens as cooperative enterprises. This dissertation contributes more broadly to economic geography by bridging the diverse/community economies literatures with relational economic geography (REG) theory. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse/community economies approaches are used in an expanding literature, but there has been little theorization of network dynamics in such studies. By drawing on concepts from REG regarding resource flows and clustering, I advance a relational conception of community economy. iii I would first like to dedicate this dissertation to Jeana and Clara, as well as parents and other family members who have encouraged me during graduate school. Without your support and motivation I may not have ever started this project and it would have certainly taken much longer to complete. My dissertation committee represents a variety of perspectives, and I am grateful to them for helping me develop and finish this project. My advisor, Kevin St. Martin, is a helpful intellectual sounding board and has always taken the time to thoughtfully and thoroughly guide me through research design, data collection and analysis, and writing. I am thankful for his detailed feedback over many dissertation drafts. I took Bob Lake’s graduate seminar on public policy, planning, and social theory my first year as a doctoral student, and the lessons from that course have stayed with me through this project. In particular, he consistently reminded me to be reflexive about the nature of knowledge and to take seriously the implications of the decisions I make to name categories of analysis. Rick Schroeder has been a critical reviewer of my work from the proposal to the final dissertation draft. His comments and questions have helped me to better communicate my ideas and arguments to a broader scholarly audience. I am grateful for the critical yet constructive commentary from David Tulloch, who encouraged me to get the details right yet think about what findings may be generalizable at the same time. My external committee member is Laura Lawson, and I am grateful for her support not only on this dissertation but as a colleague, supervisor, and co-worker. Her feedback has helped me to bridge social theory with the lived experiences of gardeners. iv This dissertation was supported financially in a variety of ways. First and foremost, I did much this work in tandem with my faculty appointment as research associate in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University. My dissertation and my professional research responsibilities overlapped and I collected data that supported both projects. Many of my research travels across New Jersey were supported through this position, and so the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES), which fund my position, helped me complete this project. Although the research design and analysis of this dissertation is my own, the dissertation was made possible in part through an NJAES Hatch Grant, project NJ84105, with Laura Lawson as principal investigator. Furthermore, my faculty appointment also enabled me to collaborate with the American Community Gardening Association, which provided data for Chapter 4. The archival materials I used in Chapter 5 were originally collected by Laura Lawson, and I searched through her library of many filing cabinets to use them. In addition, this faculty position provided travel funding to attend and present at the ACGA and Association of American Geographers (AAG) conferences. I also helped develop a Rutgers Community-University Partnership Grant in this position, and the resulting project provided some of the material for Chapter 8. Other sources of funding came from Rutgers Graduate School—New Brunswick and the Association of American Geographers. A Pre-Dissertation Travel Award from the graduate school allowed me to travel to Australia in the early stages of this dissertation project. It was through this early data collection that I began to formulate my questions about network dynamics. Additionally, three conference travel awards from the graduate v school helped me be able to present my work at AAG conferences, allowing me to get feedback from a wider community of scholars. Travel awards from the AAG’s Urban Geography Specialty Group were also helpful in this regard. Additionally, a teaching assistantship from the Department of Geography supported me in the early stages of my doctoral program. I worked closely with many community gardeners and garden supporters in order to conduct this research. In New Brunswick, where I conducted much of this research, I am thankful for the New Brunswick Community Garden Coalition, the New Brunswick Community Food Alliance, Elijah’s Promise, Unity Square Partnership, and the Cook Organic Garden Club. Other partners around the state included Come Grow with Us!, Ag in the City, Isles, the Greater Newark Conservancy, AtlantiCare, Rutgers Cooperative Extension, and the New Jersey Community Garden Conference and Freylinghuysen Arboretum. I would like to also extend special thanks to the East Brunswick Community Garden. My conversations there laid the groundwork for this dissertation. Numerous community gardens hosted me during my dissertation research, not only in New Jersey but also in Seattle, San Francisco, and in Melbourne and Newcastle Australia. Friends and colleagues around Rutgers were extremely important during this project. Fellow graduate students in the Department of Geography at Rutgers helped me along in the process as well: Ariele Baker, Lindsay Campbell, Amelia Duffy-Tumasz, Nate Gabriel, Ali Horton, Raysa Martinez-Krueger, Eric Sarmiento, Debby Scott, Charlene Sharpe, Asher Siebert, Sean Tanner, Irene Zager, and many more geography graduate students provided friendship, camaraderie, and assistance in developing my vi dissertation proposal. Department staff, including Theresa Kirby, Betty Ann Abbatemarco, Mike Siegel, Kelly Bernstein, and Cleo Bartos, were crucial in helping me along the way. Additionally, I would like to thank faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Landscape Architecture, who, by supporting my professional appointment, also supported the making of this dissertation. Sections of this dissertation have been published elsewhere. A version of Chapter 4 in forthcoming by Luke Drake and Laura Lawson as “Results of a US and Canada community garden survey: Shared challenges in garden management amid diverse geographical and organizational contexts” in Agriculture & Human Values. A version of Chapter 5 was published by Luke Drake and Laura Lawson in 2014 as “Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the U.S.” in Cities, volume 40, Part B (0):133-142. The material used in this dissertation is solely the author’s work. vii Title Page…………………………………………………………………………………..i