Land Rights and Urban Agriculture: Improving living standards of underserved urban communities
“The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”
Ayn Rand
Amid mass collectivization of agricultural land, mass famines and political instability, a glimmer of hope would be handed down to the underserved communities of Kazan in the USSR. Indeed, after a costly victory over their german neighbours, some citizens would receive farmable land from the government, a measure taken to mitigate the constant food shortages plaguing the country. These gardens, called “dachas”, would shape the local identity and heritage and heavily influence the development of the city and its surrounding territories. Linguistically, the term “dacha” refers to the land given by the Tsar to princes and boyars as a reward for their service and loyalty. Even if the term has lost its aristocratic character, its use symbolizes an opportunity for the lower classes of society to ascend to a higher social status through the ownership of land.
In addition to their primary function as farmable land, dachas also offered urbanites and their family easy access to natural areas far from urban centres. This access to quality natural areas resulted in a notable improvement of the quality of life for the owners of the plots. Since their inception, the dacha became a social space where whole families, but also whole communities, could gather around a common activity. The creation of gardeners’ associations after the dissolution of the Soviet Union also allowed underserved communities to integrate into political life at the local and federal levels. These associations and unions of gardeners (or dachniki) have the power to influence local policy and communicate directly with the Ministry of Agriculture to create partnerships and request financial aid. Although the gardens allow for a certain freedom of expression from the individual, the owner is still subject to normative pressures; during the Soviet period, the authorities imposed strict regulations on the use of plots and the crops that could be grown and nowadays, the dachniki are subject to societal pressures as they must respect aesthetic norms set by their respective communities.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the purchase and sale of plots was permitted. Combined with the rapid expansion of the urban territory, the dachas are now at risk of gentrification by being bought and woven into the urban fabric as green spaces. Fortunately, the process of gentrification of the dachas remains slow as a large majority of owners still wish to keep their plots as they guarantee a certain food security for the poorest urban populations and an alternative source of income.
Detroit. A once bustling city now lying vacant and decrepit. The poster child of urban decay is now home to primarily African American minorities who struggle to access to fresh and nutritious food stemming from a lack of easily accessible retail options. This lack of options has resulted in a city where seventy percent of the population is either overweight or obese. However, the numerous empty and abandoned lots have seen the birth of many grassroots movements whose mission was to revitalize underserved communities through urban farming. With a quarter to a third of the city lying vacant, community gardens were given the golden opportunity to sprout from the fertile soil. Proximity to water, willing labour and a desperate need for fresh produce, all point to Detroit’s potential in becoming an agrarian hub and turning the page on its industrial past. In Detroit’s north end neighbourhood, we can find the Oakland Avenue Farms, founded and run by the North End Christian Community Development Corporation. This five-acre landscape serves as a garden growing over thirty varieties of vegetables and fruit, a communal meeting place, a hub for knowledge sharing amongst the youth through partnerships with local universities helping to connect motivated and willing local youth with hundred of thousands of dollars in academic scholarships, and an art exhibition, thus echoing the Russian dachas which also served as multifunctional spaces. Another similarity with the dachas is that these communal gardens have the effect of boosting the self-determination of the local community through the creation of new land owners via land grants and through the creation of entities with political weight such as the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust — Detroit’s first community land trust.
To summarise, granting land rights to underserved urban communities and promoting urban agriculture has been proven to drastically improve the quality of life of the members of said community. Access to fresh produce, a green communal space and an intergenerational source of wealth has allowed the invisible and marginalised to ditch their invisibility cloaks, claim their right to self determination and make their voices heard on a local or even national level.
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