Nourishing Environments, Caring Cities: Gardening and the Social Reproduction of the Urban Environment in Deindustrial Michigan

Through vegetable gardening, residents of a small city in Michigan, USA, are striving to make their urban environments more socially equitable and ecologically sustainable. While gardeners across differences of class and race are motivated by a desire to change their environments and educate others, they do so in distinct ways due to different priorities. These range from neighborhood upkeep to ecological sustainability, and variation aligns with existing, intersecting forms of class distinction and racial differentiation. To engage the shared desires for equitable and sustainable urban life motivating gardeners, together with the class- and race-based inequalities that shape and are shaped by their practices, this paper analyzes gardening as a form of social reproduction of the urban environment. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, this research examines the differences between gardens created for neighborhood upkeep as compared to those created for ecological sustainability, finding identifiable differences in gardening methods, spatial forms, and aesthetics directly related to gardeners’ motivations as they are shaped by experiences of race and class inequality. As both climate change and public disinvestment in social reproduction continue, the experiences of these gardeners indicate the insufficiency of shared motivations in realizing needs for just sustainability, and the importance of recognizing and responding to manifestations of social and environmental inequality in gardening motivation and practice.