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Although urban agricultural programs rarely alleviate the pressures of food insecurity on a large scale, community gardens and urban farms are still cropping up in underserved communities and gentrifying areas of redevelopment. This paper identifies the purposes these programs serve for their communities and argues that with government support, grassroots approaches can combat complex problems. Using qualitative and quantitative sources employing a wide range of social research methodology to establish triangulation including but not limited to: case studies; interviews, quantitative analysis of land values; comparative analyses of vacant land policies; urban archives news documents and photographs; empirical models of urban land use and food distribution. The study illustrates the community food garden as an oasis from the typical threats of food insecurity, violence, and sexual harassment urban areas often pose. This collection of qualitative data support existing literature which states that if maintained, community agricultural projects result in a multitude of social, economic, environmental, and physical health benefits. Finally, this paper suggests that with proper support, these small programs can have larger societal impacts. This paper views community agricultural projects as an overlooked vehicle for social and structural change. Community members know the struggles in their neighborhoods best; Grassroots programs like urban gardens leverage social dynamics that create sustainable change.

The neighborhoods north and northwest of downtown St Louis are blighted by their abundance of substandard, abandoned, and demolished housing. Crime, poverty, and unemployment are high while family stability, educational achievement, and health outcomes are low. These conditions are not unique to St Louis, but can be found in neighborhoods in every city in America. How did this happen? What factors led to the demise of these neighborhoods? This chapter examines the history of St Louis along with theories of neighborhood succession to identify possible explanations for the city's collapse.

Between September 4, 2010 and mid-2013 a severe earthquake sequence struck Christchurch, the second largest city in New Zealand, causing multiple fatalities and the destruction of much of the central business district. Large areas of suburban residential housing were condemned with the prospect that entire neighbourhoods would be abandoned for several decades if not permanently. The recovery and rebuilding process was immediately placed high on central and local government agendas since Christchurch and the surrounding Canterbury region were and continue to be seen as crucial to the security and stability of the national economy. Programmes for recovery developed initially relied principally on one-off funding packages and strategies from central government, local government recovery plans and the settlement of commercial insurance claims. There remains, however, the spectre of Christchurch as a city of demolition sites and vacant lots for the best part of a decade if not longer. Furthermore, although local and national Civil Defence and Emergency Management systems were activated during the most severe seismic events the response operations did not always reach those in need as promptly as was expected. Residents in a number of communities and neighbourhoods are now conscious that when disaster strikes they are still likely to have to fend for themselves. This chapter documents and evaluates two specific “gap-filling” responses to the Christchurch earthquakes over a three-year period. The first response considered is a community-based project called “Greening the Rubble” which took root in October 2010 as the prospect of a central city of vacant lots and car parks worried a number of volunteers into action to temporarily cheer up empty public and private sites with pocket parks, native plant displays and cultural interventions. The second initiative scrutinised, the “Mt Pleasant Community Response Plan 2012–2013,” is one of the first community-based emergency response plans to emerge that has sought to complement official civil defence planning arrangements. Both responses are discussed in detail in the context of constantly changing and evolving hazardscapes and socio-economic and political conditions.

Almost every city in America has felt the effects of the current home foreclosure crisis. It has been reported that 94 of the top 100 metropolitan areas reported an increase in home foreclosures in 2008. Yet, some of the varying costs of this ongoing crisis are relatively unknown. This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the influence an increase in vacant homes due to home foreclosure may have on criminal behavior. It does so by first discussing the breadth of the home foreclosure crisis. Next, the chapter covers strain, social disorganization, and disorder theories and addresses their explanations of the potential criminal consequences of vacant homes due to home foreclosure. Then, the chapter discusses if these classic theories actually apply to this crisis. This is done by introducing the concept of suburban insulation. Finally, the conclusion links the key concepts and ideas from the aforementioned theories and how they best relate to this current phenomenon.

The objective of this chapter is to provide an approach to the farmland abandonment problem in Galicia, the Spain’s north-western region. We describe the land use pattern that characterized the traditional agricultural system, and analyze the process of structural adjustment and changes in land use recorded in the last 50 years. The empirical basis is provided mainly by an original elaboration of agricultural census data for the period 1982–2009. The results show that in the last five decades the area devoted to crops and pastures was constrained to a small portion of the territory (just over 20%), while the agro-livestock uses of hill land which were very important up to the mid-twentieth century disappeared. All this led to a remarkable expansion of abandoned land, which currently occupies at least 20% of the regional area. The drivers of this farmland abandonment are diverse and vary from one zone to another. But among them the conditioners derived from the structure of land ownership must be emphasized, coupled with the poor functioning of the land market and leasing. Land abandonment has had a major impact on the dynamics of the agricultural sector, limiting the size of farms and causing an increasing intensification in a small portion of the territory. This has also led to severe environmental problems, especially forest fires. Consequently, improving mobility and land use should be a priority of agricultural and rural development policies in this region.

The forests of eastern Paraguayan have been cleared, forcing the indigenous Mbyá-Guaraní to take refuge in cities. Rather than assimilate into the city’s underclass as other indigenous people do, Mbyá remain on the margins of the national society and protest their land loss in increasingly public demonstrations against the government. This research points to the historical struggle that the Mbyá-Guaraní of eastern Paraguay have waged against the state to explain Mbyá identity and action in the urban environment.

Recent work with indigenous refugees shows that dislocation entails not only a disruption of social ties, but efforts to reestablish identities and relations in their new conditions. This research explores the interplay of urban conditions and historic struggles in the development of these new indigenous identities for the Mbyá-Guarani.

Indigenous refugees in extreme poverty are a growing problem in urban Latin America. Once residents of the forest, these groups squat in vacant lots and scavenge for a living, ravaged by disease, drugs, alcohol, and sex work. This work seeks to identify the factors that lead some indigenous people to integrate into urban society, while others assert themselves against that system.

As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when advocates of these initiatives have good intentions and are aware of their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I investigate this more general pattern with the case of how urban agriculture became used for green gentrification in Denver, Colorado. This is a city with many urban farmers that gained access to land after the Great Recession but faced the contradiction of being a force for displacement and at risk of displacement as the city adopted new sustainability and food system goals, the housing market recovered, and green gentrification spread. I argue that to understand this outcome, it is necessary to explain how political economy and cultural forces create neighborhood disinvestment and economic marginalization and compel the entrance of urban agriculture initiatives due to their low-profit mode of production and potential economic, environmental, and social benefits. Central to how urban agriculture initiatives contribute to green gentrification is the process of revalorization, which is how green growth machines repurpose such initiatives by drawing on their cultural cachet to exploit rent gaps. I conclude with a set of hypotheses to help other scholars test the conditions under which urban agriculture is more or less likely to contribute to green gentrification. Doing so may help nuance convictions about the benefits of urban agriculture within the context of entrenched inequalities in rapidly changing cities.

This chapter describes the shortfalls in local police budgets following the economic woes experienced by police departments during the Great Recession. Providing a timeline of external events impacting police budgets, in particular, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the Great Recession, this chapter places these events since 2000 in an economic context. In addition, multiple sources, that is, interviews with police administrators, survey data, and news media content, are used to analyze police budget cuts. Most police administrators have already cut their budgets and report their jurisdictions anticipate more effects from the economic crisis. Significant reductions in police budgets, personnel and training are discussed. Both a police administrator and academic perspective of policing in an economic crisis are included in this chapter to better understand how recent budgets cuts affect the quality of policing.

To the Most Rev. M.A. Corrigan, Archbishop of New York: