City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City's Nature
Lindsay K. Campbell
Abstract
This book begins with the question of why PlaNYC2030—New York City’s municipal, long-term sustainability plan, launched during the Mayor Michael Bloomberg administration—had a robust urban forestry agenda, but lacked an urban agriculture agenda. PlaNYC launched the MillionTreesNYC campaign, investing over $400 million in city funds and leveraging a public-private partnership to plant one million trees citywide. Meanwhile, despite NYC having a long tradition of community gardening and burgeoning interest in local food systems, the plan contained no mention of community gardens or urban farms. I ... More
This book begins with the question of why PlaNYC2030—New York City’s municipal, long-term sustainability plan, launched during the Mayor Michael Bloomberg administration—had a robust urban forestry agenda, but lacked an urban agriculture agenda. PlaNYC launched the MillionTreesNYC campaign, investing over $400 million in city funds and leveraging a public-private partnership to plant one million trees citywide. Meanwhile, despite NYC having a long tradition of community gardening and burgeoning interest in local food systems, the plan contained no mention of community gardens or urban farms. In contrasting the top-down, centralized investment in the urban forest with the dispersed and decentralized social movement around urban agriculture, the book describes the ways in which political, discursive, and material processes intertwine to construct nature in the city. Urban greening unfolds through the strategic interplay of actors, the deployment of different narrative frames, and the mobilizing and manipulation of the physical environment—including other living, non-human entities. Understanding how and why the sustainability agenda is set and implemented provides crucial lessons to scholars, policymakers, and activists alike as they engage in the greening of cities.
Keywords:
sustainability,
planning,
urban agriculture,
urban forestry,
New York City,
urban greening,
urban ecology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501707506 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501707506.001.0001 |
