This is the sixth article in an eight-part series running that will follow our Chicago urban farms through harvest. Go back to part five. Go ahead to part seven.
A few weeks ago, Chicago was awarded a 1 million dollar grant from the USDA to support urban agriculture. At a time when Chicago is also seeing historic levels of violence, developing agriculture in the city may seem trivial, but studies have shown that small growing projects, like community gardens and urban farms, can have broad beneficial impacts on communities. Beyond food access, urban ag programs have been associated with decreased vandalism, decreased crime, and increased neighborhood pride.
To find out why this might be, we talked to Ben Helphand, Executive Director of NeighborSpace, a land trust that works to preserve community managed open space in Chicago. NeighborSpace supports vegetable gardens, and other kinds of open space such as habitat restoration projects and playgrounds. In all cases, people in the community are responsible for upkeep of the space, as opposed to something like a city park or forest preserve which is managed by a staff. According to Ben, that makes a big difference.
“If a community garden is well tended, it cues to people that see it that this is a community that cares. And that has a lot of repercussions.”
“The common thread is that the work is done by and for the community,” Ben says. “Your hand is directly in it. It’s a lot of work but there’s skin in the game.
Community gardens feel more personal. They feel like handmade spaces because you can see and participate in the labor that creates and maintains them.
“In a lot of traditional park district landscapes, the maintenance yards are hidden,” says Ben. “They’re behind a big shed, they’re down a side road. They do the maintenance early in the morning. It’s designed to be invisible. But in a lot of community gardens, it’s not invisible, it’s the centerpiece. The work day is the thing, the main event. The work schedule that in a park would be behind the shed is right there in the front of the garden and the goal is to get you involved.”
Not only are community gardens relatively accessible, they have a human touch. Ben compares this to a thumb print on an ancient piece of pottery. In seeing it, you are confronted by the craftsperson. The effect of this visible, personal labor is a palpable feeling of care, or as Ben calls these spaces, ‘landscapes of care.’ If a community garden is well tended, it cues to people that see it that this is a community that cares. And that has a lot of repercussions.”
” You see FarmWorks, and you see previously fallow land in the community being used for good”
Someone who is walking past a community garden or an urban farm can perceive the labor and emotional investment that goes into that space, and they’re less likely to treat that space poorly. As such, the benefits of gardens and farms extend even to people who don’t participate in them directly.
One example is Chicago FarmWorks, Heartland Alliance’s urban farm on Chicago’s west side and one of NeighborSpace’s member sites. FarmWorks’ main farm was built out in 2014 on a piece of land that had been unused for ). It is also located in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood, which has a high vacancy rate as well as a high crime rate. To get a sense of how Chicago FarmWorks functions as a landscape of care, we spoke with someone who would know: one of its neighbors. Mark Salach has lived for six years directly across the street.
“When I first came here,” Mark says, “where the farm is now was just weeds overgrown on top of old concrete and brick. People would come by and fly dump tires and construction debris and junk.” Mark and some of his friends tried to clean up the lot, even posting a hand painted sign telling people not to dump trash, but it was too much to keep up with, especially afterhundreds of used tires were dumped in the middle of the lot one night.
The lot didn’t only attract garbage, but crime, too.
“I never in my life thought that I’d have to call 911 or 311 as much as have,” Mark laughs. “People would come out here to party in the field, bring prostitutes, do drugs. Two or three different cars doing different things. Throwing bottles of booze out the window. It just encouraged mischief. It added to this general sense of nobody caring about the place.”
Since FarmWorks has moved in, Mark says the block has improved. “It’s gotten better and better. it’s tidy, it looks like a farm over there. Someone is caring for this space, they’re not going to just throw a tire there. It’s part of a whole mindset change.”
“You see FarmWorks,” Ben says, “and you see previously fallow land in the community being used for good. And not just for the yield, but for people actively working the land. It proves that something can be done.”
Chicago FarmWorks’ harvest is distributed at a food pantry down the street and in the homes of people in the employment program. A true landscape of care.
This is the sixth article in an eight-part series running that will follow our Chicago urban farms through harvest. Go back to part five. Go ahead to part seven.
Dave Snyder is a writer and farmer whose poems, essays and criticism have appeared in Best American Poetry, Gastronomica, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. He is currently Farm Director for Pisticci Restaurant in New York City. From 2012 – 2015, Dave worked for Heartland Alliance managing Chicago FarmWorks. This year he returns to tell FarmWorks’ story.
