Abstract

This dissertation examines the property relations and political practices of eight community gardens in East Harlem, New York City, that are threatened with eviction by “Housing New York,” a citywide affordable housing plan, leading to a contentious land use conflict.

Property relations in community gardens take place among a broad set of actors, like gardeners, passers-by, and neighbours, but also developers, city officials, and city workers who all interact regularly and throughout the eviction process. These property relations consequently reveal how such urban spaces are contested. Keeping with Verdery (2001), Moore (2001), and Riles (2004), property relations – intertwined with power relations – point to the political practices to represent and assert their claims to a property in formal institutions and public review processes but also during daily interactions or direct actions.

During the yearlong multi-sited ethnography I executed in 2016-2017, I examined the gardeners’ property relations to better understand the contention between the City’s formal legal ownership rights versus the gardeners’ embodied and moral sense of ownership of the same space, which are two competing and asymmetrical authorities pitted against each other. To do so, I inquired how gardeners negotiate normative conceptions of property aesthetics and liberal citizenship while also scrutinizing the City-led land use public review process. I argue property relations are a way of negotiating power, be they on private, collective or commons property. Negotiating power here means as much producing or maintaining power as it does mitigating it.

As such, this dissertation illustrates how race has been and still is at the heart of American property (Bhandar, 2018; Roy, 2017; Harris, 1993). Community gardens have acted as spaces at the margins in the sense suggested by both Das (2004) and hooks (1989). Commoning gardens are community-led margins that act simultaneously as sites of resistance and repression and engage in partnerships with the State for self-creation and maintenance. Thus, community gardens as margins are an ideal vantage point from which to explore the inner workings of the State and the capitalist public-private production of the urban space.