Gardens in the Growth Machine: Seattle’s P-Patch Program and the Pursuit of Permanent Community Gardens

We’ve seen it happen over and over. Residents in blighted neighborhoods work to transform vacant lots into community gardens—only to see the fruits of their labors bulldozed when the neighborhood gentrifies and the land is repurposed for something more lucrative. Community gardeners have observed this pattern for gardens on both private and public land (Barraclough 2009; Salvidar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004). Social scientists studying community gardens (Darly and McClintock 2017; Martinez 2010; Rosan and Pearsall 2017) have attributed the pattern to forces of urban political economy, specifically the logic of the urban growth machine (Logan and Molotch 1987). The urban