UAA and AAG in California

I recently returned from two conference in California:

– Urban Affairs Association in San Francisco

– Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles

At the UAA, I participated in a session titled Farming and Gardening in the City: the politics and practices of urban agriculture in the 21st Century

This session brought together several urban farming scholars working on projects in New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Through our collaboration on this session, we realized that there is potential for developing an urban farming network and hope to expand on this work in the future.

At the AAG, I co-organized a session on vacant land titled The vacant land dilemma/opportunity for cities in transition. This session featured a diverse set of papers that addressed vacant land as an opportunity for sustainable redevelopment, a space for informal and public urbanization processes, farming, and a way to rethink approaches to creating land banks in shrinking cities.

I also presented a paper, which is a work in progress with Joseph Pierce (FSU), titled Methodological questions in American urban environmental justice research: What about procedural justice? We are particularly interested in and concerned about the persistent lack of attention to the procedural dimension of urban environmental justice and hope to further elaborate on sources of the gap and identifies ways forward through this project.