INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12684 108 © 2018 Urban research PUblications limited The authors would like to thank the activists who shared their perspectives and work with us. — SOWING SEEDS OF DISPLACEMENT: Gentrifcation and Food Justice in Oakland, CA Alison Hope Alkon And JosH CAdJi Abstract Green gentrifcation is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in afuent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low-income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire to serve long-term residents, activists embody a hip green aesthetic that is palatable to affluent whites and can be appropriated by urban boosters to promote the neighborhood. We use this process as a lens to theorize links between food and green gentrifcation, highlighting the importance of food to cities’ eforts to brand themselves as ripe for redevelopment, and understand green gentrifcation as a racialized process tied to cultural foodways. We also attend to the practical stakes for food justice activism, arguing that a clear understanding of green gentrifcation and food justice activists’ unwitting role in it can help the latter to attempt to mitigate their culpability and seek to develop broad inclusive strategies for locally led development without displacement. Sowing seeds of displacement: gentrification and food justice in Oakland, CA In the spring of 2014, a real estate agent released a video that she hoped would increase interest in a neighborhood she called NOBE. An acronym for North Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville, cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, the neologism echoes other trendy neighborhoods like San Francisco’s SOMA (South of Market) or New York’s DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). The realtor highlighted attributes like walkability, ‘affordable homes’ (at the time, just under half a million dollars), ‘new cool bars’ and ‘great restaurants and cafés’––all evidence of what she called a revitalization. A moment later, she added: ‘We’re super psyched that there’s a community garden across the street. That’s definitely a bonus to this block!’. The camera then panned to the Golden Gate Community Garden, a project run by Phat Beets Produce. In doing so, it cast the garden not as a resource for the neighborhood’s many food-insecure low-income residents, but as a selling point for the growing number of affluent buyers threatening to displace them. 1 Phat Beets is a food justice organization whose mission is to create a healthier, more equitable food system in their North Oakland neighborhood by providing afordable access to fresh produce, facilitating youth leadership in health and nutrition education, and connecting small farmers of color to urban communities. While it is difficult to define a relatively nascent social movement like food justice––the term has only become widely used since the mid-2000s––it can be seen as ‘the struggle against racism, exploitation, and oppression taking place within the food system that addresses inequality’s root causes both within and beyond the food chain’ (Hislop, 2014). The movement can trace some of its roots to eforts to create more environmentally and socially sustainable alternatives to industrial food systems, especially those that build support for small organic farms through the establishment of local distribution 1 See https://evilleeye.com/news-commentary/commentary/realtor-responds-to-nobe-controversy/ (accessed 6 September 2018).