Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Gated gardens: Effects of urbanization on community formation and commons management in community gardens Monika Egerer ⁎ , Madeleine Fairbairn Environmental Studies Dept., University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Urban agriculture Enclosure Gentrification California Resource management Urban sustainability ABSTRACT Community gardens are often positioned as spaces where urban people can build community, reclaim common space, and reassert a “right to the city” in urban landscapes that are shaped by gentrification and the privati- zation of space. However, the literature on urban agriculture often focuses on the struggles of gardens to endure external political-economic processes, largely overlooking within-garden tensions relating to social inequality and resource access. In this study we examined how the pressures associated with urbanization are inscribed in three community garden landscapes in the central coast of California—a region undergoing massive urban transformation in recent decades. The cases reveal that social tensions from urbanization permeate garden boundaries to influence the production of space and the social relations within the garden. Specifically, the resource struggles and social inequities in these regions are made visible in the gardens through conflicts over membership rules, resource management, and theft of produce. The analysis of these conflicts illustrates how extreme real estate valuation and gentrification shapes the particular ways in which the urban commons are managed, including the forms of inclusion and exclusion, claims-making, and racialization of resources that are employed. Uncovering and complicating our understanding of the struggles of and tensions within community gardens is a necessary step in the pursuit of “just sustainability” within changing cityscapes. 1. Introduction “Give me the flowers or I will call the police,” Lori shouted, brandishing a pair of garden shears. “Get the fuck away from me.” The middle aged woman she was addressing was undeterred, maintaining her grasp on the bunch of pink roses in one hand and a pair of children’s Crayola scissors in the other. “Give me the flowers, drop the scissors, and I am calling the police. You are not welcome here,” Lori insisted. “Get the fuck away from me lady.” The woman shoves Lori, but in the process falls to the ground herself. She drops both flowers and scissors. In what feels like a blink of an eye, she scrambles back up and briskly walks out the the gate down the street, turning into a driveway. “Hi, I’d like to report an incidence of theft...Yes...I’m at Mayston Community Garden.” This incident—observed during participant observation in a Santa Cruz urban garden—displays a side of community gardening that is not often discussed in contemporary scholarship. Garden shears are not conventionally thought of as weapons, nor roses as sites of neighbor- hood contestation. Yet, in gardens, where—as one gardener ex- plained—the “worst kind of pest is the two-legged kind,” garden shears can take on a completely different role in what (or who) they prune. Fruits, vegetables, and flowers that are cultivated and cared for in community gardens represent more than toil and sweat—they inter- nalize the politics of place within and outside the garden gate. The ways in which gardeners use particular “weapons,” from garden shears to personal fences to rules and regulations, reveal the nuanced strategies and practices by which they proclaim a right to community member- ship, a right to common resources, and a right to space in the city. Urban community gardens are situated in landscapes where capi- talist urbanization transforms nature and social relations (Williams, 1973; Harvey, 1989). Urbanization can broadly be described by land conversion into impervious cover, and by distinct socioeconomic and sociopolitical processes (Grimm et al., 2008). Urban political ecologists (e.g., Heynen et al., 2006a) characterize urbanization processes by: capital accumulation and the externalization of nature (sensu Marx, 1976; Harvey, 1982; Cronon, 1991); uneven geographic (both physical, socioeconomic) development (Smith, 1982); and the exclusion and marginalization of some social groups for the benefit of others https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.07.014 Received 19 December 2017; Received in revised form 16 July 2018; Accepted 25 July 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: 1156 High Street, ENVS, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. E-mail address: megerer@ucsc.edu (M. Egerer). Geoforum 96 (2018) 61–69 0016-7185/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T