A study of the contexts within which urban vacant land is accessed for community open space (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin)

Community-initiated and managed open spaces---community gardens, urban farms, sites for artistic expression and other social uses---are being created on unused land parcels in postindustrial U.S. cities where local government must manage significant inventories of publicly-owned vacant land. In any one city these spaces emerge out of two local contexts: a historic context of past settlement patterns, urban renewal, and community and open space activism; and a present context of neighborhood planning, municipal vacant land policies and community non-profit organizations. These twin contexts and local community open space examples are described in detail, using Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee as case studies.; Transformations of vacant parcels into community spaces are most often singular episodes in which grassroots requests to access city-owned land are judged as not inconsistent with certain municipal objectives relative to neighborhood redevelopment. They also represent a form of privatization whereby residents, through their stewardship, relieve municipal government of some of the costs of vacant land management. And while today's community open spaces maintain connections to the environmental activism of three decades ago, their total numbers are too low to collectively represent a distinct urban social movement. They are better considered as products of the larger community development movement that has successfully provided urban districts with housing, social services and other forms of citizen empowerment; and, when used for urban agriculture, can contribute to the emerging community food security movement. Community open spaces are pragmatically created through some cooperative arrangement with city government. In spirit, however, these are sites of insurgent citizenship that collectively represent a reclaiming of the public realm within city neighborhoods.