"Though Chicago is a city of legendary skyscrapers and dense apartment blocks, it is also a city of wide open tracts of land. This surprising juxtaposition can be viewed as an opportunity: available land can become a food source for urban dwellers experiencing poverty or limited access to grocery stores. In Cultivating the City, sociologist and law professor Nate Ela tells a story of struggles to relieve poverty by reforming property. The setting is Chicagos community gardens and urban farms. Today, these places are often hailed as oases in food deserts. But they also represent the resurgence of a centuries-old form of redistributive social policy, which lets people in need use, but not own, idle land. Ela compares the return of urban agriculture since the 1990s to similar projects that cropped up during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, which can be traced to European ideas about property and redistribution through the enclosure of common lands. In each moment, social reformers have tinkered with the rules and norms of property, suggesting that letting the poor and unemployed put idle land to use could offer an alternative to redistribution via tax and transfer.

Beyond this fresh take on contemporary urban agriculture, Ela provides a new perspective on social policy and urban governance. He explains the promise and potential pitfalls of addressing poverty and unemployment by reworking property relations. Finally, he points to how this redistributive strategy can be applied to resources other than disused land, such as idle factories and empty buildings, with the potential to become a powerful tool for making cities more productive, resilient, and just"-- Provided by publisher.