Group #8 Community Development
• Growing Up in the Big Cities: Planning for the Future of Urban Agriculture
Nathan Sisodia, University of Michigan Law School
Urban agriculture (“UA”) traditionally includes growing food in urban areas using front or back yard vegetable gardens, roof-top and balcony gardening, and community gardening. One significant virtue of traditional UA is its potential to provide food security for urban communities, reconnect communities through farming practices, and engage the community on many levels. More recently, newer forms of UA are incorporating modern technology, automation, and/or software; and among various names have been referred to as controlled environment agriculture (“CEA”). CEA differs greatly from traditional, community-based UA in that it incorporates plant science and environmental control to optimize plant growth; and incorporates technologies such as vertical growing structures, hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics. Further unlike traditional community-based UA, CEA requires higher levels of capital investments and energy input, lower labor inputs, and may have less significant ties to local communities than traditional UA.
With the growth of CEA, cities are updating zoning laws and planning initiatives in attempt to incorporate these innovations into the fabric of their urban areas. This article will provide an overview of the differences between traditional UA and CEA and their respective growths in recent years, will survey various cities’ legal and planning decisions in response to the growth of CEA, and will analyze differences in these cities’ approaches to this change in UA. Finally, this article will propose recommendations for how cities can incorporate CEA into their existing legal fabrics in order to minimize interruptions to existing communities and traditional UA practices.
• Community Control: A CED Clinical Perspective
Todd Arena, Albany Law School
Recent protest and movement waves, centered around the racial justice uprising cycle that began in 2014 and achieved insurrectionary levels in the summer of 2020, have brought calls for community control back into public discourse for the first time in a generation. But an enthusiasm gap for community control between sympathetic movement actors and skeptics in media, government, law, and academia has appeared. An ambiguous public is left in the lurch, primed for hesitancy by this cacophony of skepticism.
This article hopes to resolve these hesitations and ambiguities in favor of community control by answering the question: what does community control mean? This piece analyzes the concept’s changing content over three distinct historical periods, informed by the author’s own embedded clinic stance as a transactional law practitioner. This embedded stance, emanating from the transactional law practice setting, reveals several shortcomings of existing legal scholarship on community control.
First, while typically understood as in conversation with public law scholarship, the ways in which community control implicates the commitments of so-called “private law” remains undertheorized. Second, it tentatively points to foundational motivators for the enthusiasm gap: the law’s normative commitments to individualism and demosphobia.
Finally, the agency of legal practitioners in shaping the contours of the law’s development over the long run is emphasized. By embracing community control, legal p