Growing Place: A Visual Study of Urban Farming

Cities across the world are currently turning to urban farming as a means to feed their inhabitants, reshape their built environments, and address the complicated legacies of capital mobility, disinvestment, and abandonment. Within the United States, the city of Milwaukee has emerged as a global leader in this urban farming movement, as pioneers such as Will Allen – founder of the Growing Power urban farm – have highlighted how such overlooked resources as vacant lots and buildings can be transformed into sites of agricultural production. Such spatial transformations have profound implications for the redevelopment of not only Milwaukee, but of cities around the world.  

Using Milwaukee as its anchor study, Growing Place: A Visual Study of Urban Farming seeks to shed new light on the past, present, and future of growing food in cities. Here, the legacy of Growing Power looms large: for over twenty-five years the non-profit organization influenced the efforts of urban farmers in such disparate cities as Detroit, New Orleans, and even Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 

Yet the farm’s 2017 closing has created the space for new actors to emerge and push urban farming in new and innovative directions. This exhibition will visually document this process of evolution, as it simultaneously takes stock of the history that makes such developments possible.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.