Care in the Concrete: New Soil for the City

By Cymene Howe, Alejandra Osejo-Varona and Keren Reichler

This is a city saturated by concrete. Like most cities, Houston is composed of asphalt and concrete, plastic and steel, materials that provide the infrastructure for mobility (of cars, trains, trucks) and stability (for homes, office buildings, parking lots). There is a cost to concrete, however, in the form of a hardened landscape that, when torrential rain comes (as it does) and when hurricanes bear down upon the city (which they do) there are few places for the water to go, to flow, to evacuate. The ‘hyperobject’ (Morton 2013) of the climate crisis pools and evaporates on our skin and people live with an attunement to the fact that another storm is coming. Houston, however, is also a permeable city that is verdant with open fields of wild grasses, mounds of mud and bayous that plunge along waterways. Across these terrains farmers find their way between the asphalt and concrete to create regenerative soils. In conditions of climatological precarity as well as plentiful fertility, urban farmers make new soil for the city.

In our anthropological research with farmers in Houston,[1] we have been struck by the paradox of care in the concrete: how do you compose the material that makes biotic life thrive in a place that is infused with petrocapitalist modernity? The environmental activist Vandana Shiva’s insights are important here as she recognizes the need to think about growth not from an economic vantage point but instead in terms of maintaining living systems and ecologies (Shiva 2015, 14); as she puts it, we need to “relink” to soil. Responsibility to and for the climate (on a local and planetary scale) comes in the twinned form of rejecting fossilized logics of economic growth and attending to the soils where we dwell. Urban agriculturalists practice Shiva’s ‘relinking soils’ by crafting new earthy compositions, an amalgam of compost, creatures and waste and, critically, through reclaiming land (Mouzin n.d.). Sometimes this reclamation involves jackhammers and energy-intensive machinery; other times it is simply hands lugging away concrete. Slowly the dirt emerges. Eventually, with care and a multispecies infusion of biotic potential, there will be soil.

Farmers cultivate growth in the interstices of the city, navigating between infrastructures and toxicity, in a city that is home to the largest petrochemical complex in the United States; or what some of us call “Petropolis” (Johnson & Bennett 2022). On rooftops and vacant lots, the urban farmers who have shared their stories with us are attentive to the composition of soil--its aridity and its moisture, its aeration and microbial life forms, its biotic and abiotic matter, its chemical corpus. But new soil for the city also demands an attention to place and a concern for time.

 Farming place in the city

 A 2014 study using Google Earth located nearly 70 sites of urban agriculture in Houston, including community gardens and non-profit farms (Broadstone and Brannstrom, 2017). Finca Tres Robles is one such place where life emerges from the concrete. The non-profit created an urban farm out of an abandoned parking lot and now grow herbs and fruit, vegetables and flowers. Central to their mission is addressing a chronic lack of access to fresh produce in Houston’s East End, a historically Latinx neighborhood. By making good quality plant-based food accessible, Finca Tres Robles also sees itself as building community through the process. Their little plot is a reservoir of regenerativity—a site of growth and restoration. Tommy Garcia-Prats, the farm’s co-founder, explains to us that cement removal was the first step in these acts of biotic care–for both plants and people–allowing an industrial relic to be transformed into rows of crops, flourishing plants and the free flow of water through a more biotic ecosystem, one that is less encumbered by concrete. Like other urban farms, Finca Tres Robles, as its name (“three oaks farm”) indicates, values trees. Their shade allows crops to thrive; they cool the climate, store carbon and provide a reprieve from the blaze of a southern sun. The trees of Tres Robles also make room for pollinating insects and birds, amphibians and reptiles. Species come together in this place. 

Houston’s urban farmscapes look, feel, and sound different from the city that surrounds them. They smell of plants gone to seed and compost settling in for the season. Birds are loud and the whine of the freeway becomes a background hum. However, urban farms are not preventing the onward march of the city’s temperature increase nor does the permeability of new urban soil stop the floods that continue to devastate. Houston’s high rates of poverty have made it home to the largest food bank distribution in the country and the fruits and vegetables grown by urban farmers cannot feed the nearly 724,750 food-insecure individuals in the Greater Houston area (Schuler & Koka 2018).

 Why, then, make new soil for the city simply to grow food? In our conversations with urban farmers, we found consistent agreement: these spaces have great ethical and material power. They work to reverse the impermeability of the built environment and they create solidarity across communities by offering healthy, quality food to those in need. Urban farms are, in this sense, political figures that challenge inequality of access to healthy food for the most vulnerable people and present a critical response to accelerated growth under petrocapitalism and its environmental consequences. Caring for the soil, for the crops, for the creatures and for the people whose lives are affected also offers sensorial reconnections with the reproduction of life and the social ties that make it possible. In the soil of urban farms grows the message that it is possible to reverse the path that has led us to the current crisis. The question that remains is whether we will make the time, in time, to do so?

Farming time in the city

 The winter freeze of 2021 brought harrowing stories of both care and loss for urban farmers. Fruit trees and crops were destroyed in a matter of minutes, zapping life from farms across the city. In our conversations, we also found an attunement to a different, more slowly reverberating climatic pattern. Beyond the catastrophic weather events that flash across national news, the increasingly frequent fluctuations in temperatures marked by late frosts and sudden heat waves are a cause for concern, often catching farmers off-guard and struggling to adapt quickly to shifting conditions. Many turn to the patient process of building life in the soil as one strategy for resilience and climate adaptation. But building soil takes time.

 At the Plant It Forward farm in southwest Houston–just beyond the highway off-ramp, and adjacent to a Spanish-language Pentecostal church–we meet Rachel Folkerts, Farm Programs Director. She tells us that it will be at least five years before this soil is productive. “The soils here are challenging” she says, “they are heavy clay. We get 60 inches of rain in a year, and it’s common for 10 inches of that to get dumped at one time. If the fields aren’t draining, then the plants have no chance. The soil microbiome has no chance.” Through building proper drainage infrastructure, applying mulch and compost, and planting cover crops, the farmers at Plant It Forward are tasked with responding to the immediate needs of production while stewarding the soil with an expanded timescale in mind.

The time of care is extended in soil cultivation, and it often conflicts with the rapid pace of urban development. Folkerts reflected on the incommensurable temporality of farm ecologies compared to standard timelines for city planning. “It’s just a totally different way of thinking than fiscal quarters or even in the development of a city, long term, this is 10 years. Whereas, long term, for an ecosystem, 100 years isn’t even really long term for an ecosystem.” Many of the urban farmers we spoke with expressed similar temporal tensions, highlighting stories of struggle to access and maintain their farms on urban land. They shared stories of lost leases, being forced to move locations, and farming under the constant possibility of eviction.

 The march of concrete

 The future of land management in Houston points to more concrete conversion. According to a recently published report on how development and climate change will affect agricultural land based on projected future scenarios, 49% of farmland and rangeland in Harris County will be converted to residential and commercial properties by 2040 in the “business as usual” scenario, with 83% of Harris County’s conversion to occur on the state’s best agricultural land (Hunter, M., et al., 2022). The pace of development and the relentless paving of the city are further instantiations of settler colonial encroachment on land that was once home to Sana, Atakapa-Ishak, Coahuiltecan, Karankawa & Akokisa peoples.

City planners often aim to treat the ills of climate change in the ways of engineered thinking: infrastructures and technological interventions. The Houston Resilience Plan schematizes how to evacuate water, how to increase porosity, how to diminish the heat island effect of an immense metropolis. The work of urban farming also offers a response to both climate change and the logics of growth that generated it: by making more places for soil and water, urban farms are a small antidote to climate-driven catastrophes, such as floods and hurricanes. The perniciousness of seasonal changes, including sudden, erratic frosts and deeper, more blistering heat waves that can destroy crops overnight are a source of worry for farmers. They are learning to adapt to an unpredictable climate now, and into the future. The impacts of climate change permeate farmer’s daily work with soil, presenting challenges and opportunities, both spatial and temporal, to build resilience.

 While the city in concrete does choke and smother soil and emergent life, it is also paradoxically, a place of refuge. Remember that Lovelock himself advocated that we migrate to megacities to avoid the deepest perils of climate change. “A city is a smaller unit to control and regulate the composition of the atmosphere, the soil,” he said, “rather similar to the nests of invertebrates of various kinds: ants, wasps, bees.”

 In farming we see a similar conjunction of the organic and inorganic, and in the practices of human care for plants and soil, even in the overdetermined fields of concrete. The essential compositions of soil are here carefully nurtured into existence and kept, not in the sense of being possessed, but instead guided on a path toward regeneration. If we trust in the restorative capacity of urban agriculture—not in the number of plots planted or in the pounds of food produced, but rather in its potential to reconnect us with the quotidian space and time of life, we might come closer to a sense of planetary care in the places where we dwell. The paradox of care in the concrete, and the commitment of Houston’s urban farmers to make new soil for the city, also helps us to ask how climate resilient practices unfold across an expanded sense of place and time. And to ask what new soils will grow.

Footnotes

[1] Our research has been supported by a Mellon Foundation grant through the Diluvial Houston Initiative at Rice University.

References

 Broadstone, S., and C. Brannstrom. (2017). Growing Food Is Work: The Labour Challenges of Urban Agriculture in Houston, Texas. In Global Urban Agriculture, edited  A.by M. G. A. WinklerPrins, 66-78. Wallingford: CABI. https://doi.org/10.1079/9781780647326.0066.

 Hunter, M., A. Sorensen, T. Nogeire-McRae, S. Beck, S. Shutts, R. Murphy. (2022). Farms Under Threat 2040: Choosing an Abundant Future. Washington, D.C.: American Farmland Trust.

 Johnson, L. & C. Bennett, eds. (2022). More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. University of Texas Press.

 Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.

 Mouzin, S. (n.d.) “The Seeds of Hope: Cultivating Utopias Amidst Chaos,” Weather Matters https://www.weathermatters.net/the-seeds-of-hope

Schuler, D. & B.R. Koka. 2018. Challenges of Social Sector Systemic Collaborations: What’s Cookin’ in Houston’s Food Insecurity Space? Building Better Cities. Houston: Rice Kinder Institute for Urban Research  

Shiva, V. (2015). Soil, Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity. Penguin Random House.