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Trends of amenity migration and exurbanization are changing the ways many rural landscapes around the globe are used, imagined, and transformed. The articles in this special issue examine these trends in diverse ways, providing a ‘state of the research’ view of amenity migration and exurbia from the perspectives of rural and cultural geography and political ecology. This research engages difficult questions about increasingly common land uses in high amenity rural and exurban areas and the environmental ideals and policies that are associated with these places. The assembled articles suggest that environmental governance and ideology may be inadequately aligned with diverse needs and desires in the many places experiencing exurbanization. The rural is still too often thought of as removed from modern globalized networks of mobility and representation, and rural governmental institutions facing exurbanization and amenity migration are often unequipped to grapple with the multiple competing interests that constitute diverse and changing rural agendas. By focusing mainly on protecting particular rural landscape attributes or specific ecological attributes, or on facilitating urbanization processes and development opportunities, environmental management practices may often miss opportunities to engage with the complex mixing of urban and rural and to facilitate dialogue across competing perspectives.
The geographical research in this special issue helps to elucidate the context and causal structures associated with the complex relationship between urban and rural, particularly in regions experiencing dispersed urbanization and exurban landscape change. This research considers the breadth and diversity of conditions and locations in which amenity migration is reworking rural landscapes, as well as the politics that accompany and result from these changes. This focus highlights the ways that the urban and the rural are closely intertwined. For example, urbanizing regions can be particularly susceptible to changing trends in land economics and environmental management practices, and exurban environmental policies and representations are often strongly influenced by urban imaginaries and ideologies of rural nature. Increasingly global in both extent and character, the amenity of rurality has played a volatile role in dispersed urbanization over the past century.
Cadieux, K.V. (2011) Competing discourses of nature in exurbia. GeoJournal 76(4). doi: 10.1007/s10708-009-9299-0
This paper explores different ways that the category of nature is used in addressing landscape changes associated with exurbia and exurbanization. Nature is an important category in the practices and representations that residents and planners use to construct and maintain exurban landscapes. However, common ways of mobilizing nature in exurban planning discourses often obstruct better discussion, rather than facilitate it. Invoking nature can make planning processes more difficult by providing a means for naturalizing planning decisions and also by exacerbating struggles over whose nature will be managed in what ways. More explicitly framing what is meant by nature in exurban planning may improve discussion of landscape problems associated with sprawl. The goal of this paper is to contribute to creating a framework for more actively contextualizing how “nature” is used in discourses relating to exurbanization. I suggest that such a framework would need to consider – and make explicit – themes such as the four that I discuss in this paper: (1) the centrality of the production of nature to exurban landscapes; (2) multiple meanings of nature that are often confused; (3) ways that normative statements about nature tend to be unquestioned in exurban planning; and (4) the simultaneous difficulty and usefulness of critiquing and “denaturalizing” both material and discursive nature. Explicit conversations about the role and representation of nature within residents’ and managers’ land-use practices and ideologies could create opportunities for dialogue between residents, planners, and academics about the valuation of and preferences for constructing particular landscapes, especially in addressing problematic aspects of the phenomena of “amenity migration” and “sprawl.”
Jordan, N., Schively Slotterback, C., Cadieux, K.V., Mulla, D., Pitt, D., Schmitt Olabisi, L. & Kim, J. (2011) TMDL Implementation in Agricultural Landscapes: A Systemic and Communicative Approach. Environmental Management 48: 1–12. doi: 10.1007/s00267-011-9647-y
Increasingly, total maximum daily load (TMDL) limits are being defined for agricultural watersheds. Reductions in non-point source pollution are often needed to meet TMDL limits, and improvements in management of annual crops appear insufficient to achieve the necessary reductions. Increased adoption of perennial crops and other changes in agricultural land use also appear necessary, but face major barriers. We outline a novel strategy that aims to create new economic opportunities for land-owners and other stakeholders and thereby to attract their voluntary participation in land-use change needed to meet TMDLs. Our strategy has two key elements. First, focused efforts are needed to create new economic enterprises that capitalize on the productive potential of multifunctional agriculture (MFA). MFA seeks to produce a wide range of goods and ecosystem services by well-designed deployment of annual and perennial crops across agricultural landscapes and watersheds; new revenue from MFA may substantially finance land-use change needed to meet TMDLs. Second, efforts to capitalize on MFA should use a novel methodology, the Communicative/Systemic Approach (C/SA). C/SA uses an integrative GIS-based spatial modeling framework for systematically assessing tradeoffs and synergies in design and evaluation of multifunctional agricultural landscapes, closely linked to deliberation and design processes by which multiple stakeholders can collaboratively create appropriate and acceptable MFA landscape designs. We anticipate that application of C/SA will strongly accelerate TMDL implementation, by aligning the interests of multiple stakeholders whose active support is needed to change agricultural land use and thereby meet TMDL goals.
Slocum, R., Shannon, J., Cadieux, K.V. & Beckman, M. (2011) ‘Properly, with love, from scratch’: Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Radical History Review 110: 178–191. (Authors had equal input and are listed in reverse alphabetical order.) doi: 10.1215/01636545-2010-033
What to eat is of great concern to the U.S. public; it is the subject of social organizing at many scales and the focus of significant academic discussion. This article analyzes Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (JOFR), a much discussed reality show that aired earlier this year in the U.S., in which English celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, well known in the UK for directing government and public attention to school lunch, brought his campaign to promote fresh cooked food to Huntington, West Virginia. We recognize the capacity of JOFR to encourage people to act on behalf of their and their loved ones’ health, as well as to become engaged politically to change the food system, and in this article, we provide a sympathetic critique of themes and methods emphasized by Oliver in his efforts to spark a food revolution. Specifically, our critique points to JOFR’s similarity to past food reform efforts, the shaming of the overweight, the focus on a particular form of whiteness that masks the work of race, food, and health, the show’s arbitrary designation of authentic food, and JOFR’s promotion of heroic, antagonistic change. A food revolution, we argue, needs to engage with structural aspects of the food system through collective action.
Cadieux, K.V. (2008) Political ecology of exurban ‘lifestyle’ landscape at Christchurch’s contested urban fence. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 7(3): 183-194.
This paper examines the relationship of planning ideals of sharply defining edges between urban density and greenspace and alternative urban greening arrangements as they are manifested in a case study of exurban “lifestyle blocks” on the fringes of Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Exurban development outside Christchurch’s urban growth boundary – called the “urban fence” – provides an example of tension between municipal attempts to curb sprawl and exurbanites’ desire to live in the dispersed settlements outside of urban boundaries. These struggles play out at different scales and in a range of different metropolitan contexts. This paper reports on the results of an ethnographic study of Christchurch urban fringe residents’ residential land-use narratives and practices. The paper focuses on landscape preferences and concerns of a sample of small-scale productive land users and explores the implications of their versions of urban greening in the context of policy visions for the urban edge. A political ecology interpretation highlights relationships in this case study between competing claims about fringe greening and fringe landscape practices. These contests over the landscapes of the urban edge illustrate ways that municipal and regional planning visions for the urban edge conflict with the ideals and practices of those residents and land use managers who might otherwise be some of the strongest supporters of urban greening initiatives. Competing discourses about the urban edge relate in different ways to concerns about abrupt urban containment and to practices that act on these concerns. I briefly discuss promising examples of edge greening in this case that may provide models for participatory management of contested and multi-use greenspace at the urban-rural fringe.
Cadieux, K.V. Beyond the rural idyll: Agrarian problems and promises in exurban sprawl. Yale Agrarian Studies Seminar paper (16 February 2007) revising for publication [6000 words]. (click here to go to paper)
Cadieux, K.V. (2006) Mediating ‘lifestyle’: Producing spectacular and mundane urban edges through landscape analysis. Landscape Studies at the City Edge, pp. 6-11 [2500 words].
The inner urban fringe is characterized by mixed uses at various scales and by transience in land use. These qualities make the fringe a particularly suitable site for exploring aspiring visions of landscape. Where processes of urbanization intersect with natural and agricultural landscapes, and often replace these landscapes with urban ones, many residents – both in and out of the city – complain about existing and future impacts of urban sprawl. At the fringe thresholds where sprawl takes place, residents and managers struggle over the appropriate meanings and uses of urban and rural vocabularies of space, place, and practice. Such struggle, and the conflicts over land use decisions it entails, provides an informative domain for social scientists to explore contemporary issues of urban edge landscapes, and also challenges those involved in urban-edge contests to imagine possibilities for fringe environments more broadly. The struggle to define and shape edge landscapes – especially around expanding cities – thus encourages discussion of plural and diverse landscape goals and provides a rich domain for exploring the production of cultural landscapes.
Cadieux, K.V. (2005). Engagement with the Land: Redemption of the Rural Residence Fantasy? In Essex, S. and Gilg, A. (eds.), Contrasting Ruralities: Changing Landscapes. Cambridge: CABI [8000 words].
As demand for rural amenity living increases, many rue the changes wrought in the landscape by urbanites in the country. But what of their potential for positive change, especially through investment in the place characteristics of exurban residential countrysides and forests? Does the enthusiasm of urban-to-rural migrants for their new home-places suggest a potential for an inversion of Clout’s declining ‘ruralisation,’ focusing environmentalism – as a globalised version of responsibility toward the land – on engagement with the land and reinvention of the productive landscape? Narratives of the new rural residential landscape suggest a reconciliation of amenity and productive models of land use in the residential countryside and forest through increased engagement with issues of agriculture, social justice, and resource use in the largely post-productive rural landscape. However, the primacy of play over work in the conceptualization of ‘nature’ as a place of leisure problematises this engaged environmentalism as another form of consumption. Can rural residence facilitate a sustainable, dwelling relationship with both local and global environments?
Cadieux, K. V. (2004). Potential for engagement with landscape and global processes at residential scale: Landscape practice as mediator between the immediate and the global. Landscape Review 9(1) [1500 words].
In the everyday context of the residential landscape, individuals confront the need to make a remarkable number of decisions, some quite local and others much more global, or at least representing or relating to the global. The difference between questions such as, ‘shall I water the lawn today?’ and those of human rights, competition for resources, and environmental degradation is bridged by our understanding of the relationship between our everyday activities and our role in the larger world. As global information infrastructure and development simultaneously provide access to knowledge about environmental and social conditions at a global scale, and also place tremendous pressure on those conditions, mundane activities take place in the face of a great and growing disparity between rich and poor, and between inhabitable and uninhabitable environments.
It is interesting to ask how individuals navigate the course of their own landscape treatments in light of their knowledge of global conditions, given the increasing ease of access to information about existing disparities and the emerging contentiousness of common environmental practices, such as use of water and pesticides (Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Howett, 1997; Robbins and Sharp, 2003). Through a series of interviews with landowners and landscape professionals who work at a residential scale in the periurban areas of the Greater Toronto Area in Canada (Cadieux, 2001; Cadieux, 2005), this research attempts to elucidate how individuals negotiate the relationship between their more global and abstract goals and their more immediate and practical goals. My findings thus far indicate that residential landowners have difficulty in generating practices compatible with their short term goals that are also compatible with, or give them a sense of agency in relation to, their global environmental goals.
Blum, A., Cadieux, K.V., Luka, N. & Taylor, L. (2004). 'Deeply Connected' to the 'Natural Landscape': Exploring the Cultural Landscapes and Places of Exurbia. In Ramsey, D. and Bryant, C. (eds.) The Structure and Dynamics of Rural Territories: Geographical Perspectives. Brandon, Manitoba: Brandon University Press [2000 words].
While it is arguable that exurbia may not be particularly new as a landscape pattern, the concept and even the word itself are relatively recent: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was first used by Auguste Comte Spectorsky in 1955 in The Exurbanites, his classic study of New York City's belt of commuter settlements inhabited by what he saw as a fairly discrete population of well-to-do professionals and executives. Spectorsky suggested that because many of these exurbanites were employed in media and cultural industries, they were particularly adept at creating and maintaining cultural images, meanings, myths and narratives – in a word, representations, both individual and collective. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan (1957) agreed with Spectorsky's assessment of exurbanites as symbol-manipulators, meaning those who had mastered the grammar and rhetoric of the new media. In what Spectorsky described as 'the limited dream,' these affluent migrants left the city in search of a lifestyle more connected to nature. In a two-day symposium at the 2002 meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers, we parsed the exurban landscape into image and reality. The primary focus of the symposium, called 'Exploring the places and cultural landscapes of exurbia,' was a re-articulation of an initial hunch: that exurbia as a phenomenon is bound up with its inhabitants' ironically inaccurate sense of being 'deeply' 'connected' to what they perceive as the 'natural' 'landscape.' We found that exurbia can be understood as an imagined landscape, more attuned to its representations than to any tangible reality. These representations tend to be grounded in an ideology of nature. To a greater degree than with other post-war settlements, the residents of exurbia see the landscape in the light of their own expectations, and shape it accordingly – even as the results, ironically, often drive the transformation and abandonment of the 'real' landscape.
Cadieux, K.V., Taylor, L. & Bunce, M. ‘Protected Countryside’ in the Greater Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt Plan: Negotiating material landscapes and abstract ideals in the city’s countryside. In preparation. [10,000 words]
In this paper, we address Protected Countryside as the most ambiguous and multivalent category of the new Greater Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt Plan. We consider difficulties in reconciling abstract ideals of countryside with the material landscapes of the Greenbelt and its surrounds. Approaching the countryside as a cultural landscape, we consider how shared and contested understandings and experiences of countryside will contribute to the transformation of the Greenbelt policy framework into a more articulated vision of the Greenbelt’s future. We also consider the possibility that the negotiation of meaning will instead contribute to fragmentation of the Greenbelt framework. In addition to recognizing more conventionally legitimate explanations for landscape protection based on environmental science and land use planning principles, the concept and category of Protected Countryside in the current legislation suggests a tentative commitment to recognizing cultural landscape values in policy-making. Cultural valuation of landscapes can be both productive and contentious. We have undertaken this analysis in the hopes that academic consideration of contemporary and historical negotiations over greenbelt protection might assist more successful communicative engagements between the many parties who have stakes in the implementation of the promise of a more liveable environment that the Greenbelt presents. This study is relevant not only to those involved in the implementation of greenbelt policies, but also to those interested in the related domains of urban growth management and rural land protection.
Cadieux, K.V. A Place to Stand, the Empowerment of a Patch: Everyday Garden Production in Suburban Christchurch. In preparation [7000 words].
Using the Maori concept of tūrangawaewae – a place to stand – as it was repeatedly represented during ethnographic exploration of residential garden use in suburban Christchurch, this paper traces the persistence of home gardening in the development of Christchurch’s urban form. Despite a shift from gardening for necessary subsistence to gardening for primarily amenity reasons, many Christchurch residents continue to insist on the importance of access to their garden patches, arguing that the economic and aesthetic benefits are intertwined, and demonstrating that the garden patch provides an important venue for the production of identity and the ordering and exploration of environmental ideals. Based on a sample of gardens across a transect from the inner city to the outer urban periphery, this study uses narratives of garden use to survey everyday practices and ideologies of a contemporary garden suburb, with a particular focus on the critical environmental perspectives that residents represent as being grounded in their gardening practices.
Cadieux, K.V. A Bright Yet Narrow Room: Woolf's Vital Environment as an Alternative to the Tragic View of Modernism. [4000 words].
The concepts of the space-in-between (reader and writer) and of the scripts embedded in the physical and conceptual environment provide an opportunity to reexamine the Modernist emphasis on creative engagement with the world. Despite the modernists’ keen interest in the importance of the constructed environment, in their enthusiasm for engaging with the changed situation of modernity – the horrible beauty of the machine age – many modernists, especially in their architecture, stripped away many of the meaningful supports for individual and social behaviour, particularly creative behaviour, embedded in the physical environment. The modernist legacy of boxy steel and concrete monoliths mutely suggest that far from overturning the machine age in favor of the enabling of the individual, modernist environments may have facilitated monstrous bureaucracy in the place of oppressive myths. Not content with the dismissal of modernism as a tragic enterprise, and moved by the intensity with which the modernists cried for the constant engagement of the individual, I am interested in the paradox by which their movement undermined the very individual engagement they appeared to desire by pulling the fabric of the social mesh embedding meaning out from the spaces in between those individuals and their surroundings. Following Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway as she treads lightly but thoughtfully through that space between, I seek greater understanding of the narrative role of physical environments in supporting the behaviour and especially the creative capacity of people making meaning in the in-between.
conference papers and talks
Cadieux, K.V. (2010) Challenging the urban edge: Controversial garden landscapes and trajectories of urban-edge agriculture policy as a method of urban-rural separation. Organizing symposium with Mattias Qviström, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences: The peri-urban interface: Between planning history and landscape history. International Planning History Society Conference, Istanbul.
At a moment when shifting housing markets have called into question orthodoxies of urban development and growth, we find renewed motive to examine the way that landscape ideologies and practices have played out – often outside of, and in tension with, the explicit policies proposed by ‘smart’ planning policies and approaches of specific times. This paper considers the theme of strategies for separating urban and rural land uses and a series of twentieth-century transformations that urban edge policies have undergone. Using Canterbury New Zealand, Ontario Canada, and Minnesota USA as case studies of different philosophies for urban edges, this paper considers the relationship between different forms of urban-edge land use planning legacies and ideals, and the way they play out as cities spread.
Moments of urban reconfiguration have been associated with urban residents’ reconsidering the urban-rural relationship. In the case studies in question, various forms of agriculture activism have influenced the containment of urban land uses, both to keep them from causing undue pressure on rural land uses, and also to encourage the inclusion of traditionally rural land uses in urban spaces. I review discourses and practices of residential land use planning across different sites to explore broad themes in the way that people are using environmental ideals that relate food and housing in the landscape.
I examine the historical development of urban edge policies, focusing on the recurring theme of separating urban and rural land uses at the urban edge. I use land use policies, oral histories, and archives of political meetings around the development urban edge and urban garden policies to consider categories of challenges that have been posed to the establishment of boundaries to guard against the problems perceived in urban-rural mixing. I am particularly interested in the histories that are often used to support the contrasting stories supporting anti-sprawl activism and urban agriculture, and use these historical sources to consider useful parameters for examining the claims made for justifying urban-rural separation – and for challenging this separation.
Specific focus points of this study include the establishment (and renovation) of urban growth boundary strategies, such as the (1970s) Christchurch urban fence, Toronto’s (early twenty-first century) Greater Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt (and earlier 1970s Parkway Belts), and the (1970s) Minneapolis Metropolitan Urban Services Area (MUSA) line. These strategies are considered particularly in the context of related urban agriculture movements, such as vacant lot and victory gardening in the early twentieth century (associated with the city beautiful movement), back-to-the land movements of the postwar era, and garden-related exurban amenity migration associated with the real estate bubble of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Urban agriculture has helped to challenge and transform the meaning of the urban edge, and these case studies illuminate the tensions between urban-rural separation philosophies and agricultural land use practices that push the boundaries of what is defined as urban.
Cadieux, K.V., Shannon, J., Ross, N., & Overgaard, J. (2010) “Good food” in context: Reviewing the goals and motives of regional food discourses in SE Minnesota. Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society Meeting, Bloomington.
This paper reviews key documents relating to food activism produced over the past ten years in the eleven southeastern counties of Minnesota. This region is host to considerable food activism, including very well-established consumer and producer food co-ops, a county-level local food steering committee and several county- and school-district level farm-to-school programs, active food security networks, farm labor activism, and a substantial agriculture sector with a strong history of diversified farming and conservation measures, despite the pressures both of uneven and erodible terrain and also of the fraught comparative advantages of the corn belt. We have reviewed documents representing different food system actors in order to assess the range of food goals and motives in this region. We posit that understanding commonalities and divergence in motives and goals of different actors over this period could help diverse food actors negotiate alliances and make plans – and could also help facilitate greater continuity and collaboration as academics partner with actors across the region in local efforts that are often only patchily connected across space and time. Consequently, as part of an initiative intended to bring greater coherence to food planning in the region, we have designed our review to inform a series of intervention research practices that will represent the goals of the region to groups of food system actors for feedback, revision, and implementation planning. A further goal of this review is “ground truthing” of the American Planning Association’s 2007 “Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning.” Using the seven categories of food system goals comprising the APA guide as a tentative proxy for the broader national context, we assess the fit between official planning goals and diverse actors’ on-the-ground goals, highlighting disjunctures and contradictions between specific goals and motives that have benefited in the past – or that appear likely to benefit in the future – from the explicit attention of the actors in question, as well as of researchers, planners, and facilitators.
Cadieux, K.V. (2010) Evaluating intervention research in alternative agri-food initiatives. Canadian Association for Food Studies, Montréal.
This paper considers evaluation of alternative agri-food projects in academic domains, such as university farm-to-school programs and food system research projects. I focus on the relationship between three parts of food projects: first, the identification of food system needs; second, the development of indicators of change or success in meeting needs; and third, the ways in which needs and indicators are used to try to change food systems. Analyzing the collaborative work of a group of activists and researchers in the U.S. Upper Midwest and U.S. and Canada Superior region, I review evaluation schemes in an effort to identify project evaluation methods, the degree to which evaluation is incorporated into projects, and how much evaluation protocols are considered to make a difference in the success of projects. This evaluation of evaluation is intended to spark critical discussion of the role of evaluation and ways in which it can connect different understandings of food systems and how different agents intervene in them.
Cadieux, K.V. (2010) Urban-edge agriculture landscapes and the promise of environmental agency. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, D.C. (Session coordinator: What do we do with landscape & environmental meaning, politically?)
Landscapes are the site of negotiation between environmental ideals and environmental practices. In everyday experience, many people experience this negotiation most appreciably in their residential landscapes, where they may also attempt to live out the reconciliation of their ideals and practices. At the same time, in many metropolitan regions, the cumulative effects of these residential land use negotiations present considerable environmental management challenges. At a moment when shifting housing markets have called into question orthodoxies of urban development and growth, this talk considers what is offered by the unusual opportunity of current residential landscape market conditions to examine the way that landscape ideologies and practices play out - often outside of, and in tension with, the explicit policies proposed by 'smart' planning policies for governing residential land use and planning. I consider the relationship between different forms of urban-edge agriculture activism and discourses and practices of residential land use planning in two U.S. and two international cases. I review this relationship across different sites to explore broad themes in the way that people are using environmental ideals related to food and housing to frame the limits of, possibilities for, and exercises of their own agency in the everyday landscape – as well as in related broader policy and cultural arenas.
Cadieux, K.V. (2010) The Political Ecology and Moral Economy of Local Food, Frozen River Film Festival, Winona, MN
Scholars considering food history and food systems have used the concepts of 'moral economy' and 'political ecology' to explore the way that people justify their food choices and economic activities. These concepts help us understand the way that the sophisticated ideas that people bring to their food activities display moral beliefs and cultural histories. These concepts can also help us better understand how our interactions with food systems take place within the contexts of history, geography, and politics. In this presentation, I consider the growing field of films on food and agriculture. What do these films say about the political ecology and moral economy of local food -- and what do they invite us to say as we take part in the conversations these films strive to cultivate?
Cadieux, K.V. (2009) How does promoting urban-edge agriculture affect different people’s sense of environmental agency?
Landscapes, it has long been pointed out, are the site of constant negotiation between environmental ideals and environmental practices. In everyday experience, many people experience this negotiation most appreciably in their residential landscapes – and in many metropolitan regions, the cumulative effects of these residential land use negotiations present considerable environmental management challenges. At a moment when shifting housing markets have called into question orthodoxies of urban development and growth, we have an unusual opportunity to examine the way that landscape ideologies and practices play out – often outside of, and in tension with, the explicit policies proposed by ‘smart’ policies for governing residential land use and planning. This talk considers the relationship between different forms of urban-edge agriculture activism and discourses and practices of residential land use planning in a number of U.S. and international cases. I lay out this relationship across different sites to explore broad themes in the way that people are using environmental ideals related to food and housing to frame the possibilities for and exercises of their own agency in the everyday landscape – as well as in related broader policy and cultural arenas.
Cadieux, K.V. (2008) Consuming production, producing sustainability: The fetish of production in local agri-food activism. Sustainable consumption and alternative agri-food systems, University of Liège. http://www.suscons.ulg.ac.be/
This paper explores ways that the category of “production” is used as a fetish in the promotion of alternative agri-food networks (AAFNs), and considers how academic work within these networks may provide opportunities for reflexive consideration of the implications of fetishizing production. I explore the idea of production and its significance in the context of institutional dining service sustainability projects, and also the conspicuous consumption of production in the broader alternative agri-food networks in which these projects are situated. Drawing on five years of ethnographic work within AAFNs in the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, the Canterbury region of Aotearoa New Zealand, and southern New England, I explore how agency and identity are figured vis-à-vis production and sustainability. The themes of this paper involve, first, the way that agency and identity are figured vis-à-vis production and sustainability, and second, the way that this type of research intervenes with an intent to open up or frame the way that producer identification occurs or that producer subject positions are produced – and particularly the way production becomes a fetish, an ethical black box that, like nature, is used as an unassailable justification in agri-food decision-making processes. I use a case study to explore how four qualities – natural, local, seasonal, and productive – contribute to the fetish quality of production, and I argue that the fetishistic representation of production presents obstacles to alternative agri-food projects’ engagement in critical and evaluative discourse. As emerging critiques of alternative agri-food activism note, reflexive participatory processes for evaluating AAFN trajectories could help create additional social context for these projects and networks by providing a framework for exploring – and re-embedding in institutional evaluation processes and policy frameworks – the motives driving emphasis on production and the effects of conspicuous production.
Cadieux, K.V. (2008) Conspicuous production: Performing neoliberal gardening identities. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston. (Panel coordinator: Methods, approaches, and theory involved in studying exurbia and amenity migration)
The recent rise in popular participation in food and agriculture movements points in part to consumer desire to change the nature of food production. Critiques vary in scope and in the way they are performed: while some critics attempt to change the food system as consumers by "voting with their forks" (à la Michael Pollan), others navigate the distance between consumption and production by seeking out participation in productive processes and attempting to share in the labelled category of "producer."
This paper examines ways that gardeners and others engaged in small-scale agriculture use production practices to perform and explore their identities in a variety of English-speaking settings across the urban–rural gradient. I concentrate on whether and how the ideal of re-integrating production and consumption translates into alternative practices, politics, and governing self narratives relating to problematic political ecologies identified with mainstream globalized commodity production and trade.
Reporting on ethnography among aspiring producers, I consider the function of producing conspicuously and its relation to the dilemmas of consuming alternative production regimes. As representations and motivations associated with production are widely co-opted, how is the performance of production affected? Many aspiring producers cite aspects of environmental (and sometimes social) sustainability as important motivators. However, the neoliberal politics of withdrawal they inspire and often demonstrate conflicts with the engaged lifestyle into which conspicuous production is supposed to provide access. Further, although production may provide opportunities for activism in everyday life, the conventionalization of resistance movements may undermine them.
Cadieux, K.V. (2007) Fertile resistance, using normative garden spaces to incubate critical urbanism. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco.
Remnants of nineteenth century garden city ideology regularly spill into current discussions of urban planning: the idea of the garden as a regulator of urban behavior is evident in calls for the preservation of open space and greenspace in and around cities. This presentation reports on ethnographic work on garden land use in the city and region of Christchurch and Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand, where garden suburb planning traditions inform the practices and narratives for shaping urban space. Demonstrating that the impulses to engage in interactions with the natural and cultivated environment often transcend urban boundaries, this work on urban and peri-urban gardens points to processes of exurbanization and examines the interaction of exurban aspirations and contemporary neoliberal land use management strategies for containing urban sprawl and mediating land use conflicts and competitions in the urban-rural fringe.
Cadieux, K.V. (2006) ‘Your everyday entrance into the spectacular’: Making a spectacle of residential lifestyle. Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society Meeting, Boston.
People who become involved in projects such as community gardening and hobby farming represent the choice to engage in optional productive lifestyles through a wide spectrum of practices and representations. Taking up practices with explicitly critical and transformative potential, especially vis-à-vis the conventional agri-food system, these participants in local food-system projects may experience a tension between the engaging social-action aspects of these projects and their disengaging aspects – the aesthetization, commodication, and exclusivity that commonly accompany such alternative food projects.
This paper explores a typology of paradigms used by local working landscape activists to describe their land-use activities in the urban and peri-urban areas of Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Participants in a variety of “lifestyle” land-use projects, such as small scale horticultural farms or urban gardens, use paradigms such as “organic,” “native,” and “green” as frameworks for environmental decision making. These frameworks are understood in different ways, and at different levels of detail; they conflict with one another, and are often contested. However, environmental representations appear to be affected by environmental practices in somewhat predictable ways.
As people learn the material practices of food production, their presuppositions shift away from abstracted impressions toward a more experiential understanding of food systems. Particular frameworks, while facilitating entry into greater expertise in paradigms such as organic production, lead to further questions about previous abstract underst andings of larger networks – and to the formation of new abstractions. Understanding this process provides insight into education in support of environmental decision making, especially in productive domains.
Cadieux, K.V. (2006). Antinomy and estrangement in forest preservation and production. American Society for Environmental History, St. Paul. (Session coordinator: Conservation-based public policies and productive forest uses across the twentieth-century)
The invisibility of the common commodity interactions with forests within western society suggests a cultural disjuncture between practical use values associated with forests and the pleasurable and meaningful amenity values associated with them. This paper explores the relationship between production and amenity preservation within influential Canadian wilderness areas as expressed in competing management plans and public statements about Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario and in public service announcements made by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. This Canadian example provides insight into the recreationalization of the forest and looks at the relationship between dialectical discussion of forest management and lay involvement in forest management and policy. Juxtaposing recreational and productive forest uses provides insight into the separation between the environment of everyday life and problematic imagined environment or wilderness. By examining the mechanisms by which productive uses of the immediate environment were made more difficult to perceive during the 1970s-90s, we might see where forest management discourses have successfully facilitated or obstructed management dialogue which addresses both amenity and material needs.
Cadieux, K.V. (2006). Discourses of nature in exurbia. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago. (Session coordinator: Amenity migration, exurbia, and emerging rural landscapes I: Nature in the geographical imagination)
This paper explores the ideology of nature as expressed in exurbia I discuss the way that discourses of nature in exurbia may provide a venue for discussion between people interested in exurban issues, especially between residents and planners. Using ‘nature’ as a lens through which to consider the agency of both residents and planners encourages the consideration of: (a.) the centrality of the production of nature to exurban landscapes; (b.) gaps in the literature on exurbia where normative questions of nature tend to be underaddressed; and (c.) the difficulty and usefulness of ‘denaturalizing’ nature, both in terms of its material processes of production and also its normative representations. Working out ways to discuss the valuation of natural landscapes in exurban residence choice may help to articulate some of the issues of sprawl. Opening space within land planning and management regimes to bring explicit conversations about nature to the forefront could give voice to residents’ reasons for constructing particular landscapes. By assisting in separating preferences for particular landscapes (natural, pastoral) from objections to others (urban, modern), consideration of the ideology of nature may help interested residents, planners, and scholars to engage with the seemingly intractable problem of sprawl.
Cadieux, K.V. (2006). Regenerative agriculture versus native regeneration: Spaces of negotiation in the organic landscape of Canterbury, New Zealand. Conference for Social Research in Organic Agriculture, Guelph, Ontario.
This paper discusses contentions in the relationship between small-scale organic farming and the restoration of native forests in urban and periurban Christchurch. I use a series of fifty interviews with small scale organic farmers, WWOOF hosts, land managers and urban gardeners, conducted between January and July, 2004, to explore ways in which the desire to engage with competing environmental narratives and processes are balanced. The potential for mobilizing an existing urban, organic gardening tradition is weighed against the desirability of restoring an indigenous landscape largely obliterated by imported landscape ideals. Discourses of sustainability undergird both land uses, and these same discourses are also used to support and plan the mainstream agriculture and imported British produced nature against which ‘organic’ and ‘native’ are defined. By considering the overlaps and disjunctures in people’s stories about sustainable agriculture and the regeneration of the native forest, we can better understand some of the underlying assumptions and premises of sustainability, especially in terms of who benefits from particular sustainabilities. As public support is mobilized for social and environmental activism under the rubrics of ‘sustainable,’ ‘organic,’ and ‘native,’ how can the articulation of the goals and values associated with each assist in disrupting the abstraction and commodification of these ideals?
Bunce, M., Cadieux, K. V. & Taylor, L. (2005). The Effectiveness of the Greenbelt Plan for Conserving the City's Countryside. (Coordinator, Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt Planning Issues Discussion Panel.) Canadian Association of Geographers, London, Ontario.
Conserving Ontario’s countryside is a stated goal of the proposed Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt, yet by confining the protected countryside within a narrow belt, opportunities for a comprehensive approach to countryside conservation are lost. Much of the public debate over the Greenbelt has focused on its effectiveness as a growth management tool in spite of the fact that the plan’s vision makes no mention of growth management and calls instead for a “broad band of protected countryside” to “enhance our urban and rural areas…” This paper focuses on how the plan intends to accomplish this and critically explores its weaknesses in terms of the meaning of countryside and the contradictions inherent in combining conflicting land uses under a culturally constructed banner. (Paper in preparation for special issue of The Canadian Geographer.)
Cadieux, K.V. (2005). Political ecologies of exurbia: tales from the edge. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Denver. (Coordinator of Special Session: Exurbia, Sprawl, and the Ideology of Nature)
Looking at sprawl from the point of view of people who have moved there to live closer to the natural environment and from the perspective of those who have designed landscapes for these people, this paper considers the narratives of the cultural landscape in exurbia: how have exurbanites read and written the relationship between residence and nature in their compromise between nature-dwelling and the nature-less city? Examining aspects of the evolution of exurbia as an ideological settlement pattern may assist in the contemporary negotiation over contested cultural landscapes (and their valuation as "nature") at the metropolitan edge.
Cadieux, K.V. (2005). The dissolution of sprawl, the abstraction of nature, and postcolonial negotiation of the 'urban fence' ideology. Harvard Graduate Student Conference on International History.
British postcolonial administrative ideology favored a strong containment policy for urban growth. As industrialized countries struggle with the morphology of expanding metropolitan centers in the context of an increasingly globalized economy and culture, elaboration of organizing principles bounding human settlements clarifies questions of urban and regional planning. Preliminary study of transitions in urban edge development planning in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Toronto, Canada, provides some insight into the way that a strong normative ideal of natural order has become abstracted through processes of planning policy, and has at the same time become a shared municipal goal across national borders, and lost much of the meaning that gave it the power to organize.
Ideals of nature have been used to order and circumscribe urban areas as abstractions of the very principles of chaos and order: as desirable and edenic reward for good urbanism, and as the other that coalesces the city. This role of nature as a source of both discipline and promise is apparent in the context of wilderness and anti-sprawl rhetoric, and can also be seen in the evolution of city and regional planning, where nature has been used as a source of and metaphor for the ordering principles of both long-term stability and dynamic change. Natural features order and enhance the moral, civic, and even nationalist function of environments at different scales, and the reinforcing power of nature is summoned to social agendas to organize various processes of environmental interaction.
In the context of British colonial settlements, nature as ‘greenspace’ has been an example of a powerful ordering priciple used to keep cities in check. Greenbelt ideals were exported to colonies in various forms of the British Town and Country Planning Act, providing international standards for the ordering and confining of areas of dense human settlement—within the ‘urban fence.’ Contrasting the urbanity within the urban fence, the greenspace of nature and the countryside provided an ideal for right living, but also became increasingly abstract, as primary production nations moved away from agrarian, ‘green’ ways of life to more diversified and urban economies.
Cadieux, K.V. (2004). Potential for engagement with landscape and global processes at residential scale: Landscape practice as mediator between the immediate and the global. Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, Lincoln, New Zealand.
(abstract above)
Cadieux, K.V. (2003) The Mortality of Trees: Potentials for Relationship with Dynamic Representations of Nature and the Politics of Succession. Guelph Rural Studies Conference, "The New Rural Community: Problems and Prospects."
Many well-intentioned residents move to rural areas in part for the relationship with natural environment promised there. This interest in landscape has both practical and ideological facets: people find in their creative manipulation of the environment an opportunity to explore their conceptual relationship with the physical world. Questions of a fundamentally moral nature are raised by mundane decisions in the stewardship of the residential environment: how do we come to know what we should do with the environment of which we are a part? The experience of engaging with the complexity of the natural environment helps undermine some of the simplifying glorification of nature and accompanying anti-urbanism that drives so much rural in-migration in North America, and this engagement also has the power to reframe environmental problems in the light of mundane, everyday activities and their effects.
Using relationships with residential forests as examples of motivating narratives and ideological mythologies, this paper explores these questions of moral ambiguity in the new rural landscape. As new rural residents simultaneously confront management issues and strong cultural narratives of forest, conflicts often arise between the desire to do something with the land and the cultural prohibition against interfering with the natural world and also between an often uncritical reverence for trees as a metonym for Eternal Nature and the revelation that comes to anyone who spends time in the woods: trees dies, too. Et in Arcadia Ego.
Cadieux, K.V. (2003). Memories of Market Gardens and the Ideological Transformation of Commons: Respite and Revenue in Residential Productive Land Use around Boston and Toronto, 1865-1945. 12th International Conference of Historical Geographers, Auckland, New Zealand.
How has the history of productive land use in the near periphery of cities laid the foundation for current land uses there? Garden suburbs have frequently been portrayed for their qualities of green respite: garden as sanctuary rather than garden as vegetable plot. This examination of market gardening around Boston and Toronto reviews common productive land uses between 1865 and 1945 – between the enclosure disputes of the American civil war and the spread of the great, connected lawn. After 1945, tract subdivisions and restrictive covenants changed the periurban landscape, but how much were small scale productive land uses integrated with residential settlement in Ontario and New England prior to that point? Using records of production and sale, descriptions of the landscape, and interviews with residents, this paper traces the rise of an aesthetic commons. In this common landscape for visual consumption, non-productive Nature replaces small-scale productive land uses, creating a post-productive amenity landscape aesthetic. By examining this change and the rise of the post-productive amenity landscape, I wish to foreground questions about ideological qualities of commons and enclosure in the individually-owned plots of the post-colonial English-speaking world.
Cadieux, K.V. (2003). Encroachment, engagement, enchantment: Toronto's expansion and the compulsion of the urban edge. Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Congress, Victoria, B.C..
What are the compelling enticements of the city’s edge? And why are we, as academics who study this edge morphology, struck so oddly by advertisements for these enchanting suburbs? Acknowledging the heterogeneity of motivations for moving to the city’s edge –especially affordability in the face of skyrocketing real estate prices in the city proper and an expansive ideology of space – this paper comments on the ideological homogeneity of the billboard images used to promote Toronto's sprawl. By looking at the cultural flotsam and jetsam of edge construction, I examine the desires embodied in advertisements for the edge suburb. What potential do these ads – and the landscape they sell – offer to city dwellers in terms of engagement with actual landscape processes? Is their flaunted ideology of nature one which satisfies the desires residents express? What does the ephemeral edge at the urban-rural frontier offer in terms of the potentials it claims? Is there a role besides bemusement for geographers, planners, and landscape crusaders in the process of urban enchantment being laid upon the farmland and forest at the city's edge?
Keywords: Urban planning, Toronto, sprawl, nature, urban-rural fringe
Cadieux, K.V. (2003). Running away from the genius of the place: Dwelling at the edge of modernity, nature, and the city (Poster). International Federation of Landscape Architects World Congress, Calgary, Alberta.
The metropolitan edge is shaped by deep tensions in the way we imagine nature, the city, and our idea of our place in relation to both in the modern world. When poet Alexander Pope celebrated access to ‘nature’ in the new English garden style in 1731– ‘Consult the Genius of the Place in all’ – could he envision the personal relationship with a plot of nature that would come to pervade English-speaking culture? By looking at the residential outdoor spaces created by edge dwellers in the Greater Toronto Area and New England, we can explore the way in which the phenomenon of the yard acts as a draw for exurbanites – a place-creating fantasy. The prevalence of enclosed outdoor room-like spaces and the dramatic differences between subdivision lots (‘developed’ by a ‘developer’) and owner-developed or severed lots (shaped by the residents who bought and transformed a property into a residence) demonstrate the degree to which the potential for actively shaping space and engaging with the natural physical world may draw people out of the city to the edges. The differences in the morphology of these yards, and in the narratives of their residents, also suggest that our conflicted relationships with nature, modernity, and the city may privilege nature in an ambiguous way – one which somehow makes it easier to evade the genii of places than to consult them.
Cadieux, K.V. (2003). Amenity and Productive Relationships with 'Nature' in Exurban and Imagined Forests. American Society for Environmental History, Providence, R.I.
Increasing rural forest residence reflects the compelling cultural narrative of life in the deep, dark woods. What draws quality-of-life migrants to the forest, and how does what they do there affect the larger culture from which they appear to be withdrawing, at least symbolically? The transformation of everyday exurban environments from landscapes of production to landscapes of consumption raises questions about the attitudes and behaviours of exurbanites toward the characteristic ‘nature’ of exurbia. This paper explores the development of the relationship between ecological mythology of the forest and land uses of forest residents, through natural resource agency propaganda films, forest management plans, literary representations of forests, and interviews with residents. Descriptions and rhetoric of everyday and extraordinary relationship with residential environments give us insight into the commodification of transcendental experiences of nature as well as the importance of this feeling of connection to nature in the narrative of exurban experience.
Cadieux, K.V. (2002). Engaging With the Urban Forest: Residential Land Use and the Power of Periurban Nature Mythology (Poster). Canadian Urban Forest Conference, Markham, Ontario.
As periurban residence increases in importance at the urban/rural interface, interest in the amenities of sylvan living presents opportunities to enhance both the sustainability of human relationships with ecosystems and people’s understanding of conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘the forest.’ Ways in which periurban residents conceptualize their environments, especially the residential forested landscape, strongly influence what they do and are willing to have done with the landscape. This paper examines attitudes and land uses of residents in the periurban Greater Toronto Area. In order to understand motivations underlying common land uses, the results of interviews, questionnaires, and land-use surveys of fifty residents and their urban/rural fringe properties are discussed, assessing the degree of engagement with the local landscape, ways in which landowners interact with their properties, and attitudes and beliefs governing these interactions.
Forested landscapes are preferred by exurbanites. This is demonstrated by choice of residential location and landscape treatment, and was also affirmed in the interviews, in which residents concentrated heavily on their interactions with trees on their properties, their philosophies regarding the importance of trees and forested landscapes, and their relationships with nature and the natural landscape of the urban/rural interface. Many residents discussed conflicts and paradoxes of periurban residence and demonstrated concern about impact on the landscape. They also expressed interest in mitigating that impact. Land use behaviours informed by knowledge of natural processes seemed to be an important part of ‘country’ living both as a way to enhance beauty in the landscape and also to increase the opportunity for engagement with the natural environment – naturalism played an important role in satisfaction with resident-yard interactions.
The committed interest in nature, shown especially by new (and very long-term) residents presents opportunities for promoting sustainable relationships with forest ecosystems. Conservation authorities, the Niagara Escarpment Commission, and local networks of interested stakeholders take advantage of this interest in nature to promote reforestation and naturalization, especially in the name of benefits for water, wildlife, and ecosystem health. However, although the forested aesthetic of ‘wild’ ‘nature’ may be dominant at some frontiers of the urban/rural interface (and the billboard iconography of expanding suburban development), personal commitment to forest sustainability does not permeate suburban subdivision landscape ideology. Even in heavily forested exurban areas, subdivision residents are much less personally invested in their behavioural and attitudinal relationship with ‘nature’ in general, and trees in particular.
How can the obviously compelling ideas of nature, conservation, and reforestation contribute to sustainable forests and also to sustainable attitudes governing more general interactions with nature and natural resources to support healthy communities at all scales? And how can we restore the relationship between pleasurable and meaningful uses of nature and the more basic and often exploitative uses upon which we are more fundamentally reliant, and yet which we often submerge beneath our more cheerful image of the mythological forest? The relationship between holistic ideologies of personal engagement with nature and sustainable management of forests at the community level will be discussed in the context of Toronto’s urban/rural interface.
Cadieux, K.V. (2002). Residential Land Use as Educational Forum: Microcosmic Sustainability in the Backyard. North American Association for Environmental Education Annual Conference, Boston 2002 [1600 word version in proceedings].
As interactions with the world become increasingly abstract and simulated, interaction with the domestic landscape provides a bounded context for engagement with environmental complexity and an opportunity for reinterpretation and recreation of individuals’ relationships with the world through everyday activities.
Quality-of-life or urban-to-rural migrants are frequently motivated to purchase properties for their potential for interaction with what is perceived as natural or pastoral. However, many common forms of recreational and residential land use are destructive to the sustainability of natural systems (such as forests) and also to the sustainability of resource-based land uses (such as agriculture). This presentation examines attitudes and beliefs expressed by exurban homeowners in Canada and the United States in relation to a variety of residential land uses and treatments. In order to facilitate sustainable land uses that support a positive experience of place, this project examined ways in which residents fall back on common, but ecologically damaging, land uses through a lack of alternative options; ways in which social networks of landowners support positive alternative landscape treatment; and processes of creation of new cultural landscapes with greater potential for sustainability than those currently common in residential development. This paper focuses on interviews and surveys of exurban residents and examination of their properties as a sources of insight into motivations to move out of urban areas into non-metropolitan, more “natural” places, and into the processes by which these residents are able, on the one hand, to turn their moves into positive stewardship opportunities, reducing their environmental impact and sharing their learning processes with their communities, and on the other hand, the processes by which “quality-of-life migrants” fail to do so, falling back on patterns that enable sprawl, homogenization of the landscape, and heightened environmental impact.
Cadieux, K.V. (2002). The Mortality of Trees: The Death of Change in Nature (Best Student Paper, Rural Studies), Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Congress, Toronto, as part of the session: Reimagining Landscapes.
Trees symbolize the natural world. The forest, as the habitation of trees, is often positioned against metropolis, the habitation of humans. Increasing rural residence reflects the compelling cultural narrative of life in the deep, dark woods. What draws quality-of-life migrants to the forest, and how does what they do there affect the larger culture from which they appear to be withdrawing, at least symbolically? Sequestration of ‘natural’ environments for exurban residential use is both driven by and exacerbating issues of social justice, environmental sustainability, and the livability of the landscape, and calling into question the relationship between practical and amenity uses of natural resources. This paper explores the relationship between ecological mythology of the forest and land uses of forest residents through explication of of fairy tales, natural resource agency propaganda films, interviews with residents, and land use analysis. Revisiting the Muir-Pinchot debate in a contemporary mythological context, an argument is made for the value of engagement with the physical natural environment not only for sustainable resource use but also for increased satisfaction with the cultural landscape.
