Luke Drake

Director of Sustainable Food Systems

Center for Environment and Society

Washington College

Chestertown, Maryland USA

Degrees

PhD, Geography

MA, Geography

BS, Business Administration

Honors and Awards

(2019) First Place at CSUN Service Learning Symposium, Office of Community Engagement

(2014) Totten Fellow at U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service New York City Field Station

Research Interests

My research focuses on the spatial networks that link communities together, and it contributes to knowledge of the relationship between economy, environment, and development. This work is driven by underlying questions of space and place, particularly how communities improve livelihoods by using local resources and also by connecting to other places through networks. Projects have included urban agriculture and farmer’s markets in the U.S. and grassroots disaster response in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. This has drawn on training in urban geography, political ecology, and geographic information systems.

Publications

Drake, L. 2024. Participatory Cartographies for Social Change. In Introducing Human Geographies (4th edition), eds. P. Cloke, K. Dombroski, A. Williams, J. Qian and M. Goodwin. Routledge.

Drake, L., Liunakwalau, H.M. and Hango Hango Community Association, Port Vila, 2022. Locating the traditional economy in Port Vila, Vanuatu: Disaster relief and agrobiodiversity. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 63(1), pp.80-96.

Lawson, L., Drake, L., and Fitzgerald, N. 2016. Foregrounding community-building in community food security: A case study of the New Brunswick Community Farmers Market and Esperanza Garden. In Cities of Farmers: Problems, Possibilities and Processes of Producing Food in Cities. Edited by Alfonso Morales and Julie Dawson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Invited chapter.

Drake, L. and Lawson, L. 2015. Best practices in community garden management to address participation, water access, and outreach. Journal of Extension 53 (6)

Drake, L., Ravit, B., Dikidjieva, I., and Lawson, L. 2015. Urban greening supported by GIS: From data collection to policy implementation. AIMS Environmental Science 2(4), 910-934. Invited article.

Drake, L., and Lawson, L. 2015. Results of a U.S. and Canada community garden survey: Shared challenges in garden management amid diverse geographical and organizational contexts. Agriculture and Human Values 32 (2), 241-254

Lawson, L., and Drake, L. 2015. From beets in the Bronx to chard in Chicago: The discourse and practice of growing food in the American city. In Food in the City: Histories of Culture and Cultivation (pp. 143-162). Edited by Dorothée Imbert. Washington D.C.: Harvard University and Dumbarton Oaks

Links

CSUN profile

Google Scholar

Publications

Visualising and analyzing diverse economies with GIS: A resource for performative research

This chapter explores how geographic information systems (GIS) can be used in diverse economies research by first tracing how debates about GIS methods and associated epistemologies have changed since the 1980s. Although initially seen as a tool limited to quantitative spatial analysis, GIS has since expanded in scope to support and extend a variety of interpretivist modes of knowledge. Participatory, qualitative, and critical GIS emerged as some diverse ways to use GIS and spatial data. Scholars using a diverse economies approach participated in this expansion of the scope of GIS. Increasingly, the potential for GIS in diverse economies research is becoming more evident. This chapter discusses three ways that GIS can align with this framework. Previous literature is reviewed on how GIS has been used to visualize and analyze economic diversity and the commons. Original research is then presented to show how GIS can reveal historical layers of economic diversity.

Network Analysis of Local Food in California: A Study of Farmers’ Markets in Los Angeles and their Farm Supply Chains

This paper examines the geography of local food through a spatial analysis of farms and farmers’ markets. It draws on two themes in the geo-graphical literature on local food, which focus on territorial and prox-imity definitions on one hand and on relationality on the other. Through GIS analysis, this paper explores spatial patterns of ninety-one farmers’ markets in Los Angeles County, California, USA; spatial patterns of 282 farms that supplied a sample of thirty-three markets; and intra-urban patterns of those supply chains. The results show an uneven geography of farms across California that supplied the sampled markets, but also show that farms travel just as far to markets in working-class neighborhoods as to wealthier neighborhoods. Conclusions explain how integrating territorial and relational conceptions of local food provide insights into the complex spatiality of production and consumption, and how local food can be understood as an interdependence between places.

Surplus Labor and Subjectivity in Urban Agriculture: Embodied Work, Contested Work

This article examines unpaid work within urban agriculture sites. It focuses on the extra work—the surplus labor—that is performed to sustain these sites and how this work relates to subject formation. Land access and subjectivities are widely discussed in the urban agriculture literature, particularly in the Global North, but recent research has also identified the continual supply of labor as a crucial issue as well. However, work dynamics of urban agriculture have seldom been the object of analysis, and little is known about the relationship between unpaid urban agriculture work and subjectivity. I argue that surplus labor is useful for analysis because of the surplus value that is produced through urban agriculture. I draw on the theoretical framework of diverse economies to examine surplus labor through an antiessentialist form of class analysis. A case study from New Jersey, USA, is based on two years of participant observation and forty-eight interviews in twenty cities. The case study reveals how surplus labor is performed, the techniques used to appropriate and distribute surplus labor, the subject formation that occurs through this surplus labor, and models of surplus food distribution that emerge from the juncture of surplus and subjectivity. Conclusions point to contested work practices and the embodied experience of surplus production as keys to subject formation. More broadly, it sheds light on the processes through which surplus labor is performed in unpaid informal forms of enterprise and the role that subject formation plays in that labor.

Developing a Vacant Property Inventory through Productive Partnerships: A University, NGO, and Municipal Planning Collaboration in Trenton, New Jersey

This paper analyzes the development of an inventory of vacant buildings and land in Trenton, New Jersey that resulted from a research partnership between the Rutgers University Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability; Isles, Inc. a Trenton-based non-governmental organization; and the City of Trenton. Participatory research design between university and NGO staff led to a smartphone GIS survey tool that functioned through web and desktop GIS. University students and community residents collected data through a smartphone GIS application and visually inspected almost every property within the city’s boundaries. Although many vacant land inventories have successfully used secondary data, this project required fieldwork to identify vacant properties because data were unavailable through secondary data. The survey was developed collaboratively with the NGO for their use and modification of it in future work, and to understand locally-specific visual markers of vacancy. The data informed the City of Trenton’s vacant property management policy, and served as a foundation for a variety of Isles’ community development programs. While smartphone applications may improve NGO access to GIS, the need for web and desktop GIS to complete data collection and analysis requires expertise and time that pose additional challenges

Governmentality in urban food production? Following “community” from intentions to outcomes

Community-produced spaces such as community gardens are attracting widespread scholarly interest for the potential of not only food production, but also for social, environmental, and educational benefits. Yet community gardens have also been scrutinized as sites of governmentality that produce neoliberal subjects. In this article, six case studies are analyzed as representative of three ways to organize and manage gardens—grassroots, externally-organized, and active nonprofit management. I use performativity theory to examine how definitions and enactments of community can be used to include, exclude, or bridge difference. The analysis highlights some of the specific moments in garden organizing and management that influence participation or resistance to community-oriented urban food production.

Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the U.S.

Highlights

•Community gardens are often seen as temporary uses of vacant land.

•Gardeners see them as important parts of neighborhoods and cities.

•Local governments and organizations historically planned gardens to be temporary.

•Increasingly, gardeners reproduce those dominant narratives as well.

•Rethinking these transformations can lead to better policy toward vacant land.

Abstract

Community gardens have gained attention and support in recent years because of a range of expected benefits and outcomes, and they are one of many examples of transformations of vacant land into green space. While the improvements to vacant or underutilized land are lauded, the practice of community gardening is underpinned by the assumption that it is a temporary practice on temporarily-available land. This assumption, which is at times implicit and at others explicit, maintains that support for community gardens—technical assistance and especially access to land—can be temporary. Through a genealogy of community garden advocacy in the U.S., we find that a dominant narrative of community gardening as a means to an end has been continuously reproduced for more than a century in large part by government agencies and philanthropic organizations. In recent decades, community gardeners have become key actors in advocacy, and although they portray gardening as a meaningful part of everyday city life, they also reproduce that narrative of temporariness by promoting it as a means to address various issues. We argue that this tension between means and ends—especially coming from community gardeners—is problematic. It is a challenge for community gardeners and the many other producers of green space on supposedly vacant land because their means-oriented discourse takes precedence in the public imagination; it perpetuates the notion that the land is ultimately still vacant.

Luke Drake

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