Repairing the Local Food System: Long-Range Planning for People’s Grocery

Alethea Marie Harper, May 2007
Award-Winning Master’s Thesis, 160 pages
Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
University of California, Berkeley

“West Oakland is a community with limited access to healthy food. My work for People’s Grocery, a local nonprofit, will help the neighborhood and the nearby agricultural community work together to repair the local food system. Local production, self-sufficiency, and restoration of knowledge and local bonds are emphasized throughout. This project exemplifies how analysis and planning can combine pragmatism with idealism, creating a realizable vision for a thriving neighborhood and a robust local food system.

“Like many inner-city neighborhoods in the post-industrial United States, West Oakland is a neighborhood in need of an economic anchor. Once a thriving industrial center with plentiful blue-collar jobs, West Oakland now finds itself with high unemployment, deteriorating housing stock, disheartening crime statistics, high rates of heart disease and diabetes, and a lack of fresh, healthy food. While access to high-quality food may seem like a small problem in comparison to pervasive crime and major health disorders, it is in fact a quiet crisis on par with these other problems. Repairing the local food system is one step in the process to reinvigorate West Oakland’s food culture and local economy.”

Detailed case studies of many urban agriculture organizations include:

Your Backyard Farmer
City Farmer
Urban Nutrition Initiative (UNI)
Edible Schoolyard, Martin Luther King Middle School
People’s Grocery
City Slicker Farms
Oakland Butterfly and Urban Gardens

The complete thesis can be read here. (Best to download the thesis and read it with Adobe Reader.)