Community gardens have been the focus of social science research in the United States for several decades and the benefits associated with these alternative food spaces has been well documented. More recently, scholars have begun to argue that these benefits are inequitably distributed across society. Largely as a result of the whiteness of these spaces, people of color are less represented in community and benefit less from their presence. Portland, Oregon is recognized as a leader in sustainability, with its abundance of community gardens and urban agriculture. It is also one of the whitest urban cities in the United States. People of color have faced a legacy of oppression and marginalization in Portland, and this is especially true for the black community. Through conducting 17 in-depth interviews and spending an extensive amount of time observing community gardens in Portland, this research aims to explore how the whiteness of these spaces functions to marginalize black individuals and contributes to the ongoing oppression of the black community. This research also demonstrates how the black community in Portland engages community gardening in an effort to resist these and broader effects of structural racism.

The study examines social and physical connections and images that define the sense of place of three community gardens managed by the City of Portland. Most research on community gardens focuses on social group connections and their impact on community revitalization and empowerment. Few studies consider the impact of physical and social connections to community gardens from the perspective of individual gardeners in constructing their sense of place. No studies have yet examined the relationship between spatial images, space connections, and empowerment feelings related to community gardens. This study is intended to initiate a discussion on the empowerment experience of individual gardeners and their images associated with community gardens in the context of sense of place. Thirty gardeners participated in the study. The use of the narrative photo storytelling method applied through de Certeau's practice of everyday life and narrative city approach enabled gardeners to express in their own terms connections to space and experience of empowerment achieved through community gardening. The study proposes the concept of the Natural Realm as the context for sense of place of Portland Community gardens. Natural Realm deemphasizes the human-centric view of nature. Community gardeners most commonly experience empowerment by perceiving community gardens as sacred places where people feel well because they can grow healthy food, practice green domesticity, and learn from nature in a beautiful setting. The study applies Rocha's ladder of empowerment to examine the relevance of individual and group action in fulfilling empowerment goals in the context of sense of place. Gardeners accomplish most of their empowerment goals through solitary efforts to maximize pleasurable activities and increase personal efficacy and satisfaction by optimizing physical and social connections in community gardens.

The Fruits of Diversity Community Orchard, located in Portland, Oregon in an affordable housing neighborhood, is a site of alternative food provisioning in which a group of people, organized by two nonprofits, work together to manage fruit and nut producing plants. Through conversations with volunteers who participate regularly and participant observation, this study explores the questions: What does community mean in the context of a community orchard? In what ways does partnering with a nonprofit from outside the neighborhood influence community and the way the project is operationalized? This thesis situates community orchards within the literature on alternative food networks (AFN) and highlights three key findings drawing on literature about community development and race in AFNs. First, neighbors and non-neighbors who participate in the project propose different definitions of community. Second, neighbor involvement is limited by a number of factors, including neighborhood divisions and organizational challenges. Notably, orchard participants do not reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the neighborhood, putting this project at risk of creating a white space in a majority people of color neighborhood and reproducing inequality rather than fighting against it. Finally, this research complicates the notion of community in alternative food networks and demonstrates how collaborating with an organization from outside the neighborhood impacted the community through increasing non-neighbor participation and through their communications, aesthetics, decision making, and inattention to racial dynamics in the neighborhood and orchard.

When it comes to the topic of environmental sustainability, most of us will readily agree that we face a litany of local and global environmental threats in the twenty-first century. As such, we would largely agree that the need to address climate change and other issues is urgent. Where this agreement tends to end, however, is on the question of whether this urgency is so great that we need not address issues of inequality and environmental justice when organizing sustainability efforts. Some are convinced that, because sustainability efforts are "saving the world for everyone", so to speak, issues of environmental justice are secondary at best. On the other hand, "just sustainability" advocates argue that no such effort is truly sustainable unless it considers winners and losers from the onset. I will argue the latter and demonstrate the potential consequences of a sustainability effort that has failed thus far at engaging those who might benefit most from involvement. This study is an exploration of the City Soil Network (CSN), a community garden organization comprised of seventeen garden sites throughout Portland, Oregon. Thirteen of these sites are in Northeast Portland, an area with a history of racial and ethnic discrimination and both inequalities and boundaries that prevail across the same lines today. A significant number of these residents are food insecure or at risk of becoming food insecure. Furthermore, recent gentrification in Northeast Portland has disproportionately displaced African Americans and members of other historically marginalized communities. As such, these groups tend to view recent neighborhood changes as a new variation on a decades old theme of injustice. Previous research suggests that community gardens can play a role in addressing all of these problems to some degree. However, this body of research has yet to explicitly analyze the relationship between local historical context, gentrification, the conflicting rhetorics of environmental sustainability and environmental justice and outcomes for community garden organizations. This case study includes content analysis of organizational publications, participant observation from four of the CSN's garden sites in Northeast Portland. It also includes interviews with eleven members of the CSN, representing all three levels of involvement with the organization, and six interviews with representatives of community organizations that serve Northeast Portland in some capacity. This study finds that the CSN largely consists of members of a preexisting community of sustainable agriculture enthusiasts. As such, those involved tend not to live near their garden site(s) and are distinct in a number of ways from the diverse neighborhoods that surround many of the CSN's garden sites. The organization has made very few neighborhood-level outreach efforts thus far, and those that have been made have largely been unsuccessful. Understandings expressed by both groups of interviewees help to explain why this has been the case. They also compel me to introduce the potentially adverse impact of gentrification on understandings of neighborhood socioeconomic conditions into the just sustainability debate; we need to consider that unjust sustainability can be the result of not only a lack of concern for inequality, but also a simple lack of awareness of it. Interviewees also provide suggestions for how the CSN or other community garden organizations might be more successful in appealing to marginalized communities.