Planting Resistance: Why New York Should Let Its Communities Grow
Voices from the Land is a collaborative op-ed and video series between Farm School NYC (FSNYC) and the New Harvest Project (TNH) that highlights urban and rural farmers, policy that impacts their work, and what we can do to uplift legislation reflective of their needs to direct future policy decisions. This project is funded by the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF) through the Rural Advancement Foundation International - USA (RAFI).
On the surface, New York City supports green space, sustainability, and urban agriculture. But if you spend time in food justice spaces, a different picture emerges—one where the city’s policies lag far behind the people already doing the work.
I didn’t come to food justice and urban farming through academia or policy fellowships. I came to it by putting my hands in the soil through AmeriCorps and the Green City Force program. Building community gardens in public housing developments across New York City helped me see the direct link between growing food and community resistance.
In many of the neighborhoods I worked with, access to fresh food is uneven, and public investment is inconsistent. Across NYCHA’s Bushwick Houses to Castle Hill in the Southeast Bronx to Canarsie, Brooklyn, you see the same trend. The invested infrastructure has few amenities and no real pathways towards community engagement. We see one supermarket, a liquor store, some fast-food options, no loitering signs, over-policing, a lack of green space, and living conditions that could be better. We see community members struggling to put food on the table, walking past chained-up gardens and green spaces that no one can access.
Ask a simple question—can New Yorkers grow food on public land?—and you’ll find yourself in a bureaucratic loop. The New York City Department of City Planning, the agency that regulates zoning, says that the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation is responsible for what can be grown where in the city. But Parks and Recreation says they aren't responsible for that, despite having programs like Greenthumb, which directly supports community gardens under their purview and manages 30,000 acres of the city’s land.
This lack of clarity prioritizes a certain landscape. The current version of public space prioritizes aesthetics and recreation over sustenance. Playgrounds covered in rubber mulch, manicured bushes, and decorative flowers are acceptable. But apple or orange trees lining our city streets and edible greens in our parks are less so, despite being easy ways to boost fresh food access. The city also has existing models like Concrete Plant Park - a Bronx Food Forest or Swale, a food forest on water - that can speak to the scale, resources, and the capacity needed to sustain local food forests.
Of course, planting fruit trees is not an easy fix. Transitioning to food-producing landscapes would require long-term investment—soil remediation, integrated pest management, and community stewardship. This requires intention, investment, and time.
Growing Food in Public Space
Right now, the way our public space is utilized reflects a deeper message—that food is something to be bought, not grown or shared in community. In my practice as an urban farmer, food justice organizer, and artist, I am working to combat this ideology directly.
My project, The Art of Community Tree Gardens, puts this philosophy forward—food should be free, and our public spaces should support radical free growing— in both practice and policy. Radical free growing is an anti-colonial grassroots approach to growing food. It reminds us that land and food have been weaponized against people of color for centuries. This kind of growing allows us to reclaim our history, our space, and our culturally relevant foods. Creating economic freedom and a greater connection with the Earth around us.
In East Flatbush, Brooklyn, I’m installing “tree satchels”, which are mobile, self-sustaining growing systems attached to street trees. Made from food-grade burlap sacks and customized with cotton rope to wrap around tree trunks, these satchels will hold lightweight and nutrient-rich soil. They can support up to 100lbs, so the growth of herbs, leafy greens, root vegetables, and native medicines will be easy to maintain. What is exciting about the tree satchels is that they transform ordinary blocks into living food systems. This will allow communities to create foraging pathways through a localized system.
Our info session was hosted virtually on April 25, 2026, and walked community members through the ethos and process of this project. We spoke about how easy it is for garden spaces to get co-opted in the city. One person can create barriers to entry for entire groups of people. The Art of Community Tree Gardens offers another pathway towards growing food in the city landscape. By optimizing trees, we reclaim ownership of the land, creating systems that allow the land to provide for us, and vice versa. The activation will run from May 16, 2026, to July 11, 2026, consisting of 6 local workshops for community members to create, design, and actualize these tree satchels.
The Art of Community Tree Gardens draws inspiration from Banksy, not in style but in strategy. The gardens will appear without announcement. I’ve done no official mapping, no social media announcement, or branding on the satchels. The goal is for people to interact with something unexpected and alive and get curious about the multitude of ways public space can be better used.
The decision to do a blitz activation of the project is political. In a city where surveillance is unevenly distributed, and immigrant, Black, and Brown communities face heightened scrutiny, visibility can carry risk. By keeping the project hyper-local and initially unpublicized, I hope to encourage participation and show people we can scale. That we can create independent food systems outside of the structure that’s set up for us. This project is public, but others won’t have to be. Block by block, community by community, we can each change what it means to see and interact with the trees around us.
Redefining Community and Knowledge
Another key theme that has emerged in my work is how we define community. That term can be vague and inaccurately represent a so-called underserved population. That dominant framing can flatten and generalize the uniqueness of neighborhoods and lived experiences. Community is expansive and should be reframed as a network of shared space, resources, knowledge, and experiences. A hub of information and support that allows each individual to grow within the collective.
One barrier that I’ve noticed in environmentalism is that expertise must be credentialed. Degrees, institutions, and affiliations become gatekeepers. But in the neighborhoods where I’ve worked, expertise looks different. It looks like the wisdom of elders who know which plants and pollinators thrived where. This kind of knowledge and wisdom is rarely captured in policy reports.
An emerging space tied to knowledge keeping is oral history. I’ve gotten to engage in this kind of knowledge-keeping through working with the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. The museum documents the stories of people connected to public housing nationally. I started working with the museum in 2023 and completed their Beauty Turner Academy Oral Historian Program in 2024. I've continued my relationship and am now going through their Apprenticeship program and participating in their Archival Working Group. My work consists of collecting interviews, doing transcriptions, and connecting Public Housing Residents with the museum.
Through my project, I hope to bring the oral histories of East Flatbush to light. Showcasing the growing already happening within the community. This project also raises an uncomfortable question: why must communities operate in the shadows to demonstrate what’s possible? Why does innovation so often require working around the very institutions that claim to support it?
We know that large institutions and governmental systems move slowly, bound by regulation and liability. But the flip side of that is maintaining control. Letting go of some of that centralized power could give our communities real authority over public land. Considering this country’s history, that is a difficult task.
We need public land that is not just maintained, but activated. Where food is not just purchased, but grown. Where expertise is not just certified, but lived.
The Art of Community Tree Gardens is one step toward activating our public land. New York City should recognize and support local efforts like this and create pathways that invest in our long-term ecological systems and public health.
Either way, the seeds are already in the ground.
You can watch Chantel’s full interview on Voices From the Land Here
