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Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability

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A chicken ain't nothin' but a bird: local food production and the politics of land-use change
Hugh Bartling
a a

Public Policy Studies, DePaul University, 2352 N. Clifton, Chicago, IL, 60614, USA Available online: 07 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Hugh Bartling (2012): A chicken ain't nothin' but a bird: local food production and the politics of land-use change, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 17:1, 23-34 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2011.627323

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Local Environment Vol. 17, No. 1, January 2012, 23 34

A chicken aint nothin but a bird: local food production and the politics of land-use change
Hugh Bartling
Public Policy Studies, DePaul University, 2352 N. Clifton, Chicago, IL 60614, USA As discourses of sustainability and the awareness of the environmental and health impacts of factory farming have become more widespread in recent years, many residents of urban and suburban communities have become interested in producing their own food. Spurred by popular writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, and First Lady Michelle Obama who planted an organic garden at the White House in 2009, gardening and food production has gained popularity in recent years. While much of this activity is allowable (and encouraged) by local governments, some urban agricultural activity falls outside the limits of permissibility in local zoning codes and land use ordinances. Keywords: urban agriculture; sustainability; land use

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While the urban food movement is multifaceted and international in scope, this paper looks at the phenomenon in the USA from the standpoint of the political conict that arises when land-use policy changes are required to accommodate small-scale urban agricultural production. Based on the analysis of primary documents and interviews, I will specically look at the conict around efforts to introduce ordinances allowing micro-scale poultrykeeping in local municipalities in the USA. There are several reasons why examining the contours of this conict is of interest to scholars and policy-makers interested in local sustainability initiatives and policies. First, efforts to allow micro-ock chicken-keeping are signicant, nascent, and growing in number throughout North America. Although no comprehensive data are available on the number of people keeping chickens in urban areas, there have been scores of articles in the popular press about the phenomenon along with a proliferation of internet sites to offer guidance, supplies and advice for city dwellers interested in raising poultry.1 The phenomena create social challenges to the extent that many cities and suburbs have explicit prohibitions on the practice of chicken-keeping. These formal restrictions against poultry-keeping were largely developed during the post-World War Two era of metropolitan expansion and the proliferation of municipal zoning and urban planning that transpired in the aftermath of the Supreme Courts decision to uphold the legality of municipal powers to regulate land use in the 1920s. Although some older cities such as New York and Chicago never implemented restrictions on poultry-keeping, in many suburbs restrictions were deployed as a way to mediate between the interests of new residents attracted to suburbia

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ISSN 1354-9839 print/ISSN 1469-6711 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2011.627323 http://www.tandfonline.com

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for a decidedly residential character and older, commercial agricultural enterprises whose practices were perceived as incompatible with residential land uses. In the intervening years, commercial agriculture has largely disappeared from cities and suburbs, impacting perceptions of the place of certain types of agriculture in residential settings. Market pressures favouring residential, retail, and ofce land uses as well as consolidation in commercial agriculture have made commercial agriculture infeasible in many metropolitan municipalities. Historians such as Beauregard (2006) and Baxandall and Ewen (2000) trace patterns in post-War culture that focus on the proliferation of consumption over production and the ways in which urbanism (broadly dened) was congured to accommodate this consumptive ethic. The new poultry-keeping movement that is emerging in the USA directly challenges these cultural patterns and policy conict has ensued in municipalities where the laws prohibiting chicken-keeping remain on the books. Given that the motivation of current advocates for urban chicken-keeping is explicitly non-commercial, the ways in which communities negotiate the efcacy of prohibitions written to address a fundamentally different set of circumstances exposes a fundamental conict about what sorts of practices and behaviors are appropriate for urban and suburban life. A second reason for focusing on local movements to allow urban and suburban poultrykeeping lies in the value of exploring the nature of this emergent cultural conict around what constitutes acceptable activities in metropolitan areas. Although there is a long and important literature in the disciplines of cultural geography, urban planning, and associated elds concerned with interrogating the notion of an urban rural divide as well as exploring the heterogeneity of what constitutes the city and the suburb, there still persists a set of dominant cultural referents dening acceptable activities in urban and suburban spaces. As the realities of metropolitan heterogeneity become more visible and urban and suburban residents engage in vigorous reconceptualisation of the norms relating to life in their municipalities, conict is sure to emerge around particular policy decisions. By exploring the rhetorical texture that is manifest in the debates surrounding pressures for a policy shift in the domain of something like chicken-keeping, we can highlight the shifting nature of urban and suburban life and governance which could point to a host of new areas of policy change. In the remainder of this article I will rst provide a historical context based from a US perspective for the shifting terrain governing animals in the city. Urban food production and animal husbandry have been around as long as cities themselves. For the purposes of this study, I will discuss how processes of industrialisation shaped the expectations for agriculture and the city with a specic emphasis on animals. The expansion of the industrial city in the USA during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by a changing conception of the relationship between humans and nature. This change has been multifaceted, but of particular import for an understanding of current policy debates, I will briey look at the literature of urbanisation and the human animal relationship. While on the surface the connections between these two domains (and their relationship to contemporary policy debates) may appear opaque, I argue that they are essential for understanding the motivations behind the push in many communities to allow chicken-keeping as well as for comprehending the resistance towards such proposals in many quarters. In a sense, the debates over urban chicken-keeping are reective of a larger ambiguity that characterises the human relationship with the environment in an era of climate change and concern about the environmental sustainability of the dominant practices of consumption and production that have grown to characterise the mainstream food system.

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In the subsequent section of this article, I will analyse several contemporary conicts surrounding efforts to allow chicken-keeping in incorporated municipalities. In particular, I will look at how the policy reform agendas have been articulated and how policy conict has been framed. I look at variety of cases in order to generate rich data. No large-n studies have been done on this policy conict given its relatively recent and rapid resurgence. However, it has been possible to identify a variety of cases in the different geographic regions of the USA. Although the cases emerge within particular, localised contexts, they are similar in the quality of issue framing and rationalisation. I will conclude the paper with a discussion of how the issue of local policies regulating poultry-raising are enmeshed within a larger set of concerns relating to environmental constraints and evolving conceptions about what it means to live, consume, and produce in a metropolitan setting. The early part of the twenty-rst century has been marked by a whole host of policy problems reecting the changing nature of metropolitan life in North America. From a planning regime that has separated land-use functions making mobility via automobile a necessity to the homogenisation of consumption reected in the proliferation of corporate-owned big boxes, dominant patterns of post-World War II metropolitan development in the USA have failed to full a host of social ends for a growing number of people. I will argue that the debate over raising poultry in metropolitan settings is an indicator (albeit a rather small one) of this shift and that efforts to legalise chicken-keeping should be thought as a step towards realising a new type of urbanism. Animals and the city Early in his majestic tome, The city in history, the commentator of cities, Mumford (1961), identies domestication of plants and animals in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago as laying the groundwork for urbanism. Being able to manipulate nature through cultivation and husbandry made the nomadic life less urgent and by literally putting down roots, humans accompanied by a variety of domesticated plants and animals began constructing durable edices, developing infrastructure, and creating technologies that expanded the capacity of humanity to manipulate the environment. In the words of Mumford, the shaping of the earth was an integral part of the shaping of the city and preceded it. That intimate biotechnic relationship is one that modern man, with his plans for replacing complex earth-forms and ecological associations with saleable articial substitutes, disrupts at his peril (Mumford 1961, p. 17). Modern mans [sic] biotechnic relationship with the earth and its non-human ora and fauna took on a qualitatively different character during the nineteenth century as capitalism and industrialisation began to radically reshape cities. Cronon (1991), in his environmental history of Chicago, Natures metropolis, describes how the conuence of a new transportation and communications technology and Chicagos particular geography helped to revolutionise regional agricultural production. Rail lines and grain elevators allowed grain ownership to be fungible and the product itself to be a speculative commodity. The massive stockyards that were erected in the southern part of the city in the 1860s had a similar impact. Cattle and pigs transported on trains could swiftly reach slaughtering facilities in Chicago where they were processed for national and global consumption on an unparalleled scale. As the nineteenth century progressed, these slaughterhouses would be increasingly organised around mechanised methods of production. As Yanarella and Reid (1996) discuss, the stockyards and packing plants in cities such as Chicago and Cincinnati deployed highly organised disassembly techniques of animal bodies as early as the

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1850s to standardise and increase the pace of producing meat products. The step-by-step methodology deployed in the meatpacking sector in their analysis was embraced later by industrialists such as Henry Ford to innovate techniques of mass production. Disassembly lines created a less expensive product and the development of refrigerated train cars allowed meat to be processed and dressed in large centralised facilities and then efciently distributed throughout the USA. Cronon discusses the contentious nature of this transformation. He recounts that there were signicant cultural and economic obstacles that needed to be overcome by the large urban meat packers in order for centrally processed meat to be accepted by consumers and local butchers. Prior to the ascendancy of urban consolidated meat production, live animals were transported directly to the places where they would ultimately be consumed. Local butchers would slaughter the animals and sell the product immediately after butchering. With the development of refrigerated rail cars and rapid distribution systems, spoilage could more easily be avoided making local slaughter less of a necessity from the standpoint of food safety and product viability. Cronon discusses how butchers in smaller midwestern and eastern USA cities initially resisted selling dressed meat, claiming that customers preferred a locally slaughtered product. In response, the large urban meat packers established their own, competing afliate networks that directly sold and marketed the dressed product. Cronon argues that the combination of this aggressive marketing and lower prices was successful in overcoming consumer hesitancy, marking a signicant change in the geography of food consumption and production. If it was the economic imperative of centralised meat packers to actively create demand for non-locally produced meat, they were assisted by shifting norms relating to acceptable animal behavior in cities. From the perspective of geography, Philo (1998) draws comparisons between mid nineteenth-century London and Chicago and suggests that the urbanisation of meat processing and distribution was accompanied by an emergent hostility towards livestock in the city. In the context of rapidly growing cities, livestock contributed to polluted streets and congestion. Speaking of London, Philo charts contemporaneous efforts to link livestock with other urban ills such as prostitution and gambling. Objections towards livestock in the case of Londons Smitheld market were justied on the grounds that their unrestrained sexuality and the brutality with which they were treated by drovers were incompatible with rened urban life. In this interpretation, the combination of new demands on scarce urban space and a sense of a new urban sensibility led to the justication for excluding livestock from urban settings. The development of an urban sensibility was tied to general changes in the labour market and industrialisation. Food production as a whole became more mechanised, centralised, and globalised restricting urban food production and animal husbandry as a legitimate economic activity to a shrinking number of individuals with access to the capital necessary in order to compete in a geographically dispersed market (Lipman 1935). By the twentieth century as operations for processing large animals such as pigs and cattle were conned to distinct exurban districts, smaller animals like chickens remained a presence in cities. In some locales, chicken-keeping was presented as a part-time endeavour that could supplement wage work and simultaneously be a leisurely diversion from the stress of urban life (Farrington 1912). This presence, however, was contested. There were two major arenas of conict related to poultry-raising in the growing metropolis during the early twentieth century that will be revisited in the discussion of contemporary disputes below. First is the issue of residential growth encountering commercial poultry operations on the exurban fringe. As the industrial city experienced population growth, new

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transportation technologies such as the streetcar and the automobile allowed urban expansion to grow in a low-density fashion further from the urban core. As cities embraced zoning as a land-use policy tool single-use land planning could insure the physical segregation of residential activity from other incompatible uses. In exurban areas of the rapidly growing metropolis, it was not uncommon for new residents to object to the smell and neighbourhood impact of agricultural enterprises like poultry operations and demand action from municipal authorities. In cases when the agricultural businesses predated residential development, new residents argued that the urban engulfment of contested areas was inevitable and that agricultural operations that created nuisances should be closed (Geese and goats jostle citizens 1907, Suburb wants chicken law 1908). Secondly, there was increasing tension between urban residents and neighbourhood butchers and residents who often raised poultry in shop basements or in the yards of mixed-use neighbourhoods. During the rst decades of the twentieth century, the Chicago Tribune, for example, ran a column called The legal friend of the people where readers would ask the newspapers advice on how to resolve local problems through the municipality and the courts. Every few months readers would write with complaints about the noise and smell emanating from small-scale poultry-raising. The response from the Tribunes columnist was consistent: in the absence of any ordinance prohibiting chicken-keeping in Chicago, residents had to rely on the city enforcing general nuisance provisions to resolve problems between neighbours.2 Although there is no census of chicken-keeping in the early twentieth century industrial city, there is evidence to suggest that some of the objections to the practice were likely bound up with skepticism of immigrant populations as in a 1909 Chicago Daily Tribune article that asserted in short, wherever immigrants who stand on the lowest scale of industry live, thousands of chickens are being raised. Many a family in these districts may live in two basement rooms only it may have no room for its children to play in, but it has a bit of space, a two by four coop, wherein chickens are kept (Many chicken farms in Chicago slums 1909, p. H2). In this case, objections towards chicken-keeping must be understood within the context of increasing heterogeneity, class biases, and the insufcient housing conditions characteristic of the industrial city. Conict over the use of urban space was not exclusive to issues involving agriculture or animals. Rather this conict should be thought of within the context of a wide variety of differences related to the nature of urban life that accompanied industrialisation and massive population growth. Concern over pollution, housing, and working conditions revealed a growing discontent for the dominant social, economic, and ecological practices of the industrial city. While the manifestations of and responses to this conict were multifaceted, for the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on metropolitan growth and development and the use of municipal regulatory power as an important response to urban conict. There is ample literature in USA urban history that explores the idea of the industrial city as disorderly and socially unsustainable and examines the various responses to resolve these perceived social ills. Of these responses, suburbanisation was probably one of the most dramatic. While suburbanisation has a long history (Bruegmann 2005), the post-Civil War expansion of suburbia took on a particular character. As mentioned above, new transportation technologies allowed for greater geographic dispersion of population in metropolitan areas allowing the value associated with proximity to urban centers to be reevaluated. The historian Smith (1995), in his study of nineteenth-century Chicago, focuses on the disorderly nature of the city and situates responses like railroad magnate George

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Pullmans eponymous planned community outside of the boundaries of the industrial city as an effort to reform existing urbanism by literally constructing a new city. In place of Chicagos chaotic land use that mixed residences, factories, and saloons in incompatible ways, Pullman invented the city anew where order and separation of land functions was privileged. Pullman was tied to the orbit of Chicago (upon which it relied for its economic viability), but was physically and socially separate, allowing for greater control of the social and physical conditions. Although Pullmans rather utopian visions for urbanism were unable to function within the connes of his requirements for corporate prot (Lindsey 1942), the idea of a functional space in proximity to but separate from the city was compelling in many quarters. Perhaps most inuential in this regard was the idea of the garden city, developed by Ebeneezer Howard in 1898. Howard argued for a middle landscape between the country and the city. This garden city would include the employment, recreational, and cultural opportunities offered by the city, but be built on a small scale and planned in such a way as to afford residents with a salubrious, manageable environment. Like Pullmans town, districts in the garden city are segregated by function in a rational and efcient way in order to maximise social gain in the community. The concept of segregating function through deliberate planning animated the effort to develop municipal districting or zoning laws. While New York was the rst US city to establish zoning in the rst decade of the twentieth century, the policy instrument was quickly adopted by suburban municipalities. Due to the suburbs nascent nature, zoning therein created a better opportunity than in the city for rationally conguring suburban land use. Zoning was rmly established as a tool for municipal land-use policy by the mid-twentieth century, just as the middle-class suburban revolution commenced. Much of the criticism of post-War zoning practice tends to be focused on its exclusionary nature, which created homogeneous municipalities and segregated economic, educational, and housing opportunities for people based on race and class (Babcock 1966, Downs 1973, Jackson 1987). Processes of suburbanisation also served a cultural function helping to dene what social, economic, and ecological practices are acceptable in suburban space. Beauregard (2006), for example, connects suburbia with an ethic of consumption that began to dominate post-War metropolitan development. Suburbs were planned to accommodate consumption through the laying out of streets, the particularities of zoning, and land-use restrictions. While suburban culture was articulated in a diversity of forms (e.g. media representations, socialisation pressures, advertising), the planned environment (and the land-use policies that shaped its contours) provided the space for actively engaging in suburban life. The policies and practices experienced in suburban settings help to formulate the norms and land-use policy expectations that have been called into question by the contemporary efforts to modify land-use laws to allow chicken-keeping. Rethinking Suburbia: a chicken aint nothing but a bird In this section, I will discuss the current movement in many areas of the USA to reform laws restricting poultry-keeping in urban and suburban settings. I will focus in particular on the factors motivating reformers and the resistance experienced in many communities to these new initiatives. I will conclude by linking these efforts within the context of the historical development informing the shifting terrain of acceptable suburban practice. Chickenkeeping, I will argue, is a modest but important reection of a larger dissatisfaction with the dominant practices that frame modern metropolitan life. In a world marked by

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the uncertainties of the global ecology and economy and the social ramications generated by such uncertainties, these localised movements can be thought of as an effort to reassert a different and, perhaps, more sustainable mode of political, economic, and ecological action. Over the past decade, there have been numerous studies of the phenomenon of smallscale urban agriculture and gardening in the United States and elsewhere. While in some cases, like Cuba, the impetus for urban agriculture projects has been a product of immediate economic necessity, in the context of countries like the USA and Canada urban agricultural projects have been undertaken for a variety of reasons. In many cities, non-prot organisations have developed innovative projects using under-valued land in distressed neighbourhoods to provide local jobs and healthy food to neighbourhood residents (Feenstra 1997). Others have emerged to link commercial chefs and a wider range of consumers with fresh and local ingredients, while simultaneously linking ecological concerns for soil fertility into the larger discussion of food insecurity (Broadway 2009). Urban agriculture has also experienced a renaissance on a more micro-scale in the form of the rise of community gardens and garden-sharing projects as engines of neighbourhood community-building (Blake and Cloutier-Fisher 2009) and regeneration (Zukin 2010). Urban agricultures expansion has occurred within the context of a simultaneous emphasis in environmental thought and practice on the advantages of local thinking. The Local Agenda 21 movement stemming from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio put the city and metropolitan region in a prominent place for forging policies purporting to be environmentally sustainable. Along with improvements in transportation and building performance, enhancing green space, gardening, and food production began to be taken seriously in municipal policy and planning circles (Beatley and Manning 1997, Nordahl 2010). Along with more interest in sustainable cities, there has been a parallel effort over the past 10 years to closely examine the ecological consequences of the dominant industrial food supply (Kloppenburg et al., 1996). Journalists writing to a large audience like Schlosser (2001) and Pollan (2006) have given mainstream audiences compelling critiques of the industrial food system. In addition, greater awareness of the environmental impact of food production has also led to consumer demand for organic and local foods (Starr et al., 2002). Along with the expansion of farmers markets and the corporate deployment of local sourcing of food, the late part of the rst decade of the twenty-rst century has also seen a renaissance in gardening with major seed companies experiencing record demand for their product (Reimer 2010). With all of these factors appearing concomitantly sustainable cities discourse, popular critiques of globalisation and the industrial production of food, increase in the popularity of gardening localised movements to allow urban poultry appeared as well. Because of the nascent, rapid, and decentralised nature of urban poultry legalisation efforts, there is little in the way of systematic research to draw upon in order to understand the movement. Governmental agencies in the USA such as the US Department of Agriculture collect no data on micro-poultry ocks. Because the efforts to change poultry laws are at the municipal level where local ofcials have the authority to regulate land use, developing a comprehensive data set on local poultry laws and debates surrounding them has not been undertaken. This article represents an initial effort to develop a general understanding of this new phenomenon. The data analysed herein are primary documents from city council meetings and other municipal advisory boards that advise local ofcials in the area of planning, land use, and health and secondary documents garnered from news reports and websites created by groups seeking to change local ordinances. Cities were selected through a 2-year period

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of monitoring Internet news aggregators for relevant reports. In my discussion of specic cases, I am focusing on examples that are representative of the larger trends and conicts apparent in the municipalities where poultry ordinances have been debated. In this sense, the choice of cases follows what Stake (1996) calls a collective case study where the cases herein are chosen because it is believed that understanding them will lead to better understanding, perhaps better theorizing about a still larger collection of cases (p. 237). In most of the cities examined, the movements to amend restrictive ordinances were initiated by citizen activists who connected through neighbourhood interactions or social networking internet sites. Consequently, advocates were well organised, and in many cases, they have developed research and educational materials to bolster their case for reform. Opponents tended to be isolated individuals or skeptical elected ofcials who were not necessarily convinced that reform would be in the best interests of their respective cities. The variety of arguments made by advocates of chicken-keeping can be broken down into several categories involving ecology, education, health, and alternative models of consumption. Opponents to revising laws prohibiting poultry deploy arguments pertaining to a desire to maintain a particular vision and meaning of urban space, a concern over perceived health risks, and a modernist ecological conception. The ecology of chicken-keeping A consistent refrain from advocates is that urban chicken-keeping is an ecologically benecial endeavour. In a public hearing before the city council of Gresham, Oregon an advocate argued that chicken wastes properties as a fertiliser will mitigate against the use of articial fertiliser in citizens gardens resulting in less fuel being used to transport fertiliser into town from afar. Other advocates extolled chickens ability to eat kitchen scraps and other waste normally destined to be dumped in landlls, thus potentially reducing the citys waste stream (City of Gresham 2009). The issue of chicken-keeping as a response to climate change also was brought up as benecial in debates. After the city council of Missoula, MT, voted to reject an urban chicken ordinance, a state-wide environmental group, the Montana Conservation Voters, highlighted how each city councilor voted on the ordinance in their annual scorecard of Missoula elected ofcials. Along with more traditional environmentalist concerns like open-lands preservation and municipal shifts to renewable energy, the group felt that the chicken ordinance was important since 85 90% of Missoulas food comes from elsewhere, relying on fossil fuel dependent transportation. So as residents become increasingly concerned with climate change. .. they gravitate toward greater self-reliance (Montana Conservation Voters 2009). Relatedly, during the public comment period at a city meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, one citizen associated hen keeping with a response to climate change, high energy costs and re-localization (Legislative Committee 2009). Rethinking consumption In many locales, advocates for chicken-keeping assert that structural obstacles outlawing the practice are either outdated or insufcient for addressing contemporary concerns about the perceived perilousness of economic opportunities during a prolonged period of stagnant wages and increasing prices for many essential commodities. This is manifest in many ways. One way is in the framing of chickens and their relationship to human

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owners. A common refrain in many public deliberations regarding poultry-keeping is what kind of animals are chickens: pets, livestock, or some hybrid. The existential ambiguity of chickens serves as a signicant point of disagreement between reformers and defenders of the status quo. A debate from a city council meeting in Bingen, Washington, is exemplary. At the behest of a citizen who kept a duck without knowing that poultry was forbidden in the town, the council deliberated about what constitutes livestock. After members of the public and council members spoke positively about the citizens illegal duck, suggesting that illegal poultry was posing no problem, one council member is described as saying she thinks there are reasons why the ordinance exists. This prompted an intervention from the Mayor who thought that a denition separating an animal as a pet versus an animal used for another purposes such as for food might be appropriate (City of Bingen 2009). Poultry ordinance reformers often contribute to this ambiguity, describing hens as both pets and sources of food; although in talking of the food potential of chickens, emphasis is usually placed on their egg-producing capacity, rather than on their meat. While some chicken owners are unabashedly raising hens for both eggs and meat, there is little evidence of active enthusiasm for permitting on-site butchering in reform efforts. In fact, most of the cases analysed in this study where ordinances have been reformed, butchering of birds is prohibited. Nevertheless, the potential of eggs and their place in a mode of consumption outside of the market model is given great prominence in the pleas by ordinance reformers. For example, in the case of Sanford, North Carolina, an advocate who had been keeping chickens illegally for 16 years before being found out by the city argued that Sanfords ordinance should be changed because in a typical week, his chickens lay ve to eight dozen fresh eggs. The eggs are used by his family, his wifes daycare, and he gives the eggs away to the homeless shelter run by Pastor Donald Kivett (City of Sanford 2009, p. 2). The advocate was also supported by testimony from representatives of food banks and homeless shelters all of whom argued that they are serving poor populations in need of assistance and that eggs are a valuable commodity that they are unable to afford on the limited budgets of non-prot agencies (City of Sanford 2009). From the standpoint of rethinking consumption, on the one hand, advocates who support chicken-keeping are facing resistance due to the unique (metropolitan) nature of the request. Unlike dogs or cats, which are common animals for people to own and which have a prominent infrastructure supporting ownership in the guise of pet stores, their place in advertising and popular culture, etc., owning live chickens is unusual. The normal presence of the animal in the urban and suburban landscape is in its inanimate form safely ensconced in grocery store refrigerators. Under the dominant logic of urban zoning policy, animals are either pets (accepted and regulated), wild (managed), or livestock (prohibited). Chickens do not conform to this typology and in this sense their hybridic nature is difcult for non-enthusiasts to embrace. Education and health Many of the debates for chicken ordinance reform are focused on health and education. Much of this discourse is directly critical of the dominant industrial food system. Advocates for reform often assert that many people are unaware of the practices of industrial agriculture and want to use chicken keeping as a way to show (especially to children) the actual origin of food. In some cases, advocates also extol locally grown eggs as having nutritional benets exceeding those of industrial eggs. Within the context of an industrial food system

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that many perceive as insufciently regulated, backyard poultry advocates argue that they feel safer by having more control over their food supply. While health concerns are a major rationale deployed on the part of reformers, health issues are also mentioned by opponents and skeptics as a reason to maintain urban poultry prohibitions. Most of these objections are related to a concern about salmonella, avian u, and the potential for an increase in the community of rodents or predators that might be attracted to the chicken coops. Criticisms and conclusions Interestingly, arguments of opponents surrounding a fear of avian u and of contaminated food supply suggest a possible point of convergence with reform advocates. These maladies also motivate those who want to be able to keep backyard chickens as well. Both express a recognition that dominant practices of industrial agricultural production are potentially problematic. The two sides diverge in their explanation for the causes of the problems with the former equating maladies with the animals themselves and the latter questioning more directly the social practices of industrial agriculture. In some sense, the divergences could be explained by differences in understanding the nature of food production and are reective of the disconnect between urban communities and their food supply which reformers are trying to bridge. Because the prohibitions in many communities were put in place within a cultural and ideological context whereby the industrial food system was becoming a natural component of a consumptive landscape which segregated production from consumption, their seeming permanence presents a challenge for reformers. While there is a legitimate concern about the possibility of nuisance and impacts on neighbouring properties generated by chicken-keeping, much of the response on the part of elected ofcials is marked by an incredulity as to why anyone would want to spend the time to raise chickens. In College Township, Pennsylvania, for example, an individual appeared before the planning commission to advocate for an overturn of the ordinance prohibiting chickenkeeping. Armed with blueprints of the proposed coop and afdavits from neighbours endorsing the project, one plan commissioner reacted to the presentation by saying that it deserved an A+ however, he still does not agree with chickens in a residential neighborhood (College Township Planning Commission 2009). In several cases, opponents or reform skeptics were worried about chickens as a gateway animal. The fear is that a precedent would be set whereby if we allow chickens in then what if someone asks for a pig or a lamb (City of Pleasant Grove 2010, p. 4). Given the analysis presented here and the shifting cultural context of urbanism, agriculture, and consumption presented above, the conict surrounding chicken ordinance reform can be read as a modest manifestation of the contested nature of the social uncertainty around the practices of food production, economic development, and environmental despoliation at a particular historical moment. By presenting the historical discussion of animals and food production in the city, it is suggested that there has been a long historical precedence for particular urban agriculture practices and that the policies that prompted their disappearance and prohibition came out of a particular set of historical circumstances: namely, rapidly growth of a suburban landscape coupled with a shift in production and consumption that made localised food production a necessary casualty of modernitys progress. As the notion of the spatial segregation of consumption and production in agriculture and other sectors of the economy became normalised, the logic of forbidding production

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animals in urban and suburban settings followed. Food provision for metropolitan citizens became an exclusive part of the domain of market interactions. Grocery stores and restaurants provided foodstuffs for workers in the industrial or post-industrial economy who no longer had the time, need, or inclination to engage in direct food production. The simultaneous industrialisation and globalisation of the food production system ensured that prices remained low and product selection increased in diversity. As argued above, a change in perception as to the feasibility of this system of food provision began to be rigorously pursued in the late twentieth and early twenty-rst centuries. This challenge which is reected at the municipal level by the poultry-keeping reform movement is reective of a larger uncertainty about economic and ecological sustainability. Examples provided from contributions to the public discourse by reformers suggest that urban chicken keeping is a response to a perceived systemic dysfunction. As indicated in the examples, reformers link their desire to keep chickens with concerns about the safety of industrial food, climate change, and potential economic disruptions. Efforts are informed less by solipsistic desires and more by a desire to engage in micro-practices of resistance. In the absence of longitudinal data pertaining to local chicken-keeping reform efforts, it is difcult to denitively argue about general trends. However, the proliferation of news stories, web-sites, and ancillary data suggests that a reform movement is underway. Since most of the opposition to reform tends to be based on impressions and preconceived perceptions as opposed to widespread experience with the actual practice of chickenkeeping in cities the next step in considering the signicance of these localised efforts will be to see how cities re-introduction of production animals translates into the shifting social understanding of urbanism. Although the success of reform efforts is rather nascent, the movement could act as a harbinger of a larger reconceptualisation of metropolitan life that impacts other policy sectors such as zoning, transportation, and economic development. To borrow from the 1930s Babe Wallace song popularised by Cab Calloway, a chicken may be nothin but a bird, or it could be a signpost on the way to a different kind of city.

Notes
1. 2. Examples of new media covering urban chicken-keeping include the magazine Backyard Poultry which started publishing in 2006 and the internet site backyardchickens.com. For examples of tension between neighbours, see the Legal Friend of the People columns published in the Chicago Daily Tribune: 11 May 1914, p. 6, 2 July 1917, p. 8, 14 June 1917, 23 May 1921, p. 8; for examples of tension involving grocers and butchers, see 3 January 1916, p. 8, 7 May 1921, p. 6.

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