On March 21, hundreds of supporters of Grow Dat Youth Farm crowded the City Park’s Master Plan public hearing. The supporters were there to voice their opposition to one specific aspect of all three of the park’s proposed designs: a road cutting through where Grow Dat currently stands, which would make this thriving organization practically inoperable.  

The supporters have made clear that there’s strong public support for keeping Grow Dat at its current location, and City Park should listen to them. But the attempt to remove this celebrated non-profit organization from City Park mirrors the long history of marginalized people being excluded or displaced from public parks in the name of enhancing public land use and more recently, environmental sustainability. This is an opportunity for City Park to not only address its problematic history of exclusion, but also to be a leader in modeling such an effort. 

Grow Dat Youth Farm uses farming as a method to develop young people’s leadership and job skills. The program intentionally hires a diverse group of teenagers (along the lines of race, class, gender and beyond) from across New Orleans to grow food together for the benefit of the Crescent City. The fruits, vegetables, and herbs they cultivate are both sold to local residents and donated to those in the community who need it most through what they call their “shared harvest.” 

Grow Dat’s eco-campus has won multiple American Institute of Architecture awards. Using repurposed shipping containers, the space was designed and built in partnership with Tulane’s acclaimed Small Center for Collaborative Design in 2011. With ecologically responsive water management systems, an outdoor teaching kitchen, and raised boardwalks and walking paths through the gardens and restored habitats along the bayou, Grow Dat is a destination in and of itself. Hundreds of visitors come to the park each year to learn about sustainable design and farming. 

For those familiar with City Park’s history, the new plan for a road cutting through Grow Dat is, unfortunately, a reproduction of the Park’s harms of the past. City Park was home to more than a dozen former plantations and later became a segregated white space that closed its public swimming pool in protest when integration of the park was forced by law.

City Park has made huge strides in breaking with this sad history of discrimination, with multi-racial presence in the park soaring in the recent decade. In fact, Grow Dat has been a national leader in creating best practices for land acknowledgement and how to teach hard histories, as documented in Firth’s book, “Feeding New Orleans.”

Grow Dat’s “History of the Land” workshops are particularly innovative, and scholars such as ourselves have studied the approach with curiosity and excitement– seeing the potential application across the United States. Their curriculum and process is a replicable template of how to grapple with the evils of the past to create a loving and just society today through interaction with the very space that embodies the history.

Research has shown that the practices of “community engagement” by urban planners and designers often remain superficial or worse, exploitative, and undermine the communities’ needs and knowledge of the land’s history and potential. Based on the reporting of the event, City Park Conservancy President and CEO Cara Lambright refuted the accusation that the design process lacked consultation with the public. But the strong showing of opposition to the proposed design undermined such a claim. At the least their initial outreach seemed to have missed a significant segment of the public. 

City Park should incorporate public responses and redress the design to avoid destroying Grow Dat Youth Farm. In doing so, City Park has an opportunity to learn from the existing sustainable and inclusive practices of Grow Dat as it aims to expand the public use of the park and to chart a new course for its inclusive and sustainable future. By embracing, rather than displacing, the organization that has been modeling both for more than a decade, the city can find a valuable partner in its efforts to improve the park. 

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Yuki Kato is a sociologist at Georgetown University. She conducts research on environmental and food justice and has a forthcoming book on the emergence of urban agriculture in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Jeanne Firth holds a PhD in Human Geography and the Environment from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was on the founding staff team of Grow Dat and is author of the new book,...