Mapping Reciprocity: Spatial and Network Analyses of a Community Farm

Student: Edgar Munoz

Faculty Mentor: James V. Mestaz

Geography, Environment & Planning

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

Urban agriculture (UA) and community farms (CF) are increasingly recognized as multifunctional socio-ecological systems, yet scholarship has insufficiently examined the political, spatial, and relational dynamics through which these spaces generate social capital while contesting capitalist and state-centric notions of food and health. This study critically examines a community farm in a low-income, migrant, and predominantly Latinx neighborhood, framing it not merely as a site of food production but as an embodied praxis of place-making, cultural resurgence, and resistance to interlocking systems of racial capitalism, dispossession, and public health inequity. Guided by a political ecology lens, the study interrogates the governance structures and power relations shaping the farm’s relational geographies. Employing a mixed-methods approach—integrating semi-structured interviews, participant observation, surveys (Survey123), spatial analysis (ArcGIS Pro), and social network analysis (Gephi)—this research traces informal and reciprocal flows of food, medicine, knowledge, labor, and money between farmers. Findings reveal that the farm functions as a site of social reproduction, sustained by strong ties among plot-holding farmers, particularly through the exchange of labor and knowledge. Network and spatial analyses show high degree centrality among farmers in close proximity, producing social clusters. These relationships underscore how the farm enacts both community sustenance and socio-political resistance, navigating land access struggles and subverting neoliberal urban food policies through grassroots autonomy and collective governance. This research contributes to critical geographic literatures on food and land justice by theorizing community farms as contested terrains of autonomy, care, and socio-ecological reproduction.