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A chicken ain't nothin' but a bird: localfood production and the politics ofland-use changeHugh Bartling aa Public Policy Studies, DePaul University, 2352 N. Clifton,Chicago, IL, 60614, USA

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To cite this article: Hugh Bartling (2012): A chicken ain't nothin' but a bird: local food productionand the politics of land-use change, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice andSustainability, 17:1, 23-34

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A chicken ain’t nothin’ but a bird: local food production and thepolitics 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 healthimpacts of factory farming have become more widespread in recent years, manyresidents of urban and suburban communities have become interested in producingtheir own food. Spurred by popular writers like Michael Pollan and BarbaraKingsolver, celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, and First Lady Michelle Obama whoplanted an organic garden at the White House in 2009, gardening and foodproduction has gained popularity in recent years. While much of this activity isallowable (and encouraged) by local governments, some urban agricultural activityfalls outside the limits of permissibility in local zoning codes and land use ordinances.

Keywords: urban agriculture; sustainability; land use

While the urban food movement is multifaceted and international in scope, this paper looksat the phenomenon in the USA from the standpoint of the political conflict that arises whenland-use policy changes are required to accommodate small-scale urban agriculturalproduction. Based on the analysis of primary documents and interviews, I will specificallylook at the conflict around efforts to introduce ordinances allowing micro-scale poultry-keeping in local municipalities in the USA.

There are several reasons why examining the contours of this conflict is of interest toscholars and policy-makers interested in local sustainability initiatives and policies. First,efforts to allow micro-flock chicken-keeping are significant, nascent, and growing innumber throughout North America. Although no comprehensive data are available onthe number of people keeping chickens in urban areas, there have been scores of articlesin the popular press about the phenomenon along with a proliferation of internet sites tooffer 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 haveexplicit prohibitions on the practice of chicken-keeping. These formal restrictions againstpoultry-keeping were largely developed during the post-World War Two era of metropolitanexpansion and the proliferation of municipal zoning and urban planning that transpired inthe aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the legality of municipal powers toregulate land use in the 1920s. Although some older cities such as New York and Chicagonever implemented restrictions on poultry-keeping, in many suburbs restrictions weredeployed as a way to mediate between the interests of new residents attracted to suburbia

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# 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2011.627323

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∗Email: hbartlin@depaul.edu

Local EnvironmentVol. 17, No. 1, January 2012, 23–34

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for a decidedly residential character and older, commercial agricultural enterprises whosepractices were perceived as incompatible with residential land uses.

In the intervening years, commercial agriculture has largely disappeared from cities andsuburbs, impacting perceptions of the “place” of certain types of agriculture in residentialsettings. Market pressures favouring residential, retail, and office land uses as well asconsolidation in commercial agriculture have made commercial agriculture infeasible inmany metropolitan municipalities. Historians such as Beauregard (2006) and Baxandalland Ewen (2000) trace patterns in post-War culture that focus on the proliferation ofconsumption over production and the ways in which urbanism (broadly defined) wasconfigured to accommodate this consumptive ethic.

The new poultry-keeping movement that is emerging in the USA directly challengesthese cultural patterns and policy conflict has ensued in municipalities where the lawsprohibiting chicken-keeping remain on the books. Given that the motivation of currentadvocates for urban chicken-keeping is explicitly non-commercial, the ways in whichcommunities negotiate the efficacy of prohibitions written to address a fundamentallydifferent set of circumstances exposes a fundamental conflict about what sorts of practicesand behaviors are “appropriate” for urban and suburban life.

A second reason for focusing on local movements to allow urban and suburban poultry-keeping lies in the value of exploring the nature of this emergent cultural conflict aroundwhat constitutes acceptable activities in metropolitan areas. Although there is a long andimportant literature in the disciplines of cultural geography, urban planning, and associatedfields concerned with interrogating the notion of an urban–rural divide as well as exploringthe heterogeneity of what constitutes “the city” and “the suburb”, there still persists a set ofdominant cultural referents defining acceptable activities in urban and suburban spaces. Asthe realities of metropolitan heterogeneity become more visible and urban and suburbanresidents engage in vigorous reconceptualisation of the norms relating to life in their muni-cipalities, conflict is sure to emerge around particular policy decisions. By exploring therhetorical texture that is manifest in the debates surrounding pressures for a policy shiftin the domain of something like chicken-keeping, we can highlight the shifting nature ofurban and suburban life and governance which could point to a host of new areas ofpolicy change.

In the remainder of this article I will first provide a historical context – based from aUS perspective – for the shifting terrain governing animals in the city. Urban foodproduction and animal husbandry have been around as long as cities themselves. Forthe purposes of this study, I will discuss how processes of industrialisation shaped theexpectations for agriculture and the city with a specific emphasis on animals. Theexpansion of the industrial city in the USA during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies was marked by a changing conception of the relationship between humans andnature. This change has been multifaceted, but of particular import for an understanding ofcurrent policy debates, I will briefly look at the literature of urbanisation and the human–animal relationship. While on the surface the connections between these two domains (andtheir relationship to contemporary policy debates) may appear opaque, I argue that they areessential for understanding the motivations behind the push in many communities to allowchicken-keeping as well as for comprehending the resistance towards such proposals inmany quarters. In a sense, the debates over urban chicken-keeping are reflective of alarger ambiguity that characterises the human relationship with the environment in anera of climate change and concern about the environmental sustainability of the dominantpractices of consumption and production that have grown to characterise the mainstreamfood system.

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In the subsequent section of this article, I will analyse several contemporary conflictssurrounding 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 conflicthas been framed. I look at variety of cases in order to generate rich data. No large-n studieshave been done on this policy conflict given its relatively recent and rapid resurgence.However, it has been possible to identify a variety of cases in the different geographicregions 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 regulatingpoultry-raising are enmeshed within a larger set of concerns relating to environmental con-straints and evolving conceptions about what it means to live, consume, and produce in ametropolitan setting. The early part of the twenty-first century has been marked by a wholehost of policy problems reflecting the changing nature of metropolitan life in NorthAmerica. From a planning regime that has separated land-use functions making mobilityvia automobile a necessity to the homogenisation of consumption reflected in the prolifer-ation of corporate-owned big boxes, dominant patterns of post-World War II metropolitandevelopment in the USA have failed to fulfil a host of social ends for a growing number ofpeople. I will argue that the debate over raising poultry in metropolitan settings is an indi-cator (albeit a rather small one) of this shift and that efforts to legalise chicken-keepingshould 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),identifies domestication of plants and animals in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago aslaying the groundwork for urbanism. Being able to manipulate nature through cultivationand husbandry made the nomadic life less urgent and by literally “putting down roots”,humans – accompanied by a variety of domesticated plants and animals – began construct-ing durable edifices, developing infrastructure, and creating technologies that expanded thecapacity of humanity to manipulate the environment. In the words of Mumford, “theshaping 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 replacingcomplex earth-forms and ecological associations with saleable artificial substitutes, disruptsat his peril” (Mumford 1961, p. 17).

“Modern man’s” [sic] “biotechnic relationship” with the earth and its non-human floraand fauna took on a qualitatively different character during the nineteenth century as capit-alism and industrialisation began to radically reshape cities. Cronon (1991), in his environ-mental history of Chicago, Nature’s metropolis, describes how the confluence of a newtransportation and communications technology and Chicago’s particular geographyhelped to revolutionise regional agricultural production. Rail lines and grain elevatorsallowed grain ownership to be fungible and the product itself to be a speculative commod-ity. The massive stockyards that were erected in the southern part of the city in the 1860shad a similar impact. Cattle and pigs transported on trains could swiftly reach slaughteringfacilities in Chicago where they were processed for national and global consumption on anunparalleled scale.

As the nineteenth century progressed, these slaughterhouses would be increasinglyorganised around mechanised methods of production. As Yanarella and Reid (1996)discuss, the stockyards and packing plants in cities such as Chicago and Cincinnatideployed 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-stepmethodology deployed in the meatpacking sector – in their analysis – was embracedlater by industrialists such as Henry Ford to innovate techniques of mass production.

Disassembly lines created a less expensive product and the development of refrigeratedtrain cars allowed meat to be processed and dressed in large centralised facilities and thenefficiently distributed throughout the USA. Cronon discusses the contentious nature of thistransformation. He recounts that there were significant cultural and economic obstacles thatneeded to be overcome by the large urban meat packers in order for centrally processedmeat to be accepted by consumers and local butchers. Prior to the ascendancy of urbanconsolidated meat production, live animals were transported directly to the places wherethey would ultimately be consumed. Local butchers would slaughter the animals and sellthe product immediately after butchering.

With the development of refrigerated rail cars and rapid distribution systems, spoilagecould more easily be avoided making local slaughter less of a necessity from the standpointof food safety and product viability. Cronon discusses how butchers in smaller midwesternand eastern USA cities initially resisted selling dressed meat, claiming that customers pre-ferred a locally slaughtered product. In response, the large urban meat packers establishedtheir own, competing affiliate networks that directly sold and marketed the dressed product.Cronon argues that the combination of this aggressive marketing and lower prices wassuccessful in overcoming consumer hesitancy, marking a significant change in thegeography of food consumption and production.

If it was the economic imperative of centralised meat packers to actively create demandfor non-locally produced meat, they were assisted by shifting norms relating to acceptableanimal behavior in cities. From the perspective of geography, Philo (1998) draws compari-sons between mid nineteenth-century London and Chicago and suggests that the urbanis-ation of meat processing and distribution was accompanied by an emergent hostilitytowards livestock in the city. In the context of rapidly growing cities, livestock contributedto polluted streets and congestion. Speaking of London, Philo charts contemporaneousefforts to link livestock with other urban “ills” such as prostitution and gambling. Objec-tions towards livestock in the case of London’s Smithfield market were justified on thegrounds that their unrestrained sexuality and the brutality with which they were treatedby drovers were incompatible with refined urban life. In this interpretation, the combinationof new demands on scarce urban space and a sense of a new “urban” sensibility led to thejustification for excluding livestock from urban settings.

The development of an urban sensibility was tied to general changes in the labourmarket and industrialisation. Food production as a whole became more mechanised, centra-lised, and globalised restricting urban food production and animal husbandry as a legitimateeconomic activity to a shrinking number of individuals with access to the capital necessaryin order to compete in a geographically dispersed market (Lipman 1935).

By the twentieth century as operations for processing large animals such as pigs andcattle were confined to distinct exurban districts, smaller animals like chickens remaineda presence in cities. In some locales, chicken-keeping was presented as a part-time endea-vour that could supplement wage work and simultaneously be a leisurely diversion from thestress of urban life (Farrington 1912). This presence, however, was contested. There weretwo major arenas of conflict related to poultry-raising in the growing metropolis during theearly twentieth century that will be revisited in the discussion of contemporary disputesbelow.

First is the issue of residential growth encountering commercial poultry operationson 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 expan-sion to grow in a low-density fashion further from the urban core. As cities embracedzoning as a land-use policy tool single-use land planning could insure the physical segre-gation of residential activity from other “incompatible” uses. In exurban areas of the rapidlygrowing metropolis, it was not uncommon for new residents to object to the smell andneighbourhood impact of agricultural enterprises like poultry operations and demandaction from municipal authorities. In cases when the agricultural businesses predated resi-dential development, new residents argued that the urban engulfment of contested areas wasinevitable and that agricultural operations that created nuisances should be closed (Geeseand goats jostle citizens 1907, Suburb wants chicken law 1908).

Secondly, there was increasing tension between urban residents and neighbourhoodbutchers and residents who often raised poultry in shop basements or in the yards ofmixed-use neighbourhoods. During the first decades of the twentieth century, theChicago Tribune, for example, ran a column called “The legal friend of the people”where readers would ask the newspaper’s advice on how to resolve local problemsthrough the municipality and the courts.

Every few months readers would write with complaints about the noise and smell ema-nating from small-scale poultry-raising. The response from the Tribune’s columnist wasconsistent: in the absence of any ordinance prohibiting chicken-keeping in Chicago, resi-dents had to rely on the city enforcing general nuisance provisions to resolve problemsbetween neighbours.2 Although there is no census of chicken-keeping in the earlytwentieth century industrial city, there is evidence to suggest that some of the objectionsto the practice were likely bound up with skepticism of immigrant populations as in a1909 Chicago Daily Tribune article that asserted “in short, wherever immigrants whostand on the lowest scale of industry live, thousands of chickens are being raised. Manya family in these districts may live in two basement rooms only – it may have no roomfor its children to play in, but it has a bit of space, a two by four coop, wherein chickensare kept” (Many chicken farms in Chicago slums 1909, p. H2). In this case, objectionstowards chicken-keeping must be understood within the context of increasing heterogen-eity, class biases, and the insufficient housing conditions characteristic of the industrial city.

Conflict over the use of urban space was not exclusive to issues involving agriculture oranimals. Rather this conflict should be thought of within the context of a wide variety ofdifferences related to the nature of urban life that accompanied industrialisation andmassive population growth. Concern over pollution, housing, and working conditionsrevealed a growing discontent for the dominant social, economic, and ecological practicesof the industrial city. While the manifestations of and responses to this conflict weremultifaceted, for the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on metropolitan growth anddevelopment and the use of municipal regulatory power as an important response tourban conflict.

There is ample literature in USA urban history that explores the idea of the industrialcity as disorderly and socially unsustainable and examines the various responses toresolve these perceived social ills. Of these responses, suburbanisation was probably oneof the most dramatic. While suburbanisation has a long history (Bruegmann 2005), thepost-Civil War expansion of suburbia took on a particular character. As mentionedabove, new transportation technologies allowed for greater geographic dispersion ofpopulation in metropolitan areas allowing the value associated with proximity to urbancenters 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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Pullman’s eponymous planned community outside of the boundaries of the industrial city asan effort to reform existing urbanism by literally constructing a new city. In place ofChicago’s chaotic land use that mixed residences, factories, and saloons in incompatibleways, Pullman invented the city anew where order and separation of land functions wasprivileged. Pullman was tied to the orbit of Chicago (upon which it relied for its economicviability), but was physically and socially separate, allowing for greater control of thesocial and physical conditions.

Although Pullman’s rather utopian visions for urbanism were unable to function withinthe confines of his requirements for corporate profit (Lindsey 1942), the idea of a functionalspace in proximity to but separate from the city was compelling in many quarters. Perhapsmost influential in this regard was the idea of the “garden city”, developed by EbeneezerHoward in 1898. Howard argued for a middle landscape between the country and thecity. This garden city would include the employment, recreational, and cultural opportu-nities offered by the city, but be built on a small scale and planned in such a way as toafford residents with a salubrious, manageable environment. Like Pullman’s town, districtsin the garden city are segregated by function in a rational and efficient way in order tomaximise social gain in the community.

The concept of segregating function through deliberate planning animated the effort todevelop municipal “districting” or zoning laws. While New York was the first US city toestablish zoning in the first decade of the twentieth century, the policy instrument wasquickly adopted by suburban municipalities. Due to the suburb’s nascent nature, zoningtherein created a better opportunity than in the city for rationally configuring suburbanland use. Zoning was firmly established as a tool for municipal land-use policy by themid-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 exclusion-ary nature, which created homogeneous municipalities and segregated economic, edu-cational, and housing opportunities for people based on race and class (Babcock 1966,Downs 1973, Jackson 1987). Processes of suburbanisation also served a cultural functionhelping to define what social, economic, and ecological practices are “acceptable” insuburban space. Beauregard (2006), for example, connects suburbia with an ethic ofconsumption that began to dominate post-War metropolitan development. Suburbs wereplanned to accommodate consumption through the laying out of streets, the particularitiesof zoning, and land-use restrictions. While “suburban culture” was articulated in a diversityof forms (e.g. media representations, socialisation pressures, advertising), the plannedenvironment (and the land-use policies that shaped its contours) provided the space foractively engaging in suburban life. The policies and practices experienced in suburbansettings help to formulate the norms and land-use policy expectations that have beencalled into question by the contemporary efforts to modify land-use laws to allowchicken-keeping.

Rethinking Suburbia: a chicken ain’t nothing but a bird

In this section, I will discuss the current movement in many areas of the USA to reform lawsrestricting poultry-keeping in urban and suburban settings. I will focus in particular on thefactors motivating reformers and the resistance experienced in many communities to thesenew initiatives. I will conclude by linking these efforts within the context of the historicaldevelopment informing the shifting terrain of acceptable suburban practice. Chicken-keeping, I will argue, is a modest – but important – reflection of a larger dissatisfactionwith 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 ramifications generatedby such uncertainties, these localised movements can be thought of as an effort to reassert adifferent and, perhaps, more sustainable mode of political, economic, and ecological action.

Over the past decade, there have been numerous studies of the phenomenon of small-scale urban agriculture and gardening in the United States and elsewhere. While in somecases, like Cuba, the impetus for urban agriculture projects has been a product of immediateeconomic necessity, in the context of countries like the USA and Canada urban agriculturalprojects have been undertaken for a variety of reasons. In many cities, non-profit organis-ations have developed innovative projects using under-valued land in distressed neighbour-hoods 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 freshand local ingredients, while simultaneously linking ecological concerns for soil fertility intothe larger discussion of food insecurity (Broadway 2009). Urban agriculture has alsoexperienced a renaissance on a more micro-scale in the form of the rise of communitygardens and garden-sharing projects as engines of neighbourhood community-building(Blake and Cloutier-Fisher 2009) and regeneration (Zukin 2010).

Urban agriculture’s expansion has occurred within the context of a simultaneousemphasis 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 thecity and metropolitan region in a prominent place for forging policies purporting to beenvironmentally sustainable. Along with improvements in transportation and buildingperformance, enhancing green space, gardening, and food production began to be takenseriously in municipal policy and planning circles (Beatley and Manning 1997, Nordahl2010). Along with more interest in “sustainable cities”, there has been a parallel effortover the past 10 years to closely examine the ecological consequences of the dominantindustrial food supply (Kloppenburg et al., 1996). Journalists writing to a large audiencelike Schlosser (2001) and Pollan (2006) have given mainstream audiences compellingcritiques of the industrial food system. In addition, greater awareness of the environmentalimpact 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 first decade of the twenty-first century has also seen arenaissance in gardening with major seed companies experiencing record demand for theirproduct (Reimer 2010). With all of these factors appearing concomitantly – sustainablecities discourse, popular critiques of globalisation and the industrial production of food,increase in the popularity of gardening – localised movements to allow urban poultryappeared as well.

Because of the nascent, rapid, and decentralised nature of urban poultry legalisationefforts, there is little in the way of systematic research to draw upon in order to understandthe movement. Governmental agencies in the USA such as the US Department ofAgriculture collect no data on micro-poultry flocks. Because the efforts to changepoultry laws are at the municipal level where local officials have the authority to regulateland use, developing a comprehensive data set on local poultry laws and debatessurrounding them has not been undertaken.

This article represents an initial effort to develop a general understanding of this newphenomenon. The data analysed herein are primary documents from city council meetingsand other municipal advisory boards that advise local officials in the area of planning, landuse, and health and secondary documents garnered from news reports and websites createdby 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 specificcases, I am focusing on examples that are representative of the larger trends and conflictsapparent 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 thecases herein are “chosen because it is believed that understanding them will lead tobetter 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 wereinitiated by citizen activists who connected through neighbourhood interactions or socialnetworking internet sites. Consequently, advocates were well organised, and in manycases, they have developed research and educational materials to bolster their case forreform. Opponents tended to be isolated individuals or skeptical elected officials whowere not necessarily convinced that reform would be in the best interests of their respectivecities.

The variety of arguments made by advocates of chicken-keeping can be broken downinto several categories involving ecology, education, health, and alternative models ofconsumption. Opponents to revising laws prohibiting poultry deploy arguments pertainingto a desire to maintain a particular vision and meaning of urban space, a concern overperceived health risks, and a modernist ecological conception.

The ecology of chicken-keeping

A consistent refrain from advocates is that urban chicken-keeping is an ecologicallybeneficial endeavour. In a public hearing before the city council of Gresham, Oregon anadvocate argued that chicken waste’s properties as a fertiliser will mitigate against theuse of artificial fertiliser in citizens’ gardens resulting in less fuel being used to transportfertiliser into town from afar. Other advocates extolled chickens’ ability to eat kitchenscraps and other waste normally destined to be dumped in landfills, thus potentiallyreducing the city’s waste stream (City of Gresham 2009).

The issue of chicken-keeping as a response to climate change also was brought up asbeneficial in debates. After the city council of Missoula, MT, voted to reject an urbanchicken 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 officials. Along with more traditional environmentalist concerns likeopen-lands preservation and municipal shifts to renewable energy, the group felt that thechicken ordinance was important since “85–90% of Missoula’s food comes from else-where, relying on fossil fuel dependent transportation. So as residents become increasinglyconcerned with climate change. .. they gravitate toward greater self-reliance” (MontanaConservation Voters 2009). Relatedly, during the public comment period at a citymeeting in New Haven, Connecticut, one citizen “associated hen keeping with a responseto climate change, high energy costs and re-localization” (Legislative Committee 2009).

Rethinking consumption

In many locales, advocates for chicken-keeping assert that structural obstacles outlawingthe practice are either outdated or insufficient for addressing contemporary concernsabout the perceived perilousness of economic opportunities during a prolonged period ofstagnant wages and increasing prices for many essential commodities. This is manifestin 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 significant point of disagreementbetween reformers and defenders of the status quo. A debate from a city council meetingin Bingen, Washington, is exemplary. At the behest of a citizen who kept a duck withoutknowing that poultry was forbidden in the town, the council deliberated about what consti-tutes “livestock”. After members of the public and council members spoke positively aboutthe citizen’s illegal duck, suggesting that illegal poultry was posing no problem, one councilmember is described as saying “she thinks there are reasons why the ordinance exists”. Thisprompted an intervention from the Mayor who thought “that a definition separating ananimal as a pet versus an animal used for another purposes such as for food might be appro-priate” (City of Bingen 2009).

Poultry ordinance reformers often contribute to this ambiguity, describing hens as bothpets and sources of food; although in talking of the food potential of chickens, emphasis isusually placed on their egg-producing capacity, rather than on their meat. While somechicken owners are unabashedly raising hens for both eggs and meat, there is little evidenceof active enthusiasm for permitting on-site butchering in reform efforts. In fact, most of thecases analysed in this study where ordinances have been reformed, butchering of birds isprohibited.

Nevertheless, the potential of eggs and their place in a mode of consumption outside ofthe market model is given great prominence in the pleas by ordinance reformers. Forexample, in the case of Sanford, North Carolina, an advocate who had been keepingchickens illegally for 16 years before being found out by the city argued that Sanford’sordinance should be changed because “in a typical week, his chickens lay five to eightdozen fresh eggs. The eggs are used by his family, his wife’s daycare, and he gives theeggs 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 banksand homeless shelters all of whom argued that they are serving poor populations in needof assistance and that eggs are a valuable commodity that they are unable to afford onthe limited budgets of non-profit agencies (City of Sanford 2009).

From the standpoint of rethinking consumption, on the one hand, advocates whosupport chicken-keeping are facing resistance due to the unique (metropolitan) nature ofthe request. Unlike dogs or cats, which are common animals for people to own andwhich 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 inanimateform safely ensconced in grocery store refrigerators. Under the dominant logic of urbanzoning policy, animals are either pets (accepted and regulated), wild (managed), or live-stock (prohibited). Chickens do not conform to this typology and in this sense theirhybridic nature is difficult 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. Advocatesfor reform often assert that many people are unaware of the practices of industrial agricul-ture and want to use chicken keeping as a way to show (especially to children) the actualorigin of food. In some cases, advocates also extol locally grown eggs as having nutritionalbenefits exceeding those of industrial eggs. Within the context of an industrial food system

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that many perceive as insufficiently regulated, backyard poultry advocates argue that theyfeel safer by having more control over their food supply.

While health concerns are a major rationale deployed on the part of reformers, healthissues are also mentioned by opponents and skeptics as a reason to maintain urbanpoultry prohibitions. Most of these objections are related to a concern about salmonella,avian flu, and the potential for an increase in the community of rodents or predators thatmight be attracted to the chicken coops.

Criticisms and conclusions

Interestingly, arguments of opponents surrounding a fear of avian flu and of contaminatedfood supply suggest a possible point of convergence with reform advocates. These maladiesalso motivate those who want to be able to keep backyard chickens as well. Both express arecognition that dominant practices of industrial agricultural production are potentiallyproblematic. The two sides diverge in their explanation for the causes of the problemswith the former equating maladies with the animals themselves and the latter questioningmore directly the social practices of industrial agriculture.

In some sense, the divergences could be explained by differences in understanding thenature of food production and are reflective of the disconnect between urban communitiesand their food supply which reformers are trying to bridge. Because the prohibitions inmany communities were put in place within a cultural and ideological context wherebythe industrial food system was becoming a “natural” component of a consumptive land-scape which segregated production from consumption, their seeming permanence presentsa challenge for reformers. While there is a legitimate concern about the possibility ofnuisance and impacts on neighbouring properties generated by chicken-keeping, muchof the response on the part of elected officials is marked by an incredulity as to whyanyone would want to spend the time to raise chickens.

In College Township, Pennsylvania, for example, an individual appeared before theplanning commission to advocate for an overturn of the ordinance prohibiting chicken-keeping. Armed with blueprints of the proposed coop and affidavits from neighboursendorsing 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 neighbor-hood” (College Township Planning Commission 2009). In several cases, opponents orreform skeptics were worried about chickens as a “gateway animal”. The fear is that aprecedent would be set whereby “if we allow chickens in then what if someone asks fora pig or a lamb” (City of Pleasant Grove 2010, p. 4).

Given the analysis presented here and the shifting cultural context of urbanism, agricul-ture, and consumption presented above, the conflict surrounding chicken ordinance reformcan be read as a modest manifestation of the contested nature of the social uncertaintyaround the practices of food production, economic development, and environmental despo-liation at a particular historical moment. By presenting the historical discussion of animalsand food production in the city, it is suggested that there has been a long historicalprecedence for particular urban agriculture practices and that the policies that promptedtheir 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 andconsumption that made localised food production a necessary casualty of modernity’s“progress”.

As the notion of the spatial segregation of consumption and production in agricultureand 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 citizensbecame an exclusive part of the domain of market interactions. Grocery stores and restau-rants provided foodstuffs for workers in the industrial or post-industrial economy who nolonger had the time, need, or inclination to engage in direct food production. The simul-taneous industrialisation and globalisation of the food production system ensured thatprices remained low and product selection increased in diversity.

As argued above, a change in perception as to the feasibility of this system of food pro-vision began to be rigorously pursued in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.This challenge – which is reflected at the municipal level by the poultry-keeping reformmovement – is reflective of a larger uncertainty about economic and ecological sustainability.Examples provided from contributions to the public discourse by reformers suggest that urbanchicken keeping is a response to a perceived systemic dysfunction. As indicated in theexamples, reformers link their desire to keep chickens with concerns about the safety ofindustrial food, climate change, and potential economic disruptions. Efforts are informedless 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, itis difficult to definitively argue about general trends. However, the proliferation of newsstories, 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 preconceivedperceptions – as opposed to widespread experience with the actual practice of chicken-keeping in cities – the next step in considering the significance of these localised effortswill be to see how cities’ re-introduction of production animals translates into the shiftingsocial 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 lifethat impacts other policy sectors such as zoning, transportation, and economic develop-ment. To borrow from the 1930s Babe Wallace song popularised by Cab Calloway, achicken may be “nothin’ but a bird”, or it could be a signpost on the way to a differentkind of city.

Notes1. Examples of new media covering urban chicken-keeping include the magazine “Backyard

Poultry” which started publishing in 2006 and the internet site backyardchickens.com.2. For examples of tension between neighbours, see the “Legal Friend of the People” columns pub-

lished in the Chicago Daily Tribune: 11 May 1914, p. 6, 2 July 1917, p. 8, 14 June 1917, 23 May1921, p. 8; for examples of tension involving grocers and butchers, see 3 January 1916, p. 8, 7May 1921, p. 6.

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