Farming at the Limits: Environmentalism and Industrial Agriculture Circa 1970
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| Publicado en: | ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025) |
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| Acceso en línea: | Citation/Abstract Full Text - PDF |
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| Resumen: | In the late 1960’s, the growing momentum of the environmentalist movement added to the culminating doubts of postwar architects in technology as a central tenet of modernist ideology. One way to recuperate the diminishing agency of architecture in the face of impending resource scarcity was to transform agricultural production to fit into the urban context. Agricultural systems were introduced into the architectures in domestic and urban spheres, to both prevent contribution to environmental degradation and shelter from the effects of environmental mismanagement. At the same time, changing federal labor policy and the Civil Rights Movement spurred a vast unionization campaign by industrial farmworkers. Through marches, pickets, and boycotts, the farmworker rights movement connected the rural space of production to the urban space of consumption. The failure of farmworker housing had been a major catalyst for the organization of farmworkers and remained an important site of action.By weaving together the histories of industrial and urban agriculture, the dissertation identifies both throughlines and disjuncts, which elucidate the stakes of transposing agriculture from rural to urban space. This transposition took place within a longer history of industrial agriculture and its trenchant failure to provide adequate living conditions for seasonal farmworkers. The failure of farmworker housing was furthered by architects’ modernist embrace of new manufactured materials in the camp-building programs of the late 1960s. The design of new urban spaces of agricultural production attempted to address both rising environmentalist anxieties and the trenchant failures to provide for industrial agricultural labor. Firstly, agricultural labor was replaced by automated feeding and environmental control systems in the design of closed environment agriculture. Secondly, agricultural labor was subsumed as a leisure activity and as reproductive labor in the new domestic architectures that integrated agricultural production into waste processing systems. A counterexample to these attempts to circumvent agricultural labor is given in the construction of union-built housing for retired farmworkers. The maximization of resource exploitation in the face of projected future resource scarcity was in contrast to the strategy of building alliances and cultivating mutual aid when faced with the conditions of actual resource scarcity. |
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| ISBN: | 9798280748842 |
| Fuente: | ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global |