Urban Politics
This literature examines urban political economy and how it constrains and enables social change for individuals, communities, and organizations.
● Urban Social Movements
A conscious collective practice originating in urban issues, able to produce qualitative changes in the urban system, local culture, and political institutions in contradiction to the dominant social structures. This literature helps me understand the structural conditions that give rise to urban movements in the capitalist city drawing on The Right to the City and Political Economy scholarship.
Social Movements
This literature discusses the strategies carried out by social movements to create, interrupt, resist social change through collective action.
● Resource Mobilization
The success of social movements depends on resources (time, money, skills, etc.) and the ability to use them.
● Networks
Community organizations require resources and networks to survive and achieve goals. This literature helps me understand how inter- and intra- networks impact social movements.
● Institutionalization
Community organizations institutionalize for long-term stability, but this process comes with trade-offs.
Urban Planning
Literature on the processes around urban development including but not limited to land use, city governance, transportation, urban design, community engagement, and environmental systems.
● Urban agriculture and community development
This scholarship helps me understand how under-resourced communities acquire public lands for urban agriculture and how urban agriculture can scale up operations and the implications of scaling up.
Once I upload all sources to Mendeley, I'll include a link here. In the meantime, here's my reading list in a PDF document.
My research interests explore how urban agriculture can help combat spatial inequality in under-resourced communities.
My work explores how urban agriculture can combat spatial inequalities in under-resourced communities facing uncertainty and the threat of displacement due to gentrification. Longtime Latinx residents of Santa Ana, California are being displaced by the forces of gentrification and divestment adding to housing insecurity and racialized anti-immigrant policies, but despite this, residents have developed creative strategies not only to combat unwanted development, but also to (re)create the community they want to live in today and for the foreseeable future. These conditions place a heavy burden on working-class and immigrant families and can destabilize an otherwise vibrant community. Previous scholarship indicates that SanTana’s working families have demonstrated resiliency and the ability to resist and adapt despite the challenges facing their communities through activism and community organizing. Today, urban agriculture movements in Santa Ana have become an avenue for advocates to claim urban space in order to better meet the needs of under resourced communities. I plan to study how urban agriculture impacts the local food system, urban land use, and community development by researching an urban agriculture organization in Santa Ana running community-owned urban farms using qualitative research methods. My study inquires:
This is the 4th year of my PhD program in Urban Planning and Public Policy at UC Irvine. Here are some updates and what I have going on this year.
As an example of one way to share my work outside of academia to a more general audience, here are some blogs I have published about some of my experiences as a graduate student at UC Irvine.
La Granjita seeks to transform the local food system through healthy and culturally sustaining foods, policy advocacy, leadership development, and promoting community ownership. Click on the title for link to Voice of OC article.
Cite as: Preciado, Emanuel. 2021. Research Program Description. University of California. December. http://centerforethnography.org/content/emanuel-preciado-research-program/essay