Gardens of Hope

"Gardens of Hope offers a window to alternative ways of making the city, with a close-up view of urban cultivation in post-Katrina New Orleans. Yuki Kato deftly moves from ethnography to politics, providing us with post-disaster lessons and practices that we may all be using in our own climate-crisis backyards." (Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens) "Greening initiatives like urban gardens are often talked about as contributors to gentrification or places for organized political activism. In this excellent new book, Yuki Kato discovers how gardens are also places for urbanites to generate the hope that positive change in times of uncertainty is possible. With richness and depth, Gardens of Hope changes how we see civic action in cities." (Richard E. Ocejo, author of Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City) "Gardens of Hope shares a fascinating story on the rise and fall of urban gardening and farming in the wake of disaster, and the few who were able to continue. Its focus is largely on why this movement into urban cultivation failed to materialize structural or significant change in a city undergoing considerable uncertainty as it recovered from a massive social and material disaster. Kato's book provides valuable insight into the long-term wake of disaster, offering an important counter-narrative to the hopeful framework of resilience that followed from Hurricane Katrina." (Stephen F. Ostertag, author of Connecting After Chaos: Social Media and the Extended Aftermath of Disaster)