Vedika Bhat

Title: Contaminated Commons: The Paradox of Soil Justice and Contamination in Seattle Community Gardens

Abstract:

Many urban community gardens across the United States occupy previously industrial land, commonly termed “brownfields”. This shared characteristic underscores a critical tension within urban agriculture, where spaces of substantial social, health, and environmental benefits may also expose gardeners to environmental risks, particularly in the form of soil contamination. In Seattle and King County, lead and arsenic contamination are of high concern because of land-use patterns and absence of known safe exposure levels for these heavy metals. This convergent parallel mixed methods study integrates community gardener perspectives and behaviors around soil contamination and mitigation with GIS spatial analysis of lead and arsenic soil contamination to identify pathways for community-led action and remediation. Findings demonstrate that gardeners perceive and mitigate contamination risk collectively, with community labor serving as the primary form of agency and safe gardening practices centered on regenerative soil stewardship rather than individual-level behavioral interventions. Gardeners also understand soil contamination as spatially uneven across the region, a perception supported by the first regional-scale soil contamination maps, focused on Seattle community gardens. Spatial analysis further suggested that lead and arsenic may follow distinct contamination pathways not fully reflected in focus-group discussions. Conversely, focus-group participants identified municipal compost as a potential contamination source not tested for or represented in spatial datasets. These findings suggest that addressing soil contamination in urban community gardens requires approaches that both include and move beyond individual behavior change to strengthen community capacity, institutional accountability, and transparent, nuanced, contaminant-specific risk communication. Although grounded in Seattle, this research has broader relevance for the paradox present in urban community agriculture, where community gardens simultaneously function as sites of environmental justice and exposure.