Care & Community in Growing Food

An assistant professor of environmental science and policy at Smith College, Efadul Huq studies urban agroecology, environmental restoration, and community stewardship as questions of justice and power. His primary projects examine how communities cultivate food, repair ecological relationships, and create collective forms of care in cities shaped by inequality, displacement, and environmental crisis. His work begins with the question, “What would urban and regional planning look like if we recognize the planning capacities of people who are already caring for land, water, food, and community under difficult conditions?”

Huq came to this work through architecture, engineering, and eventually urban planning. Raised in Dhaka, “one of the densest cities in the world,” he was first drawn to architecture, then to “the elegance of structural engineering.” But he found himself increasingly interested in the social and political life of cities: who gets to shape them, who is displaced by them, and whose knowledge counts in planning their futures. A mentor eventually pointed him toward urban planning, where those questions became central to his research and teaching. After earning his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Huq arrived at Smith in 2021.

While Huq was in graduate school, he worked with immigrant communities in Chicago and began to notice “the relationship those communities had to their landscape, their food landscape.” This observation ended up having a profound influence on his work going forward. In Chicago, he saw immigrant communities growing their own food to supplement their diets and support their communities. Across the world in Dhaka, he saw slum communities “farming in the streets and on lake edges,” using parcels of land ignored by the city to provide food and income. These experiences eventually led him to his two current projects—ReWET in Dhaka and Care per Acre, based at Grow Food Northampton in Florence, MA.

Huq is a project co-lead for ReWET, which describes itself as a “locally-led urban wetland restoration model.” ReWET is focused on Gulshan-Baridhara Lake in the center of Dhaka which was recently designated as an “Ecologically Critical Area.” On one side of the lake lie several exclusive neighborhoods where the real estate prices are comparable to those in Global North cities, Huq says. On the other is the low-income community of Korail, which is home to more than 250,000 people. ReWET’s mission is to revitalize the lake through nature-based solutions that will bring back biodiversity while also creating employment for Korail’s residents. ReWET’s primary collaborator is an urban agriculture collective called Nogor Abad. Through Nogor Abad, Korail’s residents are farming on the edges of the lake, growing not only fruit and vegetables but also flowers and medicinal herbs, feeding their community directly and earning income by selling their produce in the marketplace. In 2019, Huq notes, already more than 30 varieties of vegetables were harvested by the farmers of Nogor Abad. Huq and his colleagues hope that ReWET may eventually “serve as a global example of how nature-based solutions can address urban environmental challenges while empowering communities.”

Closer to his home in the U.S., Huq has been spending time at Grow Food Northampton, a community garden and farm in Florence, MA. His new project, Care per Acre, is supported by the Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability (CEEDS), and “asks what becomes visible when we measure land not only by how much it produces, but by how much collective care it receives.” In this framework—influenced by “feminist political ecology, multispecies soil thinking, critical quantitative methods, and reparative ecology”—care is defined as “material and collective labor,” or all the work that goes into making a garden grow, from planting and mulching to harvesting and amending the soil. Huq is interested not only in the outcomes but “what social and institutional conditions make care just, collective, and sustainable.”

Locating the project at Grow Food Northampton builds on relationships Huq has been developing for the past four years. Since arriving at Smith, he has collaborated with Grow Food Northampton through his teaching and service: inviting its managers into his classes, bringing students to the farm for field visits, and co-organizing community-facing events on topics such as perennial agriculture, invasive species, and land care with his partner Piyush Labhsetwar, Grow Food’s land relations manager. As he was initially considering Care per Acre, one question that emerged was, “Where on earth are we even going to find a farm where the care density is actually rich enough that we can document it?” Grow Food’s community garden turned out to be the ideal solution. Huq and his students are approaching the community garden not as separate individual plots, but as “one plot of land that hundreds of people are managing.” Their plan is to document and explore the physical changes as well as “the social and ecological dimensions of what’s happening.” In addition, Huq and his students are also documenting the care practices of one of the larger-scale commercial farmers working on Grow Food’s land; in contrast to the community garden, the farmer is working on more acres but with far fewer people. In both cases, Huq and his students will be looking at soil, pollinator and plant abundance and diversity as well as water infiltration, photosynthesis rates and more. “And on the social side,” Huq says, “we’re going to start surveying the participants and getting a sense of their care practices—what exactly they do, how do they do it and how it’s connected to the community.”

During this academic year, Huq’s students have been engaged in literature reviews to help them prepare, and this summer, they will move into data collection mode. The hope is to do a general survey and then follow it up with more intensive interviews with a smaller number of people. If all goes well, Huq hopes that he can continue the project over the next several years, learning the impact of care practices in this particular place over time.

Huq’s work with farmers on opposite sides of the world has brought him into a new relationship with his own family history. His grandparents were farmers in Bangladesh, and his father was the first in the family to move to the city for work. “I think historically, we have been taught this story that poverty and farming are related, and one has to move away from land to make progress in life,” Huq says. “I grew up learning to see my grandfather’s work as drudgery. But what I wasn’t taught was that farming becomes drudgery under particular conditions—and that under other conditions, land-based work can also be a source of knowledge, dignity, care, and community.” Huq’s projects in Dhaka and Florence are, in part, a way of revisiting that history without romanticizing it, asking what it would take for people’s relationships to land to be less marked by dispossession and exhaustion, and more by justice, collective care, and possibility.