Community Gardens: Space for Interactions and Adaptations (original) (raw)
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In the aftermath of failed urban renewal projects and the decline of central cities, community gardens have become increasingly popular in urban planning, public health, and environmental circles. However, gardens still occupy a tenuous and contradictory position in the city. While urban gardens are bounded spaces, they are also dynamic places where different understandings of (agri)culture, land use, and belonging are enacted and contested. In this paper we identify three distinct ways in which gardens in a small Midwestern city are used and experienced by refugee gardeners and local officials: the material garden, the imagined garden, and the community's garden. The material garden, embodied in the biophysical aspects of the soil, seeds, and resources needed to cultivate plants, shapes what can grow in the garden and the transformations by refugee agricultural practices. While planners tend to see urban gardens as temporary spaces that can promote limited pathways of migrant incorporation, gardeners practice and imagine gardening differently through social, cultural, and economic interactions. We argue that these practices challenge traditional understandings of nature and urban planning, and can promote inclusive understandings of agriculture, cities, and sustainability, embodied in the ideal of the community's garden. Keywords: urban agriculture; migrant incorporation; multicultural planning; refugees; Midwest fundamentally 'places of movement and migration' (2014, 1). Geographers and foodways scholars have traced the transfer of rice and other crops across the Atlantic during European colonialism (Carney, 2002) and described how immigrant and refugee farmers draw on practices, experiences, and memories of agriculture in their country of origin to cultivate plants that are culturally significant to newcomers (Airriess and Clawson, 1994; Pearsall et al., 2016). Within urban gardens, seeds, agricultural practices and ecological knowledge, soil inputs, and gardeners themselves often come from elsewhere. At the same time, urban gardeners interact with neighbors and local officials as they rent garden plots, alter landscapes, and harvest, distribute, and consume their produce. Urban gardens, therefore, are dynamic places where multiple understandings of agriculture, economic development, and land use planning are enacted as well as contested. Gardens also embody longstanding tensions over the appearance and control of urban landscapes. As Sarah Moore (2006) argued, the recent interest in urban agriculture can overlook a rich history of subsistence and community gardening in cities. Since the 19 th century, officials in Europe and the United States have used green space and gardening programs as key components of urban revitalization. Critics of industrial cities argued that the separation of urban residents from nature was 'unnatural,' much like cities themselves, and resulted in negative health and social consequences for city dwellers. In response, early reformers and planners built public parks, boulevard systems, and grand monuments as part of The City Beautiful movement (Gandy, 2002). City officials also promoted gardening on vacant land and school grounds during economic crises (Lawson, 2005). Although vacant lot gardens were almost always temporary, reformers argued that being in nature and working with the soil would help poor children and adults develop good work habits and 'American' values, particularly as they related to food (Ziegelman, 2010). In these initiatives, gardens and green space functioned as forms of environmental determinism that would rejuvenate and transform the character of marginalized urban residents, many of whom were
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Urban agriculture is an important neighborhood revitalization strategy in the U.S. Rust Belt, where deindustrialization has left blighted and vacant land in the urban core. Immigrants and refugees represent a growing and important stakeholder group in urban agriculture, including in community gardens across the Rust Belt Midwest. Community gardens provide a host of social and economic benefits to urban landscapes, including increased access to culturally appropriate food and medicinal plants for refugee and immigrant growers. Our work in Lansing, Michigan was part of a collaboration with the Greater Lansing Food Bank’s Garden Project (GLFGP) to describe the refugee and immigrant community gardening experience in three urban gardens with high refugee and immigrant enrollment. Our research describes the ways garden management facilitates inclusion for refugee and immigrant gardeners and how particular factors of inclusion in turn contribute to social capital, an important outcome that...
Enduring Gardens: Woven by Friends into the Fabric of the Urban Community
For the most part, academic literature neglects the psychological impact of public gardens and the landscape on human well-being. Literature about botanical gardening and urban landscape design provide the foundation of contemporary public gardening practices. Largely overlooked, however, is a discussion of the relevance of such gardens to visitors. Public gardens, however, can play an important role in fostering a sense of place in communities, in both historical and contemporary contexts. In this study, the impacts of such gardens are considered through Canadian experiences using perceptual lenses offered by diverse writers whose work can be found in bodies of literature related to history, geography, non-fiction, and poetry. Concepts such as ‘place-making’ which can foster ‘home-making’, for example, are intriguing and worthwhile areas of inquiry in understanding the role of public gardens in the urban landscape. This research explores the importance of ‘home’ in gardens. It also considers the importance of gardens to an individual’s internal (psychological) and external (social) home, particularly for those currently involved as volunteers at public gardens. The concept is related to stewardship and how being a steward of the garden home is key to being a steward of one’s internal home. The animating question here concerns the role that cultivated gardens might play in an individual’s connection to landscape. This topic is explored through an examination of volunteer programs (popularly known as Friends of the Garden programs) using grounded theory to explore the perceptions and perspectives of volunteers who work in three public gardens in Ottawa, Kitchener, and Toronto, Ontario. The subject of gardens and their interrelationship to people lends itself to an interdisciplinary methodological approach encompassing studies in landscape ecology, geography, history, planning, design, and psychology, among others. The qualitative methods approach used in this thesis involves an in-depth examination of secondary literature, as well as field work involving semi-structured interviews, and narrative methods. Further, this research explores the role these gardens play with respect to the unique Canadian sense of place and well-being found within urban public gardens. The findings of the research reveal differing perspectives of volunteers with respect to “sense-making” and the ways in which they engage with each other and with the urban public gardens where they work. In addition, the findings revealed the crucial role played by the volunteer as stewards of the garden. The volunteers see these gardens as sanctuaries and view their own role as serving the greater good of their communities for reasons that go beyond political and economic considerations; they are based on intrinsic sets of values. The research revealed that volunteers frequently possessed strong connections to childhood experiences spent in natural settings with their families. These experiences helped to stimulate a shared belief amongst gardeners that the very act of gardening is itself a valued and valuable “way of life”. Furthermore, volunteers are often retired and older; as such, they volunteer in the gardens as a way to contribute to the world to make it more beautiful and meaningful for others and to pass those gardens down to future generations. Gardens are seen as ways to re-create home from one’s childhood past; volunteers often link their present experience in the garden with a sense of connection and belonging in similar terms used to describe their home (as a country, a house, or a valued place). These findings demonstrate that there is a strong sense of place that is both acquired and fostered through engagement with urban public gardens. The findings also raise the possibility that public gardens play an important role in fostering sense of place in visitors. This, in turn, can contribute to a sense of home or belonging, and stewardship of communities and natural surroundings. This research contributes to an understanding of the role that public gardens play as valuable places that make important contributions to social and ecological well-being. Key words: Public Gardens; Volunteers; Home; Sense of Place; Ethnosphere; Aesthetics; Stewardship