Community gardens are tools that should be built to last.
It feels like no small thing to have access to greenspace when you live in a city — even if your city is relatively suburban. There’s all sorts of research about how being in nature, spending time outdoors, or even just having plants around can improve a person’s state of being. But there are more urgent reasons to gardening in the city. Given the fragility of the nation’s food systems exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and its impending economic downturn, the overall lack of availability and affordability of fresh and healthy foods, growing skepticism of Big Ag and large scale monoculture crops, and the lack of community connectivity in areas experiencing urbanization, urban greenspaces and community gardens seem to be more important than ever.
The idea of a community garden in an empty lot in the city should be a good one then, right? There’s the potential for many needs to be met and many problems to be nixed with one solution. Certainly, a functioning community garden has the ability to supplement produce for many households, to provide a green refuge from screens, and to be a safe and well-kept place to gather and build beneficial relationships with the folks nearby. Brian Emerson writes in the freely available community garden guidebook — “From Neglected Parcels to Community Gardens: A Handbook” — that the benefits of a functioning community garden include and are not limited to:
- Having a community building tool, creating opportunities for neighbors to work together
- Growing produce in urban areas for community members or food banks
- Cleaning up and using vacant lots
- Providing safe learning space for children and adults
- Preserving urban green space
- Reducing city heat from streets and parking lots
- Enabling positive human-earth connections and the cultivation of environmental stewardship
- Reducing stress and improving mental health of community members
- Beautifying and enriching neighborhoods and enhancing their sense of identity
- Providing opportunities for intergenerational and cross-cultural connections
Ideally, these lofty benefits would all come to be, and the garden space itself could act as an agent of change. Reaching all of these goals takes time and continued cooperation. A community garden must continue to function in order to serve its purpose. But many community gardens instead wind up empty, overgrown, and neglected. Does change need to happen in order to make community gardens more resilient? What makes a community garden last?
A community garden can fizzle out for many reasons. They may suffer from a breakdown in the web of resources and relationships that make them last. An initial source of interest and volunteers could disappear, a coordinator could move on and leave responsibilities unclaimed, et cetera. Maybe the garden never received the support it needed in the first place.
Some community gardens were not organized by the community itself, but rather they were laid down as a kind of band-aid to a perceived problem (such as criminal activity, vandalism, food insecurity). There are many widely available lists of the benefits of community gardens (see above); anyone could ask for a community garden in an empty space with no backing from the actual community of people in that space. A paternalistic council of decision makers agrees, spends a grand or so on throwing up some raised beds, ignores any investment in seeking community interest and communicating their goals, and then expects people to do something with the finished project.
While having an external organization is helpful for assigning garden responsibilities and sustaining a project for the long term, the described approach treats a community garden like a prescription. It assumes that the prescriber has the knowledge and authority to make the prescription, and that the patient will benefit in the end. When gardens are used in this way and are established as a top-down decision, it has a negative impact on the way that people perceive this space and possibly other garden spaces as well. If the gardens were hierarchically placed with the intention of improving local image, while placing the responsibility of solving hunger on the individual in an unjust and oppressive system, use of the space will not be sustained in a way that builds a community up. With no grassroots foundation, no horizontal network, and no true community mission, there is little reason for interaction with this project outside of self interest.
Besides that core issue, here are some reasons why it is challenging for people to garden. These give more backing as to why organization should come from the ground up (pun intended), and what the combination of community organization and support from an outside body might look like.
- Resources, including tools, seeds, soil, and training, are not usually owned or sought out by the people that community gardens can serve the most. Many apartment and home renters usually don’t have a prior need to own shovels, rakes, hoes, tillers, etc. They also may not have the space or supplies necessary to start their own seedlings. Learning about gardening takes time — a precious resource by every measure. If a prospective gardener is to try and maintain a plot, buying the necessary tools and supplies and dedicating the time and effort may just be too high of a start-up cost for the whole endeavor. In fact, supplying resources is the most effective way to create and keep public interest in the garden, according to this research. Tools for public use need to be available on-site or nearby. Other resources such as soil, mulch, and compost should be able to be sourced by an organizer as well. Seedlings and seeds can be found in donations from those who have excess, or have a way to reach those who need them via a seed swap event. Having an already established, locally controlled, organizing body (a school, a club, a community center) or a source of volunteers (a class, master gardeners) that can hold classes, training events, or just answer garden questions is almost necessary.
- People are busy! Working a full time job or multiple jobs is exhausting, and adding a commitment to maintaining a garden space on top of prior responsibilities may just be too much — especially for a beginner gardener who may need extra time for learning. Also, change happens! People move, change jobs, and come into different situations all the time — garden organizers included. Community gardens will (and should probably always have) high turnover rates. Creating or finding reliable support from a club, an organization like a school, or even a city or neighborhood committee, to take responsibility for keeping the goings-on going would be ideal. This hinges, of course, on community interest. If the organization/club/city committee is the one making this decision for the community, the process is happening backwards.
- Produce doesn’t always get harvested by the people who plant it. Some community gardens have a problem with the “theft” of their veggies. If it is not a critter taking the fruits of a gardener’s labor, then it is most likely going to a hungry person who needs it. Hunger is a deep and pressing issue that cannot be solved with community gardening alone, despite the approaches that some cities take. But, feeding the community seems like it should be built into the definition — though it can be disheartening for a gardener to put effort into gardening with no reward. The idea of a “giving garden” bed in a highly accessible location into which folks can plant their excess seedlings can be part of the resolution. This idea also gives a nod to community gardens that provide exclusively communal growing spaces. A basket into which people place their excess produce nearby can help too. Having the space for a community garden means having the space to host events such as free food distribution with no questions asked.
- The Tragedy of the Commons: common spaces like lawns, landscapes, or donation beds can become overgrown and fall into disuse simply because common spaces do not have a party responsible for taking care of them. Designating one during the establishment of the garden may be a simple solution here. The idea of a monthly or bi-weekly volunteer day to take care of the grounds outside of the vegetable beds could be helpful as well.
- By anticipating problems like soil quality, light exposure, water availability, and ease of access via public transportation, biking, or walking when organizing and planning the garden space, then the costs of resolving these problems can be anticipated as well. In doing so, the organizers can prevent having to drop the project halfway through because of a barrier that was not anticipated. For example, if the soil has unsafe levels of lead, extra care will need to be taken in sourcing large amounts of compost and the materials needed for raised beds.
- Building relationships with neighbors, nonprofits, community businesses, and other organizations takes time and a lot of effort. Garnering interest, especially a steady stream of available volunteers, can be a challenge.
In addition to coordination and support, some other commonalities between successful and sustainable gardening programs are found to be as follows (from this article of research on California’s programs):
- Local leadership and staffing
- Volunteers and community partners
- Skill building opportunities (like gardening workshops or cooking and tasting events) that sustain interest and build momentum
The aforementioned model of what makes community gardens successful brings attention to “the need for policy initiatives aimed at extending specific forms of assistance to encourage consumers to grow foods in [community gardens]”. However, we must be cautious of approaching the issues of food insecurity through the neoliberal inspired lens of responsibilization. For example, the UDSA’s Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program (USDA-CFPCGP) provides money to help establish gardens in order to “fight food insecurity through developing community food projects that help promote the self-sufficiency of low-income communities”. When a community of people is experiencing hunger and food insecurity, a garden will never be able to address the systematic failures creating these issues.
However, regulatory help and government assistance such as the ability to bypass zoning requirements and regulations, making less conditional pools of funding or the rights to empty lots available, and providing assistance via program development can create stability in a community garden, if in a less horizontally organized way. Many cities have public or non-profit networks like this — here’s the public one in Cleveland, and a private nonprofit one in Toledo.
People are entitled to safe and healthy communities, and building a network via a community garden can be part of stepping away from a model of scarcity and isolation. There should be thought put into how these spaces can be made more sustainable and resilient to inevitable change over time. Assistance from the top-down that makes finding resources easier for gardeners is needed, but in a way that deviates from a savior-istic approach, and avoids making the resolution to food scarcity an individual’s responsibility when there are so many well established barriers in place. It is important for the community gardeners to help their neighbors, public officials, and outside organizations recognize the potential of these spaces and to contribute not only to their establishment but also to their upkeep from the ground up.
Handbooks and resources:
UC Los Angeles Extension’s Guide
