Community Gardens

Community gardens are tracks of land, jointly tended by local residents for either collective or mutual individual benefit. Participants share resources and engage in cooperative decision making about the use of the land. Although community gardens may be located in rural areas, urban community gardens, established in the United States in the late 1800s, often make news as they have come to be understood in relation to a variety of purposes and processes necessary in industrialized areas. Community gardens are increasingly being embraced for providing the physical and spatial context for educational, social, and individual or environmental health purposes, through which the processes of ritual building and communal experience can also occur. Existentially, community gardens also provide a lingering memory of the physical and social landscape prior to the days of extensive privatized land division. As such, community gardening, through its combined spatial and process dimensions, serves as a symbol of sustainable human connection amid the forces of individualized conceptions of urban life and development.

From an education standpoint, community gardens can become laboratories for learning about nature and ecology. For youth, participation can also facilitate a sense of pride and an awareness of community responsibility. For teens, lessons may become more relational in terms of social skill building, cooperation for a common goal, and leadership development. For adults, community gardening can enhance a sense of belonging, providing an opportunity to collaborate with others and build support groups. Adults can also role-model cooperation and engage in cross-generational learning with younger participants.

Community gardens can provide social opportunities for isolated individuals and for cultural building. When gardened by individuals from similar backgrounds, the gardens offer a space for maintaining traditions centered on nature. When utilized by diverse individuals, community gardening can facilitate cross-cultural and cross-racial exchange, serving to break down barriers through common activity and dialogue. As a cooperative urban agriculture endeavor, community gardens are also slowly becoming appreciated for their role in microeconomics wherein low-income communities provide resources to their residents.

Community gardens can support health, both on an individual level in terms of good nutrition and environmentally in terms of air quality, open space, and city aesthetics, although the extent of their contribution to air quality and overall beautification is debated. When used for rehabilitative purposes, specific healing community gardens can provide a community space for people dealing with mental or physical disorders, for those that need help readjusting to social interactions, or for those that need assistance in the self-esteem building necessary after physical or emotional abuse. Community gardening can also provide opportunities to build communal reliance and a sense of holism, experiences that are not always accessible in industrialized systems of compartmentalized production.

Community gardening is not without challenge. When utilized within institutions such as hospitals, prisons, and schools, community gardening risks becoming co-opted as a placating activity to reduce challenges to the forces of control, rather than being considered as an arena for cooperation and collaborative skill building and democracy. In addition, issues of property ownership, zoning regulations, short leases, public liability insurance, resource needs, and the pressures of capital development threaten the sustainability of community gardens. Community gardens have been threatened in cities across the country, with politicians and government planners tending to support community gardening when property values are low and when funds are available through blight, education, anti-crime, and environmental programs, [Page 383]but abandoning them by giving in to development pressures when values rise.

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