Growing healthy communities through urban gardening

New Life Journal, June-July, 2002 by Jodi Rhoden, Heather Steele

The notion that cities are removed from the natural rhythm of the seasons is pervasive. We think of cities as industrial, unnatural places, where all our food has to be trucked in from "out in the country." We forget that people have always grown food in cities, kept animals, and directly participated in the means of producing what they need to live. Historically, this system of home-based agriculture not only provided the most valuable resource, food, but it cultivated connections between neighbors, friends, and families, as well. Community Gardening is a growing movement that helps us return to those connections in order to live more full, rich, sustainable lives. All over the world, gardeners, friends, neighbors, teachers, elders, and families have been coming together to cultivate food and community in urban spaces because they recognize the transformative power of shared work and shared resources. The estimated 10,000 community gardens in American cities serve as meeting places, as food sources, as recreational spaces, as educational centers, as income sources, and as empowerment zones for neighborhoods and communities.

There are as many different kinds of community gardens as there are communities. Some varieties include the following:

* Individual plot gardens where families or individuals get their own small plot in a garden with many other gardeners, such as many of the community gardens sponsored by the Atlanta Community Food Bank.

* Shared garden spaces that collectively grow food for use by the growers and the larger community, such as GROW: the Asheville Community Gardens Project's Pierson Street Garden.

* School gardens that incorporate gardening into school curricula for hands-on learning, such as the CitySprouts gardens in Cambridge, MA, and Alice Water's groundbreaking project, the Edible Schoolyard, in Berkeley, CA.

* Gardens serving churches, shelters, hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and other communities for therapeutic purposes.

* Urban farms that provide income and job training for residents, such as Boston's The Food Project, which employs urban youth in organic farming and marketing, and the San Francisco-based SLUG, which makes and markets gourmet vinegars and sauces from their urban gardens.

Gardening is not only becoming a vital component of urban living again, it is also an appropriate and holistic response to current social and environmental problems. Primarily, community gardening works at the grassroots level to bring people together, interrupting the urban tendency toward isolation and disconnection. In the context of a shared community garden, for example, the institutionalized barriers that separate people fall away, and people can connect in the most basic and life-giving way. Generations can come together, elders imparting to the young their rich histories, often involving knowledge of plants and the natural world. Neighbors of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds find a common ground in which to share their lives, and to share tips from the many different traditions of gardening. Gardening is a significant means of maintaining cultural knowledge of immigrant and minority groups, and community gardens provide a venue for recording and transmitting this knowledge across cultures. The Southern Seed Legacy Project, for instance, is gathering, documenting, and disseminating traditional seeds and stories from the large Vietnamese-American population in Atlanta, in an effort they call "memory banking."

Usually, a garden will yield more produce than its growers can ever eat, and since the city abounds with opportunities to donate fresh food, gardening also addresses the reality of urban hunger. And the impact is real: in 2000, the Garden Writers Association of America's "Plant a Row for the Hungry," a program that encourages gardeners to donate food to shelters and food banks, recorded 1,200,000 pounds of produce donated to the hungry through their program alone. And gardening helps to alleviate poverty: the Philadelphia Urban Gardening Project reports that low-income people who garden save an average of $150 each in food costs per growing season.

Urban gardening benefits communities in so many other ways. Gardening in cities is ecologically sustainable: it keeps the food system local and diverts tons of compost from the waste stream; while the increase of greenspace improves urban air quality, water quality, and reduces temperature "hot spots." It provides hands-on educational experiences in schools, bringing children out of the classroom and into the schoolyard to learn about history, math, science, nutrition, social studies, and the arts. Gardening transforms spaces and gives people greater power over their own communities. It turns vacant, litter-filled lots or private, gated areas into vibrant community gathering spots, sources of income and of life-giving abundance. But, most of all, community gardens are sources of community pride.

Resource Guide for Community Gardening Resources: