Search Results

Asset Assessments and Community Gardens

MELVIN DELGADO and DENISE HUMM-DELGADO

in Asset Assessments and Community Social Work Practice

Community gardens, and more specifically those involving food security, have engendered community asset assessments with this sphere as a focus. Community gardens, as a result, can respond to a range ... More

Community gardens, and more specifically those involving food security, have engendered community asset assessments with this sphere as a focus. Community gardens, as a result, can respond to a range of instrumental community needs such as food security, places for intergenerational and interethnic contact, and community beautification. Expressive community needs, although much more difficult to measure but, nonetheless, equally important, can be met by having community gardens foster social capital bonding and bridging by providing a place and space for residents to gather and connect with each other. Furthermore, expressive needs can be fostered that cross generations, cultures, and knowledge and abilities pertaining to growing food.Less

“It’s a Little Piece of My Country”

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

in Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens

Gardens are natural sites to congregate and converse and relax with others. In the urban community gardens of Los Angeles, some of the poorest, most marginalized newcomer immigrants gather to grow ... More

Gardens are natural sites to congregate and converse and relax with others. In the urban community gardens of Los Angeles, some of the poorest, most marginalized newcomer immigrants gather to grow homeland vegetables, share community ties, and build new places of belonging. This chapter focuses on life in these urban gardens, where undocumented immigrants who are excluded from other spaces of Los Angeles collectively transform discarded urban patches of ground into oases of freedom, belonging, and homeland connection. On previously abandoned lots, they are producing bountiful vegetables and herb patches, vibrant community connection, and places of great beauty. As they tend to their gardens, they are tending to themselves, practicing care of self, family, community, and the land.Less

Limits to growth? Why gardening has limited success growing inclusive communities

Hannah Pitt

in Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice

Community has been presented as central to urban gardens’ practices and outcomes. This chapter considers what kind of communities result and whether they can tackle inequality, questioning their ... More

Community has been presented as central to urban gardens’ practices and outcomes. This chapter considers what kind of communities result and whether they can tackle inequality, questioning their potential as an inclusive basis for challenging injustice. Answering these questions requires attention to activities forming garden communities and their spatiality. Informed by relational geography, the chapter challenges simplistic treatments of links between garden, community and place. Case studies from the UK demonstrate how facets enabling gardens to form communities result in exclusivity, unintentionally limiting who can access their benefits. Communities formed through collective place-making are found to struggle to extend across space and time, limiting their potential to reduce social inequalities. Achieving wider change requires work to push spatial relations across time to imagine a better future, and across space towards neighbours, social justice movements and structural causes of injustice.Less

The Challenges of Urban Agriculture

David J. Hess

in Localist Movements in a Global Economy: Sustainability, Justice, and Urban Development in the United States

This chapter examines literature on agrifood studies, which is generally critical of the reformist aspirations of localism. It explains that agrifood literature provides valuable insights into the ... More

This chapter examines literature on agrifood studies, which is generally critical of the reformist aspirations of localism. It explains that agrifood literature provides valuable insights into the challenges of sustainability and social justice that localism as a pathway for change faces. It analyzes case-study materials on urban community gardening and urban nonprofit farms and discusses the sustainability and justice challenges of urban agriculture. The analysis shows that the government-oriented protest politics of variable scale and substantial concern with sustainability and justice issues can be found in this field of localist politics.Less

Community Garden Interventions

Melvin Delgado

in Social Justice and the Urban Obesity Crisis: Implications for Social Work

This chapter focuses on community gardening as an intervention aimed at addressing obesity. Community gardens originally sprang up in the United States as a response to social and economic crises ... More

This chapter focuses on community gardening as an intervention aimed at addressing obesity. Community gardens originally sprang up in the United States as a response to social and economic crises dating back to the late nineteenth century. When these gardens are planted and cultivated by the community, they achieve a variety of key social, economic, political, educational, and health-related goals. A social justice perspective adds an important dimension to community gardens, particularly in its emphasis on community inclusion and participatory democracy. This chapter begins with a historical overview of urban farming before defining the phrase urban garden program. It then discusses the history of urban community gardening and potential pitfalls of community gardening. It also presents case examples that illustrate how community gardens facilitate comprehensive approaches that successfully allow health promotion to be conceptualized along a range of dimensions, including social justice-inspired change.Less

Growing in the City: From Community Gardening to Urban Agriculture

Lindsay K. Campbell

in City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City's Nature

Chapter five traces the network of actors and storylines involved in creating, advocating for (or resisting), and maintaining urban agriculture in New York City. First, it describes a brief history ... More

Chapter five traces the network of actors and storylines involved in creating, advocating for (or resisting), and maintaining urban agriculture in New York City. First, it describes a brief history of community gardening as a social movement in New York City since the 1970s. Then, it explores the vibrant material practices and varied narratives employed by a newer wave of civic practitioners engaging in urban agriculture from the 2000s to the present. The chapter parses this more recent trend into its various threads, which range from a focus on local food production, to commitments to food justice, to an interest in neighborhood stabilization and youth empowerment.Less

Paradise, Future

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

in Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens

This chapter revisits themes developed in this book and discusses possibilities for rethinking and reinventing new models of garden making in Southern California, and metropolitan regions more ... More

This chapter revisits themes developed in this book and discusses possibilities for rethinking and reinventing new models of garden making in Southern California, and metropolitan regions more generally. It argues that Southern California has always been a place of reinvention, and it remains a place of promise and potential. Rather than trying to create a paradise, one can strive for diverse gardens that promote environmental sustainability and a kind of cultural sustainability that promotes social equality, upholds fair labor standards, and recognizes the need for green spaces of beauty in all neighborhoods and communities. In the United States, people are also embracing shared backyard gardening and challenging restrictive municipal codes and policies that mandate lawn. There is a new enthusiasm for organic vegetable gardening without pesticides and herbicides, for wall gardens in cities where space is tight, and even for removal of lawns. The chapter reviews some of these projects, looking at new efforts in private residential gardens, urban community gardens, and public spaces, all with an eye to keeping immigration and the Southern California region in focus.Less

We Will Not Perish; We Will Flourish: Community Gardening, Self-Reliance, and Refusal

Ashanté M. Reese

in Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.

This chapter revisits self-reliance, examining it as a lens through which contemporary efforts to increase food access are framed. In it, a community garden at a public housing community is featured, ... More

This chapter revisits self-reliance, examining it as a lens through which contemporary efforts to increase food access are framed. In it, a community garden at a public housing community is featured, focusing on the ways the gardeners attempted to build community, maintain the garden to meet food needs, and develop programming for youth development. The chapter also examines how this garden functions within a broader landscape of precarity: how they continued gardening despite displacement.Less

Community gardening for integrated urban renewal in Copenhagen: securing or denying minorities’ right to the city?

Parama Roy

in Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic ... More

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013) especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of “right to the city” is operationalized as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to, a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space) and b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.Less

Gardens of Migration

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

in Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine Southern California gardens through a migration lens. It argues that we cannot understand these gardens without acknowledging that nearly ... More

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine Southern California gardens through a migration lens. It argues that we cannot understand these gardens without acknowledging that nearly all the plants, the people, and the water in Southern California have come from elsewhere. The book underscores the sociological implications of migration and gardens, unearthing social, cultural, and economic consequences of Southern California gardens. It shares what the author has learned in her study of paid immigrant gardeners in suburban residential gardens; urban community gardens in some of the poorest, most densely populated neighborhoods of Los Angeles; and the most elite botanical garden in the West. The remainder of the chapter sketches three claims that frame the present study; discusses why sociology has ignored gardens; and describes the methodology used in the study; and provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.Less

Paths Leading to Faith in Place

Amanda J. Baugh

in God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White

Chapter 3 considers some of the varied paths that led individuals and groups to work with Faith in Place. While the women and men I encountered during my fieldwork generally supported the ... More

Chapter 3 considers some of the varied paths that led individuals and groups to work with Faith in Place. While the women and men I encountered during my fieldwork generally supported the organization’s values and messages, additional factors also contributed to their religious environmental involvement. This chapter examines the diverse set of motivations participants brought to their work with Faith in Place, including factors related to religion, racial and ethnic identity, civic identity, and economic opportunity.Less

Policy Frameworks: Scaling Civic Ecology Practices Up and Out

Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball

in Civic Ecology: Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up

Three general steps move civic ecology practices from small local innovations to broader policy innovations: giving a label to the phenomenon (in our case “civic ecology”); becoming more effective as ... More

Three general steps move civic ecology practices from small local innovations to broader policy innovations: giving a label to the phenomenon (in our case “civic ecology”); becoming more effective as local providers of ecosystem services and contributors to community well-being through partnerships with scientists; and government and larger NGOs formulating policies that allow civic ecology practices to spread. Civic ecology practices are small social or “social-ecological innovations,” whereas larger NGOs and government agencies are policy entrepreneurs who shape the policy environment. Policy entrepreneurs can also bridge between multiple civic ecology practices and larger management initiatives to form regional adaptive and collaborative resource management systems.Less

Broken Places

Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball

in Civic Ecology: Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up

Broken places, also referred to as red zones, are places that suffer from poverty, crime, war, disaster, and environmental degradation. When they are created by sudden disturbances such as hurricanes ... More

Broken places, also referred to as red zones, are places that suffer from poverty, crime, war, disaster, and environmental degradation. When they are created by sudden disturbances such as hurricanes or war, we call them “sudden red zones.” When they are created gradually over many years by industries abandoning a city, leaving behind unemployment, poverty, crime, environmental contamination, and neglected open space, they are called “slow burn” declines. In some cases, a lake, city or other social-ecological system crosses a “threshold” after a sudden or slow-burn decline, where ongoing social and ecological processes are seriously disrupted. Community gardening in Detroit and Boston, memorial gardens after 9/11 in New York City, and community tree planting in New Orleans all demonstrate how civic ecology practices emerge in sudden and slow-burn broken places.Less

Governance

Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball

in Civic Ecology: Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up

Governance refers to how multiple institutions and organizations influence policy. Governance institutions include not only city, county, state, and national governments, but also businesses, ... More

Governance refers to how multiple institutions and organizations influence policy. Governance institutions include not only city, county, state, and national governments, but also businesses, community groups, and small non-profit organizations, as well as large national and international NGOs like The Nature Conservancy, and multilateral organizations like the United Nations. Based on multiple studies conducted over many years on systems as different as policing and forest management, Elinor Ostrom concluded that, relative to top-down government, multiple layers of governance do not produce inefficiencies but rather enable societies to more effectively address complex challenges. This is because the various organizations bring a variety of ideas to the table, which become experiments that can lead to better solutions. Community organizations conducting civic ecology practices are one of many organizations involved in such polycentric governance systems. Additionally, civic ecology practices play a role in the civic environmental movement, which as opposed to the more antagonistic environmental movement that emerged in the 1970s, focuses on collaborations among the non-profit and government sector in environmental management and policy formation.Less

Is urban gardening a source of wellbeing and just freedom? A Capability Approach based analysis from the UK and Ireland

Alma Clavin

in Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice

The production of urban space and associated neoliberalisation of urban governance limits opportunities for individual and collective freedoms. Such a socio-spatial approach to uneven urban ... More

The production of urban space and associated neoliberalisation of urban governance limits opportunities for individual and collective freedoms. Such a socio-spatial approach to uneven urban development has influenced a number of authors in their examination of urban community gardens. The research has shown both positive agency and wellbeing benefits of these spaces and also more critical accounts of how the spaces are limited in their ability to truly enhance political freedoms, overcoming asymmetric power relations. In addition to ongoing issues of insecurity of tenure, such well-intentioned community garden initiatives may be seen as light green, weak approaches to urban sustainability rather than a true oppositional discourse of practice, therefore seen to continue neoliberal forms of both unsustainable and uneven development. Using qualitative, visual methods, the chapter focuses on the potential of community gardens to enhance both human agency and ecological sustainability of passive adult users, and active youth and child users in urban areas. The sites chosen are specifically designed with ecological principles and associated features. In order to examine the freedoms valued within these sites, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) is operationalized in five such sites in the UK and Ireland. Various critiques of the CA are addressed, and a particular approach to evaluating human wellbeing, linking the sustainable and just use of urban resources is developed. Such a re-conceptualisation of the CA is significant in realizing the potential role of the sites in enhancing a more expressive mode of being for individuals, along with the enhancement of participative and critical capacity in urban areas.Less

Beautify

Amanda I. Seligman

in Chicago's Block Clubs: How Neighbors Shape the City

Block clubs were primarily focused on making local improvements. Many block club activities centered on beautification projects. Vacant lots were common sources of concern to block club members ... More

Block clubs were primarily focused on making local improvements. Many block club activities centered on beautification projects. Vacant lots were common sources of concern to block club members because they were unsightly and attracted nuisances such as illegal drug use, garbage, and cars. Many block clubs transformed vacant lots into local assets such as gardens and playlots for children. In order to inspire neighbors to beautify their homes, block clubs regularly participated in larger institutional campaigns and competitions that offered prizes for the most attractive properties. Summertime projects focused on making improvements to buildings and sprucing up yards; in winter, block clubs held Christmas decorating competitions. Such campaigns sometimes promoted government action, such as when the City of Chicago launched an “Operation Pride” campaign. But they primarily depended on private, voluntary participation.Less

The Tragedy of the Uncommon: Property, Possession, and Belonging in Community Gardens

Piers H. G. Stephens

in The Greening of Everyday Life: Challenging Practices, Imagining Possibilities

This chapter applies the author’s previous work on property rights justification to the significance of community gardens. After criticizing the traditional Lockean private property justification, ... More

This chapter applies the author’s previous work on property rights justification to the significance of community gardens. After criticizing the traditional Lockean private property justification, which emphasizes economic expansionism, it argues that the experiential basis for legitimate property ownership derives from “belonging,” a felt bond of lived experience over time between a person or group of people and an object, being, or place, and that this can be in tension with the Lockean abstract orientation the author calls “possession.” It is then argued: (i) that the combination of this orientation with technocratic politics has a powerfully reductive impact on contemporary life, making the goods of connection to nature tragically uncommon, and (ii) that certain types of belonging, exemplified by community garden practices, can offer rich, persuasive practical alternatives to the reductiveness of the current path.Less

Introduction

Amy Starecheski

in Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City

This chapter opens with an autobiographical introduction to the author’s experiences squatting at Casa del Sol in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. The connections between squatting, ... More

This chapter opens with an autobiographical introduction to the author’s experiences squatting at Casa del Sol in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. The connections between squatting, urban homesteading, and community garden activism are introduced through the story of the 1999 fight to preserve hundreds of community gardens. The questions raised through those experiences drive this research. The study of squatting makes the contested and dynamic nature of value, urban citizenship, claims on urban space, and property claims in particular, highly visible. In a neoliberalizing city, squatters’ initiative could be coopted into a discourse of individual responsibility. At the same time, squatters’ actions challenged neoliberal projects of privatization and commodification of urban space. While squatters claimed a right to the city based on their labor and their status as urban citizens, as new homeowners in an era where the social meanings of debt and homeownership were being renegotiated, they also used history and property rights to develop new ways of being part of the city. The chapter closes with a description of the research and writing process for the book, with an emphasis on the role of oral history methods, and an overview of the book’s structure.Less

Critical Environmental Education

Robert B. Stevenson, Arjen E. J. Wals, Joe E. Heimlich, and Ellen Field

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter considers an alternative socially critical perspective on environmental education, the emphasis of which is on the influence of cultural norms and structural features of society on ... More

This chapter considers an alternative socially critical perspective on environmental education, the emphasis of which is on the influence of cultural norms and structural features of society on people's environmental actions and the need for participatory approaches that engage citizens in creating and determining appropriate actions to realize their own vision of a sustainable urban environment. It describes emerging learning spaces, also known as “ecologies of learning,” that engage young and old urban citizens in participatory collaborative activities such as community gardening, critical place-based education in urban schools, and social media environmental interest networks. After providing a brief history of environmental education, the chapter discusses communicating information about and solving environmental problems. It then examines critical thinking about issues of quality of life and human-nature interrelationships before concluding with an overview of how to develop capacity for integrating environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable development.Less