Community Gardening As Social Action PDF Download

This study analyzes the roles and contradictions embedded within the establishment and maintenance of community gardens within urban communities. I apply Henri Lefebvre's framework of the social production of space to evaluate the capacity for urban residents to shape their neighborhoods, in the context of neoliberal development practices. These realities shape the experiences of gardeners in a multitude of ways, including the extent to which they have access to amenities, political resources, and the spaces themselves. Throughout this study, utilizing data from a combination of 25 in-depth interviews and extensive participant observation in 45 community gardens across the city of Boston and the surrounding area, I demonstrate how narratives surrounding community gardens have shifted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century and have adapted to dominant cultural rhetoric in order to justify their continued existence. Throughout the history of the community gardening movement, justifications for the spaces have included environmental justice, food access, and community resilience. My findings demonstrate that due to neoliberal development pressures and the imperatives of the growth machine, community gardens in Boston are protected primarily through the non-profit sector, which has lead to numerous inequalities in the community gardening experience. Low-income people, racial and ethnic minorities, and immigrant populations, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods, face barriers in accessing the spaces, despite the fact that they are often the most likely to need the spaces for the purpose of improving their access to fresh and healthy food. In disadvantaged communities, community gardens are often part of an oppositional strategy and the Right to the City movement, which seeks to counter gentrification. In these instances, community gardens serve not only as spaces for expression of environmental and food justices, but they also allow for the demonstrations of ownership in the form of art, staging grounds for political dissent and transportation advocacy, and reclamation of space in communities with histories of violent crime. This study demonstrates that community gardens have a multiplicity of meanings for their stakeholders and contributes to our understanding of how community gardens relate to the broader urban social fabric.