Podil Urban Farm (Kyiv)

A community garden that opened in spring 2025 in Kyiv's historic Podil district — the first of its kind in the city centre — in the middle of wartime. Residents and volunteers cleared a plot that had sat walled off since a building was demolished there in 1985, and turned it into a garden with raised beds, rainwater collection, compost bins and a tool shed. It was formally opened in May 2025.

Neighbours rent a planting box for 500 UAH a year, and the fees go into a shared community fund that pays for running the garden. Volunteers from Ukraine and abroad helped build it out over the summer of 2024. The sunny side holds the vegetable boxes; the shaded side is a 'zen space' with benches, so people who do not garden still have a reason to be there.

Construction was funded by the Ukrainian office of the Danish company Novo Nordisk, administered through the NGO DIY Ukraine. Running costs come from residents' box fees (500 UAH/year). The site is public land, and what happens to it next is left to local people to decide.

The project is framed explicitly around agency: in a war that has taken control away from people, remaking a place with your own hands is itself the point. CGIAR's resilient-cities research has recorded rising interest in home and community food growing during the war across Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Dnipro and other cities; Podil Urban Farm is one concrete inner-city expression of that.

Web articles and features that cover this case.

• ArticleUrban agriculture during economic crisis: Lessons from Cuba, Sri Lanka and Ukraine — CGIAR ↗cgiar.org

This entry is compiled from the public sources, official sites and research below.

• OfficialPodil Urban Farm — Kyiv's first community garden (Coolville Design Lab) ↗colville-andersen.com