Urban Farming and Community: The Social Capital that Soil Grows

Ask people who frequent an urban garden and many say the same thing: 'The vegetables, honestly, are a bonus — what I really come for is the people.' A few months after taking a plot, the greetings exchanged at watering time turn into small talk, seeds and seedlings start changing hands, and a share of the harvest begins to circulate. Before a typhoon someone fixes your stakes; while you travel the person in the next plot waters your bed. The accumulation of these small acts quietly weaves, right there in the city, a web of 'relationships you can lean on when it matters.' A garden grows crops, but it is also a device for growing the connections between people.

This 'harvest of connection' is more than a matter of mood. Isolation is said to damage health on a scale comparable to smoking, and studies suggest that in disasters what divides survival is less the evacuation plan than the thickness of neighbourly ties. Relationships between people are, for individual wellbeing and for a community's resilience alike, unmistakably a form of 'capital.' This column first confirms, in the language of science, why that capital grows so readily in a garden, and then visits the systems into which citizens around the world have crystallised it.

Social capital, to borrow political scientist Robert Putnam's definition, means 'connections among individuals — the social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.' It is a 'third capital' alongside physical capital (money, machines) and human capital (knowledge, skills): invisible, yet genuinely enriching to people and places. The more trusting a community, research has repeatedly shown, the lower its transaction costs, the better it handles crime, child-rearing and disasters, and even the healthier its people tend to be.

Putnam divided this capital in two. One is 'bonding' capital, which ties similar people tightly together — family, or friends from the same hometown. The other is 'bridging' capital, which spans difference, connecting people across generations, nationalities and stations in life. The former is a support in hard times; the latter brings new opportunities and information. A healthy community needs both, but what tends to wear thinnest in the modern city is the latter — the bridging kind, across unlike others. As we will see, the urban garden is one of the few places that grows both at once.