China — Resident-Made City Gardens, Spreading from a Narrow Vacant Lot

In thinking about urban agriculture in China, the first thing to grasp is the sense of scale. Rapid urbanisation has gathered millions to tens of millions of people in big cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Chongqing, and land is extremely scarce. The urban farming that has sprouted within them appears not as vast suburban farms but as 'community gardens' (shequ huayuan) and rooftop plots that make use of slender gaps in the dense city. Land that cannot be built on, neglected greenery, shared rooftops — it is precisely these low-value margins that have become the stage cultivated by residents' hands.

This report takes that site-first viewpoint. Before surveying policy documents or statistics from above, it names actual projects running in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Chongqing, and follows carefully who is cultivating what land, and to what end. We pay particular attention to the Shanghai community-garden movement led by the non-profit Clover Nature School (Siyecaotang) and researchers at Tongji University. How did a practice begun on one narrow vacant lot spread across the whole city, and then to other cities? What comes into view is that, beyond the single aim of food production, many values — neighbourhood regeneration, environmental education, biodiversity and elderly welfare — fold together onto one small garden.

Our database currently holds about eight Chinese cases. Geographically they concentrate in Shanghai (5), followed by Shenzhen (1), Chengdu (1) and Chongqing (1). The tilt toward Shanghai is not arbitrary: it reflects the fact that the resident-participatory community-garden movement has put down its deepest roots in this city. In form, community gardens (shequ huayuan) make up the majority, with rooftop gardens appearing in Chengdu and Chongqing. Few in number, the cases nonetheless let you survey the outline of Chinese urban farming as it unfolds — not as 'large-scale production' but as 'making small green spaces in the neighbourhood'.

What is striking in the numbers is not area but the speed of spread. In Shanghai, more than 200 community gardens and over 900 resident mini-gardens were created between 2014 and 2022, and Shenzhen's 'We Garden' is said to have reached several hundred sites between its 2019 launch and the end of 2023. Individual sites, meanwhile, are tiny: Shanghai's Baicaoyuan is about 200 m², Hongxu Habitat Garden only about 450 m². Small as points, they are multiplying rapidly as a surface — and this character of 'small, fast and many' defines China's urban farming today.