Cultivating Community and Healthy Living: Urban Grocery and Garden

Urban Farm DB summary

This project proposes a grocery store and garden design for a food desert neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, US, where grocery chains avoid low-income areas and where about 49 million people nationally experience food insecurity (citing Whittle et al., 2015). Its methods combine case studies of community gardens, farms, and markets with resident interviews and a literature review; drawing on that literature, it reports that autonomy over a garden keeps participants invested in their community, that convenience stores are prevalent in the studied neighborhood, and that marketing of nutritious foods is less common than for packaged foods though point-of-sale kiosks show promise for marketing fresh produce to children.