Research & reports

City of Seattle, Department of Neighborhoods · Seattle Department of Neighborhoods · United States

The official page for Seattle's P-Patch Community Gardening Program, run by the city's Department of Neighborhoods. It describes 91 P-Patch community gardens distributed throughout the city where residents grow organic vegetables, flowers, and herbs in shared plots that also serve as community gathering and learning spaces.

Keep Growing Detroit · Keep Growing Detroit · United States

The official site of Keep Growing Detroit, an urban agriculture organization aiming for food sovereignty in which most fruits and vegetables consumed by Detroiters are grown within the city. It runs the Garden Resource Program, education series on topics like beekeeping and carpentry, and an online farm store, Grown in Detroit.

Sole Food Street Farms · Sole Food Street Farms · Canada

Founded in 2009, Sole Food Street Farms is a social enterprise that converts vacant lots into productive farmland around Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It trains and employs residents facing complex barriers, selling and donating fresh produce.

Black Creek Community Farm · Black Creek Community Farm · Canada

An 8-acre urban agriculture centre in Toronto's Jane and Finch neighbourhood. In 2024 it harvested 31,046 pounds across 49 crops and 115 varieties, engaged 7,500 program participants, donated 3,066 pounds of food to food banks, held over 200 workshops, and provided over 60 youth employment opportunities.

Santropol Roulant · Santropol Roulant · Canada

Santropol Roulant's rooftop farm in Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood combines intensive garden beds with container gardening and keeps beehives. Produce grown there feeds the organization's meals-on-wheels kitchen, and kitchen scraps are composted in the basement and returned to the rooftop farm, forming a closed food-waste loop.

The Stop Community Food Centre · The Stop Community Food Centre · Canada

The official site of The Stop Community Food Centre, a Toronto-based food organization operating for over 40 years, running a food bank, community kitchen, and urban agriculture programs. It serves 522 meals per week, draws 126,000 annual farmers market visitors, and is supported by 180 volunteers, emphasizing community empowerment over a charity model.

Common Roots Urban Farm · Common Roots Urban Farm (Ecology Action Centre) · Canada

Official site of Common Roots Urban Farm, which operates two sites in Nova Scotia, Canada: BiHi Park in Halifax (established 2019) and Woodside in Dartmouth, on the grounds of Nova Scotia Hospital (active since 2015). It runs communal gathering gardens, teaching gardens, and 240 community allotment plots rented or donated to individuals and groups. The farm is now part of the Ecology Action Centre, working with partner organizations including Nourish Nova Scotia, YWCA Halifax, and Feed Nova Scotia.

· Wikipedia · Indonesia

Indonesian politician Ridwan Kamil (born 1971) served as mayor of Bandung from 2013 to 2018. Before becoming mayor, he was a pioneer of the 'Indonesia Berkebun' (Gardening Indonesia) urban farming movement, which had grown to 14 cities with about 4,000 members by 2011. As mayor, he also worked pro bono on creating public open spaces in crowded residential areas of Bandung.

Incredible Edible Todmorden · Incredible Edible Todmorden · United Kingdom

The official site of Incredible Edible Todmorden, the UK grassroots movement that plants and shares free-to-harvest vegetables, fruit and herbs in public spaces around the town. It runs with no office, no paid staff and no major funding, and states that the wider Incredible Edible network now numbers over 700 groups worldwide.

Centre for Mental Health · Centre for Mental Health · United Kingdom

This Centre for Mental Health article describes Sydenham Garden, a community resource in Lewisham, London, whose green space supports mental health through contact with nature, growing and cooking food, and creative activities. About 370 people a year join as 'co-workers' on placements of up to 12 months, and the piece frames the garden as an antidote to loneliness, isolation and exclusion.

Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · United Kingdom

A donation page for the RHS Campaign for School Gardening, stating that over 30,800 schools and groups across the UK already receive support and around 2.1 million children take part in gardening activities through the campaign.

· Wikipedia · Global

A Wikipedia article on care farming, the use of farming practices to provide healing, mental health, social, or educational care. It cites the 19th-century Riddrie farm school in Scotland (1866-1871), where of 158 boys admitted, 64 were later considered to be living respectable and productive lives, though the program ended due to financial constraints. It references practices in the UK, Netherlands, US, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium (Flanders) without giving specific farm-count or participant statistics, and notes potential benefits for offender rehabilitation and as an adjunct therapy for anxiety and depression, while stressing the need for more rigorous research.

· Wikipedia · Global

Experiential learning is defined as learning through experience, or more specifically learning through reflection on doing, distinguished from classroom-based learning by the learner's active role. David A. Kolb systematized the modern theory in the 1970s, building on the work of Dewey, Lewin, and Piaget. Learning is described as a cycle of four stages: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation, with genuine learning requiring active engagement, reflection, analytical skills, and decision-making/problem-solving skills.

Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · United Kingdom

The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) runs a campaign to make plants "an integrated part of everyday school life," offering free biannual newsletters, online training courses, a five-level School Gardening Award, and a library of activity plans and teaching guides. It also offers guided and self-guided school visits to RHS gardens and a biodiversity project with the Natural History Museum (the National Education Nature Park). The page does not state specific participation figures such as the number of schools involved.

Jeong D., Li L., Perez-Quesada G. · Choices Magazine (Agricultural & Applied Economics Association), 2nd Quarter 2026 · United States

An analysis of community garden siting through an environmental cost-benefit framework, organised around two direct costs (land and water) and two externalities (water pollution and gentrification). Cheap vacant parcels can carry remediation and infrastructure costs that exceed those of pricier development-ready sites over a garden's planning horizon, and in arid regions irrigation can be up to 34% of annual maintenance cost. On the externality side, weak nutrient management lets nitrogen and phosphorus accumulate and risk groundwater contamination, and community gardens can raise adjacent property values by 3–4% initially and around 7% within five years, potentially displacing the lower-income residents they are meant to serve. The authors note that the absence of a comprehensive geo-referenced inventory of community gardens — with establishment dates, tenure arrangements and management practices — constrains rigorous cost quantification and causal analysis.

Plinth · Plinth · United Kingdom

Published 5 April 2026 and updated 14 June 2026. Full cost recovery means funders covering not only a project's direct costs but its proportional share of overheads — rent, finance, IT, HR and chief-executive time. The article works through an example where two of ten staff (20 per cent of capacity) deliver a project, so £28,000 of £140,000 in annual overheads is added to £85,000 of direct costs for a £113,000 budget, and notes that overhead rates of 15–25 per cent are common sector guidance. It argues that accepting grants below true cost is a structural funding problem rather than a budgeting error, with consequences including staff burnout and governance risk, and notes that charity staff earn roughly 7 per cent less per hour than equivalent roles elsewhere in the economy.

内閣府 · 内閣府 · Japan

A Cabinet Office page describing the work of the single nationwide 'designated utilisation organisation' appointed by the Prime Minister under Japan's Dormant Deposits Utilisation Act (Act No. 101 of 2016). The Japan Network for Public Interest Activities (JANPIA) was designated on 11 January 2019 and must draw up an annual business plan for Cabinet Office approval, then select, supervise, inspect and evaluate the intermediary distribution organisations. The page carries associated documents dated 28 December 2023 and 30 March 2026.

内閣府 · 内閣府 · Japan

An explanatory deck on Japan's dormant deposits scheme published by the Cabinet Office in July 2026. Dormant deposits are accounts untouched for ten years or more; the enabling act passed as a member's bill in December 2016 and grant-making began in fiscal 2019, with activity-support organisations and equity investment added from 2024 under the June 2023 amendment. Dormant deposits transferred rose from ¥137.4 billion in FY2021 to ¥187.1 billion in FY2025, repayments to depositors rose from ¥25.2 billion to ¥58.7 billion over the same period, and transfers to the designated utilisation organisation ranged from ¥8.7 billion to ¥7.4 billion. As of the end of April 2026, 373 intermediary distribution organisations and 1,550 executing organisations had taken part, with an average grant of ¥154 million per project at the intermediary level and ¥16.24 million at the executing level.

Zhao H., Wardropper C.B., Cao H., Campbell C.G., Chang N.-B., Qiu J. · npj Urban Sustainability · United States (South Florida)

A University of Florida (UF/IFAS) study of where public support for urban agriculture actually comes from, combining a survey of 1,000 adults across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties (in English and Spanish) with AI-assisted analysis of thousands of US news stories over the past decade. Support is not monolithic: different behaviours have different drivers. A sense of community connection predicts financial donations; hands-on gardening experience predicts volunteering; a sense of shared responsibility predicts buying local produce and backing policy. News interest has risen especially since COVID-19, and is strongest in Florida and West Coast states. The authors conclude that outreach tailored to the specific behaviour being sought works better than one uniform message.

Kremer, Peleg, Borowiak, Craig, Scolio, Madeline · Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development · 米国（ペンシルベニア州フィラデルフィア）

US community gardens embody a conundrum: vital to community well-being and integral to urban social infrastructure, yet profoundly vulnerable through insecure land tenure, fragmented policy support and systemic disinvestment. This reflective essay examines the Philadelphia Garden Data Collaborative (PGDC), a multistakeholder initiative documenting, protecting and advocating for community-managed green space, from the authors' position as participant researchers. It traces the shift from grassroots mapping to coordinated data stewardship, which enabled both emergency interventions (such as preventing sheriff-sale evictions) and long-term preservation strategies, and examines the ethical dilemmas of collecting sensitive community data where bureaucratic neglect has rendered gardens invisible and where visibility can expose them to new risks. It concludes that data can strengthen advocacy and inform policy, but must be coupled with secure tenure mechanisms and sustained public investment.

Pearson, Natalie · British Food Journal · 英国（食を育てる人びとへの質的調査）

It is often argued that growing one's own food reduces household food waste by raising appreciation of food, but focused research on this is lacking. Using thematically analysed qualitative surveys with a privileged sample of food gardeners, this study finds the relationship more complex than proposed: for these gardeners, growing their own food can also decrease appreciation of food and create waste because of the challenges of growing, processing and storing it. Food gardening could nonetheless become an instrumental waste-prevention practice if growing is made easy and convenient, gardeners are given opportunities to work together, more channels exist for sharing surplus, and cooking skills improve. Its contribution is to critique the assumption that growing your own always leads to appreciation of food and less waste.

Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Germany

The national statistics page of the German federation of allotment garden associations (BKD). It gives the base figures — 867,092 plots, 44,000 hectares, an average plot of 370 square metres — along with the three-tier structure of roughly 13,000 clubs, 502 district federations and 20 state federations, membership by state, and a ranking of plots in the 15 largest cities (Berlin about 66,000, Leipzig 39,000). The nationwide average wait for a plot is three years, rising to seven in Berlin and eight in Hamburg. It also shows the skew by which the eastern states excluding Berlin, holding 15 per cent of the population, contain more than half of all allotments.

Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte · Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte · Germany

An encyclopaedia entry from the Society for Schleswig-Holstein History. It dates the appearance of 'poor gardens' in the duchies to the end of the 1820s and records that by 1826 they existed in 19 towns. In 1830 the Society of Voluntary Friends of the Poor in Kiel allocated plots on the municipal land at the Prüner Schlag at a size of 400 square metres — a size the entry says still holds today. The initiative is attributed to the governor Landgrave Carl of Hesse (1744–1836); the entry notes that the later allotment movement begun by the Leipzig physician D. M. Schreber (1808–1861) turned the poor gardens into Schrebergärten.

VGT Gartenfreunde Treptow e. V. · VGT Gartenfreunde Treptow e. V. · Germany

A source page in which the Berlin-Treptow garden association explains the Allotment and Small-Lease Ordinance of 31 July 1919 clause by clause. Section 1 put the rent for non-commercial horticultural land in the hands of the lower administrative authority, to be set in light of local conditions and land values after consulting agricultural and horticultural experts. Section 3 barred the landlord from terminating the lease, gave the holder a right to convert a loan for use into a lease, and a right to demand renewal once a term expired. Under section 4 an allotment office was set up in the Treptow district administration, which lasted until 1938. The association's 1948 statutes, the page notes, still referred back to the 1919 ordinance.

· Wikipedia (Deutsch) · Germany

The article on the history and scale of Germany's national allotment federation. Founded on 21 August 1921 as the Reich federation of German allotment associations, it later became the Bundesverband Deutscher Gartenfreunde and took its present name on 9 September 2023. It now covers more than 13,000 clubs and 20 state bodies, some 900,000 plots on 44,000 hectares used by around five million people — an area equal to 0.25 per cent of Germany's agricultural land. The article also carries the historical figures for 1938: one million members on 45,000 hectares, producing 350 million kg of fruit and 300 million kg of vegetables.