Research & reports

Lucia Škamlová, Agnieszka Wilkaniec, Magdalena Szczepańska, Vladimír Bačík, Petra Hencelová · Urban forestry & urban greening · Europe

This research conducted a comparative analysis of community gardens in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Poznań, Poland, to understand their development and management in post-socialist urban environments. Extensive field research, including exploratory walks, participatory observation, and semi-structured interviews with community garden representatives, was used. The analysis revealed both similarities and differences in city-specific approaches to establishing, managing, and developing community gardens, concluding that a "copy-paste" management approach does not exist and practices vary by local context.

Jean-Christophe Levassor · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · France

This study addresses social divisions in Le Pile, east Roubaix, France, where over 40% of residents live below the poverty line. It states that without proactive policies, social divisions will worsen, and initiatives like urban farming and zero waste will only have a limited effect beyond a small circle of insiders. La Condition Publique aims to recreate ties among various actors to support urban renovation and foster resilience in this deprived neighborhood.

Juan Ignacio Plaza Gutiérrez, Daniel Herrero Luque, Marta Martínez Arnáiz, Eugenio Baraja Rodríguez · Cuadernos Geográficos · Spain

This article explores the singularity and diversity of peri-urban garden landscapes characterizing the surroundings of several cities in Castilla y León, Spain. The study analyzed the spatio-temporal evolution, landscape dimension, functional relationship with urban space, and the consideration of their protection, management, and maintenance in planning instruments. Results reveal the unequal persistence of traditional garden belts, their diverse types, and their uneven treatment in urban planning in the studied cases.

Ian Siddons Heginworth, Gary Nash · · United Kingdom (London)

This introduction provides an overview of a book discussing an eighteen-week environmental arts therapy pilot group for adult mental health clients. The book explores themes related to hostile mothering and connections to nature, and considers trauma-informed environmental arts therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome. It also describes the Community Outdoor Art Therapy Service (COATS) in London, which uses urban parks and community gardens.

David Watson · Organization · United Kingdom

This article explores the experience and organization of labor within a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme in the United Kingdom, drawing on Marx’s concept of alienation. It presents a case study of how labor in a CSA scheme counteracts experiences of alienation created by capitalism and considers how this might inform the reorganization of labor in the food system more generally.

Joan Morales Moras · Kepes · Spain (Barcelona)

This study examined an academic project in Barcelona, Spain, where design students collaborated with the self-managed Espai Quiró urban agriculture and organic community project in the La Salut neighborhood. The involvement of the community managers and students in this pedagogical experience responded to a design model committed to citizens and citizen-led neighborhood associations. This participated in the idea of transition towards a new alternative way of living in cities, advocating for the reappropriation of public space.

Sofia Nikolaidou · Manchester University Press eBooks · Europe

This chapter examines new forms of urban gardening, often involving informal and temporary reuse of vacant land, and their impact on urban green space governance and planning practices. Using examples from Greece and Switzerland, it highlights differences and similarities in practices, social and institutional contexts, and collaborative governance patterns. The study calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives, which affects new configurations of urban green areas and public space, and related planning practices.

Cristina Imbroglini · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Italy

A study (Italy) starting from the hypothesis that new and original landscape strategies can concretely contribute to the environmental and social reactivation of metropolitan settlements, addressing urban marginality understood as both social and spatial exclusion. It focuses on abandoned or underutilised landscapes and structures far from city centres and from circuits of opportunity and cultural exchange, and proposes two design devices: "the piers," green infrastructure or linear landscapes integrating sustainable mobility, open spaces, and urban agricultural activities; and "new social condensers," public facilities for vulnerable people realised in the most deprived urban areas through the recovery of underutilised or abandoned spaces.

Thomas Krikser, Ingo Zasada, Annette Piorr · Sustainability · Germany

An empirical study in Germany combined qualitative and quantitative survey data with multi-value qualitative comparative analysis across three urban agriculture models — self-harvesting gardens, intercultural gardens, and community gardens — to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for socio-economic success. It found that different value systems and cost-benefit considerations applied across models: a service-focused farmer-consumer relationship ensuring self-reliance mattered most for self-harvesting gardens, self-reliance combined with sharing mattered for intercultural gardens, and community gardening success depended on self-governance and individually determined factors beyond production output, with participants across models showing a post-productive orientation that goes beyond conventional trade-off thinking.

Inés Melón Izco · · Spain

"Madrid To Go" is an architectural design proposal for an intermodal transit station in Madrid, Spain, positioned above existing rail platforms to connect two neighborhoods historically divided by the rail yard, combining a covered, climate-controlled station with a food market and a strip of urban gardens intended primarily for cultural, educational, leisure and awareness purposes, with the roof shape referencing the profile of the Sierra de Madrid visible from Chamartín.

남진보, 김근호 · · United Kingdom

This 2019 study examined community-led gardens for particulate matter (PM) abatement in London, UK, as case studies for addressing PM problems, using place-keeping theory as its analytical framework and analyzing the gardens' management structures. It found that strong governance backed by local policy support is key to addressing PM issues, alongside stakeholder partnerships, community-generated supplementary funding, regular evaluation through community monitoring, and long-term maintenance. The study concludes that community garden management should take a self-sustaining structure built on strong governance, and recommends policies that encourage community involvement in decision-making, expand external funding including from private and business sectors, provide PM-monitoring tools and education (for example via universities), and plant low-maintenance vegetation to sustain gardens against funding and labor shortages.

Gerlinde Behrendt, Sarah Peter, Simone Sterly, Anna Maria Häring · Working paper/Working paper CIRIEC ... · Germany

Empirical evidence on community financing in the German organic food sector shows that a still-niche but growing number of firms use citizen-sourced funding to substitute or complement bank credit. The models are classified into four types — pure financing instruments (crowdfunding, profit participation rights, direct loans), legal-form-based models (cooperatives, corporations), intermediary-pooled financing (citizen shareholder corporations, land purchase cooperatives), and others such as community supported agriculture, leasing and sponsorship — and their role is discussed in easing access to capital for farms facing rising land prices and limited access to traditional bank credit.

Marco Picone, Filippo Schilleci · Nova Science Publishers (Nova Science Publishers, Inc.) · Italy

A critical essay examining an urban-garden participatory process underway as part of Palermo, Italy's "Laboratorio Palermo città educativa," launched by the municipality in 2015 to convert abandoned or degraded public green areas into urban gardens for educational activities across all ages, in the name of neighborhood community reappropriation. The paper argues that in a context of austerity urbanism, it is easy for the municipality to exploit the absence of public investment to mobilize active citizens as protagonists of urban change, and that the idea of creating urban community gardens—like other recent slogans such as smart cities and creative cities—tends to become a universally praised, virtuous development model without scrutiny. It further notes that the lack of an effective regulation governing the use of public green spaces in the city continues to create obstacles to the solutions proposed by the thematic working table. The author concludes that field-based qualitative research is still needed to determine whether these reappropriation processes conceal neoliberal dynamics that delegate a false decision-making power to citizens while using them to fill current political vacuums.

M. Mar Santiago Arca · Revista galega de educación · Spain

A report on a garden created by pupils of the 4th B class of Infant Education at CEIP Emilia Pardo Bazán school in A Coruña, Spain, during the 2016-17 school year, in their plot of the school garden. Although aesthetic aspects were part of the project, Philosophy for Children and the development of thinking skills served as the basis underpinning the entire process.

Károly Kacz · Annals of the Polish Association of Agricultural and Agribusiness Economists · Europe

A study analyzed the distribution of local products through short food supply chains (SFSCs) in Hungary, focusing on farmer markets and Community Supported Agriculture systems, using data from multiple databases. Both traditional and neo-traditional SFSC forms were found to be viable in Hungary, but as in other Central and Eastern European countries, traditional SFSC types—particularly local farmer markets—remain dominant in numbers; the study concludes that forming and supporting neo-traditional organizations is useful for exploiting the potential of short supply chains.

Teresa Marat-Mendes, João Cunha Borges · Repositório do ISCTE-IUL · Europe

This 2019 presentation introduces the ongoing SPLACH (Spatial Planning for Change) research project focused on the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), Portugal, home to about 3 million people, most of whom live in peripheral residential areas developed over the 20th century. These areas face problems including social isolation and car dependency, while municipal and private initiatives, including the promotion of urban agriculture, have sought to counteract such issues. SPLACH has surveyed a number of case studies to theorize the planning and housing dynamics in the LMA and their impact on territorializing ethical principles grounded in urban agriculture initiatives. The presentation raises the question of what specific issues identified in the SPLACH case studies offer opportunities to rethink urban planning and urban form toward a more sustainable environment and to promote the social role of urban planning.

Anne Barbillon, Christine Aubry, François Nold, Stéphane Besançon, Nastaran Manouchehri · Agricultural Sciences · France

This study assessed health risks from soil trace metals (lead, cadmium, mercury, copper, and zinc) at three urban farms near Paris (Ile-de-France region), evaluating two main exposure pathways: soil and vegetable ingestion. All three farms had soil trace-metal levels above geochemical background values and the thresholds used in France as reference values for sludge spreading. Using a Hazard Quotient (HQ)-based risk assessment (HQ being the ratio of estimated daily intake to tolerable daily intake), the riskiest scenarios were urban farmers working on-site daily year-round (HQtot = 1.02), child gardeners (HQtot = 1.29), and regular child consumers eating exclusively the farm's vegetables under a maximalist scenario (HQtot = 1.6). The adult gardener scenario followed (HQtot = 0.9), while the lowest-risk scenarios were adult consumers (HQtot = 0.62) and farm workers (HQtot = 0.45).

Laura Petruskeviciute · · United Kingdom

This case study examines DOT TO DOT©, a social innovation project run in the Maryhill area of Glasgow, Scotland, from 2017 to 2018 and funded by the EU's European Social Fund Aspiring Communities programme. A cross-disciplinary initiative involving intergenerational groups from the local creative community — social entrepreneurs, researchers, educators, and youth — it temporarily reused ecologically vacant sites, aiming to improve the lives of disadvantaged communities through regenerative design and live projects built with reclaimed waste materials. The experimental site was planned across three areas: (a) a Community Garden growing edible plants (phase 1), (b) a Remake Station (phase 2), and (c) a sensory woodland, combining somatic learning tools, research-by-doing, experimentation through reuse, and collaborative design modeling that integrated spatial, visual, quantitative, and qualitative data. The project states its aim as generating knowledge exchange and live demonstrations relevant to local community development, in support of integrated decision-making and bottom-up governance for healthy outdoor environments.

Jill L. Edmondson, Dylan Z. Childs, Miriam C. Dobson, Kevin J. Gaston, Philip H. Warren, Jonathan R. Leake · The Science of The Total Environment · United Kingdom

Combining citizen science data on self-provisioning crop yields with field-mapping and GIS analysis of allotments, this study estimated city-scale fruit and vegetable production from urban allotments in Leicester, UK. The average area of individual allotment plots under cultivation was 52%, and citywide allotment production was estimated at more than 1,200 t of fruit and vegetables plus 200 t of potatoes per year, equivalent to feeding over 8,500 people; using the 13% of plots that are completely uncultivated could raise this to over 1,400 t, feeding around 10,000 people, though this production may not be located where the need for fresh produce access is greatest. Allotment land peaked at 475 ha in the 1950s compared with 97 ha currently, a decline estimated to correspond to a fall from more than 45,000 to under 10,000 people fed per year.

Arne Backlund, Annette Holtze · Linnaeus Eco-Tech · Europe

A report on one of several wastewater projects run since 1998 by Storstrøm County and A & B Backlund ApS in Denmark, examining source-separating (diverting) toilet technology and the composition of collected human urine mixture and composted faeces, carried out under an Action Plan administered by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. User experience in the Danish projects shows the diverting technology is accepted in housing areas, works well in public places, and is highly appreciated in allotment gardens, though further technical improvement is still needed. Comparing the collected urine mixture's nutrient, heavy-metal, organic-compound and microorganism content against organic fertilizers used in Danish agriculture, the analyzed urine mixture was found to be of high quality.

Géraldine Brown, Nathan Kerrigan, Jana Fried · Pure (Coventry University) · United Kingdom

This report presents an evaluation, conducted by a team of Coventry University researchers, of Garden Organic's London Food Poverty Project (LFPP) in Southwark, London, UK, which adapts the organization's Master Gardener Programme. Prior independent evaluations of the Master Gardener Programme had identified positive outcomes for volunteers, communities, households, and substance-misusing prisoners across health and wellbeing, skills and employability, community life, food eating and buying, food recycling and composting, relationship building, and recovery support. Funded by the Hirschmann Foundation, the LFPP aimed to build resilience and knowledge in an urban locality identified as an area of deprivation, targeting individuals and families across Southwark communities at risk of or experiencing food poverty, using an approach that encourages participation in food growing and cooking on a low income. The report is organized into four sections: background context, the collaborative community research approach, key findings on community growing, cooking, and networks, and reflections and learning points.

Giuseppe Aliperti, Silvia Sarti · Manchester University Press eBooks · Italy

This study analyzes, as a case study, an urban gardening initiative in the central neighbourhood of a mid-size Italian city, developed through participatory planning interventions and the requalification of urban sites. Noting that most existing research on spatial justice has focused on metropolitan settings, it examines the issue in a smaller urban area. Several actors were involved in implementing the initiative, and residents and local retailers were identified as the groups potentially subject to spatial injustice. Comparing the perspectives of these different stakeholders, the study measures both the positive and negative impacts of the initiative on the local community.

Donald Gray, Laura Colucci‐Gray, R.A. Donald, Aristea Kyriacou, Daniel Wodah · Scottish Educational Review · United Kingdom

A study of a school garden project in three regeneration areas of a Scottish city, run in partnership among a teacher education institution, an NGO, a city council planning and infrastructure department, and three primary schools, used a semi-ethnographic approach to collect observation data, visual data, and teacher and pupil interviews. Analyzed through a socio-material lens, the findings articulate significant changes in the discourses and practices of learning associated with school gardening: beyond delivering curricular outcomes or practical skills, tending the gardens and growing food contributed to a learning aesthetics that foregrounds the centrality of the body in learning, acknowledges the living state of materials, and positions children's actions as ways of being and becoming in the world.

Global Generation · Global Generation · United Kingdom

Global Generation's Skip Garden was a portable urban garden that operated for 10 years, from 2009 to 2019, within a 67-acre King's Cross construction site, relocating within the site as land was sold and developed. Food was grown in skips by young people and local business volunteers, using largely self-sustaining organic practices including composting, rainwater harvesting and beekeeping, with produce served at the on-site Skip Garden Kitchen.

BBC News · BBC News · United Kingdom

BBC News reported that Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh closed after going into liquidation on November 1, 2019, with the loss of 18 jobs. The charity had provided volunteering opportunities and support to disadvantaged young people and adults and drew about 200,000 visitors a year. It had survived a 2016 closure threat via a crowdfunding appeal that raised more than £100,000, but trustees decided it could not find a sustainable future amid declining external funding and rising costs. Its roughly 100 livestock and pets were to be sold or re-homed.