Research & reports

Roman Szkup · Journal of Geography Politics and Society · Poland

A questionnaire survey was conducted among users of two allotment gardens ("Żeromskiego" AG and "Wolinka" AG) in the Łódź suburban area, Poland, to verify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their behavior and recreation. The analysis showed that while the pandemic affected the behavior and rest of allotment garden users, the impact was not as large as could be expected.

Sam Ramsden · Voluntary Sector Review · United Kingdom

This article explored an externally funded charity-led project in a deprived area of the UK, implementing urban agriculture, community gardening, and household energy activities. The project successfully engaged marginalized people, who strongly voiced outcomes including reduced isolation, improved mental health, and increased resilience and self-reliance. Environmental outcomes were less tangible but included improvements to the local environment and reduced energy usage. However, after the funding finished, marginalized participants were vulnerable to outcomes not being sustained in the long term.

John H. McKendrick, Jed Graham · ResearchOnline · United Kingdom

This report presents the Scottish Poverty and Inequality Research Unit's (SPIRU) review of the volunteer work undertaken with Belville Community Garden Trust during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (mid-March onwards).

Jan Hassink, Angela Moriggi, Saverio Senni, Elisabeth Hense, Dries de Moor · · Europe

A 2020 paper uses care ethics as an analytical tool to examine caring, regenerative agricultural and food practices, including community supported agriculture, urban agriculture, care and social farming, and organic and biodynamic farming. Drawing on empirical cases in the Netherlands and Italy guided by social justice, cooperation, respectful relationships, inclusion, and education, it describes how care for the community, vulnerable citizens, the environment, farm animals, and food is practiced. It identifies challenges farmers face around access to land, budgets, and dealing with the conventional system, and poses as an open question the extent to which such caring practices can influence dominant agricultural and food systems.

Moruzzo R., Di Iacovo F., Funghi A., Scarpellini P., Espinosa Diaz S., Riccioli F. · Social Sciences · Italy

A study exploring how care and social farms provide inclusive environments supporting the personal growth of participants, by researchers affiliated with universities in Italy.

Claire Bustin · · United Kingdom (Sandwell)

A Sandwell church was awarded a £751 town grant by the council to provide equipment for young and elderly people to work in a community garden on their grounds.

Chiara Certomà, Martin Sondermann, Susan Noori · Manchester University Press eBooks · Europe

This chapter critically analyzes the relationship between urban gardening and socio-spatial justice, exploring whether and how urban gardening practices can tackle social and spatial injustices. Urban gardening points out less visible sides of urban governance and planning, unveiling different forms of power, dominance, and resistance to the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in space. The analysis questions the contradictions in the constitution of urban spaces and their capability to mitigate material, political, and social exclusions, unfairness, and inequalities.

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.

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.

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.

Luc Menapace · Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France, blog) · France

Blog article from the BnF's Gallica platform recounting how Abbé Lemire founded the Ligue du Coin de Terre et du Foyer in 1896 to promote workers' gardens. The league was recognized as a public-interest body in 1909, renamed the Fédération nationale des jardins ouvriers in 1921, and renamed again to the Fédération nationale des jardins familiaux in 1992. Gardens were framed as remedies for insalubrity and alcoholism and as sources of food and leisure.

Barykina N. · Urban History (Cambridge University Press) · Germany

Analyzes Berlin's Horseshoe Estate (Hufeisensiedlung) by Taut and Wagner, examining how Weimar public-housing policy, new technologies, bureaucracy, and garden-city ideals shaped this modernist Siedlung as both aesthetic vision and social environment.

Cumbers A., Shaw D., Crossan J., McMaster R. · Work, Employment and Society · United Kingdom

Using Glasgow community gardens as a case study, argues that gardening provides space for important forms of work that address social needs and advance community empowerment in deprived urban areas.

Boštjančič E., Antolović S., Erčulj V. · Frontiers in Psychology · Poland

Investigates how corporate volunteering programs relate to job resources and work engagement, showing employees with volunteering opportunities report higher autonomy, co-worker support, and engagement, linking CSR practices to employee wellbeing.

· Sustainability · Germany

An online survey of 123 community gardens across Germany assessing social sustainability, finding that social benefits—collective activities, socializing and belonging—rather than harvests are the main motivation to participate.

Isabelle Anguelovski, James J. T. Connolly, Laia Masip, Hamil Pearsall · Urban Geography · Spain (Barcelona)

Longitudinal spatial analysis linking Barcelona's municipal greening interventions (parks/green corridors) to gentrification in disenfranchised neighborhoods, providing quantitative evidence that public greening policy is associated with exclusionary neighborhood change.

Laura M. Van Oers, Wouter Boon, Ellen H.M. Moors · Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions · Netherlands

This study investigated how grassroots organizations, specifically Dutch Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), construct legitimacy for their survival. It found that CSAs predominantly work to garner legitimacy from their members, and that survival seems associated with social capital building. A moralization of food provision was observed, which explains why new and possibly inconvenient terms of exchange still amass legitimacy. As external audiences remain at a distance, they often misunderstand CSA, its deliverables, and impacts on social welfare.

Giulia Allegrini · Archivio istituzionale della ricerca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna) · Italy (Bologna)

This paper sheds light on the connection between urban agriculture and social innovation, presenting the “Salus W space” project in Bologna. Financed by the European program “Urban innovation action,” the project aims to regenerate a former private hospital into an innovative space welcoming refugees and people with housing needs.

Nicole Darmon, Pauline Martin, Pascale Scheromm, Florence Ghestem, Paul Marchand, Jean-Noël Consalès, Darmon, Nicole, Martin, Pauline, Scheromm, Pascale, Ghestem, Florence, Marchand, Paul, Consalès, Jean-Noël · AgEcon Search (University of Minnesota, USA) · France

This multidisciplinary study in poor neighborhoods of Marseille, France, investigated whether community gardeners had a larger supply of healthy food, particularly fruits and vegetables, than non-gardeners. Among 21 women gardeners, only eleven harvested during the study month, with an average of 53 g of produce per household member per day. The study found that gardener households purchased significantly more fruit and vegetables (369 g/d per person) than non-gardener households (211 g/d per person), but this difference was due to purchases, not higher quantities produced.

Laurence Baudelet-Stelmacher · In Situ · France

This article traces the emergence and development of the French community garden movement, which began in 1997 with the establishment of the "Jardin dans tous ses états" network. Over 20 years, the movement has expanded significantly in major metropolitan areas and rural settings across France, influenced by North American community garden models. It has addressed environmental respect, participatory democracy, and the need for social connection.

Les Levidow · AgEcon Search (University of Minnesota, USA) · United Kingdom (London)

This research examines the role of 'community' in London's food initiatives and how it stimulates congenial activities through social innovation. These initiatives involve forms of social innovation such as enhancing socio-political capabilities, fulfilling unsatisfied needs, and redefining societal problems. London's food initiatives face challenges in combining these diverse aims and activities.

Veronica Barry, Chris Blythe · · United Kingdom

A book chapter frames community gardens as part of "health care as a community collective," exploring active and passive spaces that support health and well-being through practical, healthy place-making. It develops case studies from Birmingham and the West Midlands, UK: Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, which has extended its health care model beyond its buildings to the surrounding landscape, and Jasmine Road Community Garden in Dudley, where local residents have collectively developed a site supporting community and individual well-being, drawing practical and theoretical insight into how gardens can facilitate individual and collective journeys toward health and recovery.

Sandra Girbés Peco, Ana Inés Renta Davids, Lena De Botton, Pilar Álvarez Cifuentes · Social & Cultural Geography · Spain

This qualitative study, based on communicative methodology, examined "The Dream," a community development process initiated by a group of unemployed Moroccan residents in an impoverished urban neighborhood in Spain, centered on the Mare de Déu de Montserrat School, a Learning Community. The process led residents to create a self-managed community garden that improved their job training and built social networks, and the school is found to have fostered a horizontal, dialogical organization that placed neighbours in central decision-making and leadership roles, helping overcome barriers that had previously hindered community responses.

Michael J. Roy, Neil McHugh, Stephen Sinclair · Stanford Social Innovation Review · United Kingdom

Published 1 May 2018. The authors argue that Social Impact Bonds look like an ideology-neutral financing fix but carry significant technical problems and a troubling ideological shift. At the time of writing the UK had 32 SIBs; government had put in $28 million in 2012 and a further $113.4 million through the Life Chances Fund in 2016, with the UK market predicted to reach $1.4 billion by 2020, while the US had at least 10 SIBs and 19 more existed across 14 other countries. The Peterborough prison SIB's initial result was an 8.4 per cent reduction in reoffending. They find little evidence that SIBs encourage innovation, note the heavy administrative burden, and contend that prioritising investor returns over service users turns citizens into commodities.

Martin P., Consalès J.-N., Scheromm P., Marchand P., Ghestem F., Darmon N. · Appetite · France (Marseille)

Study in a deprived Marseille neighborhood found that socioeconomically disadvantaged women with access to a community garden were more likely to adopt a healthy diet than matched controls without such access.