Research & reports

Etienne Louis Nel · · South Africa

A 2019 book chapter examines community-based Local Economic Development (LED) in South Africa through three authority-based cases: Kei Road, the Independent Development Trust project, and East London. In Kei Road, a small rural service centre near Bisho in the Eastern Cape, the organization Eyethu launched a community-gardens project to promote household self-sufficiency and small-scale farming, and also runs a women's bulk-buying co-operative to reduce household costs. In 1993, Kei Road again drew attention when refugee numbers temporarily swelled due to people fleeing a faction fight in the neighboring village of Kwarini.

Athena K. Ramos, Natalia Trinidad, Sonja Bickford, Nate Bickford, Julia Torquati, Maria Mushi · Collaborations A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice · United States

A study conducted a bilingual online survey to gauge public support for a planned community garden in South Omaha, Nebraska, and to prioritize messaging strategies about its potential benefits. Assessing interest, perceived benefits, purposes, and desired co-located functions, the study identified the value of developing local data, the importance of an asset-based framework, the need to understand community perceptions of potential benefits, the challenge of balancing community research efforts, and the need for partnerships to expand a project's reach.

Devin C O'Mara · Fordham Research Commons (Fordham University) · United States (New York City)

This 2019 paper examines the potential of urban agriculture to increase food security and education for underprivileged children in New York City, United States. Chapter 1 addresses the issue of food insecurity among children, considering information on the number of children lacking access to healthy, fresh food. Chapter 2 traces the history of urban agriculture in New York City, from one person's rooftop to a broader sustainability movement. Chapter 3 examines the potential outcomes of integrating urban agriculture into social justice efforts for underprivileged children, covering food security, education, and physical and mental health. Chapter 4 analyzes how incorporating urban agriculture into future sustainable infrastructure could benefit everyone, not only children. Drawing on the preceding chapters, Chapter 5 offers recommendations for creating greater access to urban agriculture for children.

Alice A. Oluoko-Odingo · Journal of Climate Change and Sustainability · Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines gender mainstreaming in adaptation to weather and climate extremes, centered on peri-urban farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although women provide most agricultural labour, they remain poor and among the most vulnerable to weather and climate extremes because of inequalities in ownership of and decision-making over land, assets and cash; even in well-planned African cities, developmental and environmental challenges continue to perpetuate inequality, discrimination and underdevelopment, with low-income communities living in risky areas without access to key services and facing heightened vulnerability. Combining literature review with fieldwork in peri-urban Nairobi (Machakos and Kajiado Counties), Kenya, the paper discusses how gender mainstreaming in peri-urban farming could support Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 13, while noting the research gap on gender mainstreaming in peri-urban farming as itself a problem the field has yet to address.

Marjanca Kos, Janez Jerman · Problems of Education in the 21st Century · Global

A quasi-experiment with one control and one experimental group, each comprising 15 children aged 6-7, examined the effect of school gardening activities on children's knowledge of and attitude toward eating garden vegetables. Individual interviews established prior knowledge and attitudes; the experimental group then carried out activities in a school garden built in cooperation with a nearby organic farm, after which interviews were repeated in both groups. Results showed that both groups had poor general knowledge of garden vegetables at the outset, but after the garden activities the experimental group's knowledge improved to a statistically significant degree and their attitude toward eating vegetables became more positive.

Micajah Daniels, Courtney Coughenour · Digital Scholarship - UNLV (University of Nevada Reno) · United States

This project uses Black Feminist Health Studies as an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the holistic impacts of community gardens on nutrition behaviors. It demonstrates, through a Socio-Ecological Wellness Wheel, that the implementation of green spaces such as community gardens correlates with both benefits and unintended negative consequences, including green gentrification, and proposes this audit tool as a way to empirically measure garden quality and the nutrition environment affecting fruit and vegetable consumption among food-insecure populations.

Angel Chen, David Natcher · Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l alimentation · Canada

An inventory and mapping exercise catalogued community gardens and greenhouses across northern Canada, covering Labrador, Nunavik, Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The work forms part of a circumpolar research project supported by the Arctic Council's Sustainable Development Working Group and is described as an initial stage toward determining the extent to which these gardens and greenhouses, as local food procurement strategies, meet the food needs of northern residents.

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.

Blakely Brown, Laura Dybdal, Curtis W. Noonan, Maja Pedersen, Martin Parker, Mary Corcoran · Health Promotion Practice · United States

On an American Indian reservation, a community-based participatory research approach applying a social-ecological model identified the factors that promote or hinder community gardens and the use of locally grown food, and tested the feasibility of a group gardening program for Native American adults. Interviews with nine key stakeholders identified knowledge/experience, self-efficacy, Elders, traditional ways, community values, generational gaps and local tribal policy as influencing factors. In a feasibility study with 20 Native American adults with prediabetes or diabetes, Profile of Mood States scores showed consistently more positive change among group gardening participants than among a comparison group.

H N Vidya · Iconic Research and Engineering Journals · Asia

This is a discursive paper arguing for the need to raise awareness of women's empowerment through home gardening as a means of household food security. It presents home gardening as a form of urban agriculture offering self-sufficiency from home-grown produce, increased self-confidence, and household food security, while noting that expanding home gardens in metro cities is constrained by water supply shortfalls, insufficient garden space, deficient sunlight, and competing land use as apartments and shared housing outnumber individual homes. No specific study population, sample size or data-based results are presented.

Ana Raihan Putri · Jurnal Ilmiah Mahasiswa Arsitektur dan Perencanaan · Indonesia

The design of low-income housing (perumahan dhuafa) in Lhokseumawe city, Indonesia, is presented as an effort by the city government and community to provide livable housing for residents classified as below the poverty line, proposing a design concept that embodies harmony between the living environment and society. The planned housing forms a "fostered area" intended as a new district where Lhokseumawe's poor can develop their economic quality of life by drawing on surrounding environmental resources; it will include public facilities such as a mosque, commercial space, hall, early-childhood education center, and park, alongside facilities for the fostered economy, including skills-training rooms for processing organic and inorganic waste into commercial goods, fish farming, and urban farming. The design's goal is to create better-organized urban space free of slums while raising living standards through livable housing equipped with facilities that support the poor's economic activities, applying a contextual architecture approach emphasizing local wisdom and natural materials in local vernacular style, intended to bring harmony among culture, the natural environment, and society within a framework of modern development.

Vanessa Daufenback, L. A. Z. Machado, Cláudia Maria Bógus · Revista Ingesta · Global

A systematic review using the Scielo database to examine the relationship between urban agriculture (UA) and food and nutrition security (SAN) in Latin America. A search for "agricultura urbana" returned 156 articles; screening by title and keywords narrowed this to 32, and excluding non-Latin-American studies left 26 articles connecting UA and SAN to some degree. Only 5 of these made a direct link between SAN and UA; the rest addressed only some dimension of the concept, and the review found no concrete, agreed definition of UA across the literature. Few studies treated the urban farmer or production scale as central to promoting SAN, despite UA's role in food-sovereignty practices such as seed exchange and preserving planting traditions. Most of the reviewed studies pointed to significant problems, including contamination of crops by heavy metals, difficulty achieving environmental, social and economic sustainability — particularly for farmers who end up working in other sectors — and a lack of technical assistance.

Ruth W. Moyer, John M. MacDonald, Greg Ridgeway, Charles C. Branas · American Journal of Public Health 109(1): 140-144 · United States (Philadelphia)

A citywide cluster-randomized trial assigning 541 Philadelphia vacant lots across 110 geographic clusters to a greening intervention, a minimal mow-and-clean intervention, or control. Shooting incidents fell significantly in the greening arm (-6.8%, 95% CI -10.6 to -2.7) and the clean-and-green arm (-9.2%, 95% CI -13.2 to -4.8), with no evidence of displacement to adjacent areas. Concludes that inexpensive, scalable vacant-land remediation significantly reduces shootings resulting in serious injury or death, and recommends cities pilot place-based interventions to reduce firearm violence.

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.

Anderson C., Maher J., Wright H. · Cogent Social Sciences · Australia

Qualitative study of volunteers at a university-based community garden in Queensland, Australia, identifying enablers, barriers, and the social, educational, and career benefits relevant to sustaining institution-supported community gardens.

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.

Siegner A., Sowerwine J., Acey C. · Sustainability 10(9):2988 · United States

Systematic review of US urban agriculture and food systems literature. Finds strong emphasis on multiple benefits but few studies robustly measuring urban farms' impact on food security in low-income communities.

Lategan F. S., Crous M. L. · South African Journal of Agricultural Extension 46(2):89-106 · South Africa

Comparing urban-farming and non-farming households in Cape Town's informal settlements, this study finds 78% severely food insecure; urban farmers were slightly more food secure but differences were not statistically significant.

Nadal A., Cerón-Palma I., García-Gómez C., Pérez-Sánchez M., Rodríguez-Labajos B., Cuerva E., Josa A., Rieradevall J. · Land Use Policy 76:719-734 · Mexico

Through interviews with 65 stakeholders in Mérida's social housing, this study analyzes social perceptions of urban agriculture in low-income Latin American settings, exploring its potential for safe, nutritious food supply and social benefits.

Vij S., Narain V., Karpouzoglou T., Mishra P. · IIED Working Paper, International Institute for Environment and Development · India

This paper examines rural-urban transformations in India's neglected peri-urban areas in relation to food production, access, consumption, and nutritional quality, arguing peri-urban agriculture could be a major contributor to pro-poor food security and poverty alleviation.

Haniotou H., Dalipi E. · In: Glatron S., Granchamp L. (eds) The Urban Garden City: Shaping the City with Gardens Through History. Springer, Cham, pp. 245–268 · Greece

The chapter surveys the proliferation of urban community gardens across Greek metropolitan areas, situating their emergence in the context of economic crisis and examining their effects on urban residents' livelihoods and relationship to green space.

Korn A., Bolton S.M., Spencer B., Alarcon J.A., Andrews L., Voss J.G. · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol. 15, No. 8 · Peru (Lima)

A longitudinal pilot study examining the feasibility and health outcomes of household garden implementation in a Lima urban slum, collecting anthropometric and mental health data at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months, finding positive associations with nutritional status and wellbeing.