Research & reports

Jefferson Pietroski Mota, Tamyres Ferri, Souza Manoella Cristina · · Brazil

A narrative account of the Horta Orgânica do CCA (HOCCA) project at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, from its founding to its consolidation. It describes converting neglected shared campus spaces into food-growing areas and spreading ecological-farming knowledge to the university and community through technical and thematic workshops. No quantitative outcome measures are reported.

Amy J. Williams · VCU Scholars Compass (Virginia Commonwealth University) · United States

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.

Monica M. White · University of North Carolina Press eBooks · United States

Using historical methods to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter examines Freedom Farms Cooperative, a 680-acre agricultural cooperative that activist Fannie Lou Hamer started in 1969 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which included a pig bank, a Head Start program, community gardens, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a sewing cooperative, a tool bank, and low-income affordable housing as strategies to support African Americans who had been fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered sharecroppers and tenant farmers education, retraining, health care, and disaster relief for those who wanted to remain in the Mississippi Delta, and the chapter presents it as a historical model of collective and shared ownership for rebuilding communities around food production.

Natalia Matesanz Ventura · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · United States (New York City)

A case study of more than 50 gardens dotting the Loisaida neighborhood in southeast Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1960s, city agents — neighbors, artists, and architects such as Matta-Clark and Fuller — have built the green spaces and public facilities the neighborhood lacked, activating community and self-managed spaces through affective, dissenting processes. Using architectural forms whose generative parameters depart from traditional design and existing hegemonies, these actors have appropriated the city and reprogrammed public space by creating common space. Stands, domes, and casitas (tiny houses), with their vernacular and kitsch forms, constitute a network centered on the historical lot of La Plaza Cultural. The community gardens form a DIY network of delocalized but interconnected spaces with their own codes, positioned against the real estate market, media encroachment, globalization, and the private appropriation of public resources.

Matheus Fernandes Iida Domiciano, Andressa Giovannini Costa, Tatiane Melo de Lima, Bruno Nery Fernandes Vasconcelos, Leidiane da Silva Rodrigues, Cleuder Roque Arruda de Matos · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

A university extension project (UFU's PEIC, with the Nucleus of Agroecology Studies of Cerrado Mineiro, NACEM) installed and maintained a vegetable garden at a nursing home for the elderly in Monte Carmelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil, involving university teachers, students, community volunteers, and elderly residents. The project reports indirect social and economic benefits, including interaction between students and elderly residents, inclusion activities for the elderly, and sale of garden produce to the community, which contributed to the residents' diet quality.

Emma Sutphen · Clark Digital Commons (Clark University) · United States

This practitioner report examines the Giving Garden, a community garden at Coogan Farm established in 2013 by the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center in New London County, Connecticut, and its effects on community health and regional food security. Based on participatory research drawing on the author's experience as a 2017 summer intern and subsequent Assistant Garden Manager, the garden contributes to reducing local food insecurity by supplying seasonal fruits and vegetables grown through biointensive, regenerative practices. Findings suggest Giving Garden members experience a heightened sense of community, recipients of garden produce achieve greater overall health, and educational programs teaching sustainable farming practices promote more ecologically friendly household farming and gardening.

Ednaldo Michellon, Janaina Miyashiro Simon, Aldeir Isael Faxina Barros, Victor de Canini Cezar, Jaqueline da Silva Rosa, Wellington Fernandes Pereira · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

The municipality of Maringá, Brazil, has 37 community gardens that make use of abandoned or underutilized natural resources while improving participating families' environment and quality of life. Since 2008, the Reference Center for Urban and Periurban Agriculture (CerAUP), created amid social movements advocating for public policy support of urban and periurban agriculture, has provided technical assistance and voluntary extension services for such projects. This study used a questionnaire with participants of the Villa Atenas community garden to assess satisfaction with cultivating medicinal plants, the plants cited, their forms of use, plant parts used, and purposes of use. Results showed high satisfaction with the space used for cultivating medicinal plants, but only superficial knowledge among participants of the plants used and their purposes, leading the authors to conclude that popular and scientific knowledge about these plants needs wider dissemination.

Roberta Hoepers Mascarenhas, Adrian José Ramos, Ana Beatriz Boos dos Santos, Eduarda Nunes, Emile de Lima Pollheim, Eric Schwamberger, Gabriela Santos Patriarca, Julia Novak Baumgart, Kassia Kathellyn Barboza, Lucas Augusto Venske, Mara Alice Pereira, Maria Eduarda Batista Tiago, Naira Zesuino, Rossie Katherine dos Santos, Samuel Carvalho de Matos-Filho, Vinícius Verwiebe, Helenadja Santos Mota, Tatiane Sueli Coutinho · Anais da Mostra Nacional de Iniciação Científica e Tecnológica Interdisciplinar (MICTI) - e-ISSN 2316-7165 · Brazil

A community medicinal-herb garden project in Brusque, Brazil, catalogued 32 medicinal herbs through a literature review and selected 28 of them for planting and further study, aiming to raise community awareness of natural treatments through a booklet and talks at schools in the Brusque municipal school network. The first activity was carried out with students from APAE, a special-education institution.

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

A research project examining the association between food insecurity, community gardens, and property value in Southern Nevada, United States. It set out five research questions—where community gardens are located, what agencies are doing with gardens to address food insecurity, perceived supports and barriers to using gardening for food insecurity, whether housing values changed after community gardens were established (using existing public data), and stakeholders' perceptions of property-value changes—and conducted interviews with key community garden stakeholders. The abstract does not report specific numerical findings from these inquiries.

Ebrahiem Babiker, Stephen Stringer, Hamidou F. Sakhanokho, John J. Adamczyk, Arlen D. Draper · HortScience · United States

'Muffin Man' is described as a new public-domain, edible ornamental cultivar of rabbiteye blueberry (Vaccinium virgatum), a species commercially important in the southeastern United States for its tolerance of common biotic and abiotic stresses, developed amid growing interest in edible landscaping as an alternative to conventional ornamental landscapes. The abstract text is truncated and provides no further cultivar details.

Robin Sakina Mama · · United States

A book chapter examining a community garden developed at Monmouth University, a small private liberal-arts university in suburban New Jersey, United States, as a form of university-community collaboration. It discusses the garden's growth, successes and lessons learned, noting that community gardens are commonly started to address food insecurity but often expand into other functions such as neighborhood revitalization, community pride and a sense of ownership, with the building of social community described as central to the endeavor. The chapter is descriptive and reports no quantitative data.

Virginie Lavallée-Picard · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · Canada

This paper describes the background, policy and program changes, implementation, and early outcomes of "Growing in the City," a municipally led comprehensive strategy launched in 2016 by the City of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, to expand food production within the city. It focuses on initiatives enabling small-scale commercial urban food production and public-realm community programs—including community gardens, boulevard gardening, an inventory of city-owned land with community gardening potential, and a pilot program to plant food trees on city land—and discusses the success factors, challenges, and areas for improvement in achieving the initiative's goals.

Chatura Vaidya, Kaleigh Fisher, John Vandermeer · Sustainability · United States

A study placed experimental bumblebee nests at 10 sites (nine of them community gardens) across an urbanization gradient (0-99% urbanization) in the United States to assess the effects of urbanization on colony development and reproductive success. Reproductive success and colony size were positively correlated with the nests' cumulative weight gain (p < 0.05), but the degree of urbanization had no significant effect on population growth rate or forager activity (p > 0.05). Growth rate was strongly negatively affected by the abundance of wax moth larvae (p < 0.05) and positively correlated with parasite diversity (p < 0.05) and the number of foragers entering the nest (p < 0.01). The study concludes that both bottom-up and top-down effects are equally important for pollinator population dynamics.

Virginia L. J. Bolshakova, John Gieng, C. Sheena Sidhu · California Agriculture · United States (California)

In San Mateo County, California, teen ambassadors trained by UC Cooperative Extension educators and volunteers at UC Elkus Ranch taught nutrition science, food cultivation and healthy living skills to elementary schoolchildren in an urban setting through an 8-week, garden-based after-school program (the Healthy Living Ambassador Program) in spring 2015. A mixed-methods pilot study measured children's vegetable selection and consumption preferences and teens' perceived self-efficacy in healthy living behavior. Children trended toward increased preference for gardening, cooking and science, and teens showed an increase in perceived health self-efficacy.

Charles C. Branas, Eugenia South, Michelle C. Kondo, Bernadette C. Hohl, Philippe Bourgois, Douglas J. Wiebe, John M. MacDonald · PNAS 115(12): 2946-2951 · United States (Philadelphia)

A citywide cluster-randomized trial assigning 541 Philadelphia vacant lots to treatment or control. Residents near treated lots (445 surveyed) reported significantly reduced perceptions of crime (-36.8%), vandalism (-39.3%) and fear of going outside (-57.8%), and significantly increased use of outdoor space for relaxing and socializing (+75.7%). In neighborhoods below the poverty line, police-recorded crime also fell significantly: overall crime -13.3%, gun violence -29.1%, burglary -21.9%, nuisance crime -30.3%. Concludes that vacant-land restoration is an effective, scalable infrastructure intervention against gun violence, crime and fear.

David Ceaser · Agritecture · United States

In this December 7, 2018 article for Agritecture, horticultural consultant David Ceaser reports on the challenges facing agrihood development, using The Cannery in Davis, California (500+ homes, 150 acres, with a 7.4-acre organic farm) as a case study. He notes that residents held unrealistic expectations about how the farm would be run and their role in it, and that poorer-than-expected soil quality required amending with organic matter, delaying farm development. Farm Director Sri Sethuratnam described the aging farmer population and food-production challenges as "a national security issue."

Horta das Corujas · Horta das Corujas (blog oficial) · Brazil

The official blog of Horta das Corujas, a volunteer-run community garden on Praça das Corujas in the Vila Beatriz neighborhood of São Paulo. Opened on September 29, 2012, the roughly 800 m² garden practices agroecological vegetable and herb cultivation, restores a local spring, keeps bees, and hosts school environmental-education visits. It operates without formal permits, run by volunteers, with about 10-15 people regularly active.

Lee R.E., Parker N.H., Soltero E.G., Ledoux T., Hernandez I., Sahnoune I. · BMC Public Health, 17:242 · United States

Piloted SAGE—a 12-session garden education program with songs, games, taste tests and garden care—for 89 children aged 3–5 in six early care and education centers across two US cities, evaluating reach, efficacy and implementation using the RE-AIM framework for PA and fruit and vegetable intake.

Rosalie M. Sharp, Daniel J. Brabander · GeoHealth · United States (Boston)

This study assessed lead (Pb) bioaccessibility, transport, and exposure pathways in urban gardens in Roxbury and Dorchester, MA, in partnership with The Food Project, which brings local farmers into the research. Compost had lower total Pb, lower gastric Pb solubility, and less fine-particle resuspension than soils, with a mean bioaccessible Pb of 265 mg/kg—nearly an order of magnitude lower than soils. Across all matrices, grain sizes under 37 μm held a disproportionate share of bioaccessible Pb, whose isotopic composition pointed to leaded gasoline and leaded paint.

Tammy E. Parece, James B. Campbell · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems · United States

This study used the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from U.S. Landsat 5, 7, and 8 satellites to assess the environmental impact of urban community gardens across three eastern U.S. cities—Roanoke, VA; Pittsburgh, PA; and Buffalo, NY—over the 2007–2015 growing seasons. It reports that establishing community gardens altered seasonal NDVI trajectories, sometimes declining initially but then increasing over time, revealing the vigorous vegetative character of urban agriculture.

Nagle L., Echols S., Tamminga K. · Journal of Green Building · United States (Pennsylvania)

Monitors the productivity of a 7.5 m² outdoor living wall planted with produce crops during the 2015 summer in State College, Pennsylvania, also collecting irradiance, water-use and soil-moisture data.

Safransky S. · Antipode · Detroit, USA

Examines Detroit's land reordering (including greening and urban farming) under fiscal austerity, arguing that repurposing 'vacant' land reignites racialized dispossession and undermines the sovereignty and land claims of existing low-income Black communities.

Sbicca J., Myers J. S. · Environmental Sociology · USA

Using two food justice organizations in the Bay Area and New York, the article situates urban food activism within 'racial neoliberalism,' showing that food/urban-agriculture movements are inseparable from racial and economic inequities and structures such as mass incarceration.

Paddeu Flaminia · Town Planning Review · USA (Detroit)

Examines Detroit's 2012 zoning ordinance legalising urban agriculture, arguing it functioned as a contested 'planning for decline'. Shows the reform was shaped by political trade-offs and left land-tenure and equity questions unresolved, limiting real benefit to residents.

· Journal of Urban Affairs · USA (Detroit)

Analyzes the political controversy over disposing municipal vacant land for urban agriculture in Detroit (incl. the Hantz large-scale scheme), showing how the land-disposition policy stoked fears of speculative land grabs and 'giving up' on the city rather than delivering community benefit.