Research & reports

Éric Duchemin, Fabien Wegmuller, Anne-Marie Legault · VertigO · Canada (Montreal)

A 2010 study on urban agriculture (AU) in Montreal, Canada, examined the city-managed community garden program and six collective gardens managed by community organizations. These AU initiatives, aimed at food security, socialization, and education, were found to serve as significant vegetable production sites and venues for socialization and education, fostering individual and collective social development in neighborhoods with a strong presence of economically disadvantaged populations.

Benjamin Amundson, Janbaaz Ghani, Joseph Shen, Nanette Ho, Patricia Szeto, XiaoLin Shi · cIRcle (University of British Columbia) · Canada

This document is a student project/report from UBC SEEDS, presenting findings, opinions, conclusions, and recommendations related to a new SUB Rooftop Garden. It is not an official document of UBC and may not reflect the current status of activities.

Andrew Flachs · Electronic Green Journal · United States

This paper explores the social and cultural effects of urban gardening in the greater Cleveland area, noting that the social impact of community gardens is less studied than other benefits. The author's fieldwork found that many gardeners combine utilitarian functions with environmentalist ideology, contrary to some authors who claim that gardeners are preoccupied with economic impact, leading to a biased conclusion about motivations. The paper aims to convey the complexity of use, function, and intent in these communal spaces.

Amy Oprean · Human Biology · United States

This abstract introduces Kami Pothukuchi, Ph.D., director of SEED Wayne, a volunteer-based organization at Wayne State University. SEED Wayne focuses on building sustainable food systems on campus and in Detroit communities. The organization conducts research projects to explore Detroit's potential for sustainability in urban agriculture and local food systems.

Emma Schroeder, Daniel J. Arp · · United States

In a 2010 interview with Emma Schroeder, Dan Arp recounted his experiences living in Eagle Heights as a graduate student in the late 1970s. Arp shared his recollections of participating in the gardens with fellow Eagle Heights residents, discussing the variety of plants and vegetables grown, organic gardening practices, weeds, pesticides, and irrigation. This interview was conducted for inclusion in a Master's thesis focusing on the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.

Michelle M Althaus Ottman, Juliana Maantay, Kristen Grady, Nério Cardoso, Nilce Nazareno da Fonte · PubMed · United States (New York City)

This project explores urban agriculture and productive landscaping in the Bronx, New York City, focusing on community gardens as an alternative to address urban problems. The study aims to describe the multiple roles of these gardens, including health-promoting, economic, environmental, and cultural benefits, and to reveal gardeners' perceptions of quality-of-life improvements. The Bronx currently hosts approximately 175 community gardens administered by Operation Green Thumb, alongside others managed by non-profits and on private property.

Megan Sheridan · University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (University of Minnesota) · United States (Minneapolis)

This project aimed to facilitate the creation of a commercial urban farm in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis. Goals included developing a business plan for an economically viable urban farm. The project found that economic viability without foundation grants is challenging, and site control is key.

Emma Schroeder, Krishna Ramanujan · · United States

In his 2010 interview with Emma Schroeder, Krishna Ramanujan shared his memories of the Eagle Heights Community Garden. Mr. Ramanujan discussed the ethnic diversity of the gardeners, the tensions between the Gardens and the University, and balancing graduate school while raising a young family in the Eagle Heights community. This interview was conducted for inclusion in a Master's thesis on the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.

Emma Schroeder, Patricia A. Palmieri, Tom Palmieri · · United States

In a 2010 interview, Tom and Pat Palmieri shared their memories of the Eagle Heights Community Garden. They discussed organic gardening practices, the seasonal vegetables they cultivated, and challenges such as weeds. The Palmieris also expressed their continued interest in gardening after their time at Eagle Heights.

Jennifer Sumner, Heather Mair, Erin Nelson · International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability · Canada (Ontario)

This paper presents a case study of Fourfold Farm CSA, an urban agriculture exemplar in south-western Ontario, Canada. Analysis of in-depth interviews with CSA members and co-founders revealed that the farm serves as more than just a source of organic food. It links urban food consumers with producers through cultural activities, emphasizing civic engagement and community.

Nicoletta Rolla · Projets de paysage · United States (New York City)

This paper introduces the backgrounds of Michela Pasquali, a landscape architect and botanist, and Franco La Cecla, a cultural anthropologist and author of the preface. Pasquali has worked on several garden projects in the United States and Italy, and published the book "I giardini della diplomazia" in 2000.

C. Clare Hinrichs · · United States (Pennsylvania)

This paper argues for sociologists' engagement with sustainable food systems, illustrating the urgency of agricultural and food issues through sketches. One sketch highlights the 2009 tomato blight in the Northeast, which devastated crops from commercial to home gardens. This blight was traced to tomato starts from large nurseries supplying major retailers, demonstrating how local food can be linked to large-scale industrialized agriculture.

Los Angeles and Seattle · · United States

This study examines two case studies of urban farms in the United States: the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, California, and Marra Farm in Seattle, Washington. These sites and their embedded political and social processes reveal much about current food systems and struggles for justice. The research focuses on the conscious strategies immigrant communities utilize to reinvent space in these urban sites, forming place-based resistance and project identities.

Sarah Rabkin · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · United States (California)

This interview, conducted by Sarah Rabkin at Jim Nelson's home at Camp Joy Gardens in Boulder Creek, California, on August 20 and October 23, 2008, features Nelson discussing the founding and early days of the UCSC Garden, his experiences with Alan Chadwick, the creation and evolution of Camp Joy, and his philosophy as a farmer-educator. Camp Joy Gardens is a 4.5-acre farm in Santa Cruz County that organically cultivates crops using biodynamic principles and supplies produce to twenty-five local families through a community-supported agriculture program.

Laura Whitzling, Michelle M. Wander, Ellen Phillips · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States (Chicago)

This study profiled soil quality, including lead levels, in 10 Chicago community gardens, comparing raised beds to non-raised beds and adjacent bare soil. The overall mean soil lead level was 135 ppm (n=86) by EPA method, with a range of 10-889 ppm. While most gardens' lead levels were not a concern, higher lead in adjacent bare soil suggested contamination risk. Use of raised beds reduced lead levels, but further study is needed.

Irene H. Reti · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · United States

María Inés Catalán was born in Santa Teresa, Guerrero, Mexico, in 1962, immigrated to the United States in 1986, and picked broccoli and carrots in California's Salinas Valley; her father was also a migrant farm worker, while her grandfather had farmed his own land in Mexico. In 1994 she entered an organic farming training program at the Rural Development Center in Salinas (an earlier incarnation of ALBA, the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association), after which she became the first Latina migrant farm worker to own and operate a certified organic farm in California and the first Latina in the country to found a farm distributing produce through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Since 2001, Catalán and her family have run Catalán Family Farms on fifteen rented acres in Hollister, California, certified organic by CCOF in 2005, growing kale, chard, strawberries, tomatoes, corn, onions, pumpkins, chiles, and carrots for sale through the Laughing Onion CSA and farmers' markets in the Salinas, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay areas, including the Ferry Plaza Market and the Berkeley Farmers' Market. She is also an activist for food security among low-income communities, especially Latinos, having worked with the group P.O.D.E.R. in San Francisco's Mission district to deliver CSA shares, collaborated with schools, churches, and the Homeless Garden Project's CSA in Santa Cruz to deliver boxes to home-bound residents, provided CSA information in Spanish, and set up a farm stand outside the Monterey County government office on WIC pickup days. She also founded the nonprofit Pequeños Agricultores en California (PAC) to help immigrant farmers obtain organic certification and apply for grants and loans.

Carlie Speedlin · Lincoln (University of Nebraska) · United States

A case study at Saratoga Elementary, a K-5 Title I school in Lincoln, Nebraska, with 266 students, 47% minority, 28% receiving special education, and 80% eligible for free or reduced-price meals, where a garden space had been built and an after-school garden club had been running since the previous spring semester. Educators were surveyed on their attitudes toward outdoor classrooms and the cognitive (emotional) benefits of outdoor education, while students self-assessed their emotional state using emotion stickers before and after garden club. The study found no significant difference in students' cognitive (emotional) response before versus after garden club participation, with only a 0.02 increase on a 1-5 emotional scale. Teacher surveys found that 50% of respondents did not include outdoor activities in their curriculum planning and 50% did not use outdoor activities or recess to alter student behaviour; all teacher respondents were aware of the outdoor space (school garden), but only 60% had used it for an activity, and only 53% were assessed as "aware" of the cognitive or emotional benefits of nature for children.

Sarah Rabkin · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · United States (California)

An oral-history interview record with Amy Courtney, founder of the Freewheelin' Farm CSA in Santa Cruz County, California, USA, conducted by Sarah Rabkin on January 16, 2009. Courtney, a 1997 graduate of UC Santa Cruz's Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture, started the farm in 2002 using almost no motorized vehicles, incorporating used equipment and recycled materials; CSA shares are still delivered by bicycle-drawn trailer six miles into Santa Cruz, with farming partners Kirstin Yogg and Darryl Wong. Courtney's background includes work with school gardens, the Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project, the United Farm Workers, the AFL-CIO, and an agricultural extension program in Cuba. The farm collaborates with "Food, What?!," a youth empowerment program based at UCSC's Life Lab Garden Classroom, and hosts a community art show, yoga classes and cooking instruction with Zen priest Edward Espe Brown. At the time of the interview, Courtney and her partners had just signed a lease for an additional parcel, multiplying the farm's acreage eightfold.

Emma Schroeder, Eric Olmanson · · United States

In this 2010 oral history interview conducted by Emma Schroeder for a master's thesis on the Eagle Heights Community Gardens, former UW–Madison graduate student Eric Olmanson recalls his experience at the Eagle Heights Community Garden. He discusses organic farming, plants that behaved like invasive weeds, permanent versus rented plots, and the garden's international community.

G. M. Hettiarachchi, Sabine Martin, A. David Rae, Phillip P. Defoe, Dennis Presely, G. M. Pierzysnki · · United States

Using a newly established urban community garden in Kansas City as a case example, this study examines the challenges of converting brownfield sites — abandoned or underutilized properties where environmental concerns impede redevelopment — into community gardens. Soil at the site was found to contain mildly elevated levels of lead (Pb) and detectable levels of DDT/DDE (an organochlorine pesticide). Based on an evaluation of soil properties, safety and corrective measures were proposed and implemented to reduce both direct (soil-to-human) and indirect (soil-to-plant-to-human) exposure for gardeners and their children, and field test plots with three crop types showing different contaminant-uptake patterns were established to evaluate site-specific soil amendments for reducing lead bioavailability.

Kathryn Colasanti · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States (Detroit)

Using Detroit, Michigan as a case, this study developed a methodology based on secondary data to estimate the acreage needed to supply, as far as seasonally possible, the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by city residents, and compared these requirements against a catalog of publicly owned vacant parcels in the city. Using high-yield, biointensive growing methods, 31% of seasonally available vegetables and 17% of fruit currently consumed by 900,000 people could be supplied on less than 300 acres, without extraordinary postharvest management or season-extension technology.

Michael Raleigh · eCommons (Cornell University) · United States

This essay argues that the U.S. food system, being heavily industrialized, consumes large amounts of fossil-fuel energy — citing an estimate that it takes 10 calories of energy to produce one calorie of food — through fossil-fuel-powered planting, spraying, fertilizing, irrigation, tilling, harvesting, processing and transport, all of which generate greenhouse gases and make the food system a major contributor to climate change. It positions the development of urban farms in Buffalo as a necessary strategy to "de-carbon" the food system, on the grounds that urban farms use human labor in place of oil-powered machines and, being smaller than industrial-scale farms, can be managed with fewer machines, with home gardens and small urban farms claimed to be more productive per unit of land and energy than large-scale farms despite their low-tech approach.

Nathan McClintock, Jenny Cooper · PDXScholar (Portland State University) · United States (California)

Between summer 2008 and spring 2009, an inventory identified open space owned by public agencies within the city limits of Oakland, California, that could support urban agriculture. The project mapped Oakland's public commons land to inform food, health and environmental policy decisions and to help nonprofits and city officials identify candidate sites for urban agriculture programs.

Leonardo da Fonseca Barbosa, José Pedro da Silva, Gabriela Vieira Junges, Weverton de Goes Duarte, Cícero Luiz Calazans de Lima, Jakes Halan Queiroz Costa · REVISTA ELETRÔNICA EXTENSÃO EM DEBATE · Brazil

A preliminary diagnostic study of agricultural and environmental conservation activities in the Tabacaria quilombola community, located in the rural zone of Palmeira dos Índios, Alagoas, Brazil, the only such community officially recognized by the state, used monthly participatory meetings, a questionnaire, and site visits to assess potential locations for a community garden. The diagnosis found an absence of technical assistance or guidance from any public agency and a lack of information reaching the community. Agriculture remained subsistence-based, centered on cassava, corn, beans and fava beans, with ecological soil and water management practices practically nonexistent. The study calls for awareness-raising and information activities to address these gaps and for the development of sustainable agricultural practices.

Sharon Zukin · Oxford University Press eBooks · United States (New York City)

An ethnographic narrative describing three community gardens in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York City, long known as one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. On a Saturday morning in mid-October, beneath elevated subway tracks, the piece describes three lush, carefully tended gardens planted in neat rows with green beans, mint, onions, peppers, tomatoes and squash. Since the 1990s these gardens have been created and maintained through the effort and planning of a small number of neighborhood community gardeners, subsidized by city and state government but also at times jeopardized by it. The gardens are described as a tangible symbol of the ongoing struggle to put down roots in the city for those without much money.