Growing Community Gardens in Cities

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Peter Harnik

An eighth excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have created parkland by adding community gardens to underutilized spaces. Community gardens are a vastly underappreciated and underprovided resource for cities, both at ground level and on rooftops. As reported [...]

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“Greening Cities, Growing Communities” Offers Lessons on Community Gardens

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Elissa Hoagland Izmailyan

The community garden movement, born in the 1970s, has gained momentum throughout the past decade. According to the Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, there are at least 650 community gardens under park agency jurisdiction alone in major U.S. cites. Jeffrey Hou, Julie Johnson, and Laura Lawson provided insight on the movement [...]

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Community-Based Gardens (& Groups) Help Renew Cleveland

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Ben Welle

We just read a nice story about residents and a community group working to revitalize the Stockyards neighborhood in Cleveland, which has recently had homes going for as low as $1,500, an increasing supply of empty parcels and no viable plans for redevelopment. Writing in Communities and Banking (pdf) (the magazine of the Federal Reserve [...]

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Philadelphia: Improving Access to Gardens & Markets

Posted on August 12, 2009 by Ben Welle

With the community gardening movement experiencing increasing popularity, some cities are undertaking innovative efforts to expand access to these facilities. In Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter directed the creation of a strategic plan called Green Works. One of the plan’s key goals is to “bring local food within 10 minutes [walk] of 75 percent of residents. [...]

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Lots for Community Gardens: Save or Not Save

Posted on June 18, 2009 by Ben Welle

An article in the Philadelphia Daily News on the city’s burgeoning reliance community garden grown food mentions an issue dealth with in many cities creating gardens, but then wondering what will happen to that land when development returns: The houses that once stood on 49th Street near Brown were built on unstable fill. Decades ago, [...]

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Community Garden Round-Up

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Ben Welle

The news program 60 Minutes recently featured Alice Waters and the locally grown food movement, visiting the Edible Schoolyard that Waters helped create. The school garden offers a great example of connecting kids to the growing and making of food. Also, Citiwire recently featured an article from Farley Peters on an increased government role in [...]

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Urban Farms & Parks

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Ben Welle

Community gardening is a growing area in which parks are playing a role. Karrie Jacobs of Metropolis magazine reviews a new book on urban farming and talks about the places she sees as ripe for it. The best thing I learned from Hungry City is that urban agriculture doesn’t need high-end architecture. Steel devoted a [...]

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