Community gardens are a vastly underappreciated and underprovided resource for cities, both at ground level and on rooftops. As reported by University of Illinois Landscape Architecture Professor Laura Lawson in her excellent book City Bountiful, surveys from the 1970s and 1980s revealed that while gardening was Americans’ favorite outdoor leisure activity, somewhere between 7 million and 18 million people wanted to garden but weren’t able to because they did not have the space. With today’s higher population, including millions of immigrants who live in cities but still have deep cultural attachments to agriculture, the situation is now unquestionably more severe. In a nation engulfed by profligate use of land, the irony is hard to miss.

Not only does the Central Bainbridge St. Community Garden produce thousands of pounds of vegetables, it also serves as a hub of activity in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community. Credit: Avery Wham.

Community gardens do not have full-fledged pedigrees as parks, but they are certainly members of the extended family, and they are overwhelmingly urban. Coming in a diversity of forms, they can provide beauty, supply food, educate youth, build confidence, reduce pesticide exposure, grow social capital, preserve mental health, instill pride, and raise property values. In 2008, The Trust for Public Land’s survey of the park systems of the seventy-seven largest cities revealed 682 gardens (and 12,988 individual garden plots) specifically owned by park departments and located on urban parkland.

The national movement has a great deal of exuberant vitality, demonstrated even by place names and their fostering organizations: the Garden of Eatin’, Queen Pea Garden, Harlem Rose Garden, Jes’ Good Rewards Children’s Garden, Paradise on Earth, Garden Resources of Washington (GROW), Denver Urban Gardens (DUG), Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG), San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), and Los Angeles’ Gardening Angels. But the movement is also severely underfunded, poorly organized, and subject to a bruisingly high level of burnout and turnover. (GROW, SLUG and BUG have all gone out of business.)

Put simply, between the legalities, the neighbors, and the typical challenges of soil and weather, urban agriculture is extraordinarily difficult, even more difficult than running normal public parks. But, community gardens make extremely efficient use of space. An area that could barely fit a single tennis court might hold 75 garden plots; a soccer field might be replaced with 300 or more. Moreover, gardens can be placed close to streets and railroads because they have no errant balls bouncing into traffic.

Most cities have plenty of underused or even unused chunks of parks that could be developed into community gardens. Even super-crowded places like Jersey City and San Francisco have parkland that is essentially unvisited. That doesn’t automatically mean it’s perfect for gardening–it may be too shady or too deep within a big park to be reachable by potential gardeners–but those drawbacks might be fixable through tree trimming or park redesign. Gardens need to be near edges where they can be seen and where people, vehicles, and irrigation water can easily reach them. But putting a garden near an edge helps open up the next internal ring of the park to greater use, thus gradually reclaiming what might be a no-man’s land in the interior.

On the other hand, putting a community garden into an existing park could well mean not putting in a soccer field, dog park, or memorial grove that some other constituency wants. Thus, developing a new, standalone community garden leaves existing parkland unmolested and raises the tide for everyone. (It also provides a boost to home values in the surrounding community; a 2007 study by the New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy found that gardens in New York’s poorest neighborhoods lifted property values by up to 9.4 percent after five years.)

A community garden program cannot be left to operate reactively. It must be designed to protect gardens at the beginning of the process, not at the end. Gardens must be clearly recognized as an integral part of a city’s park system, and they should be included in all redevelopment projects–particularly those that are high-density and that are marketed to former suburbanites who may love all aspects of the city except its lack of gardening space. As of 2009, the only city that has a truly sophisticated garden structure is Seattle. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and several other places have relatively strong private-sector agencies or public-private partnerships that own, hold and support significant numbers of community gardens, but only Seattle’s P-Patch program proactively plans, sites, negotiates, sets rules, and protects gardens throughout the city.

With 68 gardens totaling 23 acres and containing 1,900 plots cultivated by 3,800 gardeners, Seattle's P-Patch is the national model for a city-run community gardening program. Credit: Seattle P-Patch Program.

P-Patch, which began in 1973 and was named after Rainie Picardo, the farmer who first allowed residents to begin gardening on his land, once even counted as a gardening member Mayor Wes Ulhman. Today P-Patch has sixty-eight gardens, an annual budget of $650,000 and a staff of six, and Seattle has more garden plots per capita than any other major city. Even more impressive, Seattle’s City Council passed a formal resolution supporting community gardens and recommending their co-location on other city-owned property. The city’s comprehensive plan calls for a standard of one garden for every 2,000 households in high-density neighborhoods (known in Seattle as “urban villages”). Nevertheless, despite this abundance, P-Patch still has a waiting list of 1,900 persons; in crowded neighborhoods that translates to three to four years.

Standalone gardens need not be slotted only to old home sites. One particularly promising locale is along rail lines, both abandoned and active. Community gardens have already been created alongside the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad Trail in Arlington, Virginia; the Ohlone Trail in Berkeley, California, and the Capital City Trail in Madison, Wisconsin. In Queens, New York, the Long Island City Roots Garden was created directly over the tracks of the unused-but-not-abandoned Degnon Terminal Railroad. (To prevent official abandonment the railroad required that the tracks be retained, so the gardeners bulldozed out 140 cubic yards of garbage and covered the rails with 160 cubic yards of clean dirt; the garden is a train-shaped 26 feet wide and 145 feet long.)

While gardens alongside rail trails are fine, they don’t actually increase the amount of parkland in a city. To do that requires moving up to the next level: creating community gardens alongside non-abandoned rail lines. This is a tougher challenge but has an added benefit since there are few parts of a city less attractive than the edges of a railroad. Some analysts are convinced that rail ridership would jump up a few notches solely if the view was pleasanter. Back in the 1960s, Lady Bird Johnson spearheaded the remarkably successful highway beautification program, but no subsequent first lady (or anyone else) has taken on what might today be called an extreme track makeover program. Could gardens lead the way?

One notable success is in Madison, Wisconsin, where the St. Paul Avenue Garden operates under a license with the Wisconsin Central Railroad, a subsidiary of Canadian National Railways. The line is lightly used by low-speed freight traffic, so there is not even a fence alongside the tracks. The 72-plot, 25-foot-wide garden runs for about two blocks in an intense utility corridor that includes a buried fiber-optic cable and an overhead high-tension line. “It used to be a dumping ground sort of place,” explained Joe Mathers, garden specialist with the Community Action Coalition for South Central Wisconsin. “Then, in the early 1980s Madison got a lot of Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia so we started looking for land for them to farm. We were in a recession so there was land available. When the economy improved development resumed and we lost some spaces. But we should always be able to hang on to this garden–nothing is permitted to be built here.”

There are a scattering of community gardens alongside rail lines in Chicago, some consisting of flower gardens to beautify station areas, and there is a garden in the Bronx, New York, alongside a large railroad storage yard. In both those cities, the rail owners are public agencies–Metra and the MTA, respectively. Public rail agencies may be more amenable to leasing or licensing trackside space than private train operators, although no detailed study of opportunities has yet been carried out.

Read more about the benefits of community gardens in an earlier post.

A P-Patch Garden in Seattle (City of Seattle)

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 during a  presentation this Wednesday sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Foundation.

They detailed the findings from their new book Greening Cities, Growing Communities, which profiles six community gardens in the Seattle Area, describing the benefits they provide and ideas for their improvement. Among those were three gardens from the P-Patch program, a partnership between the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, which provides land and staff support, and the P-Patch Trust, a non-profit which provides funding for gardening efforts.

Lawson began the presentation by noting that community gardens are often designed for temporary use – founded in vacant lots and other unclaimed places. Despite their cherished status, they are at risk of eventually losing out to development. According to Hou, community gardens are “still at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to urban land use.”

Hou listed a host of benefits that community gardens provide. Among these were:

• Improved health and well being: Gardens foster active living for people of all ages. Caring for plants also improves mental well-being and outlook, while the gardens yield low-cost, healthy produce for their communities.
• Ecological sustainability: Gardens preserve scarce urban open space. Additionally, gardeners are often at the forefront of sustainable landscaping. All of Seattle’s “P-Patch” gardens are organic, and many sites have implemented resource-conserving measures like rainwater harvesting.
• Cultural sustainability: For many of Seattle’s immigrants, gardening is an opportunity to connect with their agrarian heritage. Additionally, gardeners can grow vegetables specific to their cultural cuisines.
• Place-making value: Good community gardens anchor neighborhoods. They provide aesthetic benefits to all residents, and many include tables, benches, and chairs for all to enjoy. The process of collectively managing a garden increases community capacity.

In the final chapters of Greening Cities, Growing Communities, the authors share their recommendations for strengthening gardens, from enlisting design professionals to designating city funding and encouraging networking between garden groups. With praise for the present value of community gardens, they chart a feasible course for their long-term improvement. As one of the garden managers observes in the book, “The garden is never done. It’s a work in progress.”

Stockyards, Cleveland: a new way to use tires in vacant lots.

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 of Boston), Matt Martin and Zachariah Starnik of the Stockyard Redevelopment Organization describe a number of initiatives to stop the downward spiral, from gardens/plantings on city Land Bank parcels with grants and other financial assistance; a collaborative effort between Stockyard and the Ohio State University extension to conduct phyto-remediation (using different types of plant life to cleanse soil) on lots with soil contamination; and a plan that calls for a neglected urban street and adjacent vacant parcels to be developed into a viable green space and corridor. (Stockyard developed a plan that shaped these efforts earlier.)

Most of the article, however, is about a group of citizens in the 48th Street Block Club that led the creation of several gardens on private lots. First, the group pressured the city to tear down abandoned and troublesome buildings and then, without city approval or denial, it started planting gardens on the properties, giving the empty areas an aesthetic turnaround and growing some food for locals in the process. As the article notes:

Revitalization of the lots has improved their appearance and removed a number of former safety risks. The lots have become not only a valuable food resource but also a wellspring of pride. They have united the neighborhood in a single cause, becoming a visible symbol of the neighborhood’s collective power. “We’ve done a lot with a little,” says one club member…….

While no one would claim that merely planting gardens will save a neighborhood, in an area hit by multiple foreclosures every little bit helps. As Art Ledger says, “It’s progress. You’re going to have things that go backwards, too. But we’re ready.”

Just stopping the downward spiral (or “cumulative causation” in economic terms) is in itself a start on the path to revitalization. It is not at all impossible that demand may increase again in this centrally located, historic and “old urbanist” neighborhood in a metro area of 2.3 million people.

Map showing farmers markets, community garden access. Green Works Philadelphia

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.

To accomplish this, the city, with the help of the Philadelphia Horticulture Society has mapped out the existing gardens and their proximity to residents. The maps allows the city to target programs to create new gardens and markets in underserved areas, perhaps concentrating first on higher population density areas or those without other access to fresh food.

Using this information the, Green Works makes the following statement and goals:

Today Philadelphia enjoys 30 outdoor seasonal farmers’ markets, which provide a place for people to gather and purchase agricultural products from the region. An additional 200 food-producing gardens combine to make access to fresh food convenient for even more city residents. And no discussion of access to fresh food would be complete without a nod to Philadelphia’s crown jewel—the Reading Terminal Market. In addition to its being a leading tourist destination, Reading Terminal Market is the leading redeemer of food stamps and Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program vouchers in the state. Yet, as the map [see right] indicates, many city neighborhoods still lack access to locally grown fresh food. To increase this access citywide, Greenworks Philadelphia calls for the creation of 59 food-producing gardens, 12 farms and 15 farmers’ markets in Philadelphia.

This is only one component of Philadelphia’s efforts in this area, but it is one of the most important. As the old business-success-model saying goes, its all about location, location, location.

The houses that once stood on 49th Street near Brown were built on unstable fill. Decades ago, an underground creek slowly swallowed the fill. Foundations cracked. Sinking houses were abandoned, then demolished. Weeds and trash took over. Years went by. Hard rains flooded the land. Mill Creek overflowed the storm sewers, carrying urban contaminants into the Schuylkill.

The Philadelphia Water Department leased the abandoned Mill Creek lot from the city’s Redevelopment Authority in 2003 for a storm-water management project. “We were in the right place at the right time,” Rosen said of herself and gardening colleague Walker. But a cloud of uncertainty looms on the horizon. The land is still owned by the Redevelopment Authority, so it is always at risk for development. The authority’s 99-year lease with the water department can be terminated at any time with 90 days’ notice.

Rosen and Walker are hoping that the authority will transfer the title to the Neighborhood Gardens Association, a land bank that would protect it as green space and assure that it can continue as a farm vital to feeding its neighbors.

This is a great story about reuse of land for the better. The story does raise the issue, however, that some land perhaps should be returned to development at some point. There is a simultaneous need for the ample supply of nearby land for gardening and preserving opportunities for development of land that can repopulate the city and increase population densities. A garden service area map seems a possible solution that we’ll be looking for — in effect, mapping out each resident’s distance to a community garden. In areas with undersupply, new gardens would be needed. In those with oversupply, lots could be returned or reserved for development. Let us know if you’ve seen something like this and we can feature it in a future post.

• Most recently, last fall the magazine had an article (pdf) about how cities can create new community gardens and how parks departments and related agencies can address them.
• An article from 2006 also addressed these issues and more specifically how cities have set up gardening programs.

Lastly, somewhat unrelated to community gardens, but to the larger food policies in the U.S., is the long-form article Michael P0llan wrote for the New York Times magazine last fall. Pollan sees an entirely different set-up for how food is grown and provided to consumers – mentioning a need for more farmers’ markets, crop/grazing rotations that reduce dependence on oil and locally grown food.

The best thing I learned from Hungry City is that urban agriculture doesn’t need high-end architecture. Steel devoted a scant paragraph in her final chapter to the organopónicos, the grassroots network of urban farms that Cuba started after it was cut off from the global supply stream by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States’ trade embargo. They’re organic, low-tech, shoehorned into every available space, impressively productive, and truly inspiring. Reading Hungry City reminded me that there’s a farm right here in Brooklyn called Added Value. It employs neighborhood kids, sells much of its produce to nearby restaurants, and sits atop two and three-quarters acres of an asphalt playfield. Its fanciest structural component is a chain-link perimeter fence.

I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see a 30-story farm rise in New York City, and I’m pretty sure that JFK’s prime acreage will be devoted to takeoffs and landings for the foreseeable future. But I can imagine the minifarm, Cuban style, as an increasingly familiar part of the urban landscape. And I love going to Added Value’s twice-weekly farmers’ market and picking up collard greens and edamame.

One example in which all of this can be found in parks is in Chicago. There, among other gardening programs — the Park District has partnered with Growing Power (whose founder Will Allen was just a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship) to create an urban farm in Jackson Park that is part educational program/part supplier of food to the south side surrounding area.