Download or read book Greening Cities Growing Communities written by Jeffrey Hou and published by Land and Community Design Case. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are thousands of community gardens all across North America, only a few cities, such as Seattle, include them in their urban planning process. This book reports on the making of Seattles community gardens and the multiple roles they play in the citys life. It touches on such issues as planning and design strategies; stewardship; community, professional, and government participation; and programs built around the gardens, especially those aimed at low-income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors. It will appeal to a broad audience of professionals, educators, community organizers, citizens, and policy makers interested in improving the quality of life in their own communities.
Download or read book City Bountiful written by Laura J. Lawson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-05-30 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The social history of American cities would not be complete without a full account of the rise of community open spaces. Lawson does exactly this by providing a compelling and poetic account of the history and making of urban gardens. Combining solid scholarship with engaging images of the gardens and stories of their makers, this book sheds new light on the value of urban open space. More important, it explains why community gardens need to stand alongside city parks as permanent open spaces. Essential reading for community developers and landscape architects as well as anyone who ventures outside, enthusiasm and shovel in hand, to improve their local environment.—Mark Francis, author of Urban Open Space and Village Homes "The definitive history of the past hundred years of America's experience with community gardens. A labor of love by a garden activist, the book appears at a most appropriate time—today our city dwellers and suburbanites are retreating onto carpets of passive open space tended by homeowner associations and lawn care outfits. Lawson thoughtfully analyzes the weaknesses of community gardens when used as a response to social crises and, by contrast, investigates community gardens as an alternative to today's managed care of open space. Her history clearly presents a way of community living that we can elect if we choose her wisdom."—Sam Bass Warner, Jr, author of To Dwell Is to Garden "An important book about how the urban gardening movement is transforming our landscape and reconnecting us to the land."—Alice Waters, Owner, Chez Panisse
Download or read book The Wealth of the Commons written by David Bollier and published by Levellers Press. This book was released on 2014-05-23 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of "progress" and governance. In short, how they've built their commons. In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private commoditization of shared resources - often known as market enclosures - while documenting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale - but most of all, it's about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. "This fine collection makes clear that the idea of the Commons is fully international, and increasingly fully worked-out. If you find yourself wondering what Occupy wants, or if some other world is possible, this pragmatic, down-to-earth, and unsentimental book will provide many of the answers." - Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future
Download or read book Community Gardens and Urban Space written by Alexandra Jane Ashton and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Participatory Design and Self building in Shared Urban Open Spaces written by Carolin Mees and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book investigates the development of community gardens with self-built structures, which have existed as a shared public open space land use form in New York City’s low-come neighborhoods like the South Bronx since the 1970s. These gardens have continued to be part of the urban landscape until today, despite conflicting land use interests, changing residents groups and contradictory city planning. Both community gardens and self-built structures are created in a participatory design and self-built effort by urban residents and are an expression of the individual gardeners’ preferences, their cultural background and the decisions made by the managing residents’ group in regards to the needs of their neighborhood. Ultimately community gardens with self-built structures are an expression of the people’s will to commonly use this land for open and enclosed structures next to their homes in the city and need to be included in future urban planning.
Download or read book The Urban Garden City written by Sandrine Glatron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of the role of gardens in cities throughout different historical periods. It shows that, thanks to various forms of spatial and social organisation, gardens are part of the material urban landscape, biodiversity, symbolic and social shape, and assets of our cities, and are increasingly becoming valued as an ‘order’ to follow. Gardens have long been part of the development of cities, serving different purposes through the ages: shaping neighborhoods to promote health or hygiene, introducing aesthetic or biological elements, gathering the citizens around a social purpose, and providing food and diversity in times of crisis. Highlighting examples that can serve as the basis for comparisons, the chapters offer a brief panorama of experiences and models of gardens in the city – in the European context and in various periods of history – while also discussing issues related to garden cities, urban agriculture and community gardens. The contributors are university staff from various disciplines in the human and life sciences, in discourse with other academics but also with practitioners who are interested in experiences with urban gardens and in promoting an awareness of their spatial, social and ‘philosophical’ goals throughout history. The book will appeal to urban geographers, sociologists and historians, but also to urban ecologists dealing with ecosystem services, biodiversity and sustainable development in cities. From a more operational standpoint, landscape planners and architects are sure to find many of the projects enlightening and inspirational.
Download or read book Urban Gardening as Politics written by Chiara Tornaghi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.
Download or read book From the Ground Up written by Efrat Eizenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little-known, and hidden between skyscrapers and wide avenues, some 650 community gardens dot New York City. Set within one of the densest and most expensive real estate markets, these gardens are attended by some of the least advantaged residents of the city. Urban residents use these spaces for horticulture, recreation, social gatherings, and artistic and cultural events. They manage the gardens collectively and with relative independence from top-down control. Despite continuous threats from market forces the gardens have been able to thrive as significant community spaces since the 1970s. This book shows how, in the process of attempting to protect these highly contested spaces, residents developed as community leaders and urban activists. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to follow the political development of urban residents, the book examines how everyday spatial practices, social interactions, the production of alternative urban space, and the generation of new urban knowledge render community gardeners into important social actors in the urban scene. The book argues that with this process of production of space a new type of ’organic resident’ evolves. These urbanites constantly engage with their urban environment, find ways to make the city more supportive for their collective needs, and produce the city in their own image. Community gardeners as organic residents claim their right to the city, act to materialize their vision of the city, and utilize the special potential of the locale to constitute themselves as powerful social actors on the urban scene.
Download or read book Urban Garden USA Community Gardening as a Tool of City Planning written by Theresa Löwenstein and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-05-18 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Landscape Management, grade: 1,3, , course: City Planning, language: English, abstract: In modern times society in most U.S. cities changed to “bedroom communities” where people stay home, watch television and forget how to live in the cultural, urban or even village sense. At the same time, however, issues such as global warming and sustainability gained attention, which led to the re-emergence of a movement within the city: Community Gardening. The question to be answered is if Community Gardens/Urban Gardens (CG) are planned as a means to other objectives or an end in itself. If it is a means to other ends, the CG is only beneficial until the other aim is achieved. If not, the gardens serve a greater use than only to overcome crisis. This in turn would be an indicator that CG should be more recognized as a city-planning tool instead of decrease in times of peace and wealth. In order to find out what role CG play in today’s urban planning and how it can contribute to improve urban conditions, I first have to illuminate the current problems in today’s cities. After having a general overview on the present urban conditions I than focus on the historical and current development of CG in general and in particular in the United States (U.S.). Later I take a closer look on the general objectives behind the emergence of urban garden movements and the benefits that they contained in the past and present. Looking at recent prime examples of urban gardens in Berlin and San Diego will shed light on the goals behind and particular the benefits CG have on today’s urban environments, communities and its residents. In the end I’ll give some recommendations on how CG should be implemented in the field of city planning to improve the described urban conditions.
Download or read book The Community Gardening Handbook written by Ben Raskin and published by CompanionHouse Books. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community gardens are "cropping" up all over, allowing neighbors to work together, grow together, and reap the delicious rewards of their labor together. As more and more people become interested in getting back to nature and growing their own food, the community-gardening movement is exploding in popularity, giving city and suburban dwellers an opportunity to try out their green thumbs. This colorfully illustrated guide to community gardening offers comprehensive planning and planting advice to those looking to start a community garden as well as to those interested in joining an existing garden. Inside The Community Garden Handbook: -Profiles of different types of community gardens around the world, such as community-supported agriculture, shared plots and individual plots, orchards, rooftop gardens, movable gardens, and more -Getting the whole family involved in the community's gardening efforts -Starting a community garden from scratch, including gathering a team, navigating the legalities, and securing funds -Organizing fun community events, such as seed swaps and workshops, to raise awareness of and draw participants to community gardens -Selecting a site, Planning the garden's layout, irrigation system, and division of plots -A season-by-season schedule of tasks to maximize growing and harvesting and maintain the garden in the off-season -A plant directory featuring detailed descriptions of close to 50 flowers, fruits, vegetables, herbs, and more that will thrive in a community-garden setting
Download or read book Hot Sweaty Mamas written by Laurie Kocanda and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors, moms, and fitness enthusiasts Kara Douglass Thom and Laurie Kocanda work to balance motherhood and fitness. They know other moms struggle to make exercise a priority in their lives because they speak with similarly minded women at seminars and on their blogs. It was from these conversations--and the interest in them--that the idea for Hot (Sweaty) Mamas was born. This book is perfect for every mom or mom-to-be thinking about starting an exercise program, as well as moms already pursuing their fitness goals. Hot (Sweaty) Mamas reaches a wider audience than other fitness books that merely focus on "getting your prebaby body back" by presenting advice on how to pursue fitness despite a busy schedule, how to carve out time with or without kids to work out, and how to get the support needed to pursue fitness goals. Moms who find it difficult to start or stick with an exercise program will learn how to reframe their thinking. Women who continue to work out and struggle with the guilt sometimes associated with taking "me time" will be reassured. Mothers-to-be will feel better prepared to pass a legacy of health and fitness to their children and make fitness and motherhood coexist. Thom and Kocanda reveal the secrets to being a fit mom inside Hot (Sweaty) Mamas.
Download or read book Community Gardening in an Unlikely City written by Tyler Schafer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community gardening is as much about community as it is gardening, and compared to growing plants, cultivating community is far more difficult. In Community Gardening in an Unlikely City: The Struggle to Grow Together in Las Vegas, Schafer documents his time as a member of a fledgling Las Vegas community garden and the process through which a rotating group of gardeners try to forge community. He demonstrates the ways in which choices gardeners make about what goals to pursue, or who belongs, or what story to tell about their collective efforts, influence how they and others experience and interpret the garden. The garden culture that emerges over time shapes how, or whether, community is practiced at the garden, and has important consequences for the gardeners’ abilities to connect with the low-income, Black and Latinx community in which it is located. Schafer’s analysis provides important insights about urban culture, the environment, and food justice in the American Southwest, and a sober look into the often messy process and practice of community.
Download or read book Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice written by Chiara Certomà and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents an in-depth and theoretically-grounded analysis of urban gardening practices (re)emerging worldwide as new forms of bottom-up socio-political participation. By complementing the scholarly perspectives through posing real cases, it focuses on how these practices are able to address – together with environmental and planning questions – the most fundamental issues of spatial justice, social cohesion, inclusiveness, social innovations and equity in cities. Through a critical exploration of international case studies, this collection investigates whether, and how, gardeners are willing and able to contrast urban spatial arrangements that produce peculiar forms of social organisation and structures for inclusion and exclusion, by considering pervasive inequalities in the access to space, natural resources and services, as well as considerable disparities in living conditions.
Download or read book The Struggle for Eden written by Malve von Hassell and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2002-01-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing at a time when the further destruction of community gardens had been legally forbidden, but the city council was voting to continue replacing them with development, Hassell (behavioral sciences, Suffolk County Community College, New York) presents one perspective on the history and current status of urban community gardens on the Lower East Side of New York City. He concentrates on the last two decades of the 20th century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Download or read book Community Gardening as Social Action written by Claire Nettle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a resurgence of community gardening over the past decade with a wide range of actors seeking to get involved, from health agencies aiming to increase fruit and vegetable consumption to radical social movements searching for symbols of non-capitalist ways of relating and occupying space. Community gardens have become a focal point for local activism in which people are working to contribute to food security, question the erosion of public space, conserve and improve urban environments, develop technologies of sustainable food production, foster community engagement and create neighbourhood solidarity. Drawing on in-depth case studies and social movement theory, Claire Nettle provides a new empirical and theoretical understanding of community gardening as a site of collective social action. This provides not only a more nuanced and complete understanding of community gardening, but also highlights its potential challenges to notions of activism, community, democracy and culture.
Download or read book Breaking Through Concrete written by David Hanson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There’s a conviction among many sustainable agriculture advocates that the best way to move agriculture forward is to look back. The hope is to return to an exalted era in agriculture, to the kind of rural scene fit for a Rockwell painting or a Shaker Village—to food grown the old fashioned way. Breaking Through Concrete is not that, which is exactly the point. This ode to urban farming is not nostalgic (those are skyscrapers in the background, not silos), but instructive. It's a beautiful, gritty and very real portrait of the possibilities for the future of food." — Dan Barber, Executive Chef & Co-owner of Blue Hill "A road map to the future of America. A blueprint of possibilities. A book full of remarkable stories of neighborhood visionaries, stories of people who grow community in their gardens. Where others see trouble, they see food and hope." —NPR's Kitchen Sisters "Finally, a book on the full continuum of urban agriculture in America, replete with inspiring images of the people and places behind today's city-grown food. Hanson and Marty tell these stories with such admiration for their subjects you'll want to bestow hero status to city farmers." —Darrin Nordahl, author of Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture “Breaking Through Concrete will satisfy readers hungry for a broad perspective on urban agriculture. The beautiful stories and photographs of successful programs throughout North America, combined with practical ‘how to’ guides, provides a valued resource for practitioners, advocates, scholars, and gardeners.” —Laura Lawson, author of City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America
Download or read book Guide to Community Gardening written by Vincent Bronson and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-31 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Marin Master Gardeners, "a community garden is any piece of land gardened by a group of people, utilizing either individual or shared plots on private or public land". Community gardens provide fresh products and plants as well as contributing to a sense of community and connection to the environment and an opportunity for satisfying labor and neighborhood improvement. They are publicly functioning in terms of ownership, access, and management, as well as typically owned in trust by local governments or not for profit associations.Community gardens vary widely throughout the world. In North America, community gardens range from familiar "victory garden" areas where people grow small plots of vegetables, to large "greening" projects to preserve natural areas, to tiny street beautification planters on urban street corners. Some grow only flowers, others are nurtured communally and their bounty shared. There are even non-profits in many major cities that offer assistance to low-income families, children groups, and community organizations by helping them develop and grow their own gardens. In the UK and the rest of Europe, closely related "allotment gardens" can have dozens of plots, each measuring hundreds of square meters and rented by the same family for generations. In the developing world, commonly held land for small gardens is a familiar part of the landscape, even in urban areas, where they may function as market gardens. They also practice crop rotations with versatile plants such as peanuts, tomatoes and much more.Community gardens are often used in urban neighborhoods to alleviate the food desert effect. Food accessibility described in urban areas refers to residents who have limited access to fresh produce such as fruits and vegetables. Food deserts often serve lower-income neighborhoods usually in which residents are forced to rely on unhealthy food options such as expensive processed foods from convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. Community gardens provide accessibility for fresh food to be in closer proximity located in local neighborhoods. Community gardens can help expand the realm for ensuring residents' access to healthy and affordable food in a community.Community gardens may help alleviate one effect of climate change, which is expected to cause a global decline in agricultural output, making fresh produce increasingly unaffordable. Community gardens are also an increasingly popular method of changing the built environment in order to promote health and wellness in the face of urbanization. The built environment has a wide range of positive and negative effects on the people who work, live, and play in a given area, including a person's chance of developing obesity Community gardens encourage an urban community's food security, allowing citizens to grow their own food or for others to donate what they have grown. Advocates say locally grown food decreases a community's reliance on fossil fuels for transport of food from large agricultural areas and reduces a society's overall use of fossil fuels to drive in agricultural machinery. A 2012 op-ed by community garden advocate Les Kishler examines how community gardening can reinforce the so-called "positive" ideas and activities of the Occupy movement.Community gardens improve users' health through increased fresh vegetable consumption and providing a venue for exercise. A fundamental part of good health is a diet rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, and other plant based foods. Community gardens provide access to such foods for the communities in which they are located. Community gardens are especially important in communities with large concentrations of low socioeconomic populations, as a lack fresh fruit and vegetable availability plagues these communities at disproportionate rates.
