Community gardening and social cohesion: different designs, different motivations

ABSTRACT

Community gardens vary in several ways: they are cultivated by different kinds of communities in various locations, entail individual or communal plots and the extent of active participation (e.g. gardening) differs. In this paper, we study seven community gardens with varying organisational designs and objectives, and investigate the extent to which these influence the enhancement of social cohesion. We also take into account to what extent differences in motivation among community gardeners matter. Despite these differences in motivation, however, we find that in all of the cases studied, people talk to and get to know others, and mutual help is widespread. We, therefore, conclude that community gardens contribute to the development of social cohesion – even if people are not particularly driven by social motivations. Moreover, while participants who are motivated by the social aspects of gardening naturally show a higher level of appreciation for them, these social aspects also bring added value for those participants who are motivated primarily by growing vegetables.

KEYWORDS:

• Community gardening
• social cohesion
• place-based
• interest-based
• motivations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Community gardens exist in rural areas as well. However, our focus is on urban areas as this paper is part of a broader research into urban food growing initiatives.

2. As not all respondents are gardeners, we refer to people involved in the gardens as “participants”.

3. Witte Vlieg consists of eight people only; we interviewed all of them and two former participants instead of using a questionnaire.

4. One respondent did not want the interview to be recorded; notes were therefore made instead.

5. Categories of similar 0/1 answers were formed. For instance, regarding motivations: “It's a nice way to teach children about food” and “I want to learn about growing food” were grouped into the category “education”, with possible outcomes 0, 1 and 2.

6. For some Doarpstún respondents the garden is also place-based; these respondents live in the neighbourhood, are not interested in gardening and see the garden as a place to meet other residents.

7. Please note that only columns can be compared; as “hobby/gardening” consists of five statements and “social atmosphere” consists of two, the first is bound to have a higher average score.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs under the strategic research programme KBIV Sustainable spatial development of ecosystems, landscapes, seas and regions and by the European Union in the research project Pure Hubs. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.