Reviewing University Community Gardens for Sustainability: taking stock, comparisons with urban community gardens and mapping research opportunities

ABSTRACT

Community gardens (CGs) in university settings are faced with challenges associated with a transient and inexperienced population of student gardeners, but they also have the potential to have a lasting impact on the food behaviours of many young people. This paper undertakes a systematic critical review of literature about University Community Gardens for Sustainability (UCGS) in order to suggest directions of future research in the emerging field research about CGs within and outside of universities. The literature shows that UCGS have similar benefits to those identified in urban CG literature; but with greater emphasis on both the educational and environmental sustainability benefits, suggesting an under-used potential of CGs in these areas. We argue that a better understanding of the particular challenges and benefits of UCGS could improve outcomes of CGs in all settings. Therefore we recommend that future should explore: (1) participant transience in CGs, thereby helping sustainability projects with large volunteer bases learn to cope with challenges this poses in order to maximise the garden’s impacts; (2) whether/how participating in CGs can contribute to changes in attitudes/behaviours with regards to sustainability and be used as a tool for Education for Sustainability in and outside of university settings and (3) failed cases of CGs to genuinely understand factors that contribute to success. By addressing these areas we can improve our understanding of how community gardening can contribute to our communities, universities and environment, and can begin to make these potential contributions a reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Education for sustainability
• failure
• higher education
• transience
• volunteers
• urban agriculture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rebecca Laycock Pedersen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5966-5141

Zoe Robinson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9499-264X

Notes

1. Guitart, Byrne, and Pickering (2012) didn’t define what they meant by “life satisfaction”, so we categorised benefits that enhanced participants’ sense of well-being (such as a “slower pace of life” and improved self-confidence/esteem and/or empowerment) under this category.

2. Although it could be argued that Guitart, Pickering, and Byrne’s (2012) “increased biodiversity” theme fit under “environmental sustainability”, it is retained as a separate category to better align with Guitart et al.’s review.

3. While a number of benefits identified by Guitart, Pickering, and Byrne (2012) could fall under the “additional benefits to individual participants” category (such as education, life satisfaction), we retained Guitart et al.’s existing categories, and added a new category called “additional benefits to individual participants” (such as employability benefits and decreased shopping trips) for the benefits that didn’t fit under any other of Guitart et al.’s categories to enable clarity in comparing the findings.

4. Benefits to health, life satisfaction, environmental equity, reduced crime/increased safety and biodiversity are not discussed further because their coverage is very similar in articles about both UCGS and urban community gardens, and apart from health benefits they were only reported by discussed and/or demonstrated by one or two articles each.

5. This term was not defined by Guitart, Pickering, and Byrne (2012).