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The Tip of the Iceberg Lettuce: What direct and indirect factors enable knowledge and skill sharing in community gardens?
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Concerns about the decline in knowledge concerning food growing stemming stem from the Green Revolution, as well as the rapid urbanization since the beginning of the 20th Century. There is a gap in the literature about community gardening in industrialized English-speaking countries, and since sharing of knowledge is a well-documented achievement of community gardens, the aim of this thesis is to find out what direct and indirect factors enable knowledge and skill sharing in community gardens. Using action research methodology, four gardens in Calgary, Canada were used as case studies, in which a total of eight participants were interviewed. This was complemented by a city-wide questionnaire for community gardeners. Encouraging personal satisfaction and using appropriate practical approaches were direct factors, and creating a positive atmosphere in an appropriate space, developing networks, and securing resources were indirect factors contributing to knowledge and skill sharing in gardens. Outcomes included how the roles gardeners take could increase social capital, why inter-garden networking is not thought of as a priority, and that Reflexive Learning is a useful way to approach the subjective aspects of gardening. Possibly the biggest contribution is that knowledge and skill sharing is merely the tip of the iceberg lettuce, and has unique synergies where it is dependent on and contributes to these direct and indirect factors. Finally, proposed action and further research are suggested.
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... Following calls for policy development (e.g. van Veenhuizen and Danso, 2007), the need to manage the explosion of interest of CFG and to genuinely address issues of food insecurity through landscape scale delivery (Smith et al., 2013), governments at all levels are developing policies to support its development (Jermé & Wakefield, 2013;Laycock, 2013) (see also the Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012). These policies -or "new political spaces" (Hajer, 2013) -are not particularly well-researched, likely due to their informal nature (as in Laycock, 2013), or operation outside conventional policy frameworks (Cohen and Reynolds, 2014;Hardman and Larkham, 2014). ...
... van Veenhuizen and Danso, 2007), the need to manage the explosion of interest of CFG and to genuinely address issues of food insecurity through landscape scale delivery (Smith et al., 2013), governments at all levels are developing policies to support its development (Jermé & Wakefield, 2013;Laycock, 2013) (see also the Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012). These policies -or "new political spaces" (Hajer, 2013) -are not particularly well-researched, likely due to their informal nature (as in Laycock, 2013), or operation outside conventional policy frameworks (Cohen and Reynolds, 2014;Hardman and Larkham, 2014). One of the challenges with public policies on urban food growing is that they are seen as 'alternative', which prevents such initiatives moving from the marginal to the mainstream (Witheridge and Morris, 2016). ...
Alongside associated forms of socially and politically conscious food production, community food growing is routinely connected to a wide range of social and environmental benefits. However, robust evidence in support of these associations remains scant, and while the conversation has shifted in recent years to take account of the sometimes unintended or negative aspects of these activities, no consensus has been reached about how such forms of food growing should adapt to new conditions, or be scaled up to maximize their positive impacts. A July 2016 conference was organized to address this strategic shortfall. This themed issue presents the papers resulting from the conference.
... […] I think that that's super vital and that's really powerful…" (Student gardener) This is in line with previous research that found that psychological ownership in community gardens is closely entwined with a sense of responsibility and concern for the space [50], and that gardeners' sense of ownership is an important contributor to knowledge-and skill-sharing in community gardens [51] (these will be picked up on below). Some of the main issues related to ownership over the gardens were a tension between the need for individual or collective ownership over tasks, people claiming ownership without contributing to the garden, and long-term and/or highly involved participants having too much control compared to short-term or less involved participants. ...
In an increasingly mobile world, transience is becoming the norm. Sustainable community food initiatives, therefore, must organise to withstand high turnover of volunteers. Using a case study of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students’ food growing scheme in universities, this paper aims to map the causes and effects of short-term, irregular, and low participation using a causal loop diagram to understand how to mitigate their negative impacts and improve participation. Data was gathered through interviews, workshops, photovoice, a fishbowl discussion, and a reflective diary. We found three amplifying feedback loops increasing short-term, irregular and low participation, their causes, and their impacts. These feedback loops were precariously buffered by a continuous in-flow of new potential participants each academic year. We also found that the stakeholders of these gardens conceptualised time akin to both temporary and permanent organisations, and these differing conceptualisations were a source of tension. Furthermore, although ‘organisational amnesia’ was a problem, the gardens were still learningful spaces. We recommend both upstream and downstream solutions are implemented to buffer the impacts of transience and suggest that university and students’ union staff could play a crucial and subtle supporting role.
Finding ways to alleviate racial tension is all important societal issue. A well-establishcd strategy is to increase positve contact between members of different racial groups, which is hypothesized to lead to improved racial attitudes if the contact takes place under certain conditions. Bridging racial divides, however, has historically been a difficult process. Leisure settings can be ideal environments for interracial interaction to occur due to qualities of free choice and self-determination. This study focuses on a specific type of leisure environment, community gardens located in urban settings. More specifically, the purpose of the study was to examine whether urban community gardens are perceived as spaces in which people of different races can successfully integrate. The study also sought to examine race and its relationship to perceptions, motivations, and benefits of community gardening. The study focused on African American and White gardeners in St. Louis.
In this three-part article we seek to establish connections between the emerging framework of sustainability science and the methodological basis of research and practice in science education in order to bring forth knowledge and competences for sustainability. The first and second parts deal with the implications of taking a sustainability view in relation to knowledge processes. The complexity, uncertainty and urgency of global environmental problems challenge the foundations of reductionist Western science. Within such debate, the proposal of sustainability science advocates for inter-disciplinary and inter-paradigmatic collaboration and it includes the requirements of post-normal science proposing a respectful dialogue between experts and non-experts in the construction of new scientific knowledge. Such a change of epistemology is rooted into participation, deliberation and the gathering of extended-facts where cultural framings and values are the hard components in the face of soft facts. A reflection on language and communication processes is thus the focus of knowledge practices and educational approaches aimed at sustainability. Language contains the roots of conceptual thinking (including scientific knowledge) and each culture and society are defined and limited by the language that is used to describe and act upon the world. Within a scenario of sustainability, a discussion of scientific language is in order to retrace the connections between language and culture, and to promote a holistic view based on pluralism and dialogue. Drawing on the linguistic reflection, the third part gives examples of teaching and learning situations involving prospective science teachers in action-research contexts: these activities are set out to promote linguistic integration and to introduce reflexive process into science learning. Discussion will focus on the methodological features of a learning process that is akin to a communal and emancipatory research process within a sustainability scenario.
The relationship between urbanization and the natural environment has never been the focus of an environmental sociological study. This article is an initial attempt to address that gap. First, in the introduction, the author discusses how early traditional urban sociologists and human ecologists variably expressed the human exemptionalism paradigm when examining urbanization. Then, in the body of the article, the author provides an overview of the struggle in environmental sociology to find connections between urbanization and the natural environment. The main focus is on how environmental sociologists have theorized the environmental impact of urbanization, although other relevant topics (e.g., environmental justice in the city) are briefly addressed. Through the course of the article, several principles are developed to help guide a future environmental sociology of urbanization. In the conclusion, the author cites research done by other social and natural scientists to further elaborate on these principles.
In processes of sustainability communication, the communicative interplay between the individual citizen and society, inseparably linked to intermediary levels of mutual mediation and reconciliation, is essential. Since attaining a sustainable society without societal communication about sustainability would seem to be impossible, the design of communicative interfaces between science, politics and the public is of particular significance. As a consequence, this paper aims to highlight meaning, role and interdependencies of sustainability-oriented knowledge communication against the backdrop of universities' education, research, and innovation activities.These approaches do not only allow for deepened analyses and substantial optimization of stored knowledge but, furthermore, also highlight opportunities for various contexts of sustainability-oriented governance – above and beyond higher education. Subsequently, these approaches are critiqued within the context of knowledge communication and analysed in the light of the contrasting “internal rationalities” of science and politics. In doing so, trends in medialization in both domains are taken as much into account as participative practices for including non-scientific actors in political decision-making.As a result, various dimensions of a dialogically-reflexive communication are proposed against the backdrop of future societal pathways towards sustainability, reflecting the diversity, dynamics and self-organization – all featuring the liaison between science and politics on an organizational basis.
We analyse environmental learning in public-access community gardens ('PAC-gardens') in Berlin, representing public green spaces that are collectively managed by civil society groups. Through extensive fieldwork, and drawing upon social theories of learning, we describe learning communities in four PAC-gardens and analyse factors that influence participation and boundary interaction, that is when experiences brought in from the outside encounter socially defined competences. Results show that these PAC-gardens have self-generated social and physical structures, which to different degrees inhibit or facilitate boundary interactions, whereas skills of individuals to put those to work, in combination with the quality of the surrounding neighbourhoods, can be ascribed for creating broader participation and greater diversity in the content of learning about local sustainability. Identified learning streams included learning about gardening and local ecological conditions; about urban politics, and about social entrepreneurship. We discuss results in relation to environmental learning that combats the generational amnesia in cities about our dependence on nature, where PAC-gardens clearly distinguish themselves from more closed forms of urban gardening such as allotment gardens and gated community gardens. We conclude that PAC-gardens that intertwine gardening with social, political and economic practices can create broader and more heterogeneous learning about social-ecological conditions, and help develop sense-of-place in degraded neighbourhoods.