Urban Gardening Programs – An overview

Laura Lawson writes in her book City Bountiful that Americans have been cultivating urban communal gardens since the 1890s depression, when social reformers started vacant-lot cultivation associations for unemployed laborers cities like Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia.<1> Public and governmental interest in such shared land-use programs has re-emerged periodically over the last century to meet different objectives at different times.  For instance, during times of economic depression, American garden programs sought to foster a self-help ethic among the poor.<2> War garden programs during the late teens (1917-1919) and mid forties were established to instill the virtues of patriotism and thrift among the masses.<3> School gardening programs, which first appeared in 1890, have been recurrently integrated into the academic curricula to teach biology, nutrition, discipline, and respect for living organisms.
 
In the late 60s and early 70s, urban gardening took on an activist agenda.  Gardens of this era were not philanthropically gifted to the downtrodden; they were demanded by those disenfranchised residents of the inner city that had endured urban renewal, white flight, race riots, the Vietnam War, and the end of America’s innocence.<4>  To be a community gardener in the 70s meant to assume local control from the authorities, to organize, to negotiate, and to fight for your greenspace if necessary. 

Now, there are a wide range of urban gardening programs, started by a wide range of actors, to serve a wide range of people.  A relief garden, children’s garden, demonstration garden, horticultural therapy garden, or job-training garden may have been spawned by an individual, philanthropic group, educational reformer, civic group, government agency, or environmentalist. In any case, an urban garden is likely to be supported by numerous sources—relying on local, national, and sometimes international financial grants, as well as volunteer labor.

Yet, despite their complexity of organization and shifting agendas over time, urban garden programs have always held a set of consistent ideological values.<5>  Urban gardens are continually justified as mechanisms for

Reviving nature in the city

Educating and instilling work ethics

Building camaraderie across diverse populations

Lawson states that “garden programs serve to further a vision of what should be in times when society is unclear about where the future is heading.”<6>

 

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<1>  Laura J. Lawson, City Bountiful: A Century of Gardening in America (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 1

<2>  Sam Bass Warner, To Dwell is to Garden: A History of Boston’s Community Gardens (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 13

<3>  Ibid, 17

<4>  Ibid, 20-22

<5>  Lawson, 288

<6>  Ibid., 289