Urban Gardens As a Solution to Food Insecurity, Food Inequities, and Hunger

Food inequities, food insufficiency, and food insecurity are a growing problem, with recent supply-chain breakdowns exacerbating existing problems, and increasing the number of people experiencing food precarity. An innovative way to increase food self-sufficiency, food insecurity and social resilience in urban contexts is to develop urban gardens. These give communities the opportunity to grown their own food, thereby increasing their food security. In addition, the social innovation provides numerous other health-mediating benefits, including raising self-esteem, providing outdoor time, socializing, and providing an opportunity for the intergenerational transmission of food production knowledge.

This project focuses on identifying the factors that mediate the successful implementation of community gardens. Towards that end, we carried out a trans-disciplinary and comparative analysis of cases in New Zealand, Mexico, Columbia and the United Kingdom. Analysing cases that ranged in levels of success, we identify: 1) the social processes through which particular urban gardens were established; 2) the economic, political, legal and cultural obstacles that needed to be navigated; 3) how groups sought to circumnavigate those obstacles; and 4) what mediated the effectiveness of those responses. The research provides a blueprint for communities who are endeavouring to develop a social response to 21^st century food crises.