Community Gardening in an Unlikely City
Community Gardening in an Unlikely City

Author: Tyler Schafer

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1793623139

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Community gardening is as much about community as it is gardening, and compared to growing plants, cultivating community is far more difficult. In Community Gardening in an Unlikely City: The Struggle to Grow Together in Las Vegas, Schafer documents his time as a member of a fledgling Las Vegas community garden and the process through which a rotating group of gardeners try to forge community. He demonstrates the ways in which choices gardeners make about what goals to pursue, or who belongs, or what story to tell about their collective efforts, influence how they and others experience and interpret the garden. The garden culture that emerges over time shapes how, or whether, community is practiced at the garden, and has important consequences for the gardeners’ abilities to connect with the low-income, Black and Latinx community in which it is located. Schafer’s analysis provides important insights about urban culture, the environment, and food justice in the American Southwest, and a sober look into the often messy process and practice of community.

City Bountiful
City Bountiful

Author: Laura J. Lawson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-05-30

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 0520243439

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"The social history of American cities would not be complete without a full account of the rise of community open spaces. Lawson does exactly this by providing a compelling and poetic account of the history and making of urban gardens. Combining solid scholarship with engaging images of the gardens and stories of their makers, this book sheds new light on the value of urban open space. More important, it explains why community gardens need to stand alongside city parks as permanent open spaces. Essential reading for community developers and landscape architects as well as anyone who ventures outside, enthusiasm and shovel in hand, to improve their local environment.—Mark Francis, author of Urban Open Space and Village Homes "The definitive history of the past hundred years of America's experience with community gardens. A labor of love by a garden activist, the book appears at a most appropriate time—today our city dwellers and suburbanites are retreating onto carpets of passive open space tended by homeowner associations and lawn care outfits. Lawson thoughtfully analyzes the weaknesses of community gardens when used as a response to social crises and, by contrast, investigates community gardens as an alternative to today's managed care of open space. Her history clearly presents a way of community living that we can elect if we choose her wisdom."—Sam Bass Warner, Jr, author of To Dwell Is to Garden "An important book about how the urban gardening movement is transforming our landscape and reconnecting us to the land."—Alice Waters, Owner, Chez Panisse

The Wealth of the Commons
The Wealth of the Commons

Author: David Bollier

Publisher: Levellers Press

Published: 2014-05-23

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 1937146146

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We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of "progress" and governance. In short, how they've built their commons. In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private com­moditization of shared resources - often known as market enclosures - while docu­menting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale - but most of all, it's about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. "This fine collection makes clear that the idea of the Commons is fully international, and increasingly fully worked-out. If you find yourself wondering what Occupy wants, or if some other world is possible, this pragmatic, down-to-earth, and unsentimental book will provide many of the answers." - Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future

Start a Community Food Garden
Start a Community Food Garden

Author: LaManda Joy

Publisher: Timber Press

Published: 2014-12-30

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 160469484X

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Recommended by the American Community Gardening Association Community gardening enhances the fabric of towns and cities through social interactions and accessibility to fresh food, creating an enormously positive effect in the lives of everyone it touches. LaManda Joy, the founder of Chicago’s Peterson Garden Project and a board member of the American Community Gardening Association, has worked in the community gardening trenches for years and brings her knowledge to the wider world in Start a Community Food Garden. This hardworking guide covers every step of the process: fundraising, community organizing, site sourcing, garden design and planning, finding and managing volunteers, and managing the garden through all four seasons. A section dedicated to the basics of growing was designed to be used by community garden leaders as an educational tool for teaching new members how to successfully garden.

A Patch of Eden
A Patch of Eden

Author: H. Patricia Hynes

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13:

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Imagine a place in the inner city where flowers and vegetables grow, and trees flourish. H. Patricia Hynes tells the stories of America's urban gardeners, who are transforming rubble-strewn lots in more than 200 cities across the nation into wonderful neighborhood sanctuaries. By describing in detail successful community garden projects in Harlem, North Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, Hynes celebrates an innovative form of urban renewal that is undertaken with seeds, soil, and sweat. These gardens cool and cleanse the air, soften the noise from traffic and factories, collect rainwater that would otherwise drain away into storm sewers, and provide habitat for songbirds and butterflies. A Patch of Eden brings you an ecological story of heroic dimensions. In what might seem to be the most unlikely of places, expert gardeners like Bernadette Cozart, Cathrine Sneed, Rachel Bagby, and Dan Underwood are working with children, elders, immigrants, inmates, low-income people, and no-income people to create gardens that are overflowing with flowers and food. Here is a glimpse of the cities of the future.

Outwitting Squirrels
Outwitting Squirrels

Author: Anne Wareham

Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books

Published: 2015-04-23

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1782433716

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Entertaining and practical, this is an honest book of advice that will be appreciated and enjoyed by amateur and professional gardeners alike.

City of Forests, City of Farms
City of Forests, City of Farms

Author: Lindsay K. Campbell

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-10-15

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1501714708

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City of Forests, City of Farms is a history of recent urban forestry and agriculture policy and programs in New York City. Centered on the 2007 initiative PlaNYC, this account tracks the development of policies that increased sustainability efforts in the city and dedicated more than $400 million dollars to trees via the MillionTreesNYC campaign. Lindsay K. Campbell uses PlaNYC to consider how and why nature is constructed in New York City. Campbell regards sustainability planning as a process that unfolds through the strategic interplay of actors, the deployment of different narrative frames, and the mobilizing and manipulation of the physical environment, which affects nonhuman animals and plants as well as the city's residents. Campbell zeroes in on a core omission in PlaNYC's original conception and funding: Despite NYC having a long tradition of community gardening, particularly since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the plan contained no mention of community gardens or urban farms. Campbell charts the change of course that resulted from burgeoning public interest in urban agriculture and local food systems. She shows how civic groups and elected officials crafted a series of visions and plans for local food systems that informed the 2011 update to PlaNYC. City of Forests, City of Farms is a valuable tool that allows us to understand and disentangle the political decisions, popular narratives, and physical practices that shape city greening in New York City and elsewhere.

Rooted in the Hood
Rooted in the Hood

Author: Anna Angelidakis

Publisher: Oro Editions

Published: 2020-03

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781943532766

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Rooted in the Hood is a photo essay celebrating the community gardens of New York City and the people who create, cultivate, and enjoy them. The late '60s and '70s witnessed the devastation of New York City, with many buildings in low-income areas left unattended, burned, and reduced to rubble. Drug dealers, gangs, and junkies soon moved in making those neighborhoods unsafe to live. This is a book about ordinary people, dreamers, and visionaries rising against these unsafe conditions by clearing empty lots, planting trees and vegetables, and slowly creating small havens for the community. By drawing attention to these local gardens, the book wishes to provide awareness of the importance of green spaces, not only in our great New York City, but across the country and around the world. There is an urgent need to protect these unique enclaves from further development.

Food Not Lawns
Food Not Lawns

Author: H. C. Flores

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 193339207X

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Combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own "paradise gardens." This joyful lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden--simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community--to all aspects of life. Plant "guerrilla gardens" in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces. Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and our throwaway society. Here, she shows us how to reclaim the earth, one garden at a time.--From publisher description.

Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives
Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives

Author: Diana Balmori

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780300063011

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Jimmy's garden on the Lower East Side of Manhattan--an assortment of stones and garbage bags, five tires, a chair, a skid, a refrigerator shelf, some ailanthus trees and goldfish, a wooden fence, and a pond with water carried by hand from a nearby fire hydrant--was recently bulldozed by the city. Jimmy then disappeared. Anna's garden is surrounded by a tall chainlink fence and filled with a menagerie of dolls and stuffed animals. The animals are whole, the dolls are maimed. Anna is a recluse who speaks to no one. The neighbors say she was in a concentration camp as a child. Gardens have always been associated with wealth and leisure, viewed as an addition to home. In this remarkable book a landscape architect and a photographer show us, in word and pictures, gardens built by homeless or impoverished New York City inhabitants. Like traditional gardens, these spaces are designed for pleasure, social activity, or private retreat. Unlike traditional gardens, they are connected to a more active and ephemeral use of the land. Transitory gardens speak the language of our times: here we find the reuse of nearly everything discarded, a sparing use of water and plant materials, an economical treatment of space, and a penchant for icons, toys, flags, and symbols of freedom and nationality. The gardens expand our definition of what makes a garden and what its design means for its creator. Diana Balmori's commentary and Margaret Morton's photographs combine with the garden-makers' own descriptions to encourage us to take note of gardens grown in unlikely places, on abandoned, littered lots, bounded by debris. By focusing on what homeless people make not for material comfort but from social and spiritual need, the book offers insight into both the meaning of landscape and the place of a garden in the life of an individual under duress.