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- All Subjects: Community Gardens
- Creators: Grebitus, Carola
Description
Community gardens have wide-reaching potential for addressing public health issues. However, of the thousands of gardens located in the United States, many lack rigorous planning and encounter crippling obstacles, like disinterest from community members, soon after implementation. This study created a processual typology to summarize steps in the implementation process for existing gardens described within peer-reviewed, academic journals and offers recommendations for more sustainably planning future garden projects up to ten years in advance. A systematic review was conducted to identify descriptions of community gardens in peer-reviewed, academic literature. A general logic model was used as a basic structure and themes for each step (inputs, activities, outputs, short/long term outcomes, impacts, and methods of evaluation) were summarized from the included studies to construct a processual typology for evaluating community garden implementation in the United States. This typology was then used to assess a case study of a garden in Des Moines, Iowa, which generated the author's interest in conducting this research after assisting with that space through an AmeriCorps community health program. Results showed that existing gardens shared common attributes and could be categorized according to one of two speeds of implementation ("regular" or "accelerated") and according to one of three types of organizational structure ("grassroots," "externally-organized," or "externally-managed"). The typology was assessed for limitations from having been based on a systematic review of only peer-reviewed, academic articles and, referring to its themes, was used to construct a logic model for a hypothetical community garden project. The processual typology developed in this study is limited in its power to summarize all existing community gardens but offers a first step toward informing the creation of logic models for future projects in order to improve sustainability and attain more funding.
ContributorsOlivas, Elijah Taylor (Author) / Magaña, Lisa (Thesis director) / MartÃÂnez, AirÃÂn (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Urban community gardens hold the potential to serve as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure to advance urban sustainability goals through the array of ecosystem services they afford. While a substantial body of literature has been produced that is dedicated to the study of these services (e.g., providing fresh produce, promoting socialization, and enhancing urban biodiversity), less attention has been paid to the strategic planning of urban community gardens, particularly in an expansive urban setting, and in the context of the co-benefit of mitigating extreme heat. The research presented in this dissertation explores the potential of community gardens as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure and how these spaces can be planned in a manner that strives to be both systematic and transparent. It focuses on methods that can (1) be employed to identify vacant or open land plots for large metropolitan areas and (2) explores multicriteria decision analysis and (3) optimization approaches that assist in the selection of “green” spaces that serve as both provisioning (a source of fresh fruits and vegetables) and regulating (heat mitigation) services, among others. This exploration involves three individual studies on each of these themes, using the Phoenix metropolitan area as its analytical backdrop. The major lessons from this piece are: (1) remotely sensed data can be effectively paired with cadastral data to identify thousands of vacant parcels for potential greening at a metropolitan scale; (2) a stakeholder-weighted multicriteria decision analysis for community garden planning can serve as an effective decision support tool, but participants' conceptualization of garden spaces resulted in social criteria being prioritized over physical-environmental factors, potentially influencing the provisioning of co-benefits; and (3) optimized urban community garden networks hold the potential to synergistically distribute co-benefits across a large metropolitan area in a manner that systematically prioritizes high-need neighborhoods. The methods examined are useful for all metropolises with a preponderance of open or vacant land seeking to advance urban sustainability goals through green infrastructure.
ContributorsSmith, Jordan Paul (Author) / Turner, Billie L (Thesis advisor) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / Tong, Daoqin (Committee member) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021