Urban resilience with gardening and sustainable employment hopes

by Stoney Chenal

Not until I moved to the South of Vietnam did I hold a strong idea of raising community gardens in cities. But this place is definitely different from Hanoi where I once spent 3 months to ride bicycles around Hanoi to find land for a community garden. One doesnt have to be very critical to realize that the chance for green jobs in Ho Chi Minh city is boundless.

Amazingly, all of reasons for the idea of urban gardening to be advocated and implemented are good. Starting a garden in the school, students can joyfully escape from existing boring environment and science lessons. Young learners even start growing curiosity and desire to explore the beauty of interconnectedness: every ecological element, such as soil, water, seed-plant-root, animals in the garden and so on, is a part of bigger systems and determine the way one another works. Children and youth grow physically and mentally from getting their hands dirty at the practical and interactive learning environment – that can alone solve many urban problems like internet addiction or street violence. At the household and community levels, the idea of growing your own food is far more than effective to protect human health, especially when food safety and chemical food poisons are no longer big concerns of housewives only. Imagine what can be better way to strengthen relationships between neighborhood members who share common spaces, planning, resources, labor works and benefits. Last but not least, there is no doubt that urban gardens are crucial parts in sustainable urban landscape design. 

Using different sustainable materials such as coconut and bamboo, architects find more fun and skillful in designing green spaces for the city.

In short, this is a win-win solution: for human and for nature. My question was that once it is this important, in what further term, urban gardening can figure out solutions for other ecological and environmental problems led by unsustainable practices, and at the same time, create new hopes? Systematic collapse such as man-made climate change threatens not only the natural ecosystem but also livelihood of thousands of people. That is the main motivation for me to start a vocational training programme on urban gardening in Ho Chi Minh City, together with Green Youth Collective – a local social enterprise. Through the process of feasibility study, nothing I could use to illustrate personal surprise to see how many local organizations, restaurants and cafeterias, schools had brought gardens into their spaces. (Im growing a journal saving all stories and people I have met working in the area!) That also means there are immense market demands for jobs available in urban gardening. The good news is this trend is nowhere going to stop.

Our plot for the training is located within a system of a big community garden, where youth easily interact with professional farmers and families with parents and kids spending free time to grow, to harvest and to cook right at the garden. The objective is simple: for them to know how to work with ecological elements, but not forget the idea of a system. This illustrates a picture of sustainability in which the output of a certain production process can be used as the input for one another.

Our working place! Such a beautiful harmonized space to think and to create. Dont you agree?

The programme offers many different faces of urban gardens: either its on a wall, or a rooftop, or a hydroponic garden like this with recycled plastic bottles. Half of bottles are white painted, in order to keep nutrient water from sunlight, and to change the way it should look. Sort of great idea, yeah? We have guest speakers who are gardeners and business owners of places like this to come and to conduct interactive sessions with youth. The design of vocational training programme also serves an objective of equipping youth essential skills, knowledge and attitudes to find their own jobs. There are many entrepreneurs who are our partners have already offered internships and jobs for youth!

Waste management, composting, plant container building..are also the things we are instructing to youth. From my perspective, this is a great way to learn how to live within the limits: when you can not exploit more, you learn how to use available resources in different purposes. Works can be creative and fun!

This start-up belongs to the range of what I belive and work for sustainability literacy. Urban gardening is a beautiful and powerful example of community empowerment, initiating sustainable practices towards resilience to change.

For all information, please contact My Hanh, Project Manager at hanh@greenyouthcollective.org.

Source: http://urbanclimatevn.com/2014/11/14/urban-resilience-with-gardening-and-sustainable-employment-hopes/

 

 

Do Community Gardens Change the Food System?

Weighing the benefits of public garden allotments.

by Eric Hess

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/011118.html

Spring has sprung and for thousands of northwesterners, thumbs are turning green. But for apartment or condo dwellers—like me—urban gardening can be a challenge. Many new buildings are being outfitted with rooftop gardens for tenants’ use, but they’re still spendy and scarce; most of us will have to look to home-owning friends with a few square feet to spare or vie with neighbors for a plot in high-demand community gardens.

How does a community garden work? Typically, the city or program (some are run by private developers) sets aside a patch of land—portions of parks, undeveloped lots, etc—ranging anywhere from 2,000-200,000 sq. ft. in size. The land is parceled into individual plots ranging from under 100 sq. ft. to over 400. Individuals pay under $100/year for a plot. Each location may have different specific requirements, but they generally make sure gardeners are actually using the plot.

I’ve heard a lot of hype in the last couple of years, and wondering where the vegetable starts on my windowsill will be planted next month got me thinking more about community gardens in the Northwest: How common are they? And how competitive can they really be?

Just a quick perusal of city gardening sites confirmed what I’d heard through the grapevine—there are far more green thumbs than available plots, leaving some waiting for as many as five years.

Here’s a quick run-down of where the Northwest’s three major metropolises stand on community gardens:

* Vancouver, BC (4.3 plots per 1,000 people): The Community Gardens program has expanded greatly in the last four years—from 950 plots to 2,500 across 50 gardens. The city also has a great program helping to match garden-owners with neighbors looking for an empty patch of soil.

* Portland, Oregon (5.2 plots per 1,000 people): The city’s Community Gardens program hosts 32 gardens, used by about 3,000 gardeners (with another 1,000 on the waiting list). Additionally, the city sponsors programs to connect urban gardeners with surplus food with families in need, and to teach youth about gardening and food production. 

* Seattle, WA (6.3 plots per 1,000 people): Heralded as one of the US’s best urban gardening programs, the P-Patch program has more than 70 gardens over 23 acres—used by 3,800 urban gardeners with another 2,000 on wait lists (which take anywhere from three months to five years). Over half of the gardeners are low income, and the program donates 7-10 tons of fresh produce each year through Solid Ground’s Lettuce Link program. 

Yet despite all the positive press and demand, I have to question the ability of p-patches to make a large impact on our food systems. A dedicated community garden owner on 200 square feet might produce a substantial portion of their vegetables (see end note), but a hobbyist on 90 square feet may simply contribute some tasty additions to their spring and summer suppers. And with an average of only 5 plots per 1,000 residents of the biggest Northwest cities, the programs have a long way to go before they are a major part of our food system or a solution to poor nutrition.

Instead, I think of community gardens along the same lines as food carts—maybe the measurable benefits aren’t so great, but they have an important place in a vibrant urban culture: they often fill land that would otherwise go unused; provide green spaces in some of our cities’ densest neighborhoods; contribute a significant chunk of fresh, healthy produce for those who otherwise might lack access; give kids hands-on experience to understand where food comes from and how ecosystems work; and, as I mentioned before, add a certain je ne sais quoi to dense, urban living by providing non-homeowners with one of the more fun advantages of having a yard.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s an enhanced sense of community when a group of neighbors get together and dig into the earth. Certainly the Victory Gardens of both World Wars provided a morale booster to civilians who felt like they were contributing to war effort (if Wikipedia is to be trusted—and it probably isn’t—they contributed 40 percent of the US’s vegetable consumption). Maybe community gardens provide a similar morale boost for those engaged in the slow-motion sustainability revolution.

Unfortunately, with a waiting time of at least a year, it doesn’t look like a p-patch will be the answer for my veggies this year. But it’s good to see such enthusiasm for public green spaces. I’m curious to hear if any of our readers have a community garden plot—and if so, what you think about it?

*End note: A quick search suggests gardens yield about 0.6 lbs of vegetables per square foot per season, and Americans consume 428 lbs of vegetables per capita per year, on average.

Seedlings image courtesy of Jackal of All Trades and Gardeners picture courtesy of sbcg08 via Flickr under the Creative Commons License. P-Patch picture is of the Belltown p-patch, taken by author.

This article originally appeared on Sightline.org

For more resources and information on urban gardening at Worldchanging see:
Community Land Sharing
Urban Farming Takes Root in Surprising Ways