Abstract
Existing community gardening research has tended to be exploratory and descriptive, utilising qualitative or mixed methodologies to explore and understand community garden participation. While research on community gardening attracts growing interest, the empirical rigour of measurement scales and embedded indicators has received comparatively less attention. Despite the extensive body of community gardening literature, a coherent narrative on valid, high quality approaches to the measurement of outcomes and impact across different cultural contexts is lacking and yet to be comprehensively examined. This is essential as cities are becoming hubs for cultural diversity. Systematic literature reviews that explore the multiple benefits of community gardening and other urban agriculture activities have been undertaken, however, a systematic review of the impact measures of community gardening is yet to be completed. This search protocol aims to address the following questions: (1) How are the health, wellbeing, social and environmental outcomes and impacts of community gardening measured? (2) What cultural diversity considerations have existing community garden measures taken into account? Demographic data will be collected along with clear domains/constructs of experiences, impacts and outcomes captured from previous literature to explore if evidence considers culturally heterogeneous and diverse populations. This will offer an understanding as to whether community gardening research is appropriately measuring this cross-cultural activity.
Highlights
Urbanisation and disconnection from the natural environment present significant public health, environmental and social challenges, due to their associations with increased social isolation, community health concerns, environmental degradation and poor mental health outcomes [1,2,3,4]
Search results will be evaluated against the list of criteria stated in the “Article evaluation approach” section, to inform critical discussion of the strengths and limitations of existing approaches to community gardening impact measurement
It is anticipated that results from the proposed systematic review will develop a better understanding of measures for collecting health, wellbeing and ecological data to assess the impacts and outcomes of community gardening
Summary
Urbanisation and disconnection from the natural environment present significant public health, environmental and social challenges, due to their associations with increased social isolation, community health concerns, environmental degradation and poor mental health outcomes [1,2,3,4]. Community gardens have been viewed as a way of addressing and bridging these concerns by, for example, promoting improved community connections [1,5,6,7,8,9], enhancing ecological sustainability [10,11] and restoring psychological wellbeing [12,13]. To increase social capital and social cohesion, culture as a determinant of health has become an attractive policy response in urban areas across the world [24,25,26]. A growing body of psychological and architectural literature has reported positive associations between human experiences of connecting with the natural environment, and constructs such as wellbeing and vitality [27,28,29,30,31,32]
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