Community garden as a way to achieve neighborhood scaled food security

Abstract

Nowadays, it is increasingly difficult to find numerous green spaces in a city. This situation caused the conversion of green land into a built area, resulting in a lack of interaction between humans and nature. One form of urban greenery that can be easily created and brings many benefits to humans is community gardens. Community garden utilizes vacant lots to create multi-functional space for the people—gardener and non-gardener. Literature and precedent studies are conducted to understand how community gardens work as a social space that produces crops as a base knowledge to analyze the following study case. This study focuses on observing the realization of food security in a community garden at Malang, Indonesia, named Cemara Hijau Farm. The community garden uses most of its planting area for functional and active food production. However, it is still in the early stages of food security and still has not met the community’s food needs on a housing scale, as can be seen from the production and the arrangement in the planting area. Even so, existence can increase public awareness of the importance of food security.