Current and future directions in research on community gardens

Abstract

There is increasing interest in community gardens where people collectively grow food in cities, reflecting concerns about food insecurity, loss of agricultural biodiversity, pollution, food miles and climate change, among other issues. Mirroring this is a growing corpus of research, but what themes does this literature examine, and how is it evolving including in relation to the findings of a previous systematic review in 2012? To identify who publishes on the topic, from where, in which disciplines and journals, and what are the major themes and gaps in the literature, we used a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach to review 1090 English language articles on community gardens identified from systematic searches of Scopus and Web of Science databases. The literature published from 1972 to 2021 was diverse in terms of discipline, subject area, and journal, but remains mostly about temperate regions, often in the United States of America (USA), with limited consideration of gardens in tropical and subtropical cities and cities in Asia, Africa and South America. Using thematic analyses based on keywords in VOSviewer, as well as titles and abstracts in Leximancer, we found there is ongoing interest in topics such as urbanization, diversity and health. While earlier research often focused on community benefits, recent research is examining climate change, food security and ecosystem services. Important thematic gaps remain including research about agrobiodiversity, the effects of uncertain land tenures and the roles of traditional knowledge in the gardens. The current review highlights how research on community garden continues to provide fruitful insights into diverse aspects of urban food production, while future reviews investigating literature in other languages, including more than just articles, and that used other terminology for the gardens would be beneficial.