Evidence on how urban gardens help citizens and cities to enhance sustainable development. Review and bibliometric analysis

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive review on a bibliometric analysis of the published research on the most recent generation of urban gardens. Urban gardens have been part of the cities ever since; however, the present paper focus on the latest wave of this type of garden, that has been triggered by individual bottom-up initiatives driven by sustainability-related motivations, which have an impact on cities’ sustainable development. Its aim is to deliver an overview of the published scientific literature and to comprehensively review the evidence it provides on the role of urban gardens in Sustainable Development. A bibliometric analysis has been carried out using the Vosviewer software and searching the Web of Science database for ‘urban gardens’, ‘community gardens’ and ‘allotments’ as keywords. A narrow selection of the most co-cited publications on urban gardens pointed to four major strands of research grouped into four clusters. The first cluster (‘Citizens’) groups evidence on urban gardens and ‘People, lifestyle and sense of community’. Citizens are found to be major triggers of urban gardens initiatives, driven by ‘motivations, purposes and benefits’ that are explored by a second strand of literature captured by the second cluster, the ‘Drivers’ cluster. A third group of publications addresses urban gardens in the context of the sustainable development of cities. The ‘Cities’ cluster shows how urban gardens contribute to urban sustainability as well as some aspects that can hinder it, namely not being acknowledged by local public policies and urban planners, while being neglected by urban planning policies framework. Finally, the fourth cluster (‘Soil’) refers to sustainability shortcomings of urban gardens resulting from their being situated in vacant land that is only available due to soil contamination, which is related with its lack of institutional recognition.We were able to conclude the studies conducted are directly related to sustainable development and there are direct and necessary relationships between the three pillars and the literature on urban gardens that has been published in recent years. Besides, little importance has been given to this whole urban garden issue, not only because most of the studies reviewed in this work are case studies, but also because there is still much economic pressure affecting the sustainability pyramid.