Abstract
At the local scale in Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP), MN, urban farms, community gardens, and home gardens support diverse individual and community goals, including food access and sovereignty, recreation and outdoor activity, youth education, and racial, economic, and environmental justice. Collaborations between urban growers, policymakers, scholars, and communities that leverage urban farms and gardens as sites of ecological, social, and political transformation represent spaces of urban agroecology. Participatory research can play a vital role in urban agroecology by facilitating integration of science, movement, and practice, but frameworks to accomplish this are still emerging. This paper, therefore, proposes a “learning framework” for urban agroecology research that has emerged from our community-university partnership. We -- a group of growers, community partners, and researchers -- have worked with each other for five years through multiple projects that broadly focused on the socio-ecological drivers and impacts of urban farms and gardens in MSP. In fall 2019, we conducted our first formal evaluation of the participatory processes implemented in our current project with the objectives to 1) identify processes that facilitated or were barriers to authentic collaboration and 2) understand the role of relationships in the participatory processes. Qualitative surveys and interviews were developed and conducted with researchers, partners, and students. Analysis revealed that urban agroecology research provided a space for shared learning, which was facilitated through co-creation of research, embodied processes, and relationships with people, cohorts, and place. As part of our partnership agreements, we as researchers wrote this article -- in close consultation with partners -- to share this framework in the hopes that it will serve as a model for other research collaborations working within complex urban agroecological systems.
Highlights
Urban growers, organizers, and policy makers in Minneapolis/St
The objectives of our Fall 2019 participatory evaluation were to determine to what degree the participatory processes in our urban agroecology research program facilitated authentic collaboration and the role of relationships between researchers, partners, and students in those processes
Participatory processes and relationships, the main foci of our objectives, represented “how” we work together and “who” is in relationship with each other. In addition to these themes, respondents highlighted that shared learning was “why” they participated in a community-university partnership and named the ways in which the social and environmental systems in which we work impacts “what” we do in the other themes
Summary
Organizers, and policy makers in Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP), MN, view urban food growing initiatives as an important strategy to support diverse goals such as food access, intergenerational learning, racial/environmental justice, climate adaptation and mitigation, stormwater management, community development, and food justice (Recknagel et al, 2016). The number of farms and gardens in MSP has increased steadily over the past decade, from 166 community gardens in 2009 to over 600 in 2016 (Prather, 2016) These increases are the result of significant grower, policymaker, neighborhood, researcher, school, and community efforts to improve support and funding for urban farms and gardens at the city, county, and state levels (Lang, 2014; Recknagel et al, 2016; Department of Community Planning Economic Development, 2018; Bress, 2019). This article addresses the need for learning frameworks that help such collaborations adaptively share knowledge, cultivate relationships, and engage in collective action toward systemic transformation
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