ABSTRACT This paper examines the gardener-plant relations in a community garden in Glasgow, focusing on how gardeners negotiate encounters with so-called weeds, plants perceived as invasive, unproductive, and out of place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and walking interviews, I trace how weeds are defined in human garden imaginaries not by species but through a flexible, situational logic of disruption and unproductiveness. This classification constitutes an ethical taxonomy through which gardeners determine which plants are allowed to live and which are to be killed. The practice of weeding emerges as a complex act of both killing and care, further complicated by weedy plants themselves who utilise practices aimed at harming them to reproduce and travel around the garden. In the final section, I briefly discuss three points of reflection that emerge from stories about weeding for a more-than-human ethic. First, harm is deeply embedded within garden care, not separate from it. Second, agency in weeding practices is not individual but distributed across species lines. And third, the ethical invisibility of weeds stems from their perceived non-individuality that renders them faceless and killable in anthropocentric imaginaries.

This scoping review aimed to identify and map interventions and gaps in evidence that sought to enhance food literacy to support sustainable dietary behaviours among adults from ethnic minority backgrounds. A scoping review was conducted following PRISMA guidelines. Studies were included if they targeted food literacy in ethnic minority adult populations. Nine databases were searched from inception to October 2024. Developed economy countries. Community-dwelling adult ethnic minority populations. Of 3128 records screened, two studies met the inclusion criteria. Both studies involved a retrospective evaluation of outcomes following participation in a community garden program. Although some sustainability-related outcomes were recorded, none directly integrated food system sustainability education as a primary objective. This review found very few food literacy interventions that integrate sustainability and are tailored for ethnic minority communities, highlighting a critical evidence gap. Future health promotion efforts should identify strategies to effectively change food preferences towards nutritious and sustainable choices and how to tailor it for culturally diverse groups to address both health and environmental challenges.

Rapid urbanization and climate change present unprecedented challenges to global food security, urban livability, and environmental sustainability. Urban greening and vertical farming have emerged as transformative solutions that address multiple urban challenges simultaneously. This comprehensive review synthesizes research from 2015-2025 on urban green infrastructure (UGI) and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) systems. Urban greening encompasses diverse interventions including green roofs, green walls, urban parks, street trees, and community gardens that provide ecosystem services including temperature regulation (0.5-1.0°C cooling), stormwater management, air quality improvement, and enhanced human well-being. Vertical farming represents an innovative agricultural paradigm utilizing hydroponics, aeroponics, and LED lighting to produce food in stacked layers within urban environments, achieving 5-10 times higher productivity per unit area compared to conventional farming while using 95% less water. However, energy consumption remains a critical challenge, with lighting accounting for 30-50% of operational costs. Recent advances in LED technology and renewable energy integration are progressively improving sustainability. Case studies from Singapore, including Sky Greens (producing 1 ton of vegetables daily), demonstrate commercial viability. In India, urban agriculture is gaining momentum with 35-40% of the population in cities and projected 60% urbanization by 2050, necessitating localized food production systems. This study evaluates benefits, challenges, and implementation strategies for urban greening and vertical farming as nature-based solutions for sustainable urban development, food security, and climate change adaptation

ABSTRACT Urban community gardens are often discussed as part of a suite of measures to enhance food security and promote community and resilience within urban food systems. Some studies have cast doubt on the productive capacity of urban community gardens to provide an efficient supply of produce to enhance food security. This research investigated how people derive value from their involvement in community gardens in relation to the food system using a reflexive thematic analysis based on semi-structured interviews with 16 community garden members and participant observation conducted across four recently formed urban community gardens in Brisbane, Australia. Three key themes emerged: (1) why people participate, with sub-themes of community, food production, learning, nature, and composting; (2) factors that shape decision-making and plant choice, with sub-themes of availability, familiarity, suitability to climate, native plants, personal motivations, and aesthetics; and (3) impact of threats and challenges to the gardens, which included flooding, reallocation of land, and volunteer numbers. The findings reveal that while urban community gardens alone cannot address food security needs, they provide spaces where participants use collaborative food growing to build community and generate social capital, connect to nature and engage in place-making, and develop critical food systems education. These benefits are largely provisional on the urban community gardens’ ongoing existence and may largely extend only to those with the capacity to participate. Community gardens provide a vital opportunity to reconnect food with social and environmental relationships in a way often absent from the industrial food system.

ABSTRACT Advancing climate change will likely alter the availability of food and diminish community resilience. To partially address these challenges for urban communities, collective or community-assisted gardens have been recognized as a useful policy option. In addition to these benefits, community-assisted gardens improve the efficacy of refugee resettlement programs by providing access to fresh produce. We explored the experiences and perceptions of Burmese refugees participating in three different community-assisted garden programs; individual backyard gardens, personal-use community gardens, and enterprise community-assisted gardens. Our semistructured interviews of 18 Burmese refugees resulted in three broad themes: benefits, challenges, and issues related to recruitment and support for gardening. Subthemes of benefits included economic benefits, improved diet and physical health, and improved social connections. Our findings illustrate that a complex mixture of benefits and challenges were experienced by Burmese refugees participating in the three programs resulting in multidimensional factors of well-being encompassed by nutritional, economic, and social health elements. Specific benefits from the three programs included: strengthening family relationships, providing families with culturally relevant food, fresh organic vegetables, saving money on the family’s food budget, improving social relationships with community members. We suggest community-assisted gardens can play an important role in refugee resettlement efforts and ameliorate global climate change on a local scale, but these programs would benefit from a greater recognition of the complexity of issues faced by refugees.

Feeding and Eating Disorders (FED) require integrated, recovery-oriented care models that extend beyond clinical treatment and incorporate supportive environments capable of enhancing psychosocial well-being. Within this perspective, nature-based and socio-agricultural practices represent promising yet underexplored therapeutic resources, particularly when integrated into spatial planning frameworks. This study develops and tests a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based Decision Support System (DSS) that matches the specific therapeutic needs of individuals undergoing treatment for FED with the spatial distribution and characteristics of green and agricultural environments. The research is based on a case study involving the FED care center “Il Pellicano” in Perugia, Italy. Supply-side data were collected from 65 facilities, including 58 social farms, 6 community gardens, and the center’s private garden. Demand-side data were obtained through a questionnaire administered to patients by healthcare professionals, while supply-side attributes were collected through structured interviews with facility managers. The spatial matching process was implemented in a GIS environment using a non-compensatory multi-criteria approach that integrated thematic activities, spatial and/or organizational accessibility, confidentiality, spatial capacity, and environmental settings. The results reveal a substantial mismatch between demand and supply, with the current territorial system satisfying only 37.67% of expressed therapeutic needs. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the main constraints relate to the limited availability of medium-sized, low-attendance, and freely accessible environments. Beyond the local case study, the proposed DSS provides a transferable planning-support tool for designing personalized therapeutic pathways and strengthening the integration between green infrastructure, social farming, and healthcare systems. The study highlights the strategic role of spatial planning in promoting health equity, social inclusion, and community well-being.

The social and solidarity bioeconomy (SSB) is an adaptive strategy that facilitates collective persistence and sustainable use of biological resources under increasingly precarious socio-economic and environmental conditions. Communal living which is present across biological systems often evolves in response to environmental pressures such as uneven resource distribution, environmental stress, and predation. Similarly, human economic systems operate as an adaptive response to ecological and social conditions such as inequity and environmental degradation. Guided by principles of social and solidarity economies, the SSB prioritizes democratic governance, sustainability, and collective well-being over profit maximization of resources used in the bioeconomy. Participation in the SSB parallels evolutionary strategies of cooperative living observed across biological kingdoms where collaboration can enhance resilience under harsh conditions. Within this framework, Communities of Practice (CoPs) such as community gardens and community bio labs, serve as important sites of knowledge sharing, resource pooling, and collective innovation. By fostering cooperation around shared domains of interest, CoPs are uniquely positioned to strengthen the development of a more equitable, democratic, and ecologically sustainable bioeconomy.

Assessing the wellbeing and therapeutic potential of urban green spaces: An indicator-based framework and cross-cultural comparison of community gardens

Belonging is a fundamental human need that influences health and well-being. Women's ability to belong to themselves is affected by structural disinvestment, environmental injustice, poverty and chronic precarity. Guided by the belongingness framework, this study explores solutions of women in the Flint area to increase "belonging to self," which encompasses basic needs, services, safety and autonomy. Using a community-based participatory research approach, we interviewed 100 women and community representatives. In-depth interviews (Fall 2017-Spring 2018) explored strengths, needs, aspirations, and solutions. A team of community-academic pairs analyzed the data. Four interrelated themes emerged: Basic Needs, Services, Safety, and Autonomy. (1) Basic Needs included gaps in food, water, and housing, disproportionately affecting women with mental health or substance use challenges, domestic violence survivors, and pregnant women. (2) Services revealed deficits in childcare, maternal support, education, employment, healthcare, and transportation, often compounded by distrust and bureaucratic barriers. (3) Safety encompassed physical and emotional vulnerabilities limiting daily life. (4) Autonomy reflected the interplay of personal agency, relational dynamics, and structural constraints. Across themes, participants proposed community-rooted, trauma-informed solutions-including 24-hour childcare, mentorship, community gardens, skill-building, and peer support-to enhance well-being, equity, and women's ability to belong to themselves. Complex and interconnected factors shape women's experiences of belonging to oneself. Themes of basic needs, access to services, safety, and autonomy can frame pathways to health and wellbeing for women in challenging contexts. Despite limited access to opportunity, women shared collective strategies for survival, support, and reimagining their futures.

ABSTRACT While community gardens have the potential to support biodiversity conservation, the social factors underlying gardeners’ knowledge of biodiversity and its role in supporting garden management is less understood. We consider how demographics and educational experiences of community gardeners contribute to their knowledge of arthropod ecological roles in urban agriculture. We conducted an online survey that assessed gardener abilities to view images of arthropods and correctly classify them to one of the three ecological roles: pollinator, herbivore, and natural enemy. The survey asked about gardener demographics and educational experiences that shape how gardeners understand the ecological roles of arthropods. We learned that gardeners are highly knowledgeable about arthropod ecological roles in gardens, correctly classifying 71–83% of arthropod images as pollinators, herbivores, and natural enemies. Female gardeners more often correctly classified pollinators, and those who had participated in a Master Gardener program (with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources) more often correctly classified herbivores and natural enemies. We reflect on past work exploring gender and ecosystem management and consider the specific features of Master Gardener training that may explain our findings. Finally, we consider whether identifying ecological roles of arthropods is necessary to support diverse ecosystem service-providing gardens.

ABSTRACT Community gardening as a form of collective action has the potential to drive transformative social change. Despite this, few studies offer empirical insights into how community gardening affects transformative social change in practice. This study aims to address this gap by examining the Onkraj gradbišča community garden in Ljubljana. Employing fieldwork with participant observation, exploratory and in-depth interviews, and a review of secondary sources as research methods, the study explores how community gardening enables and sustains transformative social change and how institutional support (or lack thereof) impacts community gardening as a transformative community strategy. The findings reveal that Onkraj gradbišča fostered key conditions of transformative social change, including inner transformation, collective leadership, community capacity building, and some scaling strategies. In contrast, scaling up strategies were ineffective and the absence of institutional support limited the impact of community gardening on enabling governance. These findings suggest that the transformative potential of Onkraj gradbišča to contribute to path-shifting urban sustainability transitions was limited. Nevertheless, as a form of prefigurative collective action, Onkraj gradbišča provided a tangible alternative for food production, community capacity building, land use management, and urban planning in the city. The study argues that performing a “vision of a better world” may be the main legacy of Onkraj gradbišča, highlighting the transformative potential of community gardening in Ljubljana.

• Uses rich qualitative data on stakeholder perspectives to inform policy design. • Presents three food policies of varying designs to inform real world policy. • Identifies cost saving policies which could potentially reduce health inequities. • Policies require large up-front costs or loss of governmental income. • Health system cost savings are expected in the medium to long term. Food production and consumption impacts both planetary and population health. This research aimed to estimate the impacts of three food policies, selected by stakeholders, for the New Zealand (NZ) population: Exempting core, sustainable foods from Goods and Services Tax (GST), education about healthy sustainable foods and māra kai (food garden informed by mātauranga Māori) and community gardens. These were modelled using a proportional multistate lifetable model through to health gains (in Health Adjusted Life Years, HALYs), health equity impacts, and net costs (combining health system costs/cost savings and intervention costs in 2011 NZD). Changes in dietary intake were modelled through to changes in diet related disease incidence over the remaining life of the 2011 NZ population (n = 4.4 million, 3% discounted). Exempting core, sustainable foods from GST resulted in 87,410 HALYs (95% Uncertainty Interval (UI): 72,280 to 104,110) and health system cost savings of $927.3 Million (M), UI: (686.6 to 1216.6 M). Education about healthy sustainable foods generated small health impacts (1,170 HALYs, UI: 930 to 1,430) and health system cost savings ($9.6 M, UI: $6.8 to $12.9 M). Māra kai and community gardens generated 8,040 HALYs (UI: 4,720 to 11,800) and would cost the government $364.3 M (UI: $267.6 to $464.6 M). All scenarios produced more age-standardised per capita health gain for Māori (Indigenous population) than non-Māori. The first two policies were cost saving while the māra kai and community gardens policy was borderline cost-effective. This research shows that these policies have the potential to improve population health and could be used to inform food policy in high-income countries. For NZ, these policies could also reduce ethnic health inequities; careful policy design involving relevant stakeholders, including Māori communities, is needed to ensure health and equity benefits are realised.

Embracing cultures, balancing autonomy, and finding solutions in international student-led campus community gardens: A participatory action research approach

Purpose This paper aims to explore burgeoning becomings of university students who participated in a university community garden project during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. The problem of student engagement at universities was amplified by the pandemic worldwide. Design/methodology/approach Using posthumanist Deluzean rhizoanalysis, the authors map the emergence of a sustainable community through qualitative semi-structured interviews into university students’ voluntary participation in a Community Garden (CG). Findings Yet this research found that the garden became a home for transient and often marginalised students as it decentred normative conceptions of university space. Research limitations/implications The authors acknowledge that this small research project involving one university CG took place on the lands of the Noongar nation whose custodianship of the land and waters reflected the intertwinings of all living and non-living elements and of continues to inform sustainable practices. Practical implications CGs offer important opportunities for students to learn about biodiversity, native and non-native food plants and gain the skills necessary for participating in sustainable futures. Social implications Moreover, this study highlights the opportunities and challenges for university CGs, offering insight into what initially attracted students to become involved and what kept them gardening through troubling times. Originality/value Whilst much research has been done on the social emotional and physical benefits of CGs, this study adds to the discourse by highlighting the how CGs as deterritorialised places offer divergent spaces for students identifying as neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+.

This paper examines the transformation of the designer’s role in the regeneration of collective housing districts in both Western and Eastern Europe, particularly when their actions support the emergence of urban commons. Given the ongoing privatization in both contexts, there is a need to repair the broken and fragmented public amenities of these neighborhoods. To this end, commons-based initiatives offer an alternative approach. Grounded in participatory methodologies and combining methods from architecture, urban planning, social sciences, and co-design, the research provides a comparative reflection on the collective production, use, and transformation of shared spatial infrastructure in neighborhoods in Bucharest, Cluj, and Paris. The findings demonstrate how emerging forms of urban commons (such as informal libraries, community gardens, and civic hubs) lay the foundation for bottom-up, resilient regeneration of collective housing estates, and highlight how these initiatives can be critically supported by designers and citizens across various local, social, and political contexts.

Imagine a world without green trees, fun parks, or colorful gardens. As cities grow, these green spaces often become concrete sidewalks and buildings. Lack of plants in cities can harm pollinators that rely on green spaces for food and housing. Pollinators are birds and insects that carry pollen or seeds from one plant to another, helping new plants grow every year. If you live in a city, you can help many of these plants and pollinators by building pollinator gardens in your neighborhood—whether that be in your backyard, a community garden, or even on your rooftop! A pollinator garden provides shelter, food, and connection points for important pollinators. These gardens are not only good for pollinators, but they are good for you too! Read on to see how to make your garden, what to decorate it with, and how it can help many insects, plants, and even kids like you!

Qwaqwa, a mountainous region situated within the Maluti-A-Phofung municipality, faces persistent challenges including food and water insecurity, deteriorating infrastructure, and limited state support, reflecting broader governance failures in rural and peri-urban South Africa. In response, a network of social entrepreneurs, including members of Qwakanda NPC, has emerged to address these challenges through community-led initiatives. This study investigates how these actors contribute to achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Employing a constructivist case study approach, the research used five in-depth interviews with Qwakanda members, supported by social media analysis. Data were thematically analysed through a hybrid manual and AI-assisted coding process to explore autogestion in sustainable development in Qwaqwa. Findings reveal that Qwaqwa’s social entrepreneurs enact autogestion by creating non-hierarchical solutions to systemic challenges through community gardens, waste management programmes, skills development initiatives and eco-tourism ventures. The research makes an original contribution by applying Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion to the context of social entrepreneurship in Qwaqwa – an area where such a theoretical and empirical intersection has not been explored before. By linking autogestion to the SDGs, this research shows how grassroots social entrepreneurship in Qwaqwa fosters locally grounded, equitable, and sustainable development. The research offers a model for other historically marginalised regions seeking locally driven solutions to persistent socio-economic and environmental challenges.

A comparison of metal concentrations in vegetables from urban community gardens and groceries in response to community research.

Drawing from interviews with 134 community garden members in eight countries, this article explores how individuals, both religious and nonreligious, understand and enact their moral relationships with other terrestrials at their community gardens. It frames the community garden as a place constituted by human and more-than-human relationships that demonstrate how people make sense of the world from where they are situated, with and without reference to religion or spirituality. We identify three experiential modes through which these relationships are expressed among gardeners: gardens as places of connection; gardens as places of control and human intervention; and gardens as places of world-repairing or mending the Earth. These modes are not mutually exclusive and span the diverse lifestances of individual gardeners. The overall aim of this article is to illustrate how scholars interested in religion, spirituality and nonreligion in everyday life can imagine place as constituted by terrestrial relationships during the planetary crisis.

Food waste in households means that there is a need to recognize the possibilities of balancing activities in the field of obtaining and managing food products. Activities in this area may concern giving away surplus food to others, purchasing local and organic products, limiting shopping activity. Generation Z, which was included in this research, uses new media, including mobile applications, to a greater extent than other generations. The main objective of the research is to recognize and present the food-sustainable behaviors and attitudes of Generation Z consumers. The study used the analysis of source data, which was the basis for formulating four hypotheses. They were verified in empirical studies conducted using the CAWI method. The collected material was analyzed using, among others, the proprietary index of environmentally and socially sustainable behaviors (ESRBI), the Mann-Whitney test. The studies showed that respondents assessed their food behaviors as irresponsible, with women's assessment being higher than men's. A positive correlation was demonstrated between the use of food saving applications and the value of the ESRBI index and individual sustainable behaviors. Respondents positively assessed the initiatives of local authorities and housing cooperatives in the area of creating places for sharing food and organizing community gardens.