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Community gardens have been seen sprouting up in and around urban settings such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh over the past several decades. Due to the long histories of industrial activities and urbanization, these soils in urban regions may be at a high risk for various contaminants such as metals and metalloids. Using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), we measured 7 elements (lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), vanadium (V), cadmium (Cd), nickel (Ni), and arsenic (As)) in soil samples collected from a total of 21 community gardens in Philadelphia City, Philadelphia suburban areas, and Pittsburgh City during September and October 2021. We found that the city areas in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had higher elemental concentrations in community garden soils compared to the suburbs. We found that all elements except vanadium were below the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) guidelines. When compared to more stringent Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) guidelines of a maximum of 140 mg/kg of lead in the soil, 36% percent of Philadelphia community gardens, 60% of Pittsburgh gardens, and 20% of the Philadelphia suburb gardens exceeded the CCME guideline. In Philadelphia city, generally, elemental concentrations exhibited a negative trend with increasing distance to historical smelter locations, although a significant correlation was observed for only zinc. We found that the soil from the raised beds had lower concentrations of lead and arsenic, but many of the samples from the raised beds had higher concentrations of zinc, copper, vanadium, and nickel. This discrepancy in raised beds is most likely attributed to these elements being actively deposited in the soil from present day sources such as vehicles on the road and active industrial sites. Understanding and recognizing such variations of these contaminants in community gardens are essential to understanding how industrial legacies and modern pollution continue to put urban communities at a disproportionate risk of health impacts.

Fresh produce is an important component of maintaining cognitive and physical health, particularly for children. A mechanism to increase access to fresh produce is the construction of community gardens in urban centres. While reducing barriers to nutritious food, the soil of the community garden can contain contaminants (e.g. metals) depending on the location and how the garden was constructed. This study quantified, for the first time, seven metals (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, Mn, and Ni) in soil from 83 community gardens across the City of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Concentrations of metals in soil were used to create distributions for environmental exposure and estimated daily intake, which were then used to determine exceedances of soil quality guidelines and acceptable daily intakes, respectively. Raised garden beds and gardens further from roads had typically lower concentrations of metals in surface gardens and those nearer to roads. While some concentrations of metals exceeded CCME guidelines levels for the protection of environmental health, the vast majority represent a low risk. For human health, only As posed a quantifiable risk of exceeding the USEPA acceptable daily intake via the consumption of produce from gardens, though this was < 1.2% for the whole population and < 10.2% for children aged 1 to 2 years. Overall, this study is the first to show that the concentration of the metals in soil from gardens typically poses a low risk to environmental and human health. We recommend the use of raised gardens to further mitigate risk.

This paper extends the definition of the domestic sphere to include urban community gardens, which I argue serve as critical \"home-like\" places that marginalized Latina/o immigrants use to sustain themselves and to re-create homeland in urban Los Angeles. Based on over 1 year of ethnographic and interview research at the gardens, I argue that the immigrant community gardeners are creating new homes, attachments and means of livelihood that link their past with the present, restoring them during this historical moment of the US immigration crisis in deportations and detentions. A range of social reproductive and restorative activities normally associated with the private domestic sphere unfold at these community gardens, allowing us to see these sites as shared open-air domiciles, hybrid-domestic places, set among plant nature. I suggest that focusing on the everyday practices, the materiality and meanings of place may productively shift our theoretical gaze from understanding migration experiences only through the lens of assimilation or transnationalism, and toward one that acknowledges active assertions organized around the right to home-making.

Geographers have a sustained interest in urban community gardens because such spaces provide a meaningful lens to interrogate the complexities of living at the intersection of nature-society relationships. Most community gardens strive to perform the dual functions of reconnecting urban residents with nature and strengthening the community. More recently, in the context of neoliberal urban restructuring, community gardens have also been viewed as platforms for the mobilization of inclusive sociopolitical arrangements to counteract the ill effects of urban problems. Common to this literature is the implicit assumption that a good community garden must necessarily be inclusive or that, conversely, community gardens that are exclusionary are bad. We argue that framing community gardens as spaces of responsibility is another way to reengage with the epistemology of community gardens. Instead of only asking how, and to what extent, community gardens are inclusionary or exclusionary, we can augment our understanding of the realities of managing a garden by asking what responsibilities are associated with any given community garden. Among other things, the answer to this question requires one to trace the responsibilization process of gardeners. Through the case study of Singapore, we argue that responsibilization invariably engenders practices of inclusion and exclusion in community gardens. Framed thusly, we first move away from the reductive view that apparent exclusionary practices in a community garden render that garden to be normatively undesirable. Second, we can appreciate why many community gardens-even seemingly inclusive ones-have shades of exclusions embedded in them.

Urban community gardens (UCGs), greenspace cultivated and managed for vegetables by local communities, provide substantial ecosystem services (ES) and are warmly welcomed by residents. However, they also have many ecosystem disservices (EDS) and are almost always refused by the decision-makers of the government, especially in China. Better understanding the residents’ perceived ES and EDS and the impact on the behavioral intention (BI) toward UCGs is of great value to solve the conflicts between residents and the government concerning UCGs and to develop sustainable UCGs. Following the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we measured perceived ES/EDS, attitudes (ATT), perceived behavioral control (PBC), subjective norm (SN), and BI of 1142 residents in Changsha, China, and investigated their direct and indirect causal relationships using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results showed that: (1) ATT, PBC, and SN significantly and positively impact the BI of UCGs and together explained 54% of the variation of BI. (2) The extended TPB model with additional components of perceived ED/EDS improved the explanatory ability of the model, explaining 65% of the variance of BI. Perceived ES and perceived EDS showed significant direct positive and negative impacts on UCGs, respectively. They also indirectly impacted BI by influencing ATT, PBC, and SN. The findings of this study can extend our understanding of residents’ attitudes, behavior, and driving mechanism toward UCGs, and can help decision makers to design better policies for UCG planning and management.

Promoting sustainability in higher education is a social and environmental imperative. This paper explores how and why volunteering at a campus community garden (CCG) can serve as a unique context for promoting sustainability. Twenty-five undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 27, who had volunteered at a campus garden, participated in individual semi-structured interviews. A majority of participants identified as female (80%) and Asian American (52%). Using reflexive thematic analysis, we first found students were motivated to volunteer for personal and academic reasons as well as to learn more about gardening. Childhood gardening experiences influenced participants’ re-engagement as adults. Second, building social connections and spending time in nature, especially when living in an urban area, sustained students’ engagement in the garden, whereas time constraints and physical tasks made it challenging to volunteer. Finally, the findings suggest that volunteering promoted pro-environmental behaviors. Students felt that their volunteer work allowed them to make a positive environmental impact. Participants also gained new environmental knowledge and skills, which encouraged them to adopt environmentally friendly lifestyle changes, advocate for environmental and social justice issues, and reflect on how they might integrate pro-environmental behaviors into their future careers.

Urban community gardens are spaces where human well-being is improved by generating ecosystem services locally, and the interactions between humans and the environment increase the resilience of social–ecological systems. Their advantages locally have already been demonstrated. Yet, their effects on larger scales are not clear. According to the panarchy principle, a resilient subsystem may improve the resilience of a whole system. The complex interactions between different scales are one of the challenges in the search for resilience in urban systems. With this research, we provide conceptual interscalar leverage points in urban planning to foster resilience. We postulate that strategically located urban community gardens enhance the general resilience of social–ecological systems on an urban scale by applying a qualitative method to approach the general resilience of a place and the cartography of general urban-landscape resilience. We applied these methods in five urban segments of Queretaro, Mexico. The case study of the Mu’ta urban community garden helps us demonstrate the changes in its general resilience with the emergence of a garden. The results confirmed the resilience influences between the scales of locality, neighborhood, and city through the social–ecological overlap, spatial continuity, and heterogeneity in the density of landscape openness to engage socially and ecologically.

This study investigated the contribution of urban community gardens to food availability in Emfuleni Local Municipality, Gauteng Province of South Africa. The objectives were to determine the ability of the urban community gardens to produce vegetables throughout the year and to assess the contribution of these gardens to food availability. It was conducted in six (6) townships of Emfuleni Local Municipality by means of semi-structured survey questionnaires. A sample of 254 participants was randomly drawn from 418 urban farmers. A descriptive analysis technique and one-way ANOVA formed part of the data analysis using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23. The study found that community gardens contributed to food availability of the respondents by providing fresh vegetables to most urban farmers and their household members throughout the year. Furthermore, it was discovered that there is no relationship between vegetable availability and gender of the respondents. Based on the results, the study recommended that farmers in urban community gardens should focus on increasing and sustaining their production to ensure that they have adequate vegetables to feed their families throughout the year.

Urban gardens, or spaces that include vegetables, fruit trees, and ornamental plants, can support bird species and communities by providing food and nesting habitat within urban landscapes. Yet, variation in management of gardens (e.g., garden size, number of tree and shrub species, ground cover) and the landscape (e.g., urban cover, landscape diversity) that surrounds them may alter communities within gardens. We examined how garden management and landscape features influence bird abundance, richness, species composition, and traits in 19 urban community gardens in the central coast of California. We found that bird abundance was higher in larger gardens and in gardens with more grass, and species richness was higher in larger gardens. Bird abundance also differed with garden ecoregion. Urban cover influenced bird species composition while bird trait distributions were influenced by urban cover, ecoregion, and grass cover. Gardens with more urban cover supported fewer insectivores, ground-nesters, and forest-associated birds, higher nesting height and more urban-associated bird species. Gardens in the ecoregion closer to the coast had more cliff nesters and more marsh-associated birds. Although urban cover and ecoregion were important for the composition and trait distribution of birds, manipulation of garden management and size may promote bird species richness, or abundance of functionally important birds in gardens.

Community gardens are often seen as a means for producing sustainable food resources in urban communities. However, the presence of trace metals and metalloids such as lead, arsenic, and cadmium in urban soils poses a health risk to gardeners who participate in urban community gardens. They are exposed to these contaminates through multiple exposure pathways such as inhalation and ingestion directly through soil or through crops grown in the soil. Hot spots of soil contamination are higher in areas of cities with greater minority populations and lower incomes. This paper reviews the state of heavy metal contamination in community garden soils across the United States. This paper outlines the major sources of heavy metals in urban soils, exposure pathways, the ways to reduce heavy metal levels in garden soils, the means to slow down the uptake of heavy metals, and limit the exposure of these contaminates. The application of biochar and compost, implementing raised beds, and maintaining a natural pH are all examples of ways to mitigate heavy metal contaminants.