Disclosure statement
Daniela Guitart is affiliated with the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University.
Catherine Pickering receives funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility for her work regarding climate change within the Australian Alps and also by the Queensland Government for part of her study on the attitudes of people towards protected zones.
Jason Byrne has previously received funds through the US National Park Service and the Western National Park Association.
Food availability, safety, and accessibility are major issues in the world today. Rapid urbanization has boosted the need for food in cities, which is where most people reside. The growing demand for food is being met by the growth within industrial agriculture. This has ultimately resulted in a disconnect between urban dwellers and the place their food originates from.
The community gardens have become a favored option for urban-based food and a lot of researchers, activists, and policy makers think that these gardens are part of an alternative food system..
While the majority of the research studies suggest that community gardens can be a successful and sustainable way of generating food in cities however, this assertion has not been proved.
There isn’t much information about the way people garden in communal gardens. The phrase “community garden” has been frequently used to describe any kind of garden regardless of the garden practices or the philosophy of garden development, placing all gardens into one basket.
An investigation that was conducted recently has identified sixty-five academic papers that describe the first research conducted about community gardens, mainly detailing the benefits to society of gardening that promote health and education, building community and resilience.
What has been ignored by scientists is the benefits to the environment from community garden. They include the efficient management of soil nutrients, sunlight, and biological resources. These are factors vital to the long-term sustainability of community gardens.
Community gardeners can add nutrients to their soil (fertilisers in contrast to. compost) manage insects (pesticides and crop rotation or companion planting), and make use of existing resources (tap water instead of collecting rainwater in tanks) are vital elements of the urban ecosystem that merit an examination.
This is due to the fact that different gardening methods can be beneficial to the environment (composting or locally sourced plants and other materials) or environmental hazard (through the use of chemical pesticides that are synthetic or a limited variety of plants).
Local research is conducted in Queensland
Our research examined fifty community gardens located in two of the fastest urbanizing cities in Australia, The Gold Coast and Brisbane. Brisbane, along with the Gold Coast, South East Queensland. South East Queensland is Australia’s most rapidly growing metropolitan area and its population projected to increase by 2.8 million from 2.8 million as of 2006 up to 4.4 million in 2031.
The principal goal of the study was to get more information about how the aspects of community gardens could determine the long-term viability of a garden and how garden managers have a deciding factor in their gardening practices and, ultimately, making decisions about future development of community gardens.
Garden managers were surveyed on who is in charge of the gardens, what motivates them as well as the culture of members, their garden philosophy as well as their facilities and their gardening methods (such as the improvement of soil quality, water use and energy use).
The gardens studied were managed by schools or several non-profit organizations. The main motivations of garden managers in establishing these gardens were community building, education, and sustainability.
Local and state government provide land and other resources for the majority of gardens, with the gardens covering 57,000 square meters of land. Gardens generally, and schools in particular, were extremely diverse culturally and included people from various different nationalities.
