The Children’s Garden in Robert Leggett Park won a national urban design award last year. Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa Citizen

The popularity of community gardens hails back to the days when growing your own food was part of everyday life

By Phil Jenkins
Ottawa Citizen
July 5, 2010

Excerpt:

There are now almost 30 community gardens quilted across the city. The plots thicken, as it were, and each year the requests to City Hall propagate for startup training and financing. The gardens have been lined up in one row called the Community Garden Network, and that in turn is planted within the Just Food program (nice double entendre that), locatable on your computers and there they are listed and addressed, should you wish to visit a bed near you or contact them. In 2008, the city upped the money it had voted for community gardens from $5,000 to $80,000, seed money for new gardens, workshops, a co-ordinator and some maintenance.

[Read more →]

Green Billy Penn, © by Kenneth Thomas 2009

Urban Agriculture in Philadelphia: Lessons for Citizenship and Ecological Democracy

Katharine Travaline, M.S. and Christian Hunold, Ph.D. Drexel University Philadelphia, PA
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the WPSA ANNUAL MEETING “Ideas, Interests and Institutions”, Hyatt Regency Vancouver, BC Canada, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Mar 19, 2009

Abstract:

The conventional agri-food system has become increasingly concentrated and centralized, leaving little room for public participation in its decision-making processes. Urban governance today also tends to offer little space for city residents to be involved in their agri-food system for reasons including historical trends that have defined food as a rural issue; urban land-use economics that leave little room for food production in cities; and the failure of municipalities to sufficiently include the public in decision-making processes.

[Read more →]