ABSTRACT
The New York Restoration Project (NYRP) model diminishes the grassroots political-organizational infrastructure of community gardens, and dissolves their opportunity to develop as autonomous community spaces. The NYRP model for garden preservation dramatically changed the way that gardeners perceived the garden and interacted with it. The garden is no longer experienced as a communal shared space that evolves over time, like a collectively determined and objectified space. Gardeners environmental autobiographies provide bountiful insights into how new opportunities are found and pave the way to what Heidegger termed another way of being in the world. Trust for Public Land (TPL) works with the gardeners to facilitate as participatory a model of operation as possible, in which gardeners are the dominant decision makers responsible for their gardens. By contrast, TPL focuses on community participation through a well-established community organization and on the creation of autonomous community open space, thereby facilitating resident's sense of ownership and legalizing it.
