ABSTRACT
For more than two centuries, community gardens have been increasingly recognized as a means of addressing the diverse and often divergent concerns of a range of city-based participants including local residents, governing authorities, private developers and community groups. They have played a role in ‘fixing’ a range of social, economic and ecological ills associated with living in the city. These gardens have:
• provided food for economically disadvantaged populations through allotments in 18th and 19th century Europe (Moselle, 1995; Crouch, 2003; Desilvey, 2003; Crouch and Ward, 2007);
• assumed moral and nationalist agendas through ‘victory gardens’ during the First and Second World Wars (Hynes, 1996);
• established their place within a constellation of public responses during the 1970s by food activists who advocated alternative strategies to mainstream food production and consumption (Belasco, 1989);
• been utilized by a number of grassroots community-development organizations involved in urban renewal projects in run-down neighbourhoods in American cities (Schmelzkopf, 1996; Smith and Kurtz, 2003).
