The impact of community gardens on sustainable urban development. Dutch grassroots initiatives as drivers for a more sustainable society?

Abstract

Grassroots initiatives spring up all around us; websites and organisations for sharing cars, exchanging tools, guerrilla gardening groups, cooking for each other and groups for gardening together are abundant (Church & Elster, 2002). These initiatives can be characterised as self-organising groups of civilians who aim to solve a social problem in their neighbourhood or community, from the perspective of an ideological, and sometimes environmental idea (Seyfang & Smith, 2007). The self-organisation of our society in this manner can be seen as a way for citizens to take responsibility for their social and physical environment (Bell et al., 2012). These ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives are often assumed as having a positive influence on the social and physical atmospheres of society (Hargreaves et al., 2011; Seyfang & Smith, 2012; Armstrong, 2000), and are named as one of the options to work towards a more sustainable society in the Local Agenda 21 of the United Nations (Bell et al., 2012). But can urban community gardens, as an illustration of ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives in the Netherlands, be called ‘sustainable’; which impacts do they have and how can these be classified in terms of ‘sustainability’? Which factors influence these urban community gardens as an illustration of ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives and which policy recommendations can be derived from these results? In order to place the development of these ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives in a broader perspective, this paper uses the multilevel perspective of Transition Theory, which is used to contextualise these ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives, as well as the possible ‘niche’ management that can be applied to it by governmental or societal actors. This larger scale theory is complemented by the use of Practice Theory, which conceptualises ‘practice’ changes on an everyday life basis, which will be used to determine whether and how the impact of these initiatives can be called ‘sustainable’. In order to answer these questions, community gardens are studied as a representative of these ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives, as they are seen as the “icons of local sustainability in urban communities, improving social, economic and environmental conditions” (Stocker & Barnett, 1998, p.180). A sample of fourteen gardens in the four largest cities of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht, have been studied through visits and in-depth semi-structured interviews with their founders/organisers. Furthermore, the impact of these gardens on their visitors/volunteers have been studied by surveying twenty visitors of four of these gardens, asking about their experiences with- and impressions of the garden. Community gardens have been concluded to influence the everyday life practices of individuals of the community gardens in a ‘sustainable’ way, even though this concept is differently defined by founders/organisers or visitors volunteers, with the educational aspect of sustainability as their agreement. Community gardens mainly have a direct impact in the social atmosphere of the individual- as well as the neighbourhood scale; creating a tighter community in which people feel more connected and more welcome and safe in their neighbourhood. Influencing factors on community gardens have been found to be three groups; process factors, organisational factors and individual factors of which individual factors are a crucial factor mainly for the internal development and set-up of a garden, as this person takes the end-responsibility for the garden. The external factor deemed most important is one of the three process factors, ‘building networks’, as this increases the chance that there are people or other sources which can help the community garden when there is a problem with for example the local government. Three main recommendations for policy makers concerning ‘sustainable’ grassroots initiatives in the form of community gardens have been made; first, to formulate a framework agreement for garden initiatives within which they are safe to go, second, to open up a support platform for initiatives, either organised by a governmental organisation or by the initiatives themselves, to exchange information for possible problems possibly accompanied by being connected to the municipality or city district by a window or designated official and third, to give an initiative the chance to prove itself and to keep in mind that expectations should not be too high, such an initiative has different functions, not just the one.