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Zimbabwe has experienced an unprecedented decline of nearly all human development indicators for the past ten years. Despite the introduction of community gardens in drought-prone areas of Zimbabwe, poverty persists amongst the vulnerable groups. The potential to improve household, community and national food and nutrition security through garden activities is high if issues of water availability cost and availability of inputs, marketing and farmer empowerment can be addressed. This paper seeks to assess the community garden's cost structure to sales volume and profitability and the land use efficiency. Primary data were collected through structured questionnaire. A two stage sampling techniques was used to select respondents. The study was conducted in Zaka district. Three major crops namely tomatoes, covo and onion were chosen for the study basing on size of land under that particular crop. Cost-Volume-Profit analysis employed for analysis of cost structure to sales volume and profitability. Land use efficiency was also employed to measure the ratio yield per acre of farm to average yield of locality. The results showed that although the farmers are able to break even the margin of safety is small especially for cove and onion. The study recommends farmers to increase the size of acreage under onion production whilst reduce acreage under production of covo. Farmers should adopt technology that would improve land use efficiency of onion. There is a need for the intervention by the Government and other stakeholders to improve the profitability and efficiency of the community gardeners. Stakeholders' collaboration especially, in terms of farmer training which can improve garden activities as participants lack knowhow.

Although studies show that people understand the negative effects of organic waste thrown into landfills, few take steps to help reduce the amount of methane pumped into the environment by composting their food scraps, garden waste, grass clippings, etc. Composting meets with resistance because it actually encompasses a complicated combination of factors and processes that involves knowledge, attention, and manual labor to perform correctly. Composting done improperly results in offensive odors such as ammonia and rotten eggs, a sloppy mess of half-decomposed raw materials, and an abundance of pests such as flies, racoons, and skunks. Individuals, communities, and cities often fail despite their collective desire to prevent the emission of greenhouse gases caused by the anaerobic decomposition of organic waste in landfills. However, by understanding how composting works and researching composting studies and patents, the project team designed and fabricated a composting reactor system that addresses the guesswork and labor associated with composting. The reactor uses sustainably sourced heat to create thermophilic conditions that accelerate the composting process and automates mixing through rotation, thus shifting composting from an art to a democratized science. The reactor was designed, fabricated, and delivered to Martial Cottle Park where it will reside and serve as a workshop demonstration device for future composters.

This paper reviews the relations between sustainable cities and community gardens, in particular between the emergence of sustainable districts and the concomitant enthusiasm for community gardens. Based on the corpus of entries for the National Eco-Districts Competition organized in 2011 by the French State, the article investigates the incidence of such a use of collective space in the projects. It then analyzes the projections and settings of urban sustainability which are thereby revealed. Collective gardens are generally promoted as creators of a sense of community, vectors of change, bringers of challenges, mobilizations and new practices. Faced with such ideas which tend to transform the garden into surety for the global planning project, the issue is also to include avenues of thought involving more strategic political and ideological conceptions to be found behind the promotion of city gardens. ; Ce texte fait un point sur les relations entre ville durable et jardins, notamment entre l'émergence des opérations de quartiers durables et l'engouement concomitant pour les jardins collectifs. À partir du corpus constitué des dossiers de candidature présentés au Concours national EcoQuartiers organisé en 2011 par l'État français, l'article évalue l'occurrence de cette forme d'espace collectif dans les projets. Il analyse ensuite les projections et les scénographies de la durabilité urbaine que les discours de projet révèlent. Les jardins collectifs y sont généralement promus en opérateurs de proximité, vecteurs de changement, porteurs d'enjeux, de mobilisations et de pratiques divers. Devant ce type de propos qui transforme le jardin en caution du projet global d'aménagement, l'intérêt est aussi de réintégrer des pistes de réflexion quant à des saisies plus stratégiques, notamment politiques et idéologiques, que recèle la promotion des jardins dans la ville.

AbstractIn this article, we examine the structure and meaning of community gardens in Florida's most cohesive and oldest African American community of Frenchtown in Tallahassee. Here, residents reclaim and transform empty spaces into places of engagement and empowerment, effectively resisting systemic racism. Using a mixed methods approach during a 5‐week NSF‐funded ethnographic field school with the Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee, we counter the prevailing stigma of Frenchtown that perpetuates its continued marginalization. We argue that community gardens are expressions of social resistance. Through garden activities, residents transcend race, culture, income, and neighborhoods, while also promoting health, heritage, place‐making, and economic opportunities. Place is constituted by spatial politics in a cultural milieu, evident in the community's ability to intersect diverse institutional boundaries via gardens. This research contextualizes how a community‐based participatory research project successfully resists violent environments through spatial transformation.

This senior project will focus on the roles that community gardens play in New York City's Lower East Side (LES). Over the past 40 years, these gardens have provided a range of ecological, educational and community services. By analyzing the history of the gardens and the variety of values they provide, this project explores the importance of these benefits, particularly in making environmental education accessible to communities. I will emphasize how the policies and histories of these communities have preserved community gardens as educational spaces, which is becoming important because they are contested spaces. I will do a case study on Children's Magical Garden, a community garden that specifically caters to underprivileged communities, and Campos Community Garden, which fulfills gaps in food inequality. These are all gardens that uniquely contribute to a story about city gardens and are touchstones for how legislative action and preservation efforts are working to save these communities. This project aims to take a more personal look at these formal and informal processes and the actors that support running and maintaining a city garden today.

Abstract The community gardens seek to ensure the promotion of healthy food and family economy. However, these areas demonstrate a potential for rescuing affective bonds and promoting the collectivity. The objective was to analyze the environmental perception and affections of the community garden program users in a city located in southern Brazil. 14 users were interviewed, mostly retired and over 60 years old. The Affective Maps Generator Tool was adapted to make the affections possible for interpretation. The content analysis found the perception of an environment that facilitates the psychological restoration, mental health, quality of life, environmental interactions, productivity, healthy diet and family economy. The affections experienced were often described with the intention to identify gardens as restorative environments and spaces that promote quality of life, which are important mediators of collectivity and the appropriation of environment.

Community gardens have emerged as community development initiatives with proven environmental, social, and public health benefits. While many studies evaluate the benefits of community gardens, fewer studies evaluate the success and failure of gardens, especially in China. This research uses four case studies of state-sponsored community gardens in Beijing and Shanghai to analyze social and organizational factors that help and hinder the success of community gardens. Factors impacting success are multi-faceted and interactive, and relations between residents and local government staff determine success throughout different development stages. In the design stage, the involvement of residents and their vision are important to success. In the maintenance stage, the leadership of key actors, including Residents' Committee staff and volunteers, residents' preparedness for self-governance, and external recognition are the most significant factors. The findings corroborate literature on factors of community gardens' success while contributing new insights about the organization and governance of community gardens in the context of a top-down political system.