Planting for Permanence: Persevering in Protecting New York's Community Gardens
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.