Engaging Community Built Collaboration to Transform an Underutilized Community Garden in a Food Desert into a Food Oasis

Pamela Harwood (Ball State University)

How can community design-build education be a catalyst for positive social change, neighborhood identity and revitalization? How can participatory design strategies and community-engaged construction support creative and critical collaboration? How can we ensure the project’s scope and objectives are appropriately aligned with community, especially when students’ short-lived, limited roots and commitment can be vulnerable in the semester timeframe? These are questions this studio contemplates. Community built is an interactive process that engages local community, students, and stakeholders in the design, development, and making of sustainable places. Through this co-creative process, we created a place that aids community bonding, develops local leadership, fosters student and community identity, and empowers both students and community to become positive change agents. Educators have a role to play as enablers of successful community engagement and students require skills in building effective dialogue to develop a shared understanding of the challenges and potential of quality place-making.

The site of this transformative, community-built project is an underutilized greenspace, once the home of a high school’s athletic field with its abandoned track circumscribing a waning community garden. The improvement and expansion of the Maring-Hunt Library Community Garden includes a series of three Garden Pavilions and Nature Play Pockets designed and built as useful spaces to address food insecurity in this USDA-designated food desert. The community garden is on the southside of our small city, isolated and removed from the economic prosperity of the collegiate campus. Working with students and the community, the built project cultivates interaction and social activity while providing learning opportunities for elementary school students, library patrons, and neighborhood families. As we face social challenges including poverty, poor nutrition and health, and dependence on industrial food systems, local food production will be more important for building food security, turning this food desert into a food oasis.