Governance and Community Building in Community Gardens

Kyunghee Kim (Virginia Tech)

The overarching goal of this research is to explore governance of community gardens as an agent of community building. Community engagement in the planning, creation and management of different living environments has been a significant strategy in design and planning disciplines to address environmental, social, and economic challenges in an integrated manner. Although community gardens, as a highly autonomous and productive community space, have become a sustainable public space, little academic investigation has been conducted examining governance aspects of community gardens.

Thus, the objectives of this case study are 1) to introduce various governance and leadership approaches of community gardens; 2) to compare community engagement in the development and management of community gardens; 3) to illustrate the different levels and types of communities developed in four community gardens; and 4) to suggest the directions for future research, with its implications on wider community development projects.

Semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders and contextual information from four community garden programs located around Southwest Virginia are analyzed and presented. Four cases represent similarities and differences in terms of program mission, service boundary, governing structure and culture, and community engagement.This comparative research concludes that each governance and community engagement approaches of community gardens contributes to develop different levels and types of communities.