Using Numbers to Save Community Gardens

The story of dis­placed urban gar­dens is noth­ing new. Remember L.A.’s doomed South Central Community Farm? Or Rudy Giuliani’s 1999 fatwa on com­mu­nity gardens?

In the past, protests have coa­lesced around the threat­ened farm or gar­den. Now, a loose coali­tion of schol­ars and activists is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent tack. They’re proac­tively sur­vey­ing gar­dens in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in hopes that hard data — serv­ings har­vested, rev­enues earned, and more — will make land­lords think twice before sum­mon­ing the bulldozers.

In New York, a geo­g­ra­pher named Mara Gittleman is com­plet­ing the third year of a gar­den sur­vey called Farming Concrete. Gittleman recruited vol­un­teers, mostly gar­den­ers, to record the weight of the har­vest (using kitchen scales) and the num­ber and type of plants being grown. In 2010, the survey’s first year, she found that 67 New York gar­dens yielded 87,690 pounds of food, with an esti­mated value of $214,060.

Of course, 67 is a rel­a­tively small per­cent­age of the total num­ber of com­mu­nity gar­dens in New York; one esti­mate puts the num­ber at 500. Gittleman’s count, though far from com­pre­hen­sive, shows that gar­den sur­veys are both pos­si­ble and rel­e­vant. “Once gar­den­ers know the mon­e­tary value of their pro­duce,” Gittleman says, “they can lever­age these fig­ures to gain vis­i­bil­ity, access fund­ing, and build capac­ity to grow even more.” Her find­ings have been a jumping-off point for sophis­ti­cated advo­cacy efforts like a research project out of Columbia University called The Potential for Urban Agriculture in New York City.

In Philadelphia, a gar­den sur­vey is being dri­ven by hopes of con­nect­ing threat­ened gar­den­ers with legal aid. This July, I spent a morn­ing with two University of Pennsylvania stu­dents, Michael Paci and Swaroop Rao, attempt­ing to count the city’s com­mu­nity gar­dens. They were doing it the old-fashioned way, by vis­it­ing every sin­gle garden.

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