I was asked by the Hungarian Kertbar\u00e1t Magazin<\/a><\/strong> to write a series of articles on the topic of community gardens, which I would like to share in English on this website. In the coming months I will translate six articles into English, covering the following topics, as he history of community gardens, community garden establishment – start-up, planning, design and implementation, community development and education, and managing the first season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the Urban Gardens Association, I have established nine community gardens in Budapest since 2012. All the gardens are located on municipal land, are a municipal investment, and we have recruited community gardeners from the neighbourhood, basically creating neighbourhood communities. As a garden manager, my role was to develop the community garden, coordinate the garden and successfully complete the first season. This includes everything from planning, to training, to a successful first season and everything that goes with community gardening. With each garden start, the goal is for the community to be self-sustaining within a year, to be self-organising, to continue the garden and community the following season, and for me to leave and start a new garden. In many ways there is a kind of organisational development process where the organisation is the garden community itself and the aim is to sustain and run the garden on an ongoing basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early 2000s, in New York, I saw 40-50 year old community gardens that were beautifully run, although they didn’t even know who the first gardeners were, who the founder was? In a way, that’s what urban gardens are supposed to do, beautify neighborhoods and develop neighborhood communities, bring permanence and beauty to their surroundings, semi-independently of the actual gardeners. The garden as a permanent site, nature as an ever-changing challenge, provides so much task and pleasure that it is possible to perpetuate the operation of an urban garden, season after season, theoretically forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my own life, community gardens emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, as a college professor I lectured to students about the Great Depression of 1929-32 and that was my first exposure to crisis and war gardens. Let’s start from there\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crisis gardens, war gardens, Cuba, modern American community gardens<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n During the Great Depression of 1929 in the United States, two types of crisis gardens were used, one to support self-sufficient individual gardens with tools and seeds, and the other to produce basic crops (potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, etc.) for free public and school catering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we take a narrow view of the concept of the community garden today and do not look towards initiatives such as the garden city movement (which deserves a separate article), the birth of modern urban community gardens has always been linked to a period of crisis, whether it be war or economic crisis. Initially, their aim was to create partial food self-sufficiency and to employ the unemployed. In the First World War these self-sufficient gardens and the self-sufficiency movement were called Liberty Gardens and in the Second World War Victory Gardens. All sides in the war were concerned about the food supply of the population, so government-sponsored programs were the urban-rural self-sufficiency garden movements. They did so with great success, so much so that by 1918, in World War I, figures show that more than 5.2 million war garden plots had been established in the US, producing $525 million in crops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The situation was similar during the Second World War, when the movement was called Victory Gardens. Britain was in a special predicament, as the naval blockade put them in a particularly difficult position, and for them, in addition to the strict rationing system, getting rid of starvation meant becoming self-sufficient. England’s food supply from the industrial revolution depended on food produced in the colonies, they were not self-sufficient in food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Modern community gardens – the beginnings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Urban community gardens in the modern sense of the word can actually be traced back to the late 1960s, when Liz Chisty and her team of Green Guerillas<\/a> founded a community garden on a deserted street corner in New York City (Bowery Houston Farm and Garden 1972), followed by several other gardens. The urban garden movements emerged after the student unrest of 1968 died down, and these green movements carried the momentum of the student revolts forward. Interestingly, the change of regime in Hungary 1989 also started as an ecological – environmental movement against the regulation of the Danube river and the construction of power plants, under the name of the Danube Cir<\/a>cle.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n New York in the sixties and seventies experienced a severe economic crisis, public safety had reached catastrophic levels, the city was full of empty lots, bankrupt factories, rust belts, land that attracted crime, full of with garbage , problems for everyone. One of the objectives of the Green Guerrilla movement was to prevent crime by illegally occupying vacant urban land, greening it and maintaining a permanent presence and establishing neighbourhood communities that looked after each other. Interestingly, it was only in 2013 that New York City adopted the legal status of community gardens and included them in the city’s green register system. All this happened under the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg. Since then, the Green Thumb<\/strong><\/a>, the hallmark of a good gardener, has been established to provide central support for urban community gardens within the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.<\/a> <\/strong>They currently have 550 community gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1978, a non-profit garden association was formed in the USA, the American Community Gardening Association,<\/strong><\/a> which organises community gardens in the United States and Canada, with 14,000 registered gardens. This movement is clearly no longer just about food production – although there is certainly a factor at work in the rapidly rising inflation, oil crisis, urban poverty, and the uplift of marginalised groups – but also about improving the vitality of cities, bringing people and ethnic groups together, and trying to respond locally to environmental degradation and, in many cases, creating alternative cultural venues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The urban climate change of the last decade, and especially the environmental rethinking of cities and urbanised areas, has given a new boost to the community garden movement worldwide. Community-maintained gardens and parks are becoming part of the urban ecosystem, they are gaining attention and are even a positive call to action for policy makers and city and district leaders, a positive initiative worthy of active support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Detroit, the city of crisis gardens<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is interesting to note that in the last decades, cities and communities in crisis in the United States have rediscovered the crisis garden movement, such as Detroit, once one of the richest cities in the US, the capital of the automotive and military industries, but now a run-down, unpromising metropolis, one of the most unlivable cities in the US. In recent years, a self-sufficient garden movement has taken off, much like the gardens of the Great Depression, growing food on a large scale and trying to hold together crumbling communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cuba the crisis garden country<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other modern example of a crisis garden comes from Cuba in the early 1990s. During the Cold War period, Cuba produced and shipped sugar and tobacco to the socialist countries in a monoculture-like way, in exchange for finished goods, fertiliser and oil. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba suffered a massive economic crisis, and its previously well-funded economy collapsed. Food shortages developed in the country, so free land was distributed among the inhabitants – any city resident could get land suitable for gardening in the cities or on the outskirts of the city. More than half of Havana’s fruit and vegetable consumption came from community gardens, and there was also small-scale livestock farming. Community gardens in Cuba not only provide food for their members, but also have enough produce to support schools, hospitals and the elderly, and even have surpluses to sell in local markets. By the 2000s, 500 community markets were operating across Cuba, 30-50% cheaper than state shops. No one in the country is starving, despite decades of US embargoes. One of the most interesting things about their example is that they have achieved these results through organic farming: they use no fuel, no fertilisers and no special pesticides to produce their food. This process is beautifully illustrated in the documentary film “The Power of Community”<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First Small Pest Garden 2012, Budapest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2012, I founded my first garden in the 19th district of Budapest, in cooperation with the local government, the First Small Pest Garden<\/a><\/strong>. The garden is 12 years old this year, it works perfectly, and in the last decade it has flourished, it is a kind of miracle how many different plants can grow on a thousand square metres, if they are well cared for. The Els\u0151 Kis Pesti kert is so successful that for years it has won the national competition for the Best Kitchen Garden, Community Garden category, and last year it was awarded the permanent title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year I’m starting my ninth garden, all of them working well. There are no perfect gardens, they are made up of plants and people, they are affected by nature, the weather, the interactions of garden members, garden pests, you could go on and on about how many variables there are in a community garden. Community gardens exist along life cycle models, in part the plant population has its own life cycle, and the garden community evolves along a life cycle, similar to the way a company is organized. Organizational development and community building have many similarities. Establishing a community garden is partly a process of organization, law, landscape design, education, and community development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the following sections, I will introduce the process of starting a community, urban garden, the first steps of starting a garden, and the benefits of community gardens.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Article series 01 Introduction, preface, purpose of the article series I was asked by the Hungarian Kertbar\u00e1t Magazin to write a series of articles on the topic of community gardens, which I would like to share in English on this website. In the coming months I will translate six articles into English, covering the following […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4767,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[236],"tags":[226,230,228,231,232,229,234,227,233],"class_list":["post-4686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-establishment-of-community-gardens","tag-community-gardens","tag-community-gardens-history","tag-crisis-gardens","tag-cuba-community-gardens","tag-detroit-community-gardens","tag-ekpek","tag-liberty-gardens","tag-urvab-gardens","tag-victory-gardens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4686"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4997,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4686\/revisions\/4997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.varosikertek.hu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Kep1.jpg\")
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