Case studies New Zealand

In Christchurch - also known as the 'Garden City' - gardening has traditionally been undertaken in private homes, reflecting New Zealand's dominantly 'suburban' urban areas with freestanding homes on sizable lots. However, community gardens such as 'The Sydenham Community Gardens' have developed since the 1990s. Organisations like the 'Christchurch South Community Gardens Trust' engage the community to grow food together, foster sustainable living, and provide venues for research, education and recreation. Nowadays, a number of community gardens can be found across the city (http://resources.ccc.govt.nz/files/christchurchcommunitygardenscontactlist-volunteerinyourpark.pdf). In the course the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, Christchurch's city centre has been severely damaged and parts of it are still inaccessible. In the aftermath of the earthquake, community groups developed concepts of how to use formerly occupied spaces for temporary garden projects: e.g.  Greening The Rubble
Other initiatives such as "Garden City 2.0" promote permanent transformations of urban areas into new community garden projects with an emphasis on food production
In addition, a number of proposed new masterplans for the rebuilding of Christchurch include community gardens. The Canterbury District Health Board is actively promoting the use of sites left vacant by the quakes in inner city urban areas as productive gardens, or  'food forests'.
The School of Landscape Architecture is interested in if and how attitudes towards community gardens have changed after the earthquakes in Christchurch. Is there an increased interest in community gardens and sustainable food production? How popular are masterplans which include new community gardens? Did other cities experience a change of attitudes in regard to allotment gardens after earthquake damage or comparable natural disasters (e.g. in Italy)?

It is planned to carry out case study research on community gardens in Christchurch starting with a city-wide survey focusing on quantitative (number and sizes of community gardens in Christchurch, geographical distribution) and qualitative aspects (how and by whom are community gardens used, what they look like). In a second step, users of community gardens will be interviewed (qualitative key informant interviews) to get to know more about why and how community gardens are used and if the earthquakes had a particular influence on their use. In a third step, the collected data will the analysed in accordance to the research questions.

Location on map