Making Community Gardens

These initiatives reclaim degraded lands to cultivate local organic food systems, create native forests, food forests, vertical gardens and ecoparks, establish food foraging public spaces and orchards, bring back biodiversity through rewilding, and create vibrant green social spaces through hands-on learning exchange and upskilling. Participants coproduce gardens in their entirety, working together in all aspects to make a garden or urban farm from scratch. The process typically begins by remediating abandoned or degraded lands. The gardens are created around principles of permaculture and agroecology and use sustainably sourced and repurposed materials to make resilient and regenerative spaces that may include water catchment systems, renewable energyscapes, composters, greenhouses, raised beds or keyhole designs, and so on, to fit each community’s needs. They may also incorporate murals, living walls, pollinator stations, and recreational areas into the design. They have been mostly produced in informal communities but can be adapted to be coproduced in any context.