Community Gardens

The 100 largest U.S. cities added 120 new parks last year, but overall spending remained largely flat. Approximately half the cities experienced cuts in their parks budgets, forcing departments to defer maintenance costs even as usership grows.

Community gardens are popping up all over Detroit. This post from Model D takes a tour through three of them, and explores how they balance art and nature.

"Vacancy begets vacancy." With more than 1,000 vacant lots adding to the city's running total of 20,000 each year, Cleveland is on an Ultra-Ex mission to prepare these sites for tomorrow's housing renaissance.

It's common for community gardens today to be so popular there is a waiting list to get in, and the system favors those new to the neighborhood. A pair of farmers has set out to change all that.

As the city of Detroit struggles with population loss and dwindling industrial jobs, farms and community gardens offer the city a positive nudge.

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust's mission is to bring parks and gardens to underserved communities in Los Angeles, where problems of obesity are bad enough that the city recently banned new fast food operations.

Developers are building more and more residential communities around organic farms, banking on increased resident demand for locally grown food, outdoor recreation space, and small-town charm.

A new community garden on the Intel corporate campus in Hillsboro, Oregon is just one of many such plots that have been added to corporate sites across the country.

Vancouver set a goal of creating 2,010 food gardens around the city by the time of the 2010 Olympics, and managed to reach that number (and a little more).

Activists have turned the site of a former inner-city freeway in San Francisco into a community garden.

Activists in Seattle have created a community garden on empty land to help provide food for the city's needy.

This post from The New York Times' blog examines how city government's are increasingly relying on automated services to keep order and boost revenue, and how citizens are reacting.

Mini-farms across the city boost neighborhood appearances, help low-income residents in tough economic times

Residents in an Oxnard neighborhood install a community garden which will provide them with fruits and vegetables.

Wait times for a plot of land in one of Santa Monica's community gardens have grown so long that officials are instituting a new program to connect gardeners with homeowners willing to share their backyards.

Urban gardening is spreading to Mexico City, resurrecting an ancient history of growing produce in the city.

This commentary from the Austin American Statesman argues that the city's aim to become the country's most livable city is undercut by its low number of community gardens.