Urban Gardens

Urban Gardens Can Bolster American Democracy

January 14, 2026 Sam Delgado, Civil Eats. Create! Food and Agriculture, Food Security, Urban Design, Urban Gardens

When people walk or drive past urban gardens, they often just see what’s on the surface. Raised beds on a small plot. Seedlings poking through the dirt. Perhaps bright pops of colorful produce, like tomatoes or peppers. But when Kate Brown, an environmental historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), looks at urban gardens, she sees a deep-rooted history of activism and sustainability—one that spans centuries, continents, and communities. Brown distilled her research on the subject into her forthcoming book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City.

These Urban Farms Are Filling The Gaps The Government Ignores

May 28, 2025 Iulia Lupse, Next City. Create! Food Deserts, Food Security, Urban Design, Urban Gardens

Rodrigo Martinez started working at Bonton Farms in 2018 while recovering from addiction. Now the Facilities Manager, he says the opportunity was more than just a job. “I’ve seen people come through the program, learn trades, develop healthy habits, and move on to better jobs, get their own place, buy their own vehicles — things like that.” His story is proof that urban farming isn’t just about food. It’s about rebuilding lives and sparking real economic opportunity. More than 53 million Americans live in food deserts, far from fresh groceries, according to the USDA. In South Dallas’ Bonton neighborhood, 44.3% of residents fall below the poverty line, triple the national average. With groceries and jobs thin on the ground, residents scrap for the essentials.

A Seattle Urban Garden Models What Community Input Should Look Like

June 13, 2024 Jennifer Caddick, Next City. Create! Community, Environment, Gardening, Parks, Seattle, Urban Gardens, Washington

More than 20 parks across Seattle support urban gardens developed and managed in partnership with local communities. From small community garden plots to large orchards, the gardens provide fresh, healthy food to community members across the city. Seattle Parks and Recreation, through itsUrban Food Systems Program, provides the land and the infrastructure for these projects. But community members are at the heart of each project, determining what to grow and how to plant and manage their gardens. One such project — the Rainier Community Center’s new urban garden — has received the2024 Toro Urban Park Innovation Award.

Ending The Food Deserts In Baltimore

July 26, 2015 Antonia Blumberg, www.huffingtonpost.com Create! Baltimore, Food and Agriculture, Urban Gardens

By Antonia Blumberg for Huffington Post - Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, who heads Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, is spearheading the Black Church Food Security Network in conjunction with the Baltimore Food and Faith Project of the Johns Hopkins Center For a Livable Future and Black Dirt Farm, a local group of urban farmers who grow food on the historic land of Harriet Tubman on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Their aim is to bring together black churches and black farmers to provide their communities with healthy, nutritious food. In Baltimore, 34 percent of the city’s African American population lives without access to fresh, healthy foods, compared to just 8 percent of white residents. Food justice came to the forefront of Brown’s mind five years ago when he was a new pastor at Pleasant Hope and found himself visiting members of his congregation in the hospital up to four times a week. “I realized the people I served were in the hospital, many of them, because of diet-related issues,” he told HuffPost.

Urban Farms Build Resilience Within Fragile Food System

October 23, 2014 Maureen Pao, www.npr.org Create! Singapore, Urban Gardens

At a local FairPrice Supermarket in central Singapore, you'll find baby carrots grown in Bakersfield, Calif. — the same ones for sale at my local grocery store in Washington, D.C. Such well-traveled vegetables aren't unusual in the tiny island state, which imports more than 90 percent of its food from some 35 countries. Singapore may be one of the most affluent countries in the world, but it depends heavily on others for basic foodstuffs. A new crop of farmers is trying to change that. Just as property developers build up when they can't build out, so, too, are these agricultural pioneers. Vertical farming is taking hold across Singapore — not only in greenhouses in the vanishing countryside but also on rooftops in the heart of the city, amid soaring skyscrapers and housing blocks.

The Farm of the Future: Green Sky Growers

October 23, 2014 The Coolist, www.facebook.com Create! Urban Gardens

The farm of the future is growing today in an unlikely place– on the roof of a retail building in a sleepy suburb near Orlando, Florida. Green Sky Growers is a true technical marvel, a state of the art farm which is one part laboratory and one part organic garden. It raises thousands of pounds of fish and vegetables every year using a mutually-beneficial farming technique called aquaponics. Green Sky Growers raises everything from tilapia to perch, herbs to tomatoes, delivering them fresh to the public and a hungry group of local restaurateurs. If you enjoy a dish of striped bass and leafy greens at the restaurant below, you may have no idea that the ingredients were sourced from 50 feet above.

What Can Urban Agriculture Do?

July 7, 2014 Kelsey Kober, www.csmonitor.com Create! Community, Food and Agriculture, Latin America, Urban Gardens

Many major cities in Latin America and the Caribbean are turning to urban farming to address the common problems that they face, such as urban poverty and food insecurity. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the urban population of Latin America and the Caribbean is now almost half a billion; the region is the most urban in the world. In 2009, representatives from Central American national governments, research institutes, and international organizations met to draft the Medellìn Declaration, which committed them to incorporate UPA, or urban and peri-urban agriculture (the latter refers to commercial farming that supplies a city’s food) to alleviate their cities’ problems. Havana, Cuba, is making use of the technological developments that have arised from the use of UPA. “In Cuba, the biggest challenge was the shortage of inputs, especially seed, fertilizer, and pesticide,” said Graeme Thomas, author of the FAO report. “That has been overcome by a shift to fully organic production.” Havana is well known for their use of organoponics, a farming technology that uses organic substrates. The city, which previously struggled with food rationing and child malnutrition, now boasts 97 organoponic gardens. An estimated 90,000 households are now growing their own vegetables and raising small animals for consumption, and

Victory Gardens DC Is Growing Food & Community

June 17, 2014 Lynda McCullough, www.foodtank.com Create! Crowdfunding, D.C., Food and Agriculture, Poverty, Urban Gardens, Washington, Washington D.C.

Victory Gardens DC, a new urban farm in Washington, D.C., grew out of one young couple’s desire to serve city residents in a practical way. Alex Shek, an entrepreneur, and his wife Julia, a nurse, decided that the best way to help the people in their Southeast neighborhood is to provide healthy food to those who can’t afford it. With Alex’s business know how, Julia’s knowledge of healthy food and cooking, and the aid of some talented friends, they started an urban farm in their own neighborhood. Neighbors, local businesses, churches and contributors on indigogo.com have provided labor and money, and the couple’s dream is now a reality. Food Tank: What inspired you to start Victory Gardens DC? AS: My wife and I moved to the city from Northern Virginia with the idea of ministry and outreach in our heart, and we wanted to fill a need, a practical need, and how practical is food? The ability to find organic food or good fresh fruits and vegetables at a low cost in the city is really challenging, and I hope we can make an impact through providing food for those that can't afford it.

Here’s The Dirt On Urban Gardens

June 4, 2014 Willy Blackmore, www.takepart.com Create! Food and Agriculture, Sustainability, Urban Gardens

I spent the last two weeks trying to buy animal shit off Craigslist. Specifically rabbit shit, which in some circles is considered the ne plus ultra of animal waste. This morning, I was finally able to get in touch with a guy out in the San Fernando Valley who raises rabbits (for what, I don’t know) on a diet of organic alfalfa pellets, grain sweetened with molasses, kitchen scraps, and extra helpings of timothy and alfalfa hay. They’re a happy bunch of bunnies, and that goes a long way toward explaining why I would pay $40 of my hard-earned cash for 60 gallons of their manure. Alex, my rabbit connection, has already composted the waste and he's even willing to deliver it to my house, where it will be hauled up into the yard and used to fertilize my beans, peppers, eggplant, and kale and to prep the new garden bed that will soon be home to tomatoes and watermelon. If there’s any left, I’ll mound it around the base of the blackberry vine, rosebushes, and fruit trees—especially the pomegranate I recently transplanted. Doing so, according to a new study, could help make the dirt in my yard far more suitable for growing food than a conventional farm.

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