The Planner in the Garden: A Historical View into the Relationship between Planning and Community Gardens

Abstract

A historical review of community garden programs in the United States since the 1890s reveals an ambivalent relationship between community gardens and the planning profession. On one hand, garden programs are praised and supported as local action to serve environmental, social, and individual objectives. On the other hand, because they are perceived as opportunistic and temporary, community gardens are largely ignored in long-range planning. Socially constructed as public catalyst and private resource, community gardens illustrate unresolved tensions between planning as a profession and as a civic concern and between comprehensive planning and interim, local interventions.