Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens

Danny Woo Community Garden

Although there are thousands of community gardens across North America, only Seattle and a few other cities include them in their urban development plans. While the conditions and experiences in Seattle may be unique, the city’s programs offer insights and lessons for other cities and communities.

Greening Cities Growing Communities, a book published last fall by the University of Washington Press, analyzes the impact these community gardens have had on the city’s residents. Written by Jeffrey Hou, associate professor of the landscape architecture department; Julie M. Johnson, a UW associate professor of landscape architecture; and Laura J. Lawson, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, the book examines:

- Planning and design strategies that support the development of urban community gardens as sustainable places for education and recreation;

- Approaches to design processes, construction, and stewardship that utilize volunteer and community participation and create a sense of community;

- Programs that enable gardens to serve as a resource for social justice for low income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors;

- Opportunities to develop active-living frameworks by strategically locating community gardens and linking them with other forms of recreation and open space as part of pedestrian-accessible networks.

Greening Cities, Growing Communities profiles Interbay, Thistle, Danny Woo, and Bradner Community Gardens, among others in Seattle. The authors found the gardens to be vibrant community spaces; providing sources of recreation, vehicles for social justice and a means of knitting people together. “Danny Woo garden is one of the most intensely used public open spaces in the International District,” Hou said in a recent presentation to the Great City Green Infrastructure Committee. “People go there to develop social networks.”

This level of activity, if disconnected from the surrounding neighborhood, can also create tension. In the case of the Thistle P-Patch, there’s a limited amount of community gathering space and the garden plot caretakers do not reside in the immediate neighborhood. The effect has been a lack of broader neighborhood support for garden activities and resource allocation.

Other challenges faced by community gardens include resource uncertainty and a lack of permanent space. As Hou pointed out, “there’s no specific land use designation for community gardens. They are subject to many pressures from development.” This is especially true in the city’s more dense neighborhoods where there’s an increased demand for both habitable square footage and growing space. Hou is now working with UW students to develop models for integrating community gardens into compact, mixed-use developments such as Yesler Terrace.

The community garden conversation is set to continue later this spring when the UW hosts a roundtable discussion and design charrette to develop innovative models for community gardens. Details to follow in the coming months.

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