Canada: What Community Gardens Tell Us About Inequality
“If there aren’t community gardens in certain quadrants of the city, it’s not because the City of Calgary hasn’t planned any for that area,” said Kristi Peters, a food systems planner at the City of Calgary. “It’s because the community association hasn’t expressed any interest.”
By Ximena González
Spawl Calgary
December 05 2020
Excerpt:
Green-thumbed Calgarians enjoy the many benefits of collective gardening in the 150 community gardens scattered across the city. Community gardens can help support a strong sense of community and promote physical and mental health—they seem to be especially effective at combating social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Natasha Guillot, executive director of the Calgary Horticultural Society, community gardens are “one of the few places that are safe” for people to gather during the pandemic.
But like many things in Calgary, community gardens aren’t an amenity readily available to all. Earlier this year, a group of University of Calgary researchers published a paper that made an unsettling (yet unsurprising) finding: areas with a higher percentage of visible minorities are less likely to have a community garden.
“The communities where [community gardens] were found were less diverse than the average,” said Noel Keough, co-author of the research paper and associate professor of sustainable design at the University of Calgary.
