Do urban gardens lead to gentrification? Not in Detroit, study finds
This indicates that the practice of gardening may be spreading beyond the Black-led institutions like churches and nonprofits that originally promoted it.
By: Greta Guest
Source: Michigan News
May 24, 2022
Excerpt:
For example, home and community gardens are more frequently planted in non-Black neighborhoods, according to the study forthcoming in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.
The study used remote sensing to map 478 home gardens and 130 community gardens across 56 neighborhoods where 700,000 people live in Detroit, an emblematic legacy city undergoing significant redevelopment.
“We found in the case of community gardens, the folks who had access to those gardens were wealthier, more educated and of a higher socioeconomic status,” said Jason Hawes, a doctoral student at University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. “They also tended to be clustered in non-Black neighborhoods. That’s a really big deal in a city that’s 78% Black.”
Study senior author Joshua Newell, an urban geographer at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability, collaborated with Hawes and Dimitrios Gounaridis, a postdoctoral researcher on the study.
“Our mapping effort produced one of the first city-scale datasets of urban agriculture available in the United States,” Newell said. The researchers incorporated Google Street View along with remote sensing to map the home and community gardens.
