Community gardens have received increasing attention from a wide range of academics, professionals, activists, hobbyists, students, and politicians as potential solutions to problems as diverse as food insecurity, childhood obesity, social fragmentation, economic instability, and declining biodiversity. Academics in particular have focused on community gardens not only as sources of food and nutrition, but also their role in cultural, political, economic, and ecological systems at multiple scales (Smith and Kurtz 2003; Baker 2004; Glover 2004; Beilin and Hunter 2011; Evers and Hodgson 2011).
Though much work has been done cataloguing the benefits of community gardens to participants and society at large, what is not as well understood is how these benefits translate into expressed motivations for participation in community gardens or the relative strength of these motivating factors at inspiring gardeners to overcome impediments such as friction of distance to access gardens. Meanwhile, although the inherently spatial focus of the discourse surrounding local food networks has led to efforts to map the food systems of both urban and rural areas at the state, census tract and even neighborhood level, there is a deficit in research designed to visualize these networks at the scale of individual behaviors (Peters et al 2009; Hu et al 2011; Hubley 2011; Kremer and DeLiberty 2011; Russell and Heidkamp 2011). This research is intended to address this deficit by assessing the motivations of community gardeners in Austin, Texas as well modeling the spatial patterns of their participation using a geographic information systems (GIS) approach.
The purposes of this study are to assess the motivations for participation among community gardeners, to describe the relative strength of these motivations as measured by distance traveled to gardens, and to illustrate, using a GIS, the geographic participation-sheds of a sample of community gardens within the Austin, Texas metropolitan area. The results of this inquiry promise to inform scholarly discourses on the evolving role of community gardens within urban space as well as informing urban land managers of the characteristics of community garden participation-sheds and the motivations of participating gardeners.
III. Research Questions and Conceptual Framework
In order to achieve the objectives stated above, the following research questions will be addressed:
- What are the primary motivations for participation among community gardeners in Austin, Texas?
- Do motivational groups exhibit significantly different demographic characteristics?
- What are the spatial patterns of participation among community gardeners?
o Do gardeners with similar spatial patterns differ in terms of demographic and motivational characteristics?
o Do gardeners with similar demographic and motivational characteristics exhibit significantly different spatial patterns?
- Do gardeners participating in long-standing community gardens (established 1970s-1990s) exhibit significantly different spatial, motivational, and demographic characteristics compared to those at recently established (2000s) gardens?
These questions will be answered through quantitative analysis and cartographic visualization of responses to a structured survey (administered face-to-face) as well as a qualitative assessment of unstructured interviews (recorded onsite) with gardeners at selected community gardens in the Austin area. Although tailored for this study, these questions were derived from previous research on urban agriculture, alternative food networks (AFN), and community gardens.
