Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Modeling community garden participation: how locations and frames shape participant demographics

  • Published:
Agriculture and Human Values Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Ample research documents the health benefits of community gardens, but our understanding of the factors shaping gardener participation is limited. Neighborhood demographics and garden frames have each been theorized to play a role in shaping who participates in community gardens. Yet, our understanding of the interplay between these factors is underdeveloped and this body of work lacks consideration of the racial and class makeup of gardeners on a large scale. With a nation-wide survey that includes measures of gardener demographics (N = 162), the present study considers the extent to which community garden frames and locations simultaneously shape participant demographics. I combine these factors into a conceptual model explaining community garden participation as an iterative process of framing, accessibility, and representation, all situated within a garden’s surrounding community. Results show some base correlations between gardens focusing on healthy food access or symbolic food labels and gardener demographics, but ordered logistic and negative binomial regressions show stronger evidence of community demographics shaping gardener demographics. At the same time, t-tests comparing mean neighborhood and gardener demographics shows a consistent under-representation of Latinx community members among gardeners. As theorized in the model presented, community garden locations are important for shaping what demographics are represented among gardeners, but how community garden benefits are framed can limit garden accessibility, and subsequently neighborhood representation, especially for Latinx residents. This model helps illustrate the mechanisms through which garden organizers and advocates can develop more inclusive community gardens through fostering representation from people of color and the working-class.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Symbolic food labels are labels like “local,” “organic,” or “sustainable” that may signal to White alternative food program participants in particular that a food should be considered healthy (Butterfield and Ramírez 2020; Guthman 2011).

  2. The cost of community garden participation was similar within the data presented in this paper, which was collected between 2015 and 2017 and is described further in the Methods section below. In this sample, 40% of respondents reported an annual garden fee of $30 or less, and 85% reported an annual garden fee of $60 or less.

  3. While existing work identifies greater good and empowerment as important benefits as described in the present paper, I was unable to fully consider these measures in the analyses presented here (due to a lack of variation within my data that I discuss later in the paper) and have therefore excluded them in these hypotheses.

  4. Here healthy food access represents a focus on basic needs, in contrast to the more restrictive identification of what people should be eating that comes with a focus on symbolic food labels.

  5. The rate of White neighborhood residents was used to holistically consider community racial makeup without over-complicating the regression models and introducing issues of multi-coliniarity that would have been present with the individual consideration of White, Black, and Latinx residents within the same models. The comparison of rates of Black gardeners and residents, as well as rates of Latinx gardeners and residents, are more directly considered in Hypothesis 2c.

  6. The number of either Black or Latinx participants is a combined measure representing the sum of the number of Black and the number of Latinx gardeners in each garden.

  7. I also considered the number of White gardeners and the number of non-White gardeners (calculated as the total number of gardeners minus the number of White gardeners), but the garden benefits had no significant relationships with these outcome variables. I therefore excluded them from this paper. Impacts of control variables and neighborhood demographics (class of the garden participants, neighborhood racial makeup, neighborhood income, and neighborhood education) were substantively similar to the models presented in the results section of this paper.

  8. While Butterfield and Ramírez (2020) identified an additional category—food donation—in their work, we had not included a response option that corresponded to this category in our survey. I was therefore unable to consider this category in the present study.

  9. I also included gardener demographics as controls where relevant: I controlled for gardener class, as described above, when predicting gardener race; I controlled for the percent of gardeners identified as White (calculated from the number of White gardeners and the total number of gardeners) when predicting gardener class.

  10. I used negative binomial regression instead of Poisson regression because the means (MeanB&L = 30.13; MeanLatinx = 8.13; MeanBlack = 22.31) were much lower than the variances (VarianceB&L = 41,172.37; VarianceLatinx = 1,122.07; VarianceBlack = 29,806.54). In the base models, likelihood ratio tests for the alphas measuring overdispersion are also statistically significant at the .001 level, indicating that the alphas (AlphaB&L = 1.27; AlphaLatinx = 3.00; AlphaBlack = 2.25) are not equal to 0 and that there is overdispersion in the outcome variables. This suggests that the negative binomial regression model is a better fit than the Poisson regression model.

  11. Greater good and self-empowerment were excluded in these analyses due to the lack of variation in responses to these options (see Table 2 for details). Community orientation was also excluded from regression models because it was not a main area of interest in this study and showed no statistically significant relationships with gardener class or race measures.

References

  • Alkon, A.H., and J. Cadji. 2020. Sowing seeds of displacement: Gentrification and food justice in Oakland, CA. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44 (1): 108–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alkon, A.H., and K.M. Norgaard. 2009. Breaking the food chains: An investigation of food justice activism. Sociological Inquiry 79 (3): 289–305.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alkon, A.H., Y. Kato, and J. Sbicca. 2020. A recipe for gentrification: Food, power, and resistance in the city. New York, NY: New York University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Aptekar, S. 2015. Visions of public space: Reproducing and resisting social hierarchies in a community garden. Sociological Forum 30 (1): 209–227.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. 2000. A community diabetes education and gardening project to improve diabetes care in a northwest American Indian tribe. The Diabetes Educator 26 (1): 113–120.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. 2000. A survey of community gardens in upstate New York: Implications for health promotion and community development. Health & Place 6 (4): 319–327.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Becker, E., and N. McClintock. 2020. The cost of low-hanging fruit? An orchard, a non-profit, and changing community in Portland. In A recipe for gentrification: food power, and resistance in the city, ed. A.H. Alkon, Y. Kato, and J. Sbicca, 132–153. New York: New York University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Boekelheide, D., and L.K. Bradley. 2017. Collard greens and common ground: A North Carolina community food gardening handbook. University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonilla-Silva, E. 2010. Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield.

    Google Scholar 

  • Braswell, T.H. 2018. Fresh food, new faces: Community gardening as ecological gentrification in St. Louis, Missouri. Agriculture and Human Values 35 (4): 809–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butterfield, K.L. 2020. Neighborhood composition and community garden locations: The effect of ethnicity, income, and education. Sociological Perspectives 63 (5): 738–763.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butterfield, K.L., and A.S. Ramírez. 2020. Framing food access: Do community gardens inadvertently reproduce inequality? Health Education & Behavior 48 (2): 160–168.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, L.K. 2017. City of forests, city of farms: Sustainability planning for New York City’s nature. Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Caspi, C.E., G. Sorensen, S.V. Subramanian, and I. Kawachi. 2012. The local food environment and diet: A systematic review. Health & Place 18 (5): 1172–1187.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chang, V.W., and D.S. Lauderdale. 2009. Fundamental cause theory, technological innovation, and health disparities: The case of cholesterol in the era of statins. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 50 (3): 245–260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, N., K. Reynolds, and R. Sanghvi. 2012. Five borough farm: Seeding the future of urban agriculture in New York City. New York, NY: Design Trust for Public Space.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corrigan, M.P. 2011. Growing what you eat: Developing community gardens in Baltimore, Maryland. Applied Geography 31 (4): 1232–1241.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drake, L., and L.J. Lawson. 2015. Results of a US and Canada community garden survey: Shared challenges in garden management amid diverse geographical and organizational contexts. Agriculture and Human Values 32 (2): 241–254.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Draper, C., and D. Freedman. 2010. Review and analysis of the benefits, purposes, and motivations associated with community gardening in the United States. Journal of Community Practice 18 (4): 458–492.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ESRI. 2019. ArcGIS living atlas of the world. https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2&q=current%20year%20acs&type=layers. Accessed 1 Jan 2020.

  • Ferris, J., C. Norman, and J. Sempik. 2001. People, land and sustainability: Community gardens and the social dimension of sustainable development. Social Policy & Administration 35 (5): 559–568.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Glover, T.D., K.J. Shinew, and D.C. Parry. 2005. Association, sociability, and civic culture: The democratic effect of community gardening. Leisure Sciences 27 (1): 75–92.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guthman, J. 2011. “If they only knew”: The unbearable whiteness of alternative food. In Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability, ed. A.H. Alkon and J. Agyeman, 263–281. MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hale, J., C. Knapp, L. Bardwell, M. Buchenau, J. Marshall, F. Sancar, and J.S. Litt. 2011. Connecting food environments and health through the relational nature of aesthetics: Gaining insight through the community gardening experience. Social Science & Medicine 72 (11): 1853–1863.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hinrichs, C., and K.S. Kremer. 2002. Social inclusion in a midwest local food system project. Journal of Poverty 6 (1): 65–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kato, Y., C. Passidomo, and D. Harvey. 2014. Political gardening in a post-disaster city: Lessons from New Orleans. Urban Studies 51 (9): 1833–1849.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kolb, K.H. 2022. Retail inequality: Reframing the food desert debate. Oakland, CA: Univ of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kwate, N.O.A. 2008. Fried chicken and fresh apples: Racial segregation as a fundamental cause of fast food density in black neighborhoods. Health & Place 14 (1): 32–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lawson, L. 2005. City bountiful: A century of community gardening in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: Univ of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lawson, L. 2007. Cultural geographies in practice: The South Central Farm: Dilemmas in practicing the public. Cultural Geographies 14 (4): 611–616.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Link, B.G., and J. Phelan. 1995. Social conditions as fundamental causes of disease. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 35: 80–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lutfey, K., and J. Freese. 2005. Toward some fundamentals of fundamental causality: Socioeconomic status and health in the routine clinic visit for diabetes. American Journal of Sociology 110 (5): 1326–1372.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McClintock, N. 2014. Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: Coming to terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions. Local Environment 19 (2): 147–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCormack, L.A., M.N. Laska, N.I. Larson, and M. Story. 2010. Review of the nutritional implications of farmers’ markets and community gardens: A call for evaluation and research efforts. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 110 (3): 399–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McEntee, J.C. 2011. Realizing rural food justice: Divergent locals in the Northeastern United States. In Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability, ed. A.H. Alkon and J. Agyeman, 239–259. MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Mundel, E., and G.E. Chapman. 2010. A decolonizing approach to health promotion in Canada: The case of the urban aboriginal community kitchen garden project. Health Promotion International 25 (2): 166–173.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Myers, J.S., P. Lal, and S. Aptekar. 2020. Community gardens and gentrification in New York City: The uneven politics of facilitation, accommodation, and resistance. In A recipe for gentrification: Food, power, and resistance in the city, ed. A.H. Alkon, Y. Kato, and J. Sbicca, 245–265. New York, NY: New York University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • NCAT. 2019. Community supported agriculture. ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture. https://attra.ncat.org/community-supported-agriculture/#structuring. Accessed Aug 2022.

  • Phelan, J.C., and B.G. Link. 2005. Controlling disease and creating disparities: A fundamental cause perspective. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B 60: 27–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reynolds, K. 2015. Disparity despite diversity: Social injustice in New York City’s urban agriculture system. Antipode 47 (1): 240–259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reynolds, K., and N. Cohen. 2016. Beyond the kale: Urban agriculture and social justice activism in NYC. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roos, D. 2020. Community supported agriculture (CSA) resource guide for farmers. NC State Extension. https://growingsmallfarms.ces.ncsu.edu/growingsmallfarms-csaguide/. Accessed Aug 2022.

  • Saldivar-tanaka, L., and M.E. Krasny. 2004. Culturing community development, neighborhood open space, and civic agriculture: The case of Latino community gardens in New York City. Agriculture and Human Values 21 (4): 399–412.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Surls, R., C. Braswell, L. Harris, and Y. Savio. 2001. Community garden start-up guide. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Cooperative Extension, Los Angeles County Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

  • Twiss, J., J. Dickinson, S. Duma, T. Kleinman, H. Paulsen, and L. Rilveria. 2003. Community gardens: Lessons learned from California healthy cities and communities. American Journal of Public Health 93 (9): 1435–1438.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. American Community Survey (ACS) 2014–2018 5-Year Estimates. Table(s) B01001.

  • U.S. Census Bureau. 2022a. 2010 Decennial Census. Table P2.

  • U.S. Census Bureau. 2022b. American Community Survey (ACS) 2010 1-Year Estimates. Table S1501.

  • White, M.M. 2017. Freedom’s seeds: Reflections of food, race, and community development: Voices of the food movement in Detroit. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 7 (2): 5–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, M.M. 2018. Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Dr. Zulema Valdez, Dr. A Susana Ramírez, and Dr. Whitney Laster Pirtle for their feedback, guidance, and support on this project. Special thanks to Dr. Zulema Valdez for her partnership and guidance in collecting the data used herein, and to the American Community Garden Association and Brittany Oaks for supporting data collection efforts.

Funding

This study was funded by University of California, Merced, Department of Sociology; University of California, Merced, Global Food Initiative Campus Collaborative Grow Grant; University of California, Merced, Blum Center Seed Grant; University of California, Merced, John & Victoria Elia Fellowship.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rancho Cordova, CA, USA

    Katie L. Butterfield

Authors
  1. Katie L. Butterfield
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Katie L. Butterfield.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Butterfield, K.L. Modeling community garden participation: how locations and frames shape participant demographics. Agric Hum Values 40, 1067–1085 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10406-2

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10406-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation