Readings 2/13/2007

Gardening's Socioeconomic Impacts

This article expressed a common theme in our class, that community gardens improve the quality of life of those directly and indirectly involved in community gardening. The connection between community gardening and neighborhood cohesion is very interesting but I think with any activity that takes a group to come together to complete can have the same effects. The article expressed many numerical figures that are questionable because we do not know what methods were used to conduct the statistics. I assume that it was a voluntary response survey of the people who took part in the community gardening. So I take the figures as a testament of their experiences not scientific findings. Furthermore, I find that the community gardening importance lies with the people that it effects. If this activity can improve the quality of life of individuals, deter juvenile delinquency, and increase urban green space, then these factors should motivate more people to take part in community gardening and make it an issue for local governments to take seriously.


Doing it Right from the Start

This article addressed the question that has been bothering me since the start of this class. That is are cities unnatural? Our class could not come to a conclusion on this question but this article gave some insight on the interaction between our man-made environments and nature. The article gives examples of towns planting trees for their aesthetic values. The townspeople did not take into consideration the factors that sustain trees and that the trees in urbanized environments face different factors than in their natural habitats. This showed that we must realize out effect on nature and that we will have to adjust our methods to coexist with nature.