Tanaka and Krasny Article

I found the Tanaka and Krasny article very informative and interesting. One of the reasons I choose to write a reflection on it was because I found parallels between their study and my term project. The article contained some helpful background on the community greening movement.
The purpose of the study was to determine the role Latino community gardens play in community development, open space, and civic agriculture. Interviews were conducted with community gardeners and with staff from non profit agencies. The study found that in addition to the gardens being sites for production of conventional and ethnic vegetables and herbs, the gardens host numerous social, educational, and cultural events, including neighborhood and church gatherings, holiday parties, children s activities, school tours, concerts, health fairs, and voter registration drives. The gardens also offered a way of maintaining Puerto Rican farming practices. In some cases, the gardens also served to promote community activism.

The article also reiterated that urban spaces such as parks and gardens provide a variety of benefits. Yet, community gardens are different from parks in that they are “community-managed open spaces.” The concept of civic agriculture introduced in the article was also very interesting. It offers a way to support community businesses as well as to supply food to poor people. At Latino community gardens, nature education is taught and agricultural literacy is instilled in young people from within a community. I found it interesting that Latino community gardens were so poorly studied. Intuitively though, I knew that they were more likely to occur in really poor areas. The study also illuminated the role of community gardens in providing leadership and landscape design. Since Latino communities are mostly immigrant filled and poor the gardens were predominately places for cultural interaction. The most important point the article made was that these garden are mainly areas of community development where people interact and to a lesser degree places where food is grown. Also, a large majority of the food grown in these gardens is given away instead of sold.