Design and Social Factors Affecting the Formation of Social Capital in Chinese Community Garden

Abstract

In recent years, community gardens are becoming more and more popular in China. However, the role of these community gardens varies significantly: some community gardens serve as an effective means of promoting social capital, while others cause social contradictions and public doubts due to the lack of professional design and management. Therefore, this paper aims to learn and better understand what factors affect the formation of social capital in Chinese community gardens. It screened eleven design factors and seven social factors and made social capital scale through literature review and expert workshop. On this basis, this study selected 35 community gardens in China as sample spaces, and collected 1257 questionnaires about the perception for social capital of gardeners through survey. In the statistical analysis phase, factor analysis and regression analysis were applied to analyze the role and the relative importance of different factors and social capital. Results show that the integration with green infrastructure, accessibility, size, visual openness, planting form, proportion of unproductive landscape, agricultural infrastructure, and smart infrastructure have significant impacts on social capital level. Meanwhile, the types of stakeholders, management rules, supervision system, self-management team, and operational activities have similar impacts on social capital level. This study recommends that planners and designers should adjust the above related factors in community garden design, and local government is urged to integrate community gardens into urban plans and public policies.

Introduction to the Special Issue “A Systemic Perspective on Urban Food Supply: Assessing Different Types of Urban Agriculture”

“…Looking at the portfolio of applied methods throughout this Special Issue, it becomes very clear that there is not only one fitting approach to assess sustainability impacts of UA and its implementation, but a whole set of suitable methods exists, which target the different sustainability dimensions. Among others, the methods range from assessment tools in the economic dimension (such as cost-benefit analysis [29]) over assessments of the social dimension (e.g., through interviews on social capital [31] or surveys among urban residents participating in community gardens [30]) to environmental analysis (such as life-cycle assessments) [35] or biomonitoring to measure impacts on biodiversity [40] depending on the targeted sustainability impacts.…”

“…Looking at this broad picture of potential measurements of UA impacts and implementation, there is further no clear preference for either quantitative or qualitative methods (see Figure 2). While two studies relied on pure qualitative analysis [25,34] and five on quantitative analysis [30,31,35,40,41], the majority of eight studies used mixed-methods approaches and combined qualitative methods (e.g., focus group discussions, stakeholder workshops, on-site visits, or expert interviews) with quantitative methods (e.g., online questionnaires or on-site surveys) [29,32,33,[36][37][38][39]42]. Given the multidimensional impacts of UA and its general multifunctionality [2,43], a mixed-methods approach often seems to be an advisable choice to tackle the different dimensions.…”

“…It contains contributions on sociocultural [25,[29][30][31][32], commercial [33][34][35] and self-supply [36,37] UA types, along with studies focusing on either varying or mixed UA types [38][39][40][41]. Comparing the scope of the studies in terms of focusing on technology-or nature-based UA, the majority of the papers deal with nature-based forms of UA [25,[29][30][31]36,39,40,42], while only three papers investigate technology-oriented types of UA [33,35,37] (see Figure 1). All in all, the case studies cover towns and cities all over the world and address a wide range of various types of UA, its impact and implementation dimensions, research objectives, and methodologies reflecting the interdisciplinarity and international research of UA.…”

“…In total, seven papers in this Special Issue deal with drivers and constraints for implementing various types of UA. Hereby, the focus of three papers is on the social dimension [30,31,34]; two papers take into account a multidimensional [25,36], one a political [42], and a conceptual paper a systemic perspective [38].…”

“…From the papers analyzing social framework conditions for implementing UA, two focus on community gardens [30,31]. The study by Ding et al [31] on community gardens in China found that spatial factors such as accessibility, size, and visual openness have an impact on the social capital. These factors should be taken into account by urban planners and designers when implementing and retrofitting community gardens.…”