Food Provision, Social Interaction or Relaxation: Which Drivers Are Vital to Being a Member of Community Gardens in Czech Cities?

Abstract

Urban gardening provides city dwellers with a wide range of benefits. Research dealing with the benefits of community gardens (CG) is often qualitative, focused on their founders’ motivations. The objective of our contemporary quantitative study is to understand why the inhabitants of Czech cities join CGs. The paper answers the research question: “What drivers exist for members’ participation in CGs?” It also deals with how the drivers of CG members differ across CGs’ locations in different urban structures. The data were obtained through an online survey from 28 CGs across Czechia, in both the capital and smaller cities. The importance of the different drivers was examined using statistical analysis and logit models. The research shows that the main motivation for the members is not crop production itself but, rather, the spending of leisure time, social contact and relaxation. Other key drivers include the passing on of experience and knowledge about nature to children, which is found mostly among the members with previous cultivation experience. Based on our results, CGs may contribute to the development of public life and to the improvement of public space; hence, the greater support by local decision makers or spatial planners can be justified.

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

“…These factors should be taken into account by urban planners and designers when implementing and retrofitting community gardens. The importance of such spatial factors is in contrast to the study on driving forces of residents engaging in Czech community gardens [30]. Dubová et al found that the location of the gardens within the urban pattern does not explain why people engage in community gardens.…”

“…The findings suggest that residents of Czech cities are motivated to engage in community gardens for recreational purposes, social exchange, and the joy of urban gardening. However, motives for joining community gardens can differ depending on previous gardening experiences, its lengths, and sociodemographic factors [30]. In a similar vein, the importance of the family tradition of commercial farming in Australia for pursuing sustainable livelihoods was confirmed by Diehl [34].…”

“…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.…”