Female Architects Creating Community Gardens

Rogers says community gardens are more than just nice to look at

By Jackie Orchard
WAMC
May 25, 2021

Excerpt:

23-year-old Mia Rogers is a graduate student at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Rogers is working on her master’s in architectural science and her thesis centers around a project to purify urban soil so that more community gardens can grow.

“Cleaning up essentially, our landscapes within our urban environments,” Rogers said.

Rogers grew up on Long Island and says she sees a need for sustainability and remediation. She says urban expansion led to polluted landscapes all over the United States.

“So within our soil systems, there are a lot of heavy metals, diesel fuels, and essentially just things that are really toxic for humans to be exposed to,” Rogers said. “Where soil within our communities, especially in gardens, can be ingested through dusts, through the food that we eat. And essentially, I’ve been focusing on community gardens for low income communities, and how to clean the areas that they’re living in due to the disproportionate exposure that most low income communities are within their neighborhoods, due to just very, very, racially, charged urban planning practices over the past half century or more.”

Rogers says community gardens are more than just nice to look at.

“They provide a lot of people with accessible means to nutrition, which, within local low income communities, it’s kind of hard,” Rogers said. “So a lot of the time, these communities are neighborhoods that are very far from like, healthy and fresh produce. So essentially, community gardens are a really great form of activism in a way where, you know, people can essentially be self-sufficient in that manner, where they can essentially rely on their own gardening skills, especially when they’re taught in these community programs to rely on, you know, their own two hands to have access to two really essential forms of nutrition such as vegetables and different herbs for their cooking — it all boils down to making these environments as safe as possible for these communities.”

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