At a New York City garden, students grow their community roots and critical consciousness

Urban gardening serves as a departure point for learning about land and relationships, as well as food, consumer culture and social activism.

By Jennifer D. Adams
The Conversation
July 10, 2019

Excerpt:

The food justice emphasis of Community Roots emerged from an actual experience of conflict between a university and a community garden. Pieranna was a member of the thriving community garden that was located on the periphery of the campus where she was working. She invited local high school students who were enrolled in College Now courses during the year to participate in unstructured gardening in the summer.

As student interest grew, Pieranna formalized the activity as a service-learning course, and thus the number of gardening students grew. A turning point in the evolution of the course came when the college’s decision to raze the garden to expand a parking lot was met by resistance from gardeners and community greening advocates. As issues of sustainability were becoming more prominent in public dialogues around the city, the irony of a city college destroying a community garden to expand a parking lot captured attention.

Ultimately, the garden was razed and reinstituted as a smaller college garden on a strip of land bordering the enlarged parking lot. For several years, Community Roots had no access to the new garden. However, lessons learned about power and displacement related to histories of colonization and gentrification helped re-direct the course.

Luckily, New York City has a thriving network of community gardens and school gardens. The course accessed other urban gardens and grassroots food-related organizations such as the Park Slope Food Coop, where both Pieranna and Jennifer are members.

Read the complete article here.