Alongside associated forms of socially and politically conscious food production, community food growing is routinely connected to a wide range of social and environmental benefits. However, robust evidence in support of these associations remains scant, and while the conversation has shifted in recent years to take account of the sometimes unintended or negative aspects of these activities, no consensus has been reached about how such forms of food growing should adapt to new conditions, or be scaled up to maximize their positive impacts. A July 2016 conference was organized to address this strategic shortfall. This themed issue presents the papers resulting from the conference.

The paper reports on a study of community gardening in Stockholm. We contribute to the body of knowledge about the sustainability of community gardens and this new form of citizen-led initiatives in Stockholm, with the ambition of creating a debate about the best way to sustain and develop these initiatives in Sweden. We argue that although community gardening may provide leverage for means of developing a sustainable city, it is a marginal phenomenon and contributes little to sustainable development its present form. Through interviews we have investigated how the citizens and municipality officers of Stockholm try to adapt to the renewed interest in community gardening by looking at the policy makers’, municipality officers’ and grassroots movements’ incentives to start community gardens. We specifically focus on how the community gardeners articulate their reasons for participating in collaborative initiatives in the city and how these expectations evolve when they are faced with the reality of gardening and the problems relating to producing food in the city. We have found that there are a growing number of citizens and local authorities advocating community gardening, but the sustainability and endurance of gardens are hampered by vague responsibilities, lack of leadership and unclear expectations of the outcome. Community gardening cases in Stockholm contribute to the debate by exemplifying how formal (e.g. policy making) and informal advocacy (e.g. civic engagement in community gardening) groups are collaborating, but also showing that they often have different agendas and initial motivations for setting up new gardens. We argue that uncritical enthusiasm results in an overly instrumental approach to governance of community gardening and that the sustainability and endurance of the community gardening is not an issue that the governing bodies plan for, and hence it is forgotten. We suggest some routes forward, involving employing facilitators from various stakeholders such as the municipality, housing companies and various NGOs.

Greater London has a vibrant food scene comprising of many different types of urban and peri-urban ‘short food supply chains’ (SFSCs). This paper reports on exploratory research, which used examples of SFSCs from London to build a more detailed understanding of different types of urban SFSC and their relative performance compared to each other. To do this, we undertook a participatory sustainability impact assessment (SIA) in which local food system stakeholders were asked to rank the perceived impacts of five different urban and peri-urban SFSCs compared with the current ‘mainstream’ food supply system (defined as supermarkets retailing mass-produced, standardized food products). The SFSCs ranked were: (1) urban gardening (self-supply), (2) urban gardening (commercial), (3) community supported agriculture (CSA), (4) direct sale (on-farm) and (5) direct sale (off-farm). Results from the SIA showed that CSAs were regarded as delivering the highest overall social, economic and environmental benefits, followed by urban gardening (commercial), urban gardening (self-supply) and direct sales (off-farm). The lowest overall rating was for the supply chain direct sales (on-farm). All five SFSCs were ranked highest on the social aspects of sustainability. Following the participatory SIA of perceived sustainability, we next developed a questionnaire in order to test the feasibility of measuring the specific (rather than ‘perceived’) impacts of an urban SFSC. We applied the test at a community-led local food market in South London, where we conducted face-to-face interviews with all market stallholders (18 respondents) and a random sample of consumers (51 respondents). Results from the community-led market were similar to those acquired at the SIA workshop, with greater agreement about the social benefits of the market, compared with economic and environmental impacts. The results also suggest that producers underestimated consumers’ willingness to share the risks that the producers face and we identify this as an important aspect for future research. The paper concludes with reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the SIA methodology.

Community gardens, as previous research has found are as much about growing the community and the individuals involved, as gardening itself. The study of Green Synergy's community garden initiatives within Lincoln's relatively deprived Abbey Ward provided an exceptional case study in which to review the inter-relationship of impact both at a community and individual level. The social element of community gardening in building connections between social and natural capital is explored, and how community gardens can provide a ‘counter-narrative’ to perceptions of place and individual well-being.

The qualitative research approach which included observation, interviews, a focus group and workshop was designed to reflect the wide scope of the projects and generate both individual and communal reflection on the projects. The themes that emerged open up a further understanding of the multiple dynamics arising from the collaborative creation of ‘green spaces’ in providing bonding and bridging social capital within communities, together with challenging narratives of individual and community capacity. In so doing, it adds to existing research evidence on the diverse community connections, spaces and products that community gardening engenders.

Aroma-Home, an artist-initiated community garden in Villetaneuse, just outside Paris, France, originated as a way to poeticize damaged urban locations by creating small communally-created pockets of unexpected natural beauty. In 2013, Sarah Harper of Friches Théâtre Urbain joined forces with local inhabitants to reclaim public spaces marred by construction and neglect. Together, they began to alter the urban landscape with whimsical plant-based interventions that sprouted up behind construction fences. This guerrilla gardening soon led to the sowing of a community garden that wove together food-growing, story-telling and place-making and fashioned its particular identity through cultural practices around growing, preparing and sharing food of the multi-ethnic participants. The horticultural-culinary conversations became inextricably connected to gardening activities: edible stories involving food memories and horticultural skills that nourished those who prepared and consumed them. This ‘From the Field’ paper looks at how the community garden/art-making processes of Aroma-Home transformed a bleak construction site into a mini-urban agricultural ‘commons’ where imagining, planting and harvesting the garden and its edible stories were all shared.

The rise of Urban Agriculture projects across the UK has led to a surge of interest in their efficacy and resulting social impacts. Real Food Wythenshawe is a Lottery-funded urban food project in the UK that aims to teach the population of Wythenshawe to grow their own food and to cook from scratch. The area, popularly referred to as ‘Europe's largest council estate’, suffers from high levels of deprivation and has been described as a ‘food desert’ due to a perceived lack of access to fresh fruit and vegetables (Small World Consulting, 2013). In order to encourage Wythenshawe residents to grow their own food and to increase access to fresh fruit and vegetables, Real Food Wythenshawe aims to transform unused areas of land into growing spaces, such as allotments and community gardens. This paper focuses on research conducted at a community garden in Wythenshawe, established by Real Food Wythenshawe as an example of a ‘meanwhile’ or temporary growing site for people affected by cancer. The research investigated the impact of the growing activities on community garden participants through a series of observations and interviews. The findings suggest that the benefits of the space were multiple and diverse, ranging from increased growing knowledge to therapeutic effects, while there has been minimal effect on participants’ dietary behavior. The organization of the community garden also raises questions over some of the practicalities of temporary urban growing sites and highlights the tensions that can arise between small community growing groups and larger institutions with control over land use. These findings add to a growing body of research that considers the value of growing in the city and reflects on the role of community gardening in deprived urban areas of the UK.

This paper is concerned with how urban food activists related to the media during 2015, when Bristol was the European Green Capital (EGC), how they represented themselves and how others represented their agenda. Our intention is to inform the debates on urban agriculture (UA) and, more specifically, to contribute to discussions about ‘scaling up’ UA. To achieve this, we adopt a form of analysis that rests on Castells’ insights about contemporary protest movements, the media and the role of communication technologies in constituting social power. By using Bristol, a city with a well-developed and studied urban agriculture movement, we suggest new areas for consideration that focus on the importance of communication in the development of the movement. Our study relied only on publicly available data; newspaper reports about the EGC and a sample of the social media used by the urban food networks in the city. We found that the mass media was mainly concerned with reporting topics other than food and that urban food was not a salient issue in their coverage. The Twitter network we analyzed was a loose constellation of different communities, which shared materials that were mostly concerned with creating a shared, normative picture of urban food. By considering the structure of these forms of media, we can observe the assembly of the forms of communication and their content. The paper concludes that the self-representation of urban food networks at that time reveals a narrow focus of interest. This emphasis may have contributed to the lack of connection within the city between potential allies. Our conclusion supports similar research findings in neighboring communities, which have observed the limited connections of urban food networks to the circuits of power and influence.

Exotic crops—plant species grown in relatively small quantities and not traditionally cultivated in a country or region—are often intimately linked with the ethnic origins of their maintainers and are a principal source of culinary and nutritional diversity for many people. Recognizing that a wealth of exotic crop diversity and associated knowledge is held by small-scale growers in the UK, Garden Organic initiated the Sowing New Seeds project to capture and preserve some of this valuable resource by building a seed collection and knowledge base. To establish a sample of this diversity and knowledge, we undertook a survey at 31 allotment sites in the Midlands region of the UK with the objectives of identifying the exotic crops cultivated, characterizing the demography of those who grow them, understanding their direct use values, and assessing their potential indirect use value for the diversification and improvement of other crops. Results reveal that 26% of the food crops recorded are exotic and that they are grown by people belonging to 13 different ethnic groups. The majority save their own seed, indicating that these crops are performing well in the UK, with grower selection providing the basis for their continuing success. Further, most maintainers swap seed with other growers, indicating that exotic crops are likely to be gradually diversifying in response to different growing conditions—a positive sign for their value for local food security and as national genetic resources with potential for use in crop improvement programs. The research highlights the multitude of benefits that growers obtain through cultivating exotic crops, which are not only related to nutrition and culinary requirements, but also to general health and well-being, culture, and a range of other forms of life enrichment. It is critical that growers are encouraged and supported in continuing to cultivate, save and pass on their exotic crops to younger generations, as well as to protect allotments from development in order to maintain this important diversity adapted to local growing conditions. Importantly, many exotic crops currently grown on a small scale may enter into commerce, and thus expand the diversity of the UK's food crop base. Such a shift may be particularly important in the face of the increasingly detrimental impacts of climate change on crop production. We conclude that exotic crop diversity could be more important for future nutrition, health and food security than we currently appreciate.