Public Gardens and Livable Cities: Partnerships Connecting People, Plants, and Place

Authors Donald A. Rakow, Meaghan Z. Gough and Sharon A. Lee have compiled a series of studies of public gardens broken down into six parts. The introduction addresses the urbanization of the future world, and the need to define and prioritize livability as distinguished from sustainability. It presents public gardens as "anchor institutions" just like libraries or parks, rooted in their physical location. Emphasizing the importance of partnerships between public gardens and organizations outside the gardens, the book explains types of partnerships in communities. Cooperative examples would be a garden shared by a school, while collaborative partnerships are those that share resources and decision-making while remaining independent. Collaborative partnerships are generally considered to be the strongest type. The final stage for any type of partnerships is collective action, which includes a shared committment to collective impact and a common agenda for moving forward.
The first chapter, titled, "Promoting neighbourhood safety and well-being," examines cities across the United States where there is a demand for more livability while introducing the idea of placemaking, a strategy that uses public spaces to promote social interaction and, of course, partnerships. The book examines many public gardens, and I will mention a few of my favourites here. In Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's Greenest Block Competition is a gardening initiative that has created an enthusiastic following and has improved public spaces throughout the borough. The Ambassador Program at the Queens Botanical Garden in NYC, like the Greenest Block competition, has powerfully developed community and built trust. However, I found the description of vacant lot programs particularly cool. Chapter one describes the Philadelphia vacant lot situation and the initiative of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in setting up a LandCare program in the 1970's, now one of the biggest vacant lot land programs in the US with over 12,000 properties. PHS has partners around the country, and participants come to Philadelphia to seek assistance from the PHS staff in designing a vacant land strategy for their own city. This chapter concludes with a topic I always look for data about, the issue of gentrification and the "long-term implications" of "beautification vs potential for resilience" regarding those newly-greened communities that have surely earned the right to hold onto their neighbourhoods and resist displacement.
The second chapter, titled, "Improving the quality of science education," addresses the job opportunity, safety and environmental sustainability spin-offs generated by community greening projects. It describes project Green Reach, which has helped Brooklyn kids grades K-8 access science information and observe nature's cycles first hand. This type of project was repeated in many other cities, including Chicago, where science class gets awesome as Chicago Botanical Garden students extract DNA in mentorship with research scientists. There has been a huge upswing in interest in urban gardening as a result of these efforts. By 2013, 2 million more households report involvement in some way in community gardening than those in 2008. In the case of Bronx Green Up, participants are awarded certificates for learning levels and skills gained, as well as practices implemented. Green Corps in Cleveland also does this, involving local teens while bringing fresh, organic produce to underserved neighbourhoods and selling produce at local farmer's markets each week. Green Corps is in an interesting partnership with the Cleveland baseball team, and maintains raised beds at the team's stadium as well as in the player's parking lot, with produce used by the team chef to prepare healthy dishes for the players.
Access to healthy food and promoting healthy lives through urban gardening partnerships are discussed in Chapter three, while Training and Employment programs are addressed in more depth in chapter four. Public gardening job training programs for veterans and an examination of the Riker's Island greenhouse program are included. The RIGP is a partnership with the department of corrections and the department of education, and develops horticultural skills while citing a forty percent reduction in recidivism as a spin-off of the program.
Chapter five explores initiatives to promote ecosystem and human health, while "strategies for the development of successful partnerships" is explored in depth in chapter six.
This is an amazing book. I truly enjoyed reading this volume and the enthusiasm regarding gardening partnerships shifted my own thinking in positive ways. The epilogue supplies a look at the future of public gardens and the book is made yet more accessible with extensive appendixing. Recognizing public gardens as anchors and the key to healthy communities is one of the most important message of our times. This energetic, reader-friendly book with many photographs shines a persuasive and motivating light.

Rakow, D. A., Gough, M. Z., & Lee, S. A. (2020). Public Gardens and livable cities: Partnerships connecting people, plants, and place. Cornell University Press.