Community gardens serve an important function in the urban landscape – but their role my not always be what city planners imagine. The following analysis combines urban theory with interviews and historical accounts that contextualize the history of the urban community garden in New York – particularly the tradition of the casita  garden the Bronx neighborhood of Tremont – from its inception, quickening with the widespread economic decline in 1970s New York, to its place in the current economic and physical landscape of the city.

 Map (left) reveals an abundance of community gardens (shown with labels) in the Tremont Crotona Neighborhood of the Bronx, despite the region's significant access to public park space (dark green). Community gardens serve a different social function from public parks, and are necessary supplements. Map (right) shows buildings in grey, revealing that lots have very limited built footprints: small-scale urban gardens are less about providing open space than about providing community space.

Maps Courtesy  OasisNYC, (Open Accessible Space Information System), edited by intertexture. 

In Richard Florida’s prizewinning essay for The Atlantic, “How the Crash will reshape America,” he cozyed up to the idea of financial crisis as engine for reinvigorating New York’s creative economy, harnessing Jane Jacobs’ assertion that, “when a place gets boring, rich people leave.”[1] Landscapes of despair and disinvestment cause new uses to bloom, just as community gardens first did in 1970s New York. Even in the face of gentrification, urban gardens fill the unique role of spontaneous public space. But for the poorer areas where casitas thrive, Florida’s suggestion that these impromptu community gardens might play an important role in urban revitalization discounts their fundamental importance as sites of dissent and cultural assertion, turning them, instead, into cogs in a "gentrification engine."

“As a neighborhood gentrifies, so do its gardens,” writes Sarah Ferguson, a historian of urban green spaces in New York. “The handful of community gardens on the Lower East Side that have attained permanent status through the Parks Department have done so because they have exceptional plantings, as well as highly motivated members capable of writing grants, lobbying politicians, and hosting poetry and jazz performances to prove their worth as community assets. Tilling vegetable plots isn’t enough. What’s being overlooked, of course, are those modest spaces tended by poor people for whom gardening is not a hobby, but an economic necessity. It’s no surprise that the neighborhood’s casita gardens have been among the first to get the ax.”[2]

Forward-thinking as advocacy for community gardens seems, the rabid quest to sweep up these spaces under the wide green mantle of city sponsorship creates a troubled dual process of protection and co-optation. As gardens are recognized, condoned, assimilated and finally legislated and mandated, they lose the fluid, adaptable ingenuity that made them successful, indeed, necessary, urban elements in the first place. The continued provision for systems of self-governing is instrumental to this process. While many community gardens can serve as green space even under city management, casita gardens, in particular, are outside the context of “urban planning.” The understanding of the casita solely as an open space denies their more important role — one of a political and social space.  Mapping casitas alongside open space reveals that, even where significant amounts of structured green space exists, the need for the casita remains.

[1] Richard Florida. “How the Crash will Reshape America.” The Atlantic Monthly. March, 2009. Accessed at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

[2] Sarah Ferguson, “The Death of Little Puerto Rico.” New Village Journal. Oakland: New Village Press. http://www.newvillage.net/Journal/issue1.html