Laura Lawson

The Planner in the Garden: A Historical View into the Relationship between Planning and Community Gardens

A historical review of community garden programs in the United States since the 1890s reveals an ambivalent relationship between community gardens and the planning profession. On one hand, garden programs are praised and supported as local action to serve environmental, social, and individual objectives. On the other hand, because they are perceived as opportunistic and temporary, community gardens are largely ignored in long-range planning. Socially constructed as public catalyst and private resource, community gardens illustrate unresolved tensions between planning as a profession and as a civic concern and between comprehensive planning and interim, local interventions.

Cultural geographies in practice: The South Central Farm: dilemmas in practicing the public

D down Alameda Street in South Central Los Angeles in 2000, I knew I had reached my destination when warehouses, salvage yards, and truck transfer stations gave way to a large green space punctuated by banana trees and 12” high corn. The South Central Farm – also known as the South Los Angeles Community Garden and the Urban Gardening Program of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank – was a 14-acre community garden that provided 350 primarily Latino households with space to garden.1 As part of my research on community gardens, I had read articles that praised this garden since its inception in 1993. Fourteen years later, the Farm was again in the news, but this time for its contested closure and ultimate destruction. While unique in many ways, the South Central Farm illustrates the ambiguous public nature of community gardens that often puts the appeal of the idea at odds with its reality as a physical site. Even though community gardening garners widespread support as an activity that produces many personal and social benefits, as a land use it lacks value as a permanent resource. The case also underscores the tendency to consider gardening as a movable, replaceable resource, ignoring the labor and social networks necessary to create such spaces. Strategies to secure user-initiated spaces like community gardens require shifting public perception from appropriated space to validated public resource. The idea to establish a community garden in South Central Los Angeles grew out of civic concerns about community health and well being. The garden was initially spearheaded by the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank as a way to heal the community in the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King beating and subsequent civil disturbances that exposed the city’s racial and economic disparities. At the same time, gardening fulfilled the Food Bank’s mission to improve food access and nutrition to low-income households. A community garden would not only provide a place for people to grow food but also, as empirical research and anecdotal accounts suggested, it would expand social networks and provide opportunities for cultural expression, skill development, household income subsidy, and environmental restoration.2 Credited with many positive outcomes, highly participatory, and relatively cheap to start compared to other community development initiatives, the Food Bank’s proposal met with enthusiastic support that garnered land, volunteers, and funding. The city owned a vacant lot adjacent to the food

Dialogue through Design: The East St. Louis Neighborhood Design Workshop and South End Neighborhood Plan

This article reflects on cross-cultural learning in the context of the University of Illinois’ East St. Louis Neighborhood Design Workshop and its two-year engagement with the South End New Development Organization to develop a neighborhood plan. Initial descriptions of East St. Louis and the student body suggest the cultural and experiential hurdles to be overcome through engagement techniques. In light of service-learning and participatory design theory and methodology, the design studio provides an opportunity to advance cultural competence through a reflective, interactive design process. Acknowledging that cultural differences between students and residents was initially affecting the ability to produce a useful plan, the faculty revised the course to incorporate new approaches to design and discussion, including quick-paced scenario charrettes and development of alternative neighborhood visions. The ensuing discussions helped community members and students develop a clearer vision of what the residents wanted for their neighborhood’s future, which the students could then develop into a plan and related design proposals. The essay concludes with reflections on the meaning of cross-cultural dialogue for landscape architecture education and practice.

The Evolution of Planning in East St. Louis

This article analyzes the evolution of East St. Louis, Illinois, in light of identifiable phases of urban planning in the United States. East St. Louis provides a useful context to trace the history of planning because it is a city that has been mired in the very social, economic, and environmental problems that compel new planning approaches. At the same time, the inability to resolve the citys problems reveals the limitations and ultimate inadequacy of any singular approach. The article tracks the evolution of the city, the catalysts for planning activities, different approaches used, and results of these efforts. It notes that each new approach rejects the previous approach in light of its failure to solve what might be entrenched, complex problems faced by the city. The conclusion calls to question this dismissal of past approaches.

Parks as Mirrors of Community Design Discourse and Community Hopes for Parks in East St. Louis

While imprinted by past social values and design ideals, parks evolve according to changing expectations and socioeconomic and racial change in the surrounding community. Design discourse and community processes both call on park design to reflect community history, expand recreational and social resources, and serve as a catalyst for community revitalization. However, community concerns to develop implementable designs in light of alternative funding strategies, volunteerism, and phased development remains largely unaddressed by the design community. Focusing primarily on urban African-American contexts in East St. Louis, Illinois, this paper outlines three non-exclusive perspectives that shape discourse on race in park planning and design: recreational use and preferences according to ethnicity and race; community development, through both grass-roots activism and professional participation; and form-seeking design approaches inspired by community history and everyday practices of marginalized groups. These three perspectives of contemporary discourse are then counterbalanced with an applied perspective based on current park revitalization efforts that are being undertaken by community groups in East St. Louis, Illinois.