Community Gardens may be a sign of the times but they are in Chicago to stay

The city of Chicago has over 10,000 acres of vacant land within its borders and much of it has been vacant for several decades. This acreage exists in all parts of the city, many of them places where homes once stood. For many people they have come to represent urban decay; symbols of their neighborhood’s fall from grace. For a time, the city government had a policy of tearing down all abandon homes, in order to prevent their use as crack houses. 

While this vacant space may be the holes knocked in to our neighborhoods by the recession, they also represent a unique opportunity to bring us closer as neighbors. There are stories coming out of Detroit about community gardens that are springing up in abandoned lots throughout the city. A city that has known recession much longer than the rest of the country Detroit had a period in the 80’s and 90’s in which abandon hundreds of houses were burned on “Devils Night” as combination of entertainment and protest.

Many of these vast community gardens have had an unexpected influence on the surrounding community. One story involves two elderly women who had been friends and neighbors in the 1970s but lost touch as they were driven in doors by crime and violence in their neighborhood. Unbeknownst to each other they both showed up to the workday to launch a community garden in their neighborhood and discovered to their surprise that they had remained neighbors for years each thinking the other must have moved away. In other cases, senior citizens who were raised on farms in the south and came north as children during the Great Migration have been connected with a younger generation eager to learn how to grown their own food. Even ex-offenders have found new careers as urban farmers. In places that were once filled with garbage crime you can now find people re-discovering what it is to be a good neighbor.

Broken out, Chicago’s 10,000 acres translates into about 75,000 city lots. The city of Chicago has made it very clear that it supports and encourages community gardens. In fact the Chicago Park District even has a program to support the creation of gardens on park district property. People in the urban agriculture movement are enthusiastic proponents of this type of land use and they are looking for allies in their cause. Local organizations like City Farm, Open Lands and Neighbor Space gladly welcome everyone’s participation.

The phenomenon of community gardening is not limited the Rustbelt or other cities hit hard by the economy. From our First Lady Michelle Obama to communities all over the United States people feel a growing sense of responsibility and a desire to relearn the skills of growing food that were once common knowledge.

This is no doubt just in time too. As we begin to confront the impacts of climate change and peak oil on the way we feed ourselves it is time to grab a neighbor and get some dirt under your finger nails.