Urban Gardens Grow A Community

Urban Gardens Grow A Community

My paper is about the Fenway Victory Gardens and questions the continued promotion of its existence as an urban garden for the Boston community since World War II. Because it is obviously no longer in use as a World War II Victory Garden, I was curious about why gardeners might continue to be so passionate about its existence, even fighting movements to put important institutions such as hospitals and schools in this park area. My idea was that the group of gardeners who use this land for a sort of community, so using ethnography, I observed the interactions between gardeners and non-gardeners to find if there could be some social benefit from these gardens that is worth protecting and less obvious than its other benefits, such as aesthetic value and historic value.

Scout Leonard