Suppose you are a fan of a sustainable lifestyle and find it nice to have an opportunity to grow food for yourself within the urban area. In that case, you should try to join the NGO-run garden.
Image Source: Amsterdam Urban Gardeners. (n.d.). [Historic Photo]. Nut En Genoegen. https://www.nutengenoegen.amsterdam/portfolio-item/over-nut-en-genoegen/
NGO-run community gardens allow us to participate in community projects on growing self-made food and other fantastic activities, such as educational sessions on the healthy and sustainable lifestyle. Organizations such as Nut en Genogen also offer several educational activities for the 'little' urbanizers, including a worm and insect hotel, a hedgehog hutch, signs by the trees and a butterfly garden in front of the clubhouse. Overall, community gardens could be an exciting option for pro-environmental newcomers and old residents to come closer to nature and make valuable new connections in your local community.
How does this relate to gentrification?
“High-educated urbanites are highly represented in the gardens, but they fail to invite other people from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds to participate in programmes.”
- NGO member, quote from the study of Bródy and de Wilde (2020)
One of the attributes of several NGO-run gardens is that if you want to become a member in one of them, you would need to pay membership fees (some of them could go up to 12,000 EUR). Fee structure becomes a natural barrier for the members of the lower-class groups to join. As a result, such gardens become dominated by the white-middle class members and become concentrated and exclusionary quite quickly. Paid membership also may result in urban transformation surrounding the grade location with people participating coming closer and overall transforming the neighbourhood. This, in turn, may lead to a displacement of lower-class people from the area as the surrounding community will be changing while excluding these citizens from the participation leading to psychological pressure on them. Bródy and de Wilde (2020) explore the topic in many details.
Implication for urban gentrifier
Amsterdam is full of community gardens of all sorts of types. However, if you want to be a member of the exclusionary club of sustainability fans, there are great opportunities for you to join one if your monthly budget can afford it. There are, of course, also free alternatives and different types of garden organisations, which you can thoroughly learn from the work of Bródy and de Wilde (2020).
In case you want to learn more on the gentrification aspect, check out these:
Slater, T. (2009). Missing Marcuse: On gentrification and displacement. City, 13(2-3), 292-311.URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604810902982250
Bródy, L. S., & de Wilde, M. (2020). Cultivating food or cultivating citizens? On the governance and potential of community gardens in Amsterdam. Local Environment, 25(3), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2020.1730776
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