In our Research we are willing to explore the Gardens in our neighborhood and their origins. Specifically our research questions are: why are gardens established within neighborhood and what effect/impact do they have on the community of the neighborhood?
We will explore and look further into the following aspects of the neighborhood and examine the direct links we believe exist, between these elements and the evolving of the gardens and their impact:
– 1. History (introduction and first link to the research question)
o Slums and squatters- conquering the neighborhood, “making it feel like home”
o Poverty, hunger in the neighborhood; what brought people to the Alphabet City in the first place. How did people fight these problems?
o Immigrant neighbors and their contribution to the establishment of gardens
– 2. Community and Health
o Garden sustainability -who took and takes care of the gardens
o Who visits the gardens- for what purposes?
o Community center–relation to the gardens
o Using the garden to encourage a healthier life style
o Access to healthy food
• Explore the need for this healthy lifestyle.
– 3. Education and Occupation
o The gardens as an educational tool (intentional and non-intentional)
o Community center and workshops on agriculture
o Assist people with providing for their families and become independent providers for income and sustainability.
– 4. Politics – Gentrification and Crime
o How the actual existence of gardens contributes or discourages the process of gentrification?
o Counter-argument: People are coming together to protect the gardens- who are they?
o Gardens are being destroyed to build more affordable/unaffordable houses
o The groups who suffer the most from the gentrification.
o The change in the demographics of the neighborhood. Who is moving into the neighborhood/displacing the old community?
o The impact the gardens had on the crime levels in the neighborhood (before, after, and means of revolutionizing the neighborhood and solving the crime issue)
– 5. We will provide a comparison to an additional neighborhood that has multiple gardens, and explore their effects on the neighborhood; the similarities and the differences between the impact of gardens in our neighborhood and in this neighborhood (South Bronx, Harlem)
– 6. We will examine an additional neighborhood that has no gardens and explore how the lack of gardens in this different neighborhood affects its development/ function and atmosphere. (wall-street, consult with peers- to learn about neighborhood with diversity but no real interactions/different types of interactions between the different people- that is presumably established in a certain way in neighborhoods that have gardens in them).
In our process of exploring and comparing our neighborhood to other neighborhoods based on the core role the gardens play in it, we consider further analyzing articles we were able to find on the topic, maps that present the demographic compositions of the neighborhoods over the years, online resources that include information about the volunteering and the use of the gardens, etc.
Aliza and Liron
