Yuelai Liu

This study aims to examine the impacts of community gardening on the daily life of residents and the management organisation of pandemic prevention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a major public health scourge in 2020. The research team applied a participatory action research approach to work with residents to design and implement the Seeding Plan, a contactless community gardening program. The authors carried out a study to compare the everyday conditions reflecting residents’ mental health of the three subject groups during the pandemic: the participants of the Seeding Plan (Group A), the non-participants living in the same communities that had implemented the Seeding Plan (Group B), and the non-participants in other communities (Group C). According to the results, group A showed the best mental health among the three; Group B, positively influenced by seeding activities, was better than Group C. The interview results also confirmed that the community connections established through gardening activities have a significant impact on maintaining a positive social mentality under extraordinary circumstances. From this, the study concluded that gardening activities can improve people’s mental health, effectively resist negative impacts, and it is a convenient tool with spreading influence on the entire community, so as to support the collective response to public health emergencies in a bottom-up direction by the community.

The importance of community gardens in a healthy urban environment has been extensively documented, while the garden building involving communities has not been much explored in fast-developing cities. This study examines community engagement in garden building activities in a rapid urbanization context, aiming to explore the application of community-engaged research methods for the promotion of neighbourhood environments. The Community Garden Initiative consisting of an array of progressive actions is formulated by the research team, featuring a process of increasing involvement of community members and decreasing intensity of external interventions. These activities have been launched based on community-university partnerships in Shanghai since 2014, synchronising with a transformation of urban regeneration paradigm in China where people-oriented approaches are more emphasized. Five actions covering 70 community gardens are analysed through surveys on participants’ attitudes and perceptions towards the activities. The results of the study presented people’s rapid acceptance of participation in public affairs, reflected possible measures to promote public participation, and confirmed the positive impacts of the garden building on the neighbourhood environmental health as well as on the community-building. Taking into account that residents generally lack the consciousness and capacities required to implement actions at the initial stage of community engagement, we proposed in the conclusion to start with external interventions and capacity buildings carried out by professionals as a supplement to the ‘community-driven’ principle of CBPR methods.