social ownership of community gardens: implications for environmental justice, food access, and the right to the city.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20234893

This study analyzes the roles and contradictions embedded within the establishment and maintenance of community gardens within urban communities. I apply Henri Lefebvre's framework of the social production of space to evaluate the capacity for urban residents to shape their neighborhoods, in the context of neoliberal development practices. These realities shape the experiences of gardeners in a multitude of ways, including the extent to which they have access to amenities, political resources, and the spaces themselves. Throughout this study, utilizing data from a combination of 25 in-depth interviews and extensive participant observation in 45 community gardens across the city of Boston and the surrounding area, I demonstrate how narratives surrounding community gardens have shifted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century and have adapted to dominant cultural rhetoric in order to justify their continued existence. Throughout the history of the community gardening movement, justifications for the spaces have included environmental justice, food access, and community resilience.