Presentation of work-in-progress on urban gardening practices at the ECSCW'13 conference in Paphos, Cyprus, 24 September 2013

1. Starting a Garden,
Caring for It,
Growing with It –
a Study on Collective Practices in Urban Gardening
Gabriela Avram
Interaction Design Centre
University of Limerick
Work-in-Progress presentation at the ECSCW’13 conference, Cyprus

2. Outline
 Sustainability and Post-Sustainability
 The Resilience Discourse
 Related research: Urban Food Communities
 Case studies:
 A community roof garden
 A secret orchard
 Challenges and Opportunities
 Future Work
 Sharing a “taste of (urban gardens) in
Ireland”

3. Introduction
 Post sustainability workshop at CHI 2013 discussed
an alternative approach to sustainability issues;
 What if we have to brace ourselves for “a world of
limitations and a world of scarcity”? (Pargman
2013)
 The role of communities becomes increasingly
important in how we deal with limitations in today’s
world;
 Phenomena such as hackerspaces, transition
towns, urban gardening and other local initiatives
that involve new settings for cooperative work.

4. Resilience and Urban Gardens
 Resilience is a key factor in the communities’ ability to
adapt to unexpected changes;
 Resilient communities – communities that have access to
a wide range of resources, strong social ties and
availability of support (Dillahunt 2013);
 Grassroots movements shape our cities, cultures and
politics and enable stakeholders to voice their concerns
and act as agents of change (Kuznetov et al 2011);
 Understanding the underlying values of urban
communities such as maker spaces, urban food
communities, citizen activist groups, in order to map the
technologies they currently use and explore new design
opportunities.

5. Research focusing on Urban Food
Communities
 Odom (2010) - food growing communities in Australia;
 Tran (2012) - an urban food growing project in Central
Harlem;
 Ilsted (2013) - Spitalfields City Farm East London;
 Lyle, Choi&Foth (2013 )- Urban Agriculture in Brisbane,
Australia;
 The reasons why people get involved in urban gardening
communities - classical sustainability ambitions to:
 promote bio diversity,
 reduce the distance food has to travel from its production place,
 avail of fresh fruit and vegetable produced locally
 recycle biodegradable waste
 Urban gardening - an interesting resilience strategy in
response to volatile global food markets and breakdowns of
the supply infrastructure in the case natural or manmade
disasters.

6. Case 1 -A Community Roof Garden
 Space re-furbished in September 2012;
 In January 2013, a wide consultation process was
initiated to research the volunteers’ attitudes and
motivations towards the rooftop garden development.

11. Technology support and problems
 Ad-hoc – general mailing list;
 Doodle, surveymonkey;
 List of email addresses;
 University mailing list;
 Website (Wordpress) - public-facing information
outlet, meant to provide public visibility and to
document the activities; also serves as coordination
mechanism;
 Facebook Page- started in July;
 Several contributors to the site and page managers;
contributions fluctuate.

13. Future work
 Establishing a routine for “media work” just
like the one for garden work;
 Mounting a camera above the garden level
to allow both recording and displaying the
evolution of the garden throughout the
seasons;
 Installing temperature and moisture sensors
in the vegetable beds to allow distant
monitoring and allow the garden to “ask for
help” - via Twitter or email.

14. Case 2: The “Secret Orchard”
 Limerick Riverpaths Volunteers - a
biodiversity activist group created in
January 2012 by people who care about the
river and canal banks connecting the
university and the city;
 The volunteers set to demonstrate that
ordinary people using the area can
contribute to its maintenance without relying
exclusively on the local authorities.

18. Use of Technology
 The Facebook Page – “We love Plassey river
bank” - instrumental in forming a community;
 Renamed as Limerick Riverpaths Volunteers;
 Facebook Events used for coordination;
 Facebook material later transferred to a
website;
 Photo albums on Flickr for raising awareness;
 Walking the banks and talking to people; small
cards for events including online presence
pointers.

19. The “Secret Orchard” project
 25 apple and pear trees to
be planted on the Canal
bank;
 Section of the website
dedicated to trees history;
 Each tree is being adopted
by a family/person;
 Research ongoing for
finding a solution to allow
“reading the identity of a
tree” with a smart phone.

20. Challenges and opportunities
 Communities are fluid and engagement is
seasonal;
 Attempting to be all inclusive involves going
beyond web & mobile technologies;
 Supporting awareness, knowledge sharing
and coordination are paramount;
 Taking care of our local environment and
growing our own food: is this “real work”?
 Technological support and augmentation,
NOT automation!

21. Conclusion
 Designing for resilience has to take into
account specific design sensitivities;
 Non-intrusive technologies preferred;
 High tech has to go hand-in-hand with low
tech;
 The barriers for contributing have to be
lowered.

22. Thank you!
My “poster” setting:
 Peppermint tea;
 Beetroot tart recipe;
 Irish apples
Comments welcome!
 gabriela.avram@ul.ie
 @gabig58
 Coniecto.org
 Limerickriverbanks.org