| This dissertation examines the role of networks in producing community gardens. It does so by tracing the flows of knowledge, labor, and materials within individual garden sites, between gardens, and between gardens, institutions and other community groups. Given the attention it has gained for themes of sustainability, local food production, and community building, it is important to understand the network dynamics through which community gardens are started, grow, and change. To this end, my study has three research questions: Which places foster community gardens? How do internal dynamics govern community garden maintenance? Lastly, how do dynamics between community gardens affect the work of garden sites?;This study centers on the case of community gardening in New Jersey, but it also uses national surveys in order to ground the case study materials in a broader context. The research methods began with a survey of 445 community gardening organizations in the U.S. and Canada, followed by discourse analysis of archival documents on community gardening in the U.S. from the 1890s to the 2010s. I then conducted 48 semi-structured interviews with people involved in community gardens in 19 municipalities. Due to my methodology of tracing network connections, five of these interviews took place in Australia to investigate a partnership with a community garden in New Jersey. I was also a participant-observer in the New Brunswick Community Garden Coalition and a member of a community garden for two years, one of which I served as the garden's president. As part of this ethnographic work, I also conducted a participatory geographic information systems project. Together, these methods revealed a complex web of resource flows and the mechanisms through which they are configured.;In theoretical terms, I rethink community gardens as cooperative enterprises. This dissertation contributes more broadly to economic geography by bridging the diverse/community economies literatures with relational economic geography (REG) theory. J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse/community economies approaches are used in an expanding literature, but there has been little theorization of network dynamics in such studies. By drawing on concepts from REG regarding resource flows and clustering, I advance a relational conception of community economy. |
