Tending the Flowers, Cultivating Community: Gardening on New York City Public Housing Sites

Masthead Logo The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 2 | Issue 1 Article 7 January 2014 Tending the Flowers, Cultivating Community: Gardening on New York City Public Housing Sites Lauren Sepanski FCRH '12 Fordham University, Follow this and additional works at: https://fordham.bepress.com/furj Part of the Civic and Community Engagement Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons Recommended Citation Sepanski, Lauren FCRH '12 (2014) "Tending the Flowers, Cultivating Community: Gardening on New York City Public Housing Sites," The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 7. Available at: https://fordham.bepress.com/furj/vol2/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalResearch@Fordham. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal by an authorized editor of DigitalResearch@Fordham. For more information, please contact . FURJ | Volume 2 | Spring 2012 Sepanski: Tending the Flowers, Cultivating Community www.furj.org C ommuni cat i on s Lauren Sepanski, FCRH ’12 Tending the Flowers, Cultivating Community Gardening on New York City Public Housing Sites Sociology Introduction Founded in 1934, The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the nation’s oldest and largest public housing agency. Nearly half a million people live in NYCHA’s 334 housing developments located throughout the five boroughs. If a NYCHA resident wants to garden, he or she may submit a garden application to his or her development’s management office and begin to garden in a place approved by the development’s manager. Some developments have preordained places for their residents to garden, complete with fences. In other developments, residents simply choose a place on the development’s grounds, such as a part of a lawn close to their apartment, and begin to garden. NYCHA will reimburse the gardener for up to $40 of his or her gardening expenses and will also provide seeds, bulbs, starter plants, compost, and some technical assistance. NYCHA is supportive of resident gardening because it is an economically efficient means of grounds beautification, as well as being environmentally beneficial and connected to a decrease in crime and vandalism on development grounds (Bennaton, 2009; Lewis, 1988). Currently, there are over 600 public housing residents gardening on NYCHA grounds (Bennaton, 2009). The table below offers basic information on different types of gardens in New York City. Table 1. Types of Gardens in New York City Community Gardens Home Gardens NYCHA Resident Gardens Who gardens? Maintained by a collaborative community group Maintained by an individual Maintained by an individual Where? On community grounds On private property On community grounds Why? Shared goal for benefit of community Individual and household needs ? While working part-time in NYCHA’s downtown office for the past two years, I received many calls from resident gardeners seeking help for the problems they were experiencing with their gardens: gardens were vandalized, plants were stolen, and requested flowers were not received. Hearing how much of a struggle it was to plant and maintain gardens on development grounds made me wonder why these individuals continued to garden. Methods To answer this question, I spent the summer of 2011 conducting ethnographic research at three different NYCHA sites in New York City, focusing on the activities of five gardeners. All of the gardeners I spent time with were women (as are most NYCHA gardeners), ranging from 30 to 90 years old, none of whom had higher than a high school education. Julia (50 years old) is of Puerto Rican and Italian descent, Maria (30) is Dominican, and Gloria (79) is Puerto Rican. All three were born and raised in the New York City area and had no prior knowledge of gardening before they began gardening on NYCHA grounds. Josephine (60) and Sarah (90), on the other hand, are African-American and lived as children on farms in the rural South where they had participated in farming and gardening before moving to New York City as teenagers.* The Garden as Personal Space for Creative Self-Expression In Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices (2008), Lisa Taylor argues that there are intrinsic differences in the processes and goals of gardening for the middle and working classes; these, Taylor argues, are the direct result of class differences. One particularly striking point that Taylor makes equates workingclass gardening with providing a feeling and expression of selfworth. Taylor writes that by keeping a “tidy” garden, members of the working class are able to “refuse pejorative associations about being working-class and to ensure that others recognize their respectability” (p. 117). Taylor’s finding is in keeping with what my gardeners experienced. When I asked why Julia thinks more people do not garden, she said, “It’s a lot easier to sit on the couch all day and watch novelas.” She viewed herself as different from residents who did not garden, and wanted to distance herself from the negative stereotype of lower-class people as lazy and unproductive. However, she also resented that other residents might think of her as different or that she was trying to show she was better by gardening. Julia told me that one time she was protecting her daughter’s friend from her boyfriend’s abusive mother, and the mother shouted at Julia, “You just think you’re special because you have a garden.” Julia was angered, hurt, and baffled by that accusation. For her—and for other gardeners as well—the purpose of gardening is not to show other housing residents that they are superior; rather, gardening serves as both a way of defying stereotypes and a form of self-expression. Just as social class is important to the community garden experience, so too is gender. The garden in Western culture is traditionally considered a “private, domestic, feminine space” because of its proximity to the home, as opposed to the “male sphere of waged work and politics” (Rose, 1993, p. 18). Gardening is indeed a gendered leisure activity. Raisborough and Bhatti (2007) argue that although much feminist analysis of leisure reads resistance as “a counter to power relations that aim to maintain, reproduce, or repackage oppressive gender relations,” empowerment does not necessarily come from resistance; it can also “stem from an active repositioning to contextualized gender-norms that escapes an Thanks to the gardeners who allowed me to work with them and to share their gardening lives in the summer of 2011. My thanks also go to Professors E. Doyle McCarthy, Oneka LaBennett, and Julie Kim for their guidance and encouragement on this project and paper. I would also like to acknowledge the FCRH Undergraduate Research Grant Program for the funding which made my research possible. *All gardener names have been changed to maintain anonymity. 43 Published by DigitalResearch@ (...truncated)