Differentiating multiple meanings of garden and community

Community gardens are widely recognized as an effective grassroots response to urban disinvestment and decay. There has been remarkably little attention paid, however, to the differences among community gardens as physical and social spaces. This paper suggests that variations among gardens reflect and reproduce differing interpretations of the meaning of both community and garden in the city. A comparative discussion of three community gardens in Minneapolis, Minnesota, highlights the concept that at the intersection of notions of community and garden are the issues of enclosure, inclusion and exclusion. Decisions about whether and how to enclose community gardens shape the role that community gardens play in urban neighborhoods.