Reclaiming public green space: community gardens
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Isolation from nature and its prosperities, such as living in healthier environments with direct access to organic vegetation and benefiting from the calming effects of natural landscapes have been the main deficit of urban areas of our times. In today’s rapidly and radically transforming and growing urban areas, in contrast to enlarging diverse amount of good and services, many open public spaces has been shrinking and even lost for the sake of growth and transformation. Unfortunately, public green spaces are one of the most prominent examples of these spaces. This shrinkage in public green spaces results in environmental and social complications in urban dwellers’ lives and decreases the quality of life in urban areas. At the focus of environmental deficits lies the inability to cope with environmental sustainability. Along with the acceleration of global warming and its effects becoming visible at urban scale, public green spaces attain a vital role to cope with these issues while their conservation and revitalization needs further attention. In addition to decreasing chance of benefiting from the natural facilities of public green spaces and a way to cope with environmental crisis, urban dwellers also lose one of the main public spaces where they can meet, socialize, express themselves freely, engage with the other members of the society and create urban culture.
As a reaction to public policies that result with the shrinkage of public green spaces, many NGOs and urban dwellers started to reclaim their ‘common’ green spaces by making efforts to protect and vitalize these vulnerable areas that are under the threat of fast paced transformations and uncontrolled growth.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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