The community garden experience < our experience

COOPERATION, CONVIVIALITY, SHARED INITIATIVE MAKE COMMUNITY GARDENS THIRD PLACES

According to US social researcher, Ray Oldenburg, we inhabit three distinct places in our lives:

• the ‘first place’ is the home; it is where we spend much of out time
• the ‘second place’ our workplace; here we spend a great deal of time though less than at home
• 'Third places’ are shared places where we informally interact with others.

The important thing about third places is that they are:

• locations where people meet informally
• congenial to social interaction, itself a component of community-building
• cheap to visit
• accessible by pubic transport
• close to where we live.

Community gardeners at Brisbane's Northey Street City Farm have installed robust seating and tables under the mango trees to enhance the conviviality of the place. A cafe offers coffee, teas and snacks to those attending the weekend organic farmers' market. Simple installations like this increase the city farm's value as a third place.

Oldenburg described the concept of the third place in his book Great Good Places (1989, 1999; Marlowe and Company, NY). He identifies successful third places as:

• coffee shops
• cafes
• restaurants
• hair dressers
• libraries.

Community gardens are third places

Community gardens could be added to Oldenburg’s list. They more than adequately fulfil his criteria.

To make community gardens into third places:

• erect a shelter of some kind - a pegola, open-sided shed or whatever - to provide shade in summer, refuge from rain and a place to sit and talk; if the garden already has a shady tree, all the better
• equip your shelter with seats and a long table such as might prove useful to the sharing of food
• invest in a small, portable gas barbecue or make some other simple cooking device or something more ambitious such as a cobb oven; scavenge a wok or frypan and a saucepan to prepare simple meals using food from the community garden
• make a habit of preparing simple food - a salad from the garden will do in summer - and sharing it around the table; the sharing of food is one of the most basic and successful of convivial acts
• pay careful attention to the governance of your community garden; bad governance drives people away; techniques of deliberative democracy that include the sharing of decision making and thoughtful discussion before making decisions brings a sense of ownership to gardeners
• adopt an open attitude to the public; invite the curious into the garden, explain what goes on there and invite them back; if they express interest in joining, provide them with printed information
• organise events in the garden apart from workshops; equinox and solstice celebrations, harvest festivals, new season planting ceremonies, full moon evenings, flowering celebrations, the seasonal arrival of migratory birds, musical performance/readings/poetry events, story telling, children's activities - there'ss so many excuses for celebration.

Community gardens as third places are attractive to planning as well as socialising (Australian City Farms & Communty Gardens Network team: from right: Morag gamble, SEED International; John Monrahan, Growing Community/Northey Street City Farm; Fiona Campbell, Randwick City Council sustainability education officer).

Informal interaction the key

It is the social interaction - the discussion, the creative thinking and collaboration, the generation of ideas and the like - that are the critical function of third places.

Out of informal interaction come the initiatives that create a sense of place, a sense of belonging and involvement, a sense of community.

Recreating the village green

Sydney-based social researcher, Hugh Mackay, reports that his research has disclosed the need for something similar to Oldenburg’s third places.

Noting the declining size of the Australian household - the growing number of one and two person dwellings - Mackay proposes that new developments incorporate what he calls a ‘village green’. He envisions this as a venue for informal interaction or quiet sitting and observing.

Mackay says we have a ‘herding instinct’, a need to be with people even if it is just sitting in a coffee bar in their company without interacting. It is a need to be with others of our kind, he says.

What Oldenburg and Mackay are proposing is more than the traditional community centre and a great deal more than the shopping mall. Malls are essentially commercial spaces rather than community places. They encourage visitation for the purpose of buying and selling rather than informal interaction and they are controlled surveilled spaces with their roaming security guards and cameras. Sure, visitors might interact in coffee shops in malls but they do not ‘hang around’ as would people at a true third place.

Conviviality the essential characteristic

A criteria for third places is that they offer the opportunity for conviviality - the enjoyment of others' company. This is a key requirement of community gardeners, more than qualifying their gardens as third places.

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PAGE UPDATED... Thursday, 7 June 2007