The community garden experience < our gardens

COMMUNITY GARDENS AS COMMUNITY REHABILITATION

Residents have turned open space on the street into gardens producing banana and taro.

The Claymore community gardens have been built on public open space, reusing a degraded grassy area for food production.

With taro and vegetables growing below banana trees and garden edges marked with sugar cane, the Claymore gardens resemble the subsistence gardens of the Pacific islands.

When the estates were built on the American Radburn model in the 1970s, the planning profession gave itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back. What the professions did not know was that Claymore, a few kilometres from Sydney's Satellite city of Campbelltown, was about to slide into two decades of social decay.

Part of the blame, according to community workers, was that the layout of the Radburn scheme created the hidden areas where crime flourished - not only the trade in drugs but the burning of houses.

The focus of the medium density housing was not the street but large areas of open space. These became places where stolen cars were stripped and of exciting police car chases. They were spaces where gangs were in control. From a 'model' housing estate, it had taken less than 20 years for Claymore to become a suburb in which no one wanted to live.

Now, over 20 years after they were built, some of those same estates are being ‘de-Radburnised’. Houses are being converted so that they address the street - the place where life takes place and where people pass by.

From fear to hope

A few years ago things started to change. Residents started a process of community renewal by taking matters into their own hands. People were sick and tired of living in a climate of fear and crime, surrounded by garbage and littered streets where even the electricity authority refused to fix street lights and where any notion of community was simply mythological.

Community renewal started when the Department of Housing handed over management of part of the Claymore Estate to Argyle Community Housing. Since then, the number of streets managed by Argyle has grown.

Argyle managers realised that renewal depended upon motivating the estate residents. They tried, failed, then tried again until they succeeded in getting neighbours to meet and talk to each other. Gaining confidence, local people reclaimed their own territory, setting up a 24-hour security patrol and cleaning up streets. In one cleanup, residents removed a total of 17.5 tonnes of garbage from a 200 metre stretch of street.

Next, they tackled a large area of common land, home turf to a local gang. That gang dissolved when residents turned up, armed with garden cultivation tools. The common land was soon turned into a series of large community food gardens.

Like a Pacific island bush garden

The Tongan influence is strong in these community gardens. They resemble Pacific island bush gardens with banana fronds waving in the breeze and taro growing in the shade below. There are patches of intensively cultivated vegetables half-hidden amid the giant leaves of the taro. The tall stalks of sugar cane define the garden boundaries.

For community workers, the lesson of Claymore is that the value of community gardening can go beyond nutritional health to give people a sense of ownership and control of their neighbourhood.

Combined with other self-help initiatives into a program of community renewal - improvements to housing and community security - the Claymore community gardens provide an affirmation of local control and hope.

Claymore community gardens contact:

Brian Murnane, Manager,

Argyle Community Housing Assocation

Ph: 02 4627 0002 Fax: 02 4627 0004

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PAGE UPDATED... Monday, 15 January 2007