Mass gardening drive boosts community spirit at nature school

It was a rainy, windy Sunday (November 17), with the sudden coldness giving the first hint of the coming winter.

The inclement weather forced sponsors to call off the opening of the Dongming Road Community Garden Fair scheduled to open that day.

Heated discussions and exchanges continued, however, at a forum themed "With community garden as a point of departure, an exploration of sustainable community governance with mass involvement." Held at a neighborhood service center in Sanlin, Pudong, experts, social workers and sub-district cadres shared insights on the community's regenerative efforts toward building a dynamic, self-governing community.

In such a community, neighbors get to know and care for each other, through ingeniously designed activities, a condition that makes many relocated residents nostalgic about the vibe of their old neighborhoods.

In his keynote speech, Tang Youcai, professor at the School of Sociology and Administration at East China University of Science and Technology, mused on the role of social organizations in shaping a social community.

Tang addressed the challenge of building a common community in a big city, where difference and distinction are the norm. He emphasized the need to start at the community level, where, through orderly participation in governance, residents can feel warmth, a sense of identity and empowerment. This sense of community-level success can then be extended to larger groups.

"Today, when people talk of xiangchou (homesickness) frequently, they essentially hark back to the sense of community and kinship in agrarian society, with its emotive resonance, and mutual aid spirit," Tang said.

In the rural area, such bonds could be built naturally on kinship but in an urban setting, a similar sense of solidarity could only be borne of public spirit at community level.

In the commuter belt, prime age workers often only return to their residences to sleep after a day's work, hence the need for an external force to help them connect with others.

Clover Nature School, a social organization dedicated to building gardens in underutilized community spaces set up by professor Liu Yuelai from Tongji University, has played a commendable role in this aspect.

For Clover, collaborative effort in creating community gardens provides a great opportunity for residents to get together, not only to break through their insularity but also to reconstruct grassroots governance.

In reviewing Clover's decade-long involvement in galvanizing community connection, Yin Keluan, general secretary of Clover, talked of the rampant gardening of yore in some old communities where residents would use public spaces to grow vegetables. Building gardens for the benefit of all residents became a natural start.

Although community gardening has been a consistent undertone throughout Clover's endeavors, its physical existence is less important than its potency in catalyzing residential involvement, Yin kept reminding the audience.

In propagating the governance mode in a sustainable manner, Clover incubates relevant social entities in a specific community, providing necessary expertise and experience, and then moves on to a new community. Thus, by the end of last year, it had been directly involved in building 288 gardens, but more than 1,800 gardens had been created under its influence.

In the case of the Dongming Road Community, they empowered two social organizations and five platforms.

Dongming Road Neighborhood in Sanlin, Pudong, an extensive community relocated from downtown Puxi in the mid-1990s, was perfect for a social experiment where all stakeholders collaborated in turning formerly isolated households into an organic whole.

Gardening is a perfect way to involve children, who then draw in their parents and grandparents, effectively solving the issue of involving all demographics, especially prime-age residents.

When this prototype Dongming experience is recreated elsewhere, adaptations are needed.

For instance, according to Yin, in experimenting with a community in downtown Xuhui District, Clover saw the need to leverage the strong school-home nexus, given the areas' traditional strength in education.

Gardening proved so important to spark spontaneous interaction among residents that Clover is moving "upstream the supply chain," as evidenced in a recent property development with Vanke where developers set aside a vacant plot so that residents could collaborate on their own at a later stage.

This is a paradigm shift, for previously such renovating efforts were confined to old neighborhoods.

Clover also attributed the success of its community effort to the stalwart support it had enjoyed from government at sub-district level, and enthusiastic support from volunteers, such as 45-year-old Sun Yingji, who preferred to call herself Dasheng (Great Sage) in their social organization Seedling Buddies. The other two leading members call themselves Fleshy, and Rabbit.

To mark the centenary of Xinhua Road this year, they launched a project of creating 100 "one (square) meter vegetable gardens," given residents' difficulty in accessing gardening space in the downtown area.

A WeChat screen grab vividly captured the jubilation from residents of Fahua Yuan compound near Xinhua Road on November 3 about the gardens they have created.

After over 40 days of manual labor, their exertions had paid off with success, and an excited resident rushed home and fetched two champagnes to celebrate the occasion.

One picture showed a child checking his "one (square) meter" of vegetables with the aid of a flashlight, in pervading darkness. Fleshy explained that the child was engaged in pest control, which also afforded him a chance to observe the behavior of the nocturnal insects.

Similar vegetable growing practices could also be observed at Chuangzhi Farm in Yangpu District, a 2,200 square meter wedge-shaped vacant plot between a high-end property development under Shui On, and a relatively old neighborhood. Clover proposed a mass-participant community farm there and, since it made its debut in July 2016, it has grown into a model of urban farming.

When we visited the farm toward dusk, we could not help but marvel at the regeneration of this once abandoned trash dump, which was divided into one-meter farming plots adopted by interested residents, at a small price.

Qin Ying, who has been responsible for the farm project, explained how children and parents were enthused about the composting project they learned after attending a lecture in Nanjing.

It was a fast method of composting introduced by a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Berkeley, commonly known as the "Berkeley method" or "fast composting."

This method produces finished compost in as little as 14 to 21 days.

Accustomed to the sight of the sleek, plastic playground elsewhere, the DIY playground struck me as crude at first, until we learned that adapting this structure had involved 35 kids from 32 families.

While we inspected, one parent made inquiries about highly sought-after, farm-sponsored after-school care classes, in which the children compete for physical work on the farm, such as picking up litter.

"Most of them pick up the litter with energy, and condemn littering practices in an undertone," Qin said.

It was total darkness when we finished our discussion at the garden office, but a 78-year-old uncle surnamed Chang was still trying to fix a stylish wind vane he had designed. The vane, in the shape of a fish, was slightly damaged in the recent typhoon, and Chang was making readjustments to enable it to function better in a similar scenario.

When asked about his supper, Chang said "no worries," as his wife would be waiting for him at home.