Exploring Participatory Design in Urban Community Gardens

Community gardens are areas that encounter frequent, intricate more-than-human interactions in the built environment. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and challenges of using participatory design methods to establish a dialogue with the people who work in community gardens. Through a collaborative design process, we hope to create more opportunities for community governance of shared places. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which these community members are interacting with each other and their space, and examine how a more-than-human perspective to participatory design could be used to facilitate and integrate a more inclusive approach that minimises negative externalities while maintaining the benefits of community gardening. This study is focused on a speculative design approach to initiating a dialogue with stakeholders in an established community garden in order to observe the interactions and opportunities that result from using participatory methods.