Do urban gardens lead to gentrification? Not in Detroit

A wide-scale look at Detroit's urban gardens finds that while they don't seem to foreshadow gentrification in the city, there are some unsettling trends about where they're located and the sociodemographics in those areas. For example, home and community gardens are more frequently planted in non-Black neighborhoods, according to the study forthcoming in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning. The study used remote sensing to map 478 home gardens and 130 community gardens across 56 neighborhoods where 700,000 people live in Detroit, an emblematic legacy city undergoing significant redevelopment. "We found in the case of community gardens, the folks who had access to those gardens were wealthier, more educated and of a higher socioeconomic status,” said Jason Hawes , a doctoral candidate at University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. "They also tended to be clustered in non-Black neighborhoods. That's a really big deal in a city that's 78% Black. Study senior author Joshua Newell , an urban geographer at U-M-s School for Environment and Sustainability, collaborated with Hawes and Dimitrios Gounaridis , a postdoctoral researcher on the study.