Abstract
Walking through Toronto’s residential downtown neighborhoods on a summer evening makes you wonder whether you have just stepped into a small farming town. Passing by front yards, you will come across vegetable gardens with rows of beans, tomatoes, basil growing tall, or heaps of yellow pumpkins. Branches of cherry or apple trees may be hanging over the fence, and vines, full of grapes and ready for vine making, are covering the porches. Peaking through the laneways between the town houses, you will spot even more vegetable gardens and fruit trees in the backyards.
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Notes
- 1.
In contrast to a fairly steady existence in Europe, urban community gardens have seen waves of popularity in North America, most often corresponding to times of war and recession like the Victory Gardens in Toronto during World War or the Veterans gardens after World War II (Palassio and Alana 2009:292).
- 2.
The TFPC was created through the World Health Organization’s healthy cities program. The program supports communities around the world in search of means to make food supplies secure, especially for low-income and at-risk citizens. The TFPC operates under the jurisdiction of the Toronto Board of Health (TBH) (Cuthbert 2009:55).
- 3.
A community garden is defined as a space on private or public lands, where people who live in the community nearby meet to grow and care for vegetables, flowers, and native plant species. They can either have individual plots or communal growing areas (Toronto Community Garden Network 2009).
- 4.
Wayne Roberts, the outgoing manager of the TFPC, predicts that the TFPC will become the fastest growing, institutional innovation in food governance over the next 25 years and will become as common-placeas the city departments of public health or of recreation (Roberts 2010: 173).
- 5.
In the 2002 Official Plan, references to urban agriculture as a land use, community service, or natural feature were totally missing (Wekerle 2002:1). The 2007 version includes these references.
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Jäggi, M. (2013). A Peek Over the Fence: Urban Agriculture as an Instrument of Social and Environmental Policy (A Case Study from Toronto). In: Wallimann, I. (eds) Environmental Policy is Social Policy – Social Policy is Environmental Policy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6723-6_10
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