Community garden
A shared space where individuals or groups cultivate garden plots. It may also include communal growing areas and shared facilities.
Allotment garden: A site divided into plots that individuals rent or hold under local rules for growing plants. It resembles a community garden but typically assigns plots through formal, individual tenure.
Urban agriculture: The cultivation, processing, and distribution of food within and around cities. Community gardens are a small-scale form of food production within urban agriculture.
Allotment movement: A movement promoting small plots of land for household food growing, especially in Europe. Its plot-based tradition helped establish organized urban cultivation for people without land.
Social capital: Resources available through relationships, trust, and networks among people. Repeated shared work can build relationships that extend beyond the garden.
Land tenure: The rules and arrangements through which people hold, use, and transfer rights to land. Uncertain tenure leaves gardens vulnerable to closure when owners change plans.
Raised-bed gardening: A gardening method that grows plants in soil raised above ground level, often within framed beds. Raised beds let gardens organize plots and manage soil in compact or contaminated sites.
School garden: A garden maintained at a school for educational, recreational, or food-growing purposes. School gardens adapt shared cultivation to lessons and student participation.
Victory garden: A home or community food garden cultivated to support wartime food supplies. Wartime campaigns showed how collective and household plots could supplement food systems.
Food sovereignty: The right of people and communities to shape their own food systems. Some gardens frame local growing as part of community control over food.
Urban land use planning: The public process of organizing how land in cities may be developed and used. Zoning and planning decisions determine whether garden sites can persist amid competing uses.