Revitalizing Public Life: Social Interaction in Seattle's Community Gardens

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his classic work Bowling Alone, describes how the retreat from public life has become a problem in large cities. With Putnam’s ideas in mind, this thesis investigates social life in Seattle’s community gardens. Gardens promote urban public life through engaging a diverse array of participants, gardeners struggle to navigate the program’s rules related to its two, sometimes contradictory, goals: inclusion and community creation. While much has been written about community gardens, there is an ethnographic gap in which scholars have not learned closely from the gardeners themselves. To address this gap, I studied four garden sites using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversation. Interacting with gardeners, I learned how they relate to each other through the shared experience of gardening as well as organizing against a common enemy manifested as vandalism and theft by non-gardeners. My findings pose questions such as: Why should local government prioritize creating programs that engage people in public space? How does a group strike a balance between inclusion of all and cohesion of some? How can public spaces best serve the full range of residents? This thesis concludes with a discussion of how Seattle’s community gardening program is one of many initiatives through which Seattle models local progressivism directly in conflict with national political and economic trends.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2017

Author	Perry, Allison
Primary advisor	Garcia, Angela
Advisor	Ebron, Paulla
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Anthropology

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/vs208jm5145

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).

Preferred Citation: Perry, Allison. (2017). "Revitalizing Public Life: Social Interaction in Seattle's Community Gardens." Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/vs208jm5145

Undergraduate Research Papers, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.

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