Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča community gardens in Incheon and Ljubljana show that the social importance of urban gardening as a neighbourhood collective action is growing in South Korea and Slovenia, largely due to the engagement of urban gardening activists and civil society organisations.

Introduction: Urban gardening as collective action
Urban gardening refers to non-commercial food production in urban areas. Throughout history, it has been an integral part of urban life. More recently, the importance of urban gardening has expanded beyond its economic and environmental benefits to include social and cultural benefits. Whereas urban gardening once provided food for the growing populations of industrial cities, its popularity in post-industrial cities is associated with leisure, healthy lifestyles, skills development, education, cultural production and arts, community building, etc.¹

Nowadays, people are increasingly spending time together on gardens, growing and sharing food, helping each other, organising workshops, sharing childcare, participating in community festivals, and even protesting. Such collective action strengthens social relationships, trust and shared identities among participants, building stronger communities in neighbourhoods and cities.²

Urban gardening as a neighbourhood collective action has been recognised for its role in empowering citizens, building partnerships between civil society and public institutions, and strengthening participatory governance.³ Moreover, situated environmental and social activism, such as urban gardening, makes political claims that challenge dominant neoliberal urban strategies.⁴ As a result, recent studies on urban gardening have focused on its potential to contribute to transformative social change.⁵

“Urban gardening as a neighbourhood collective action has been recognised for its role in empowering citizens, building partnerships between civil society and public institutions, and strengthening participatory governance.”

In South Korea (hereafter Korea) and Slovenia, the social importance of urban gardening has not been extensively studied, despite its popularity.⁶ Moreover, studies on urban gardening in both countries have rarely been conducted from a comparative perspective. This article compares the Ieum community garden in Incheon, Korea, and the Onkraj gradbišča community garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to better understand urban gardening as a neighbourhood collective action and its social importance in both countries.

Urban gardening in South Korea and Slovenia
Korea and Slovenia experienced a period of rapid economic growth between the 1950s and 1970s. State-led industrialisation attracted impoverished rural populations to rapidly growing urban centres in search of new jobs and a better life. Although the situation in Slovenia is not directly comparable with the massive rural-urban migration in Korea, their urbanisation processes followed somewhat similar patterns.

In 1950, only about 20% of the Korean and Slovenian populations lived in urban areas. Twenty years later, the urban population had doubled in both countries. In Korea, the urban population grew by 47% between 1960 and 1970, and by 39% between 1970 and 1980. In Slovenia, the process of rapid urbanisation began about a decade earlier, when the urban population grew by 42% between 1950 and 1960, and by 31% between 1960 and 1970.⁷

Despite the differences in subsequent urbanisation, the comparison shows that a significant proportion of the Korean and Slovenian populations moved to the cities comparatively recently.⁸ The migrants brought with them social practices and identities that were still rooted in their previous lives in the rural countryside. For them, growing edible plants or raising small animals became an important means of survival. It was common to find informal gardens and allotments scattered throughout the city not long ago. This suggests that urban gardening has long been a part of urban life in Korea and Slovenia.⁹

“Urban gardening has long been a part of urban life in Korea and Slovenia.”

Cities in Korea and Slovenia today are quite different from their industrial pasts. As elsewhere in the world, the importance of urban gardening today goes beyond survival and can include numerous social and cultural benefits. Urban gardening in Korea and Slovenia is becoming less about growing food and more about leisure, healthy living, skills development, education, cultural production or art. In addition, the impact of urban gardening on community capacity building is increasingly recognised in both countries.¹⁰

The Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča community gardens in Incheon and Ljubljana are reportedly good cases of urban gardening as a neighbourhood collective action that can help to understand its social importance in Korea and Slovenia.

Ieum community garden in Incheon, South Korea
The Ieum community garden is located on the outskirts of Songdo International City in Incheon. In 2020, a proposal to build a community garden in Incheon was included in the city’s participatory budget. The Incheon Urban Agriculture Network was selected to prepare, implement and manage the new community garden, which opened in 2021. Currently, the garden offers 330 individual plots, 17 communal plots and 8 special plots, which are allocated to applicants through a lottery system each year.

From the outset, the garden was not intended to be a generic allotment garden. Urban gardening activists and experts from the Incheon Urban Agriculture Network sought to create an urban garden that would contribute to community adaptation to climate change, improve access to healthy food, and promote community capacity building through urban gardening. They organise various activities that bring gardeners together, strengthen social relationships, build trust and improve communication among them. All gardeners are also required to attend a mandatory community gardening training and volunteer for a minimum of six hours per year.¹¹

Gardeners are involved in various forms of community gardening. They participate in food sharing, clubs, children’s education, cultural activities and art projects. Some are also engaged in environmental and social activism. Some of the produce is donated to local social welfare organisations and charities, extending the garden’s social outreach. The garden offers guided tours for schools, experts, and policy makers from Korea and abroad. Moreover, the Incheon Urban Agriculture Network is an active member of various networks of civil society organisations. They also collaborate with the City of Incheon, which provides financial support for the garden.¹²

Onkraj gradbišča community garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia
The Onkraj gradbišča community garden was established in 2010 as a collaboration between the KUD Obrat Cultural and Art Association and the Bunker Institute. The garden was created as a temporary project on an idle construction site in the centre of Ljubljana. However, after the City of Ljubljana extended the lease of the land, the number of gardeners increased from a dozen to up to a hundred per year. There were about 40 individual and communal plots. The garden was closed in 2022, after a decision was made to build a social housing on the site.

The Onkraj gradbišča community garden responded to the specific needs of gardeners for an accessible green space. With their help, KUD Obrat created a garden that provided access to healthy food, improved the local environment and contributed to community capacity building. Urban gardening not only brought participants together to share their interest in growing food, but also affected social relationships, trust and communication among them. They became involved in managing the garden, organising cultural festivals, art projects, childcare and education. In addition to urban gardening, some gardeners were also involved in environmental and social activism.¹³

These activities helped to connect the garden with the neighbourhood and the city. They also affected its social outreach through collaboration with similar urban gardens in Slovenia and abroad. KUD Obrat joined Mreža za prostor, a national network of community initiatives and civil society organisations in the field of sustainable spatial development.¹⁴ The collaboration with the public institutions, however, proved less successful although the gardeners were aware of its importance. The City of Ljubljana showed no interest in a comprehensive supporting policy, even though it leased the land at no cost.¹⁵

Comparing the social importance of Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča
The Ieum communtiy garden is larger, with ten times more plots and better facilities than the Onkraj gradbišča community garden. As a result, the former has attracted a significantly larger number of gardeners to date, suggesting that the two gardens have different social importance. The difference seems to be related not only to the number of plots, but also to the supporting public policy. While the City of Ljubljana provided the land for the garden for a period of twelve years, it offered no other formal support. In contrast, the City of Incheon not only provides the land but also financial support.

While every place is expected to be different in one way or another, comparative urbanism should focus on understanding similarities rather than differences between otherwise separate and distant places.¹⁶ In the case of the Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča community gardens, there are several important similarities between them, despite their different historical, social, urban and institutional contexts.

In both Incheon and Ljubljana, urban gardening activists and experts established urban gardens on idle construction sites. From the outset, the Incheon Urban Agriculture Network and KUD Obrat aimed to create urban gardens that would facilitate the cultivation of food and community. Nettle argues that such community gardens represent distinct forms of neighbourhood collective action that often follow similar means and ends, and produce similar outcomes.¹⁷

“From the outset, the Incheon Urban Agriculture Network and KUD Obrat aimed to create urban gardens that would facilitate the cultivation of food and community.”

In the Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča community gardens, neighbourhood collective action included growing and sharing food, managing the gardens, volunteering, educating children, participating in community workshops and cultural events, and even environmental and social activism. Community gardening not only provided access to healthy food and leisure time, and improved living environment, but also strengthened social relationships, trust and a shared identity among gardeners, which contributed to community capacity building.

Moreover, the two gardens show that community gardening in Incheon and Ljubljana has had an impact on the surrounding neighbourhoods and the city, largely due to the activism of the Incheon Urban Agriculture Network and KUD Obrat, both of which have been instrumental in managing the gardens and fostering formal and informal collaboration between gardeners, civic groups, experts and public institutions.

This corroborates the findings of previous studies that have identified the social importance of community gardening in facilitating coalition building between civil society organisations, as well as between citizens, communities, civil society and public institutions. Such collaboration is seen as crucial in the pursuit of participatory governance, which strengthens the resilience of neighbourhoods and cities.¹⁸

Conclusion: transformative potential of urban gardening
This article compares the Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča community gardens to better understand urban gardening and its social importance in Korea and Slovenia. However, the two community gardens are hardly representative of either countries, where most of urban gardening takes place on individual gardens and allotments, with little to do with neighbourhood collective action. The two gardens are important because they exemplify a limited number of successful community gardens, allowing for the exploration of their social importance, challenges and transformative potential for building resilient neighbourhoods and cities.

In the Ieum and Onkraj gradbišča community gardens, people not only grew food but also engaged in practices that strengthened social relationships, shared identities, community capacity and collaboration between different actors. This was made possible because of the involvement of the Incheon Urban Agriculture Network and KUD Obrat. Their similar role in enabling neighbourhood collective action seems to explain the similarities between the two gardens.

However, compared to Incheon, the institutional support for the Onkraj gradbišča community garden in Ljubljana was limited. As a result, its social outreach was also limited, underscoring the importance of supporting public policies to sustain neighbourhood collective action in cities.

Future research on urban gardening in Korea and Slovenia should continue to explore it as a form of prefigurative collective action and identify existing community gardening practices, their actors, meanings and social benefits, as well as supporting public policies that can contribute to transformative social change here and now.

“Future research on urban gardening in Korea and Slovenia should continue to explore it as a form of prefigurative collective action that can contribute to transformative social change here and now.”

* This article is a short and revised version of a conference paper that was presented at the 2024 International CEESOK Conference in Budapest, Hungary.

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