The dynamics of an expanding community economy: community garden networks and clusters in New Jersey
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of networks in producing community gardens. It does so by tracing the flows of knowledge, labor, and materials within individual garden sites, between gardens, and between gardens, institutions and other community groups. Given the attention it has gained for themes of sustainability, local food production, and community building, it is important to understand the network dynamics through which community gardens are started, grow, and change. To this end, my study has three research questions: Which places foster community gardens? How do internal dynamics govern community garden maintenance? Lastly, how do dynamics between community gardens affect the work of garden sites? This study centers on the case of community gardening in New Jersey, but it also uses national surveys in order to ground the case study materials in a broader context. The research methods began with a survey of 445 community gardening organizations in the U.S. and Canada, followed by discourse analysis of archival documents on community gardening in the U.S. from the 1890s to the 2010s. I then conducted 48 semi-structured interviews with people involved in community gardens in 19 municipalities. Due to my methodology of tracing network connections, five of these interviews took place in Australia to investigate a partnership with a community garden in New Jersey. I was also a participant-observer in the New Brunswick Community Garden Coalition and a member of a community garden for two years, one of which I served as the garden’s president. As part of this ethnographic work, I also conducted a participatory geographic information systems project. Together, these methods revealed a complex web of resource flows and the mechanisms through which they are configured. In theoretical terms, I rethink community gardens as cooperative enterprises. This dissertation contributes more broadly to economic geography by bridging the diverse/community economies literatures with relational economic geography (REG) theory. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse/community economies approaches are used in an expanding literature, but there has been little theorization of network dynamics in such studies. By drawing on concepts from REG regarding resource flows and clustering, I advance a relational conception of community economy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it