Grow Gothenburg connects gardeners with people who own unused land - Shareable

Grow Gothenburg connects gardeners with people who own unused land - Shareable

By

Wolfgang Hoeschele

July 23, 2018

Last year's Shareable article about Gothenburg as a Sharing City featured Grow Gothenburg, which had just been initiated at the time. In order to learn how this project is coming along, we talked to Jonathan Naraine, one of the people at The Foodprint Lab who started the project.

Wolfgang Hoeschele , Shareable: How did this project get started?

Jonathan Naraine, The Footprint Lab: Doing urban farming tours around the city, we found that there were a lot of interested people, but not enough places for them to grow plants. So we wanted to enable more sharing of spaces — either green spaces, or gray spaces. In 2016, collaborating with the city of Gothenburg, we created an interactive map of local urban farming. We realized that the city has municipal land to offer for gardeners, but there is so much more land in private ownership. So we had the idea, let's make it easy for more people to share land.

How good is the fit between the land offered and the needs of the people looking for land?

We have had good matches by happenstance. Last year, we helped facilitate establishing a student farm near Chalmers University. For example, a student who was living close to the Chalmers campus happened to find us, she was just curious what's happening in Gothenburg. Within a couple of weeks, she met the group, they needed new people. She and then many more people found the community garden, when they had been on the verge of no longer functioning.

A commercial grower had been looking for space for many years, going back and forth searching for places. Then through our platform, she found municipal land that suited her very well, and she started a CSA there. This spring, we had a project with a big property owner, matching three different sites via the website. Many people have been selected to start new community gardens and commercial farms. This creates a win-win situation for the property owners by creating social and green meeting places on unused land, and people who want to farm get access to land with less investment costs.