Grassroots urban agriculture projects are highly interactive spaces, allowing people from different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds to learn, play and work together. They offer unconventional urban greenspace and recreational opportunities and contribute to urbanites’ understanding of how food is grown. Landscape architects can contribute numerous professional strengths to the design of these food-oriented landscapes. Case study research at Hackney City Farm, UK, and Prinzessinnengarten, Germany, illustrates that grassroots projects could benefit from a strong spatial design and increased layering of on-site uses in order to serve a greater cross-section of the community than at present. This research culminates in the design of a multifunctional food-oriented landscape at Brant Avenue Public School, Guelph, and is shaped by the case study findings and literature on participatory design and facilitation. The research demonstrates how landscape architects can work with community groups to provide a high diversity of on-site uses and user experience.

Outdoor education in the UK has been growing in popularity and with it a further understanding of its benefits. Research shows that many young people still don’t access natural environments and many educators still struggle with how to provide them. This is particularly prevalent in urban environments where spatial inequality has been linked to a decline in health, well-being and personal development. Community mapping involves a community coming together to create a map of their locality and share local knowledge. This can take many forms. Sometimes it might be a traditional cartographic map while other times it may be stories, sculptures or poems. In this research I explore how community mapping can be used as a pedagogical tool, looking particularly at how it can help educators approach outdoor education in an urban environment. I take a teacher action research approach, inspired by previous art-based approaches to educational inquiry. Through doing a community mapping project with two groups of 8 to 10 year olds on an urban farm in central London I share the visable and often invisible components of our pedagogies, including children’s voices and work as well as the voice of myself and another educators, reflecting on the realities of outdoor education in an urban environment. I discover the cross curricular possibilities that such a project brings, the spaces it opens up for us to learn from children’s voices and the many ways in which community mapping can be used to address aims and goals of the UK primary curriculum. Community mapping can help educators overcome a lack of confidence in how to approach outdoor learning. The child-led nature of projects can allow children and educators to work together to co-create their understanding of the locality, noticing the small details they hadn’t seen before. It can provide a space for educators to learn more about how the young people they work with see the world around them while also providing authentic experiences that can be utilized in wider classroom learning. This research allows other educators to take away what resonates with them, with their experiences and pedagogies, and use these new understandings to enhance their own educational practices in their own settings.