Our Approach
Our Manifesto
What features an Edible Estates project may have, would depend upon the existing greenspaces within a neighbourhood, and the needs, aspirations and capacity of the people who live there. In the Interventions section of our site you will find some of the methods we have developed over the past five years. Meanwhile, we have set out below our Manifesto; the things we think are important:-
Rethinking Greenspace
In some estates, there is a lot greenspace maintained as amenity grassland. Whilst some grassed areas are required for recreation and clothes drying, some land could be put to better use, for example as food growing spaces, imaginative playspaces or wildflower meadows.
As they are, these grasslands represent a maintenance burden for the Council and/or residents, whilst cutting the grass may be good physical activity, this same effort could provide fresh, cheap and nutritious vegetables and encourage greater interaction and co-operation between neighbours.
The Edible Estates model is mostly about other things we can do with greenspace. We want to re-think greenspace within social housing estates as an asset which can contribute to personal and community well-being.
Community Growing
Growing food can be a very social activity, there’s opportunities to help out fellow growers with advice, plants, tools and mucking in with big jobs. It can create opportunities to meet new people and start new friendships. Whilst some people may want to manage a full size allotment growing lots of fruit and vegetables, others might be happy with a wee raised bed and a crop of herbs. Community food growing projects put an emphasis on the community aspect of growing.
Healthy Eating
Once we have grown food, we make sure to give folk support to ensure they know how to cook it into delicious and healthy meals. Coming together to eat is a powerful tool for promoting community, we always try to organise events and meetings around cooking and eating food.
Community Empowerment
Community greenspace regeneration projects can involve residents of all ages, backgrounds and abilities. It provides routes for personal and community capacity building, and visual evidence that positive changes are taking place through the regeneration of landscape.
More over, our goal is for each project to be self-sustaining through community management – participants supporting each other, and managing the project for themselves. We use community participative design workshops to build the capacity of a group to design their own project. This knowledge and experience is essential to understand the issues involved in the management of a community growing project. To this we add training and support to establish a community association to manage their project.
Co-production & Greenspace Management
Traditionally, the greenspace in housing estates has been managed by Councils with little direct involvement of local households. Some Councils now contract large landscaping firms to regenerate and maintain greenspace. These contractors often have little or no relationship with the local households.
In recent years, reducing budgets are limiting what Councils can do to maintain and upgrade landscapes, this opens up opportunities to encourage and support local households to take a role – sometimes called ‘co-production’. Best practice projects in community greenspace management have shown that multiple benefits come from involving communities in the design and management of their greenspace.
Our aspiration is to establish community enterprises to bid for contracts to manage greenspace on behalf of the local authorities. These enterprises would be managed by the communities they serve, and encourage and support households throughout the neighbourhood to grow their own, either in their own garden or at community food growing sites in the neighbourhood.
Training, Employment & Enterprise
We are keen to explore opportunities for creating employment through horticulture enterprises within the community, and on nearby agricultural land. It may be that the peripheral location of some council estates on the cities fringes can be turned to their advantage as they are close by good quality agricultural land which could be used to develop intensive horticultural operations providing local food to the city.
Living Landscapes
We want to create landscapes which are beautiful to live in, that provide wildlife habitat and which provide a community harvest. We support Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Living Landscapes scheme to establish wildflower meadows and reduced use reduced mowing strategies.
Health & Wellbeing
Community food growing projects are recognised as having a big impact upon the health and wellbeing of participants. If the project is sited within a community, the benefits can extend in some manner or form to everybody that lives there.
Read more about Health & Wellbeing >
Natural Play
There is an awareness that the play facilities provided for children have been preoccupied with heath and safety rather than fun and adventure, and that children need ‘risk and challenge’ to develop in a healthy way. Playing and learning in natural outdoor environments is good for children – they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. It stimulates physical activity, promotes creativity and helps develop social skills. It can create an appreciation of the natural world, relieve stress, develop resilience and bring learning to life. And it’s a lot of fun.