Community gardens in Paris – a re-growing trend.
There are 1,064 community gardens in the Paris region covering 879 hectares. These are 2018 figures and may have increased in recent years, especially post-2022 after social distancing.
Community gardens are categorized by their use, such as family gardens, shared gardens, social integration gardens, therapeutic gardens, and gardens for activists.
Family gardens are the most common community garden. They comprise 60% of all community gardens and 80% of the surface coverage. They range from 0.8 hectares to 1.2 hectares each. Almost all of them are just outside the Paris periphery in the surrounding urbanized municipalities.
Shared gardens comprise 24% of all community gardens but only 3% of the hectare coverage. Generally, they are ten times smaller than family gardens at about 1,000 square metres on average. Almost all of them are in the centre of Paris or in the adjoining northern and eastern municipalities.
The smallest community garden is the Simplon-aux-Champs in the 18th arrondissement (district) of Paris which is only 25 square metres. The largest community garden is the Crosne family garden in the Essonne county which is more than 25 hectares.
Community gardens in France date back to the 19th century and were common in the United Kingdom and Germany too, where they were called “fields for the poor” or “gardens for the poor.” In France, they were called “jardins ouvriers” – “gardens for the workers” or “workers’ gardens.” Religious institutions created many of them to help residents during difficult times.
The numbers increased rapidly during the war peiods, particularly from 1916-1918 and from the 1930s, reaching up to 250,000 allotments in France. After the war, the numbers sharply decreased due to the favourable economy and land being claimed for housing. The “workers’ gardens” of France were renamed “family gardens.”
Informal shared gardens were introduced by the late 1980s, particularly in the cities of Lille, Lyon, and Nantes, followed by Paris in the early 2000s. “Social integration gardens” (gardens created to reintegrate socially excluded or professionally disadvantaged people) began to appear and received legal recognition in 1998. A regional collective was formed in the Paris Region and remained active until 2012. At the same time, in Paris, “gardens for activists” arose, which are gardens that offer group gardening activities.
Generally, across France, community gardens are known as “multi-function gardens” because Eric Duchemin’s 2015 research said that gardens are associated with ‘no less than eight fields of intervention: urban planning, environment, economy, food security, health, leisure, education, and social interaction.’
