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The Documentary: Neighbourhood: Neighbourhood: How a Garden Grows

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2a BBC Neighbourhood WS Website 1920x1080_LOWELL.jpg

22/08/2018 GMT

Neighbourhood: How a Garden Grows

Neighbourhood

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Neighbourhood, Neighbourhood: How a Garden Grows

In a small city, a community garden represents change. But is it good or bad?

Lowell has seen better days. Once a bustling mill town, in the 1920s and 30s it was hit hard by broad shifts in manufacturing that rocked the northeast United States. In the decades since, an influx of immigrants from all over the world has moved in, making Lowell a vibrant place to live despite the departure of industry. However, it remains a largely low-income city, and in the past few years an effort to address urban access to fresh food has brought community gardens to some of the poorest neighbourhoods. Community gardens have a reputation for improving neighbourhoods, transforming blight, and lowering crime rates. With the city’s large immigrant population, each garden serves a diverse array of neighbours, from Puerto Rican to Burmese, each investing their sweat equity into making Lowell a liveable home.

Sounds idyllic, right? So why are tomatoes disappearing in the middle of the night? What is captured on the security cameras that monitor the chain link fences bordering the gardens? And, as property values rise, could the gardens themselves be to blame?

Alexis Pancrazi talks to recent immigrants, long-time Lowellians, and a local historian to try to get a better picture of how the gardens are part and parcel of the city’s efforts to reinvent itself, and makes some surprising discoveries along the way about how community gardens can impact individual lives and a city at large.  

Music by Lee Rosevere and AA Aalto 
Image montage: D8

The Documentary: Neighbourhood

Five neighbourhoods from across the globe that reflect the complexity of our local worlds

Five neighbourhoods in Nigeria, Finland, the US and India that reflect the complexity of our local worlds

In a collaboration between the Sundance Institute and BBC World Service five programmes explore the complexities of Neighbourhood across the globe. 

Trying to rent a flat in the biggest city in India, Mumbai, with more than twelve and a half million inhabitants; modernising Nigeria’s city of Lagos for its astonishing 21 million people; talking to Finns about what it has meant to be a nation always squashed between Sweden and Russia; to two very different American neighbourhoods, a community garden in the old mill town of Lowell in Massachusetts, and the ancestral homeland of the Shinnecock Indians out at Conscience Point on Long Island near New York – these are places that reflect the infinite complexity of the local worlds in which we live.
 
That’s five Neighbourhoods on the BBC World Service.

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