Heavy Metal City-Zen
Abstract
Urban Gardening has become increasingly popular globally in the past two decades as urbanites begin to recognise the benefits of growing their own food and the sense of community these gardening activities engender. Urban Gardening activities take place in formal institutions such as schools and care facilities, but a vast number of urban gardens have sprung up independently with the dual role of promoting community cohesion and provision of safe and healthy food for their community. These activities grow as citizens reclaim derelict land and increasingly use roof top gardens and novel containers. Many such sites are in areas of high traffic density, brown field sites or sites overlying landfill, providing much needed green oases in the city which are particularly popular with the “share” generation. However, as a result of their urban location, there are still some significant barriers to adoption of these urban gardening practices for food production, which is a pity given their multi-faceted potential. One of the main concerns is the transfer of urban pollutants into the consumer’s food chain. Trace metals are one of the contaminants frequently found in urban crops and soils. Perceived concerns about the effects of these heavy metal contaminants on human health often outweigh the true risk; part of the problem is the lack of data in the urban production context. Moreover, collection of city-wide data on the health of the soil is often difficult and expensive to collect. In this project we intend to attempt to overcome these issues by recruiting citizens to conduct simple common collaborative experiments in their urban gardens, from these data we will create a city map of soil health status and providing information on potential risk of heavy metal contaminants and ways in which to mitigate those risks in an Urban Gardening context. This city Zen science project will place the citizen at the heart of the experimental process in contrast to more traditional observational data collection. This is a strategy we have successfully used in previous projects and which has the benefits of exposing the citizen to the scientific process and how as scientists we overcome variance, bias and arrive at scientifically sound evidence based conclusions. This project intends to draw on the knowledge and expertise gained in the primary project on Garden-Soil, which investigates the use of soil washing to reduce heavy metal contamination in highly degraded sites.
Community Gardening Sustainable Development Goals Citizen Science Contamination Urban Soil
Publikationen
Project staff
Andrea Watzinger
Priv.-Doz. Mag.rer.nat. Dr.rer.nat. Andrea Watzinger
andrea.watzinger@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-91175
Project Leader
16.10.2019 - 14.04.2021
Rebecca Hood-Nowotny
Priv.-Doz. Rebecca Hood-Nowotny MBA Ph.D.
rebecca.hood@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-91176
Project Staff
16.10.2019 - 14.04.2021