Urban gardens have a variety of benefits; they act as spaces for individuals to connect with nature; places to teach agricultural skills; sources of food in urban food deserts; and spaces where neighbors can bond with one another. "Socially vulnerable," or low-income, urban neighborhoods are choice sites for community gardens. These gardens are created to empower local citizens and give them access to fresh produce, communal space, and nature. The objectives of this study were to analyze how urban community gardens in low-income neighborhoods are understood by the neighborhood, and how the community makes meaning of this place. Place meanings and environmental attitudes have been valuable in addressing key issues of urban sustainability and social vulnerability. I look to understand these place meanings attached to this community garden, and how they function on a larger scale.

Field notes and responses to semi-structured interviews were analyzed using an iterative analytic method. Interviewees were staff members of the urban community garden. Participant observation (informal interviews, direct observation) was conducted for eight hours a week, at varying times of the day. General thematic categories and sub-categories evolved from continued observation and re-examining field notes and interviews multiple times.

A range of place meanings emerged from this study. The researched community in Southeast, USA is using their urban garden as a space of teaching history, racial and ethnic pride, and also empowering members of the community (especially young children) to bond with nature. The garden is a space where individuals perceive they are reclaiming the city, in both physical and figurative ways. The garden itself appears to be working as a physical representation of agency in this low-income community; these are places where local citizens themselves reckon with their capacity, thereby resisting victim status. This garden also acts as a space where college-aged volunteers from outside of the community can interact with volunteers from this diverse neighborhood in ways that challenge dominant narratives of criminality or danger within marginalized groups; some of the volunteers were people who were previously incarcerated and lived in a halfway house nearby, some were racial/ethnic minority landowners who had lived there for generations. Urban community gardens enable citizens in socially vulnerable areas to employ their agency and have this agency made visible within our narratives of these communities. Through this qualitative case study, I`ve come to envision and understand a community garden as a space of reclamation -- a space where low-income communities openly employ their agency, challenge local regimes of symbolic power, and resist their label as "vulnerable." This is just one way in which we can add nuance to disparate social vulnerability studies. Studies of disparate vulnerability must be understood considering that there are multiple institutions, community factors, organizations, and individuals that play a role in the social (and therefore, environmental) vulnerability of a group of people. By studying the ways in which communities challenge and reclaim their community agency, we are able to see that the prevailing narrative of vulnerability should be nuanced and multiple, including many complex ways of being. Further exploration of this topic is necessary in an urbanizing world with growing socioeconomic disparity.