Can we creatively foster community resilience from the home garden? Alternate title: Can we creatively foster climate resilient communities from the home garden?

Typically, a community shares geographic boundaries and fate. This connectivity provides opportunities for people to work together to use adaptive or transformative responses against external social, ecological, and economic stresses such as those experienced with climate change. Using household urban agriculture as a mechanism and investigative lens, this research considers community resilience with its notions of building collective resilience, to mobilise community members to survive and thrive in amongst change and uncertainty. A survey of the Greater Adelaide (metropolitan) community was undertaken November-December 2022 featuring insights from >500 people across 18 Local Government Areas. The anonymous online survey asked questions about home gardening practices, perceptions of connections, barriers, and impacts held/anticipated with regards to growing food at home, community resilience, and climate change. Survey results show that whilst there has been a slight decrease in food growing compared to the past, more than 4 in 5 respondents currently grow food at home. Further, more than two-thirds of all respondents feel this practice connects them with others, and over half of non-connected respondents desire connection. Overall, 75% or greater (strongly) agreed growing food at home builds resilient communities and that urban agriculture increases the capacity of communities to build resilience to climate change. Time, space, knowledge and costs were all identified as both limitations and change factors to growing food at home. The results suggest that this community recognises a correlation between growing food at home and reducing community vulnerability and sustainability to climate change, particularly through connectedness. The range of suggested local, communal, and institutional supports to help communities overcome urban agriculture barriers reflect both the highly multidimensional nature of urban agriculture and its accessibility. Community corroboration of the survey data via qualitative methods (e.g. focus groups) is required to ensure representativeness of Greater Adelaide’s population and depth of data.