Nimes Jardins Solidaire

This community garden is a paradise, enclosed by hedges, olive trees and grapevines it went on for block after block, little paths winding through varied allotments all bursting with productivity on our sunny spring visit. We’d heard that it had brought new immigrants together with established residents, in keeping with the European Urban Garden Association’s goals of cultural and social integration.

Indeed it was started by an idealistic social worker who after cultivating her own family plot in Nimes became convinced of the social benefits of organic gardening. In 1996 Muriel Gavach founded the Côté Jardins Solidaires bringing together ‘social workers and members of the peasant world to create a community garden on land belonging to the city of Nimes.’ Today it employs three community workers (equivalent to two full-time) who work collaboratively with local gardeners to provide food aid, gardening and cooking workshops, weekly community meals, social skills and budgeting, a weekly vegetarian and fully organic table d’hote (partnership with “Marigoule” cooperative, with local farmers and friends) – and runs workshops in local schools.

‘Despite an interdependent world, social links become more and more disconnected. This particularly affects big urban areas that have difficulties such as high unemployment rates, marginalisation, rejection, poverty, and criminality. At the same time, these areas are the place for social innovation and economic growth. In these big cities, even though interpersonal contacts are regular, there is no actual exchange between these city dwellers with various cultural origins, of various ages and different social categories.

‘In these cities more than anywhere else, cultural integration of people from various origins is a real debate, leading some European politicians to call “multiculturalism” a failure. Community gardens are a part of this. Coming from the movement of working-class gardens forty years ago, some of them today are places of education for meetings, exchanges, for the integration of mutual respect, while keeping the historical aspect of food self-sufficiency alive.’ (European Urban Garden Otesha).