French Urban Planning Students Visit Ocean Hill Community Garden

A group of urban planning students from Paris are visiting a community garden in Ocean Hill today to study whether urban farming can improve nutrition and food choices in low-income urban areas. They’re being hosted by Citizens Committee for New York City, a micro-funding organization that awards grants for community projects throughout the five boroughs.

The students from the Engineering School of Paris are exploring the 19,000-square-foot Phoenix Community Garden at the corner of Fulton and Somers Streets. They’re interested in Phoenix because it hosts a biweekly series of education sessions on gardening, cooking, herbal medicine and dye plants. The garden is also building an outdoor horticultural classroom and improving the garden beds. “Through this project, the group is training a new generation of community gardeners and sharing the deep agricultural wisdom of garden elders,” Citizens Committee told Brownstoner in an email. These topics tie in well with the students’ research study, which compares the impact of urban agriculture in New York, Rome and Amsterdam.