Promoting Neighborhood Safety and Well-Being

This chapter examines the approach, process, and outcomes of placemaking partnerships formed with public gardens to promote a sense of safety and well-being at the neighborhood scale. Cases in this chapter emphasize the intentional use of urban greening as a tool to empower residents to actively contribute to positive change, to elevate diverse cultures sharing common spaces, and to capitalize on existing assets in the community to manage vacant land. One such case is the greening of Brooklyn. The chapter discusses the efforts that the Brooklyn Botannical Garden (BBG) put into making Brooklyn green. The strategy of the BBG was to transform the neighborhood into a community of gardeners by initiating greening contests. It also talks about the efforts of the Queens Botannical Garden and how they took advantage of the diverse culture that can be found in Queens to make their area green by creating the ambassador program. In this program, they recruit twelve to fifteen ambassadors who speak in their native language to their communities on behalf of the botannical garden.