Dundee is a city known for scientific discoveries and design, but thanks to the dedicated team at the Maxwell Centre and the Green Map Platform team, Dundee is also a city where you can discover brilliant opportunities to grow food and improve local biodiversity with ease.
There are 29 growing spaces and community gardens listed on the Grow Dundee website to date. These vital projects provide people living in the city with some great ways of participating in growing and gardening activities that bring a huge range of community benefits; from volunteer and training opportunities to cooking and community gatherings.
For example, Bonnie Dundee is a group of volunteers who maintain lovely planters and garden spaces that dot the city, whilst advocating for biodiversity. By contrast, the Campy growers manage an eight acre growing site in the west of the city and work with community residents to address the challenges of food insecurity.
“Dundee is unique in the number of Community Gardens it has” Nicola Macnee, Maxwell Centre, project coordinator.
“We created the Community growing spaces network to support each other and we wanted to find an effective way of showcasing the brilliant people and organisations that contribute to biodiversity, food growing and community wellbeing across Dundee”
Using the Green Map Platform to co-create a website and build community
The Grow Dundee website has been developed by the Green Map Platform team to showcase the work of Dundee’s community garden network. The website uses the website builder tools, available to users of the Green Map Platform, to create a page for each community garden and growing site on the Grow Dundee Green Map. We have also posted a case study on this project that shares more details!
Each registered community garden and growing site on the Dundee Green Map can share information about their events and volunteering opportunities. Importantly, they also have the ability to update their pages. The Maxwell Centre has coordinated the project and worked with the members of the Community Garden network to train them how to use the tools.
The new site enables a diverse range of local groups and organisations, some of which have their own website or social channels, to work together to present locally relevant information about growing and gardening opportunities across the city.
Each location on the Grow Dundee website uses Green Map icons to identify the different types of facilities and services they offer. These globally recognized icons tell you information about each location - for example if you can access gardening volunteer opportunities or if the location has a community fridge.
The icons provide a simple, visual way of connecting people to the benefits of community-led projects with a growing and food focus.
“The Green Map icons have been co-created by communities working in grassroots projects around the world, highlighting sustainable assets and natural, cultural, social justice and green living resources.” says Green Map System’s founder Wendy Brawer, “Seeing them used in Dundee to represent the diversity of the local food and growing movement is exactly how we want to see people utilise them, what a great project.”
You can see the Grow Dundee website here> growdundee.blog/home
Find out more about Green Map Platform plans and services here
As seen at GreenMap.org, the Green Map Platform is a digital mapping tool designed for community map makers. The Platform is the result of an international collaboration between Green Map System, the GIS Collective and design and research agency Tacit Tacit.
