Colinas, J.; Ugolini, F.; Khalilnezhad, M.R. Public Food Trees’ Usage and Perception, and Their Potential for Participatory Edible Cities: A Case Study in Birjand, Iran. Sustainability2024, 16, 8498.
Colinas, J.; Ugolini, F.; Khalilnezhad, M.R. Public Food Trees’ Usage and Perception, and Their Potential for Participatory Edible Cities: A Case Study in Birjand, Iran. Sustainability 2024, 16, 8498.
Colinas, J.; Ugolini, F.; Khalilnezhad, M.R. Public Food Trees’ Usage and Perception, and Their Potential for Participatory Edible Cities: A Case Study in Birjand, Iran. Sustainability2024, 16, 8498.
Colinas, J.; Ugolini, F.; Khalilnezhad, M.R. Public Food Trees’ Usage and Perception, and Their Potential for Participatory Edible Cities: A Case Study in Birjand, Iran. Sustainability 2024, 16, 8498.
Abstract
Public food trees are increasingly popular among researchers, urban planners and citizens, for their diversity of social, provisional and environmental benefits. However, the practice still faces several barriers, including the limited share of the population who uses them, and long-term management, studies to date suggesting municipality-citizen co-management partnerships as the most effective form, but still rare. Though participatory projects usually involve new plantations, several green spaces already harbor food trees which could be used to rapidly develop and test approaches for improving public usage and for co-management. Here we used a qualitative approach to explore usage and perception of public fruit trees and attitude towards public usage and participation, among green space visitors, staff and administrators of two urban green spaces harboring fruit trees in Birjand, Iran: one public park (Tohid Park) and one historic garden (Akbarieh Garden). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve visitors of both spaces, four administrators and eight workers. We found that despite their great personal experience and interest in picking fruit, as well as a culture of strong relationships with fruit trees, visitors’ usage of the fruit was low, with a social norm against harvesting the fruit of others appearing as a main but easily remediable reason. Nevertheless, most visitors had a deep level of appreciation of these public fruit trees due in particular to the diverse pleasures that they provided (sensory, emotional, cognitive, experiential, social), and were greatly emotionally attached to them. They also had great interest in participating in their management and care, and more so in Tohid Park due to a greater potential social impact. According to some participants, education is needed to reduce damage that some citizens cause while picking fruit, or access should be restricted if maximizing production is the goal. These findings expand our understanding of the ways in which people can relate to existing urban fruit trees and suggest that they could be used to develop effective co-management schemes, thereby contributing to building smart and participatory edible cities.
Keywords
public produce; public urban fruit trees; edible city; participatory city
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Forestry
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
