Influence of Community Vegetable Gardens on the Settlement in Residential District and Community Spirit of Local Residents from Perspective of Urban Regeneration

Urban problems raised by the concentration of population in urban areas have caused residents to migrate to other regions while causing other problems such as deteriorated infrastructure, traffic and environmental pollution problems in existing urban areas. As an alternative to improve this phenomenon, urban regeneration has emerged, and under the assumption that creating community vegetable gardens is effective in revitalizing cities considering their physical, social and cultural environment, frequency and descriptive analyses were conducted on the vegetable gardens in Jungnosong-dong, Wansan-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do, Korea to examine differences in the components of the surrounding environment and the settlement, and community spirit of the two groups comprised of 30 and 35 persons who did not and did participate in gardening respectively. Regression analysis were conducted to determine whether there were changes in community spirit after participating in gardening. As a component of the surrounding environment, gardening and fence management were found to be important for both the groups, and they seemed to have high satisfaction with their residence because they wanted to continue to live in their neighborhood. Overall, the satisfaction evaluation results showed that those who participated in gardening showed a higher satisfaction level than those who did not. Based on the changes in community spirit after participating in the activity, it was found that there was a high level of perception in all the components, indicating that the gardening had a positive effect on the cultivation of community spirit. As such, the spaces called vegetable gardens are not only for doing physical activities but also as shared conversation topics, and through the activities in the gardens, changes in the awareness of local residents can be brought about through the formation of social networks and natural communication between neighbors. It can be concluded that they encourage residents to actively participate in improving the urban environment through activities such as planting.