Understanding social media-enabled participation and resilience in urban farming communities

Abstract

The roles of technology in urban farming have recently been a subject of examination in sustainable humancomputer interaction (HCI). Few have suggested that social media can support citizen engagement due to its accumulative power for collective action. However, little has been known about how such a provision takes place and what kind of participation can lead to the resilience of a community. This paper presents a field report which seeks to reveal the nature of participation in a social media-enabled urban farming community. Through an interpretive case study, the findings demonstrate interconnectedness of the community involving people, place, and technology. Three areas of contributions are outlined: a wider application of design framework for sustainable food culture, the role of social media for social participation through urban farms, and the route to building community resilience from social media-enabled participation.

Implications of Grassroots Sustainable Agriculture Community Values on the Design of Information Systems

“…In context of their mapping [17], this research falls under "formative user studies" genre and explores problems in local, collective contexts. This work is adapted from and builds on qualitative research techniques used by previous formative user studies within S-HCI to report on and champion special consideration of practices by people who lead alternative sustainability life styles [8,28,58,90] and people who grow food [3,10,44,48,63,93]. Our work extends this area of research by engaging in observant participation, a qualitative research method that anthropologist João H. Costa Vargas [92] differentiates from the traditional participant observation to underline the importance of participation rather than observation.…”