Developing social dimension of community gardens in residential neighbourhood / Shafa Marzidah Abdullah Ayeop

The community garden has been introduced over the past few decades. It has attracted interest among academic researchers, policymakers, and urban planners all over the world. Efforts to improve the social condition of the local community can be identified through the implementation of community gardens. These community gardens have significantly contributed support in the aspect of social dimension which is the foundation of a sustainable development. Population growth every year poses a great challenge in meeting the needs of the community. Therefore, the social dimension needs to be explored for comprehensive improvement. Planning for sustainable communities is also often associated with environmental initiatives such as community gardens. This thesis explores the social dimension and the factors that influence the community garden in a residential neighbourhood. The study involved community gardeners from four community gardens in Shah Alam and 86 respondents from community garden participants. The selection of variables was identified from a comprehensive literature review and developed into an open and closed-ended questionnaire design. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse the data. The analysis was done using the descriptive and factor analysis technique. Fifty-three items were involved in the assessment, but 4 items were dropped because of the low value of communalities. The final number of items were 49 with components of Health (13 items); Security and Safety (4 items), Social Interaction (8), Sense of belonging (5) Leisure and Recreation with (5), Education and Skill (11) and Political Activities (9). The range of percentage of total variance was between 68.67% to 81.69%. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin were between 0.73% to 0.90%. The research has found that community garden has contribution factor on social dimensions. Health component was identified with three other contributing factors namely Healthy Food, Healthy Physical and Healthy Consumption. The results of this study can provide stakeholders a clear picture of the social dimension of community garden in residential neighbourhood. Based on the results of the research, a framework describing the factor of social dimension components with community gardens in residential neighbourhood was developed. This result is the main contribution to this research. It is expected to be able to function to provide important information to decision makers to expand community garden initiatives throughout the country. In addition, this research as also becomes an academic reference that can help many individuals in future studies.