Equal access to open green space is one of the key target goals under SDG 11 for transforming cities onto more sustainable pathways because urban green space provides a range of ecosystem goods and services such as reduced air pollution and improved temperature regulation. Recently, research has uncovered additional health and well-being benefits of green spaces, particularly within urban environments, where it has been shown that just passing by green spaces can help to reduce stress, heart rate and blood pressure. In addition, research indicates that the perception of crime as well as actual crime rates are lower in neighbourhoods with access to green and open spaces. What’s more, green space can also provide a physical site for enhanced human interactions particularly through shared and collaborative practices often seen in community gardens or edible parks. These spaces of interaction have been shown to combat social dislocation and loneliness in urban environments.

As part of the SHARECITY project we are identifying, mapping, analysing and assessing the practices and sustainability potential that spaces for shared growing in urban environments provide. We are focusing on those practices of shared growing that use some form of ICT to mediate their activities and seeing what difference those technologies make to the practices and impacts of sharing. We have mapped these across 100 urban spaces globally and you can interact with them through our SHARECITY100 Database. This database was used to identify a suite of case studies in nine cities for in-depth examination with researchers spending many months in the field immersed in the activities of thirty-eight food sharing initiatives. Shared growing activities comprise a third of our sample and include a range of innovative approaches to urban sustainability challenges.

596 Acres from New York, Unites States and 3000 Acres from Melbourne, Australia, for example, seek to optimise the use of vacant land for communal growing activities. Both initiatives identify and map unused land using online tools and then provide support citizen groups to develop them into community gardens.

Other growing initiatives in the SHARECITY100 database, such as The Skip Garden and Kitchen in London, UK and Himmelbeet in Berlin, Germany, focus on creating inclusive intercultural gardens within which people can come together to share land, seeds, plants, food, compost, tools, kitchen space, knowledge, and meals through gifting and selling.

Himmelbeet is an intercultural food sharing initiative, which started in 2013. Currently, the community garden is located on vacant space in Wedding, a neighbourhood with one of Berlin’s highest unemployment rates of 26%. Himmelbeet’s main target goal is ‘The good life for all. Not more but also not less.’ The initiative enables access to healthy food and education, for some of Berlin’s inhabitants for whom this turns out to be more difficult. One of Himmelbeet’s current projects is the development of a book on gardening that is accessible to everyone, written in easy language. The ‘TUML Buch’ is composed in a collaborative manner with a diverse group working together to develop the content, but also to provide space for knowledge exchange and friendships to develop. All outputs from the process are documented online and provided for free for others to use.

However, it is not always plain sailing for such community enterprises. Later in 2018, Himmelbeet’s license to operate will cease and the land will be leased instead to a soccer organization for deprived youth, which will develop a sports and education initiative on the site where the garden currently resides. Despite trying to find a mutually agreeable compromise for the past three years Himmelbeet will now have to find a new vacant space for their activities. As a community garden they receive little protection from the state for their activities because they are not classified as a park, a school or a sports centre which have explicit teams within the local authority to plan and management developments.

Another growing initiative listed on the SHARECITY100 Database which facilitates equal access to green space here in Ireland is the Muck and Magic community garden (MaM) in Ballymun, a suburb north of Dublin city centre.

A local volunteer group based in Ballymun, Dublin started MaM as part of the Ballymun Regeneration Plan in 2011. MaM is based on a piece of land which is owned by the Dublin City Council and lease to the initiative on an annual basis. The garden operates with the help of local volunteers and gardeners from the surrounding neighbourhoods. Amongst them are members from a local day centre for adults with special needs as well as a group that attends the garden from a local drugs rehabilitation project.

Over the course of seven years, the garden, which started with four raised beds for vegetable growing, now incorporates a garden shed, poly tunnel and a series of composts. The area is also covered by ornamental trees and harbours an insect hotel. In addition, MaM has a wormery and makes its own leaf mould following a circular approach of self-subsistence.
The garden is open to everyone and welcomes new and returning volunteers for gardening afternoons. In 2014, the garden was made wheelchair accessible and a series of surface paths were incorporated into the garden design. MaM’s newest project is to develop a sensory garden which is due to open later this year which aims to enhance the outdoor experiences visitors enjoy when they visit the garden, as John from MaM notes below:

… I feel the garden has great potential for people of all category of needs. I remember actually, the St. Michaels House Group, they invited us actually to the center one day for lunch […] what really struck me was I was asking about what other activities they have during the week and they all really are indoor activities you know and really, to spend half a day in an open air environment like our garden and having just an environment where there is to be lots of space around them and I can see it has a number of benefits…
                                                       John O’Donoghue – Initiator and participant at MaM community garden

SHARECITY is working with MaM to co-design a sustainability impacts toolkit to help them establish exactly what kinds of impacts their work has on participants. This research will be published soon on our website!

Taking a closer look at shared growing initiatives, as the SHARECITY project is doing, confirms multiple potential benefits for urban populations. However, it also shows that more work has to be done on establishing exactly the kinds of benefits that emerge from growing together and who exactly is benefitting from such activities. Similarly the governance of shared urban food growing is embryonic and this could undermine the achievement of optimal sustainability benefits from green spaces as community gardens and other edible initiatives fail to receive adequate attention and protection from land use planning authorities and other regulatory bodies. By better defining the benefits emerging from shared food growing and the kinds of regulatory actions needed to support them, we hope that the target goals under SDG 11 as well as other goals around hunger (SDG2) and responsible production and consumption (SDG 12) become achievable.

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal aims to achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls. The United Nations state that they aim to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through providing women with equal access to education, healthcare, decent work and representation in the political sphere. The United Nations believes that by achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment this will benefit humanity at large. My own research for my Masters thesis focused on women’s empowerment, particularly women’s economic empowerment. My research also examined how the term ‘empowerment’ emerged in relation to women’s empowerment and how the term became an important aim in development discourse. My Masters research focused specifically on Hmong women’s empowerment. The Hmong are an ethnic group which mainly reside in the mountainous areas of south-east Asia.

The term empowerment was first formally used in international development discourse in relation to the feminist movement in the Global South. The empowerment concept was then formally recognised in the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, where it was stated that women’s empowerment and gender and sexual rights were central to population issues. Then, in 2000, at the United Nations Declaration, the third Millennium Development Goal referred to directly to empowerment: ‘promote gender equality and empower women’. Since then, the term has become increasingly common in theories of development and gender and also among policy makers. Cornwall (2016: 356) describes women’s empowerment as “a process that engages women in thinking differently about themselves, about situations they are in, about their social worlds and relationships”. It is relevant to speak of ‘empowering women’ because as a group they are often disempowered relative to men. In terms of women’s empowerment, Kabeer (2000: 22) claims that women are “constrained by the norms, beliefs, customs, and values through which societies differentiate between women and men”. She states that this can manifest itself in a wide variety of different ways such as through gender pay gaps or gender-based physical or psychological violence. In patriarchal societies, this can lead to men holding power over women by making major decisions within a household, not allowing women to work, curtailing women’s access to resources, and so on.

One way in which the Sustainable Development Goals aim to promote women’s empowerment is through increasing women’s access to decent paid work. Women’s economic empowerment can be defined as “when a woman has the ability to succeed and advance economically and has the power to make and act on economic decisions” (Golla et al, 2011: 3). Women’s economic empowerment has become an important global policy priority and is seen as a vital contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. There is evidence to suggest that economic strength is the basis of social, political and physiological power in society, and so with a higher economic status, women often benefit socially and physiologically. Economic empowerment can have positive effects on women. With economic power, women have the ability to make more household decisions as economic empowerment can increase self-confidence and women’s voice within the household. Women’s economic empowerment can also have positive effects on the development of their country. Evidence suggests that women are more likely than men to spend their income on nutrition, health, and education of both daughters and sons. As a result, this can lead to economic growth, poverty reduction, increased health and welfare. Increased income can encourage as well as facilitate mothers to send their daughters to school as well as their sons.

The positive impacts of women’s economic empowerment were evident among the Hmong women I interviewed in Northern Vietnam. From my research, I discovered that by Hmong women being employed, Hmong gender roles in the household underwent a change. Prior to Hmong women working full-time jobs, they mainly stayed at home to care for their children and carry out other household tasks. In the past, Hmong men used to carry out work on the farm and were generally not involved in household tasks. Since Hmong women have begun to work full time outside of the home, their husbands have begun to look after the children and cook for the family and carry out other domestic chores. This has almost led to a reversal in Hmong gender roles. I gained a sense of Hmong women’s empowerment through my interviews with these women. The women stated that they no longer felt restricted to their household chores and were able to earn a large income which meant that they no longer depended on their husbands for money.
​
It is evident from my research that the fifth sustainable development goal is an important one.  Achieving women’s empowerment has the potential to reduce gender inequality and have a positive impact on wider society. My own research has proven that decent paid work for women can certainly increase women’s sense of empowerment and in turn reduce gender inequality.

​References can be requested from info@geographysocietyireland.ie

Blood and blood transfusion therapies are indispensable to sustainable healthcare systems worldwide, and people have a right to give and receive blood in a way that best supports the health and well-being needs of society  [1]. In Ireland, we ensure the availability of a sustainable and safe supply of blood through a combination of voluntary donors, and public agencies such as the statutory non-profit Irish Blood Transfusion Service’ (hereafter; IBTS) which routinely collects, fractionates, and screens the blood for pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, as well as responding to the more unexpected and undesirable outcomes of blood transfusion [2]. Because Ireland is one of the least materially rewarding countries in which to give blood, [3] eager and altruistic donors often couch their willingness to give in terms of citizenship, responsibility, and compassion towards those in medical need; sentiments which help to solidify one’s sense of belonging and inclusion within the wider body-politic [4]

The World Health Organisation has affirmed ‘voluntary self-sufficient’ blood donation as the safest and most sustainable means for meeting the state’s statistical blood requirements [5] and together with the European Union Directive  2002/ 98/EC [6] has mandated that a preemptive screening of potential donors through rigorous onsite questioning and potential donor deferrals be established as a routine and permanent fixture of this process. What this has amounted to in practice is excessive and often discriminatory exclusion guidelines that centre around controversial and intimate aspects of one’s race or sexual orientation, and which work to sustain nothing more than a naturalized association between blood, risk, and security.

​The aim of my Research Masters was therefore to investigate the moral and political economies of blood donor regulation in Ireland, examining in what ways the geography of global disease outbreaks from hepatitis, and later HIV/AIDS, cultivated an exclusionary and often inaccessible blood donation regimen that is still visible in the Irish Blood Transfusion service today. Using blood donor practices in the Republic of Ireland as a case study, and as a frame of reference, my research focused on the spatial tactics and surveillance techniques adopted by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service as a way in which to regulate and exclude potential donors between the years of 2015-2016 as well as the narratives, voices and opinions of non-normative donors who themselves embodied and experienced exclusion at this marginalized site of citizenship.
 
Since the height of the hepatitis and AIDS crisis, both gay men as well as immigrants have been central to the exclusionary logic that has at times prohibited them from contributing to the national blood supply [7]. Racial exclusions often masquerade as travel based restrictions which target particular bodies that are believed to be located closer to the epicentre of infection. Blood transfusion services, on the other hand, typically paint a monochromatic picture of power, claiming that their donor selection criteria is standardized, fair, and in the interests of “safeguarding” a national blood supply. Exclusions on the behavioural collective ‘men who have sex with men’ MSM from donating blood have historically taken the form of either temporary or indefinite deferrals in over twenty countries including Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the US, without any scientific evidence to support it, and rather, a mounting international evidence to suggest it’s indefensibility. The most recent litigation case taken by a French citizen to the European Court of Justice as of April 2015 [8] ruled that EU countries should seek a “less onerous” means in which to protect the national blood supply, and together with a High Court challenge by Irish blood donor activist, and student Tomas Heneghan, [9] it compelled the state to introduce a one year deferral on MSM, bringing it’s policy into line with international developments. While the recent decision taken by the Irish government to move away from an indefinite MSM deferral has been welcomed by many as a step in the right direction, the continued exclusion of  monogamous same-sex couples which the new policy entails, has likewise been criticised for perpetuating an “inequitable risk tolerance” [10] between ineligible same sex partners and sexually promiscuous heterosexual men. During a time when blood donation is at its lowest rate in almost a decade [11], and only 3% of the eligible Irish population donate blood, [12] valid questions need to be asked as to whether it is indeed sustainable for us to continue meeting our national blood requirements through the presence of scientifically unsupported donor exclusions. 
 
My research was to largely reveal that what is accepted as the most sustainable model of blood donation internationally, is still premised on the fear and mistrust of the spaces within which so-called ‘panic figures’ move [13]. Lengthy and esoteric ‘health and lifestyle’ questionnaires are designed to confuse and unsettle potential donors from the outset, while questions addressing one’s size and weight often render implicit that the appearance of the body acts as the ultimate marker of one’s health, productivity, and thereby safety. The corporeality of the flesh remains an important visual modality in which to construct a spatial, as well as temporal geography of the body that assesses and surveills all aspects one’s moral behaviour; arms are scanned for signs of intravenous track marks, while the corporeal proximity of bodies is also often conflated with moral deterioration and given equal cause for expulsion. The ‘queer body’ [14] had, in particular, been mapped as a space in which to project future fears of a diseased and death-ridden polity. MSM who had presented as heterosexual prior to the lifting of the Irish ‘gay blood ban’ in January 2017 feared that their identities would be outed providing they did not regulate or suppress their bodily movements within the space so as not to give away any indiscriminate cues about their sexuality. This was also true of blood drives held in community spaces where MSM who had not yet been open about their sexual practices felt compelled to donate blood as a way in which to conceal their sexual identity among unwitting family, friends or colleagues, even in the absence of STI testing. Especially striking was an Irish trans woman and avid blood donor Ms Aoife Martin, now well documented in the Irish media, [15] who had received an expulsion letter simply for undergoing a male- to- female gender identity transition that exemplified not only the continued inaccessibility and inequality of health care services towards people who identify as Trans [6] but also the way in which biological parts continued to be viewed by medical services as what Seidman (1995) [17] has referred to as an “authentic and unchanging space,” while gender identities are rendered a mere fictitious aberration of the former Self.

mmediate and reactionary decisions that have been taken to date by the IBTS which had excluded non-normative donors from the Irish blood donor registry throughout the research, is illustrative of the ways in which political decisions continue to be taken among objectively positioned medical services; decisions which cannot simply be reducible to scientific evidence regarding blood safety alone. What remains apparent from the research is that the act of  blood donation provides geographers with a useful opportunity in which to more closely interrogate the boundary-making practices of citizenship, the regulation of the national, as well as the biological body, and ultimately, the ways in which sustainable models of blood transfusion, and of our health and development goals more broadly, must rely in equal measure on the equitable and inclusive accommodation of our increasingly socially diverse blood donor pool. 

​​References can be requested from info@geographysocietyireland.ie

​Bio: Rory Horner is a Senior Lecturer and ESRC Future Research Leader at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research focuses on globalization, trade and development, with a particular interest in South–South trade and the pharmaceutical industry in India and sub-Saharan Africa.
@rory_horner and @globaldevinst

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight the need to rethink the dominant imaginary of the global map of development.
 
Through much of the 20th century, a classic macro-geographic division of the world into two, and according to standard of living, has prevailed. While the nomenclature has changed from First and Third World, to developed and developing, to global North and South lines, the territorial categorisation of the world into two has continued.
 
Under such an understanding, from the perspective of many in the global North, development was largely a challenge for far away countries in the global South. Aid was provided by rich countries to poor countries under a moral geography of charity, often justified by the aim of helping developing countries become more like developed countries.
 
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which preceded the SDGs, reflected just such a geography. The MDGs were largely designed by rich countries. Their focus was almost exclusively on targets for poor countries. The SDGs, which apply to all countries in the world and present universal development goals, challenge this dominant map.
 
Of course, the SDGs highlight continuing major development challenges in lower-income countries. These include poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2), health care (SDG 3), education (SDG 4), water and sanitation (SDG 6), energy services (SDG 7), decent jobs (SDG 8) and infrastructure (SDG 9).
 
Yet, rather than just relating to lower-income countries, the SDGs highlight major development challenges that are present in high-income countries too. Initial indicators of progress towards the SDGs point to sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12), climate change (SDG 13) and ecosystem conservation (SDG 14 and 15) as high priorities for countries such as Ireland in the global North. Other major challenges in such countries include agricultural systems and malnutrition (related to obesity) (SDG 2), malnutrition (related to obesity), jobs and unemployment (SDG 8), and gender equality (SDG 5).
 
Although major development challenges, including those highlighted by the SDGs are present in all countries in the world, considerable geographic variation is present in the nature and severity of those challenges. It is not a flat world, but one characterised by vast inequalities.
 
As well as applying to all countries, the SDGs also had a very different process of formation from the MDGs. Brazil, in particular, as well as the G77 (a collective of the UN’s 130 ‘developing countries’), played prominent roles in converting the ‘post-2015 Development Agenda’ into the United Nations General Assembly-agreed Sustainable Development Goals.
 
The SDGs have been made within a very different context from the MDGs. New geographies of wealth, middle classes, poverty, health and environment have been observed this century. Patterns of global inequality have changed, with some fall in between-country inequality across a number of different indicators, while inequalities within many countries have risen. The Paris Agreement of 2015 requires climate commitments by all countries, not just ‘developed’ or ‘Annex 1’ countries. We are also living in a world of multi-directional development cooperation, justified by a morality of solidarity, rather than just aid from North to South justified by a morality of charity.
 
The SDGs also provide a challenge to dominant understandings of development trajectories. Rather than seeking to become like developed countries under a developmentalist logic, the SDGs seek to put forward a goal for all countries of transformation towards sustainable development.
 
Considerable debate revolves around the SDGs as to what effect, if any, they have in practice. Fascinating research has suggested that rather than setting development agendas, national and local governments in Ecuador engage with global goals which reinforce or serve their own interests.
 
While much more evidence is needed as to implementation, the SDGs do help point to a very different geography of contemporary development challenges facing our planet and global society. Instead of an earlier era of international development, we are now operating in an era of global development.
 
This blogpost draws on research on the changing geographies of global development, published in Development and Change:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12379