Allotment gardening and health: a comparative survey among allotment gardeners and their neighbors without an allotment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The potential contribution of allotment gardens to a healthy and active life-style is increasingly recognized, especially for elderly populations. However, few studies have empirically examined beneficial effects of allotment gardening. In the present study the health, well-being and physical activity of older and younger allotment gardeners was compared to that of controls without an allotment.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A survey was conducted among 121 members of 12 allotment sites in the Netherlands and a control group of 63 respondents without an allotment garden living next to the home addresses of allotment gardeners. The survey included five self-reported health measures (perceived general health, acute health complaints, physical constraints, chronic illnesses, and consultations with GP), four self-reported well-being measures (stress, life satisfaction, loneliness, and social contacts with friends) and one measure assessing self-reported levels of physical activity in summer. Respondents were divided into a younger and older group at the median of 62 years which equals the average retirement age in the Netherlands.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>After adjusting for income, education level, gender, stressful life events, physical activity in winter, and access to a garden at home as covariates, both younger and older allotment gardeners reported higher levels of physical activity during the summer than neighbors in corresponding age categories. The impacts of allotment gardening on health and well-being were moderated by age. Allotment gardeners of 62 years and older scored significantly or marginally better on all measures of health and well-being than neighbors in the same age category. Health and well-being of younger allotment gardeners did not differ from younger neighbors. The greater health and well-being benefits of allotment gardening for older gardeners may be related to the finding that older allotment gardeners were more oriented towards gardening and being active, and less towards passive relaxation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These findings are consistent with the notion that having an allotment garden may promote an active life-style and contribute to healthy aging. However, the findings may be limited by self selection and additional research is needed to confirm and extend the current findings.</p

When Regions Collide: In What Sense a New ‘Regional Problem’?

The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A, vol 46, part 10, pp. 2332-2352, 2014, DOI: 10.1068/a130341pGoing beyond the territorial/relational divide in regional studies requires researchers to do more than examine the extent to which territoriality and relationality are complementary alternatives. The variety of networked regional spaces means it is intellectually unsustainable to simply relate a single networked regional space to territory– scale without first considering how networked regional spaces interact. Illustrated through the experience of Germany, our paper demonstrates that interaction between different networked regional spaces (eg, city-regions and cross-border regions) is resulting in new networked regional imaginaries (eg, cross-border metropolitan regions). Its overall aim is to show that the production of entirely new networked spaces can assist in overcoming the contradictions present in one configuration of regions, but this only serves to create a new ‘regional problem’ requiring ever more complex configurations of regions

From places to flows? Planning for the new ‘regional world’ in Germany

This is a conference paper. The proceedings are available as a print publication from The Regional Studies Association: Contested Regions: Territorial Politics and Policy(2011) ISBN 978-1-897721-40-7 http://www.regionalstudies.org/publications/rsapub.aspThe last two decades have been dominated by discourses describing a resurgence of regions. Part and parcel of this discourse has been how leading proponents of what is labelled the ‘new regionalism’ documenting how the collapse of Atlantic Fordism and onset of globalization is seeing the region challenge the nation-state as the ‘natural economic zone’ (Ohmae, 1995), alongside its primacy as the site/scale at which economic management is conducted, social welfare delivered, and political subjects are identified by their national citizenship. Captivating academics (interested in interpreting capitalism’s new economic and spatial form) and policymakers (casting increasingly ‘envious eyes’ toward the regional zones of the Atlantic and European growth economies) alike, the new regionalist orthodoxy of the mid-to-late-1990s saw the region canonized in academic and political discourse as a functional space for economic planning and governance. Nevertheless, despite largely unprecedented levels of intellectual and political energy being invested in the conviction that regions are central to modern life, critics of the new regionalism generally, and normative claims relating to the formation of the ‘regional world’ in particular, responded to the blind faith in which regions were being championed to expose a series of deep-rooted problems, contradictions, and challenges. Of paramount concern among critics has been the exposition of widespread conceptual amnesia when it comes to defining the region. Often assumed, rarely defined, it is hard to dispute how the region remains an ‘object of mystery’ (Harrison, 2006), an ‘enigmatic concept’ (MacLeod and Jones, 2007), and a ‘complicated category’ (Paasi, 2010) for those trying to engage with this most durable of constructs. Even in the work of the political scientist, Michael Keating, one of the most consistently insightful scholars on this aspect of the new regionalism, while it is acknowledged that regions take various forms (e.g. administrative, cultural, economic, governmental, historical) his focus, and that of those advancing claims we were now living in a ‘regional world’, became narrowly focused and remained principally with regions as actual or potential subnational political units – be they administrative or governmental

A 'recipe for depopulation'? School closures and local population decline in Saxony

A popular notion asserts that closing the last primary school marks a community's demographic death. No young parents will remain, much less new ones move in. This notion is frequently voiced but rarely verified. Are school closuresa cause or consequence of local decline? This study reviews existing research on school locations and peripheral population decline to show that expectations of a dramatic impact of school closures on out-migration are theoretically ill-founded. I proceed to discus specific methodological challenges in the empirical analysis of this relationship, and conduct a statistical analysis for the province of Saxony in East Germany for the period 1994-2007. In contrast to the prevailing discourse, there is little evidence of an appreciable effect of primary school closures on local population decline. This negative finding is discussed in light of local contextual factors and general insights from population geography