CREAF and the Ferrer Green for Good Foundation convert social urban gardens into “living laboratories” to understand the environmental health of Barcelona

Plants can tell stories about the quality of the air we breathe and the soil we walk on. This idea gave rise to the HealthyCities4All project, led by CREAF researchers Corina Basnou and Sandra Calduch , in collaboration with the Ferrer Green for Good Foundation . The aim of the initiative is to understand how social urban gardens reflect the environmental state of cities and what implications they have for human health.

This is a tailor-made and deeply inclusive project because it works in two newly created social urban gardens located in vulnerable areas of the metropolitan area. One is located in the Institut Escola La Mina in Sant Adrià de Besòs, a previously gray and harsh space that has now been transformed into a garden full of life and community activity. The second garden is located in La Florida, in Hospitalet de Llobregat , a former degraded area associated with social problems that now boasts a therapeutic and reference point for neighborhood cohesion.

Swiss chard is the vegetable chosen for this environmental study because it is a good indicator of environmental health , meaning that what happens to it can be used to see how polluted an entire garden is. At the same time, it allows us to know whether or not people who consume these foods are exposed to pollutants.

For now, the project focuses on detecting the presence of heavy metals , such as lead, cadmium or nickel. Heavy metals are very harmful to health because, even in very small concentrations, they accumulate in the body and interfere with essential biological processes . In addition, they are not like other pollutants that the body can easily eliminate, but rather they remain and accumulate. In the case of plants, metals can come from both air pollution and soil pollution . To detect them, the CREAF team is doing laboratory work to analyze the leaves of Swiss chard.

The CREAF team has experience in detecting heavy metals in urban gardens. Five years ago they already worked in six urban gardens managed by the Barcelona City Council through the Horts4U project. This allowed them to generate a long-term database of the environmental state in various parts of the city that will be useful in the current project.

The project is an opportunity to convert these gardens into spaces of care, mental health and relationships of trust . This is the case of the La Florida garden, located in a vulnerable environment that hosts people in situations of social exclusion or in psychological recovery processes . “For many of these people, contact with the land is a deeply healing and transformative experience, a space where they can work with their hands, reconnect with nature and build community bonds,” explains researcher Corina Basnou.

The collaboration between CREAF, the Ferrer Green for Good Foundation and the local community demonstrates how research and the third sector can generate greener cities and more cohesive neighborhoods , while providing new tools to better understand the effects of urban pollution. The project, which will last 4 years, aims to become an exemplary initiative that allows monitoring the environmental quality of other cities in an accessible way.

"The projects of the Ferrer Green for Good Foundation, despite being in urban areas, promote models of regenerative agriculture within the framework of permaculture. Committed to the health of the soil, biodiversity and environmental impact in general, we take people's health as a backbone of our purpose. It is for this reason that the alliance with CREAF becomes so necessary", says Nacho Peres, head of permaculture at the Ferrer Green for Good Foundation.

The HealthyCities4All project is one of the first fruits of the alliance between CREAF and the Ferrer Green for Good Foundation , which combines scientific knowledge and social transformation to demonstrate the value of edible green spaces within cities.