Wang Jingli

wangjingli0715@163.com

A TOTAL of 11 community gardens jointly built and maintained by residents in various neighborhoods were selected as winning gardens for their excellent designs, the city’s urban management authority announced at a garden party Saturday.

This June, Shenzhen launched a selection to pick out excellent community gardens across the city. The event attracted 24 participating community gardens, and after public voting for 10 days, 11 community gardens won the award.

The winning gardens are located in Longhua, Longgang, Nanshan, Bao’an, Yantian, Futian, Guangming, Pingshan and Luohu districts, as well as in Dapeng New Area and Shenshan Special Cooperation Zone.

During the garden party, the 11 winning gardens showed their construction results to the audience via video link.

Nanshan’s winning garden, named Nanyuan Lyuyun (Green Cloud Garden), is the garden party’s main venue. Located at the rooftop of Boonself apartment building in Nanyuan Community, the garden not only has flowers and vegetables, but also has solar panels and areas for yoga and other activities.

The garden, which is meticulously designed, has become a new co-built community space as well as a gathering place for young people to socialize.

The Shenzhen Municipal Urban Administration and Law Enforcement Bureau launched a community garden construction plan in 2019 to encourage the public to participate in the city’s management.

Co-built community gardens are designed to be built and maintained by residents in neighborhoods and they are located in community public green space.

As of April, a total of 240 of these kinds of community gardens had been built across the city and there will be 120 more by the end of this year, according to the bureau.