Heavy Metal City-Zen. Exploring the potential risk of heavy metal contamination of food crop plants in urban gardening contexts using a citizen science approach.

Urban Gardening has become increasingly popular globally in the past two decades as urbanites begin to recognise the benefits of growing their own food and the sense of community these gardening activities engender. These activities grow as citizens reclaim derelict land and are increasingly using roof top gardens and novel containers, providing much needed green oases in the city, concepts which are particularly popular with the “share” generation. However, many such sites are in areas of high traffic density, on brown field sites or on sites overlying landfill, as a result of their urban location. The proximity to such sites may lead to worries about the food safety and reduction of the adoption of such healthy urban gardening practices. One of the main concerns is the transfer of urban pollutants into the consumer’s food chain. Trace metals are one of the contaminants frequently found in urban crops and soils. Perceived concerns about the effects of these heavy metal contaminants on human health often outweigh the true risk; part of the problem is the lack of data in the urban production context. Moreover, collection of city-wide data on the health of the soil is often difficult and expensive to collect. In this project we intend to attempt to overcome these issues by recruiting citizens to conduct simple common collaborative experiments in their urban gardens, from these data we will create a city map of soil health status and providing information on potential risk of heavy metal contaminants and ways in which to mitigate those risks in an Urban Gardening context. We chose a citizen science approach in this project, not only as it will allow us to gather a wealth of data but also it will empower us to jointly generate useful information for the greater public good which can contribute towards creating green sustainable cities.

This project will place the citizen at the heart of the experimental process in contrast to more traditional observational data collection. Using an experimental approach really exposes the citizens to the scientific process and enables them to gain tacit knowledge of how scientists overcome variance, bias and arrives at scientifically sound evidence based conclusions. As a result, citizen science can provide reassurance to the public about the rigour and process of scientific enquiry. In doing so it can inspire confidence and understanding of the nuances of political bias; putting contextual knowledge together, in learning by doing.