What prevents community gardens from long-term survival? A five-year case study in Suzhou, China

Community gardens are increasingly recognised as important instruments of urban micro-regeneration, yet their long-term sustainability remains fragile under project-based governance. This study traces the five-year evolution (2021–2025) of maintenance barriers in a government-initiated community garden in Suzhou, China. Using a longitudinal mixed-methods design, this paper tracks the community garden across three stages (inception, growth and struggle) through three phases of Likert-scale surveys and semi-structured interviews, supplemented by Participatory Action Research (PAR). The findings reveal a marked divergence in barrier trajectories. Individual technical constraints declined as residents accumulated horticultural knowledge, with the mean score for ‘lack of gardening knowledge and skills’ falling from 4.00 in 2021 to 1.83 in 2025. By contrast, team and institutional barriers intensified: ‘lack of an internal leader’ rose from 4.07 to 4.83, ‘unclear garden tasks’ from 3.20 to 4.33, and ‘Inadequate support from local authorities’ from 3.53 to 4.83, reaching the ceiling value of 5.0 for several individual respondents in 2025. The withdrawal of external facilitators exposed a governance vacuum that residents themselves labelled the ‘Three-Ignores’ ( san-bu-guan ) condition, in which fragmented responsibilities among Residents’ Committees, Property Management Companies and Homeowners’ Committees, together with unfulfilled budgetary commitments, produced systemic deterioration. At the same time, a significant demographic shift towards a volunteer team composed exclusively of elderly residents weakened the garden’s collective resilience. Sustaining community gardens requires a shift in urban management from temporary ‘project logic’ to more durable ‘governance logic’, including formal exit strategies, clearer responsibility arrangements and the incorporation of community assets into established administrative and budgetary systems.