Community-Garden

Mr. Wang Jingkang (second from right) visits Kunshan Duke University’s community garden. Recently, environmental advocate Wang Jingkang toured the DKU Community Garden. We at CGSC seized the chance to sit down for a short interview about his philosophy and hands-on experience in community-garden design. Below is the full transcript. Further reading: Wang Jingkang, “Everyone Is a Designer— Gaia Ecological Construction Inspires Civic Action” https://www.meipian.cn/1xsw99sy ...

Community Garden in May 2025 The Community Garden Steering Committee (CGSC) of Duke Kunshan University (DKU) consists of volunteers responsible for the day-to-day management of the Community Garden. To help garden participants connect with the appropriate CGSC members, here are our introductions. Contact Information: Microsoft Teams: https://tinyurl.com/garden-dku Email: dku-garden@proton.me Committee Members Xing Shi Cai (蔡醒诗) Xing Shi Cai Responsibility: Membership Management I’m an assistant professor of mathematics at DKU and have served as the adviser for the DKU Plant Futures club since 2023. Our club promotes plant-based diets and products to protect the environment and support animal welfare. In 2024, I initiated the restart of the Community Garden at DKU to encourage people to connect with nature and develop gardening skills—abilities that may become increasingly valuable in the future. ...

This is written for the archive of DKU by Xing Shi Cai. The Garden in Jan 2025 As the faculty adviser for Plant Futures since 2023, I’ve had the privilege of working with students passionate about plant-based living and environmental sustainability. In spring 2024, while brainstorming new initiatives for our club, several students with gardening experience proposed an exciting idea: creating a community garden. We discovered there had already been a garden between the IB and WDR buildings, adjacent to the campus’s southern boundary. At the time, only a handful of people were utilizing this space, leaving much of it untended. With optimism and perhaps a touch of naivety, I envisioned a simple approach to starting our community garden: create a grid system using Excel, where each cell represented one square meter of land, and let community members claim their plots. ...