Te Tāpui Atawhai Auckland City Mission Homeground Rooftop Garden

Located on top of the HomeGround building is a rooftop māra kai (community food garden), known as Matatihi, with a glasshouse garden, vegetable beds, and an outdoor kitchen equipped for tenants’ use. The rooftop not only offers a space to grow food and nurture horticultural skills but is central for enhancing well-being, connection, and a sense of community. Inspired by Melbourne’s Common Ground supportive housing initiative, the rooftop garden reflects a shared belief in not only the importance of food security but also connecting with nature, particularly in dense urban environments where access to green space is increasingly limited. Former Mission deputy chair Celia Caughey championed the idea of a garden, emphasising the need for urban greenery and cultivation.

Volunteer teams grow vegetables and fruit, which include herbs, lettuce, coffee, tea and bananas. The planting of the māra kai also includes native plants that have medicinal, culinary and cultural significance for Māori including kawakawa and kūmara among other plant and food species. Matatihi connects to the community gardens that surround St. Matthews in the city where composting bins are located, which are also maintained by Mission clients and tenants. The rooftop garden is a part of HomeGround’s sustainability vision, foregrounded by its cross-laminated timber structure, making it the tallest structural timber building in Aotearoa New Zealand. While the rooftop garden is on a smaller scale compared with large scale urban rooftop farms abroad, it demonstrates a step towards innovative ways for people to access locally grown food, as a major challenge to urban food production and subsequently food security is land availability and access (Sprecht et al., 2014). The rooftop garden also anticipates the need to increase vegetation in dense urban areas, using ordinarily underutilised parts of buildings (the roof). The benefits of this increased vegetation include carbon sequestration and cooling increased ambient temperatures caused by the urban heat island effect.