Design Workshop with H. Armstrong

A City Garden for a Changing World

A One-day Ideas Workshop

In the wake of the crisis of the global money market, leaders are mobilising to rescue their countries with national rather than global policies.  This may set up a new tension between global and national.   Will the priorities shift from finances to globalised environmental management or will the focus be a reinvention of nationhood and competing city states?  In this context, what will be the landscape response? A design ideas workshop for the conference, ’Landscape – A Great Idea’, sought to explore these issues.  Ideas workshops are often catalysts to enable new ways of thinking, both by participating and through publications.  In the deepening world financial crises, financial, environmental, social, etc, can the IDEA of LANDSCAPE provide a way forward?  A number of manifestos about landscape have appeared recently, such as

• Landscape Architecture: an Apocalyptic Manifesto, A treatise criticizing current Landscape Architectural values and practices
• A Response to an Apocalyptic Manifesto by Elizabeth Meyer, Critique of Apocalyptic Manifesto, supporting current landscape practice
• Stalker Manifesto - An argument for not using design for marginal landscapes

Given these different positions, perhaps today landscape is a contested great idea, particularly urban landscapes. Because most people live in cities today, this workshop looked at how a ‘City Garden’ can bring people together to explore an alternative to the consumerist/spectacle city of the last fifteen years. What can a new form of ‘City Garden’ be? A city garden can be more than a park.

• It can reveal local identity but it can also celebrate the future.
• It can revive horticultural/agricultural traditions.
• It can be a playful place exploring all the senses.
• It can be an empowering place for diverse communities
• It can be a catalyst for eco-design and engaged citizenship
• It can be a place of hope while elevating the soul

Setting the Context for a City Garden for a Changing World
Shrinking Cities
Growing Cities
Instant-Ephemeral Cities

Setting the Context for a City Garden for a Changing World Cities today are liquid; either shrinking, growing, or instant-ephemeral.  In preparation for the workshop, participants developed concepts for a hypothetical city garden suitable for one of the cities below.  Shrinking Cities: Detroit, Berlin Growing Cities: Mumbai Instant-Ephemeral Cities: Dubai In developing hypothetical city garden concepts, participants explored the main conference themes ’Landscape – A Great Idea’             Scale Matters             Landscape as a Model Other themes considered were             Resilience within Change             Liquid Modernity             Landscapes as ‘soft environmental management systems’

Design Reponses
Designs for Shrinking Cities – Berlin and Detroit
Designs for Growing Cities – Mumbai

Designs for Shrinking Cities Berlin 1 Construction Kit City Garden by Sabine Papst Shrinking cities have the opportunity to use abandoned space for public gardens which can revitalise urban space, making the city greener and more liveable with its mosaic of green spaces from small to large scale.  This can be achieved by providing City Garden Construction Kits and Mobile Garden Centre Kiosks.

The City Garden Construction Kit creates self-made and self-administered city gardens without fences for everybody in urban spaces The Mobile Garden Centre Kiosk provides advice to residents who are using the construction Kits The construction kit varies in size and content depending on the future use of the site. Citizens can realise their own garden ideas by using the kit, but the garden must stay open for everyone. Construction Kit Goals

• To improve social networks
• To raise citizen awareness about the ecological importance of urban green spaces
• To give city children the opportunity to play and work in a garden, so establishing a relationship the plants and nature
• To give city people the opportunity to choose between café (consumption) recreation or city garden recreation (non-consumption), enjoying the outdoors with neighbours and friends
• To bring about an awareness of self-made spaces, so that the wider urban community can appreciate these gardens and that much of the green quality of life can lie in the hands of the residents

Possible Garden Design Concepts

• City gardens can be leisure zones for playing and relaxing
• They can be meeting places where working in the gardens brings neighbours together
• They can be places for intercultural exchange between people from flats and units gardening together
• They can be Horticultural Zones where fruit and vegetables are grown
• They can be Entertainment Zones with self-made stages for theatre, performance, and cinema projected onto existing walls
• They can be Art-work Zones of artists installations and working atelier in abandoned house and shops near the garden
• They can be Street Garden Zones with narrow garden strips planted with flowers
• They can be Ruderal Gardens where minimal intervention enables unusual natural gardens

Berlin  2 Future City Garden - Housing Park – Park Housing by Linda Breth Symptoms and Opportunities

• Berlin as a shrinking city has large housing buildings which become untenanted
• Many empty zones become parks such as old rail structures, filled-up canals and former military zones
• Berlin is an active city with young people appropriating abandoned buildings  for clubs and nightlife

Experiment

• Build up a network of experimental locations
• Include local experiments within neighbourhoods

City Garden Ideas

• Use activity of city members to re-use empty housing structures
• Green corridors through buildings form a network of internal and external green space
• Open roof for new energy systems
• Explore mobile stage platform with photovoltaic elements

Detroit 1 True Void by Nicole Theresa Raab What does it mean when industrial cities return to nature? Does this mean the end of urbanism as we know it? Will a new urban formation emerge from these ex-urban spaces? Or is this condition simply the second phase of the same urban dynamics that abandon the inner city in favour of edge cities, simply re-starting the expansion again over the original site? Kyong Park 2004

What is Detroit good for?

• Post-apocalyptic dis-urbanisation
• Challenges growth and development
• Detroit’s voids become the people’s common ground.

The problem with Detroit has always been figuring out what the place was good for.  When it became the motor-city, it was a city designed for the automobile not for the human being. When de-industrialisation was underway, Detroit came to represent urban failure.  The city that put the world on wheels became immobile. Detroit became post-apocalyptic – car rich and dirt-poor.   It became inhospitable and dangerous and the American Dream took the middle class to the suburbs. Stalker Manifesto And where the citizens appropriate the open spaces for picnics, concerts, growing food…or whatever human creativity allows, the seed for the new city is planted. Detroit 2 Detroit desire lines by  Julia Woelcher  ‘…in every neighbourhood with empty lots, new pathways emerge; a thin but vast network of dirt routes, overlaying and negating the asphalt grid.  They call these desire lines - lines of desire - the planned versus the practical, - the designed versus the accidental’ The motorless city

Detroit is a shrinking city

• Detroit’s inner districts are vacant
• 45% of the inhabitants don’t have a car
• A car is the key for jobs, healthcare, education, food, everything
• Public transport fails to cover the most essential needs

One city garden won’t do

• Claim the streets, claim the neighbourhood
• closely connected basic elements – community kitchens, markets, gardens, parks – along desire lines improves daily lives
• life without a car is possible if everything is reachable by bike or on foot within a few minutes
• a territory can be more than a block

Designs for Growing Cities Mumbai – a Growing City between Density and Voids by Carla Lo

• 2 poles poverty and wealth; density and voids
• 18 million people – 40% in slums – 50 million people by 2050
• Slums can provide a new way of thinking of the city

Dharavi Slums - how to get gardens - by small interventions and using movie screens to create illusional gardens

Mathakadi Caves - steep hills with caves - use the terraces for gardens - supported by gabions filled with garbage

Mangrove Forests - use the tidal area - make high tech food generators - soil-less and vertical