This new green movement that represents more than just the manifestation of a romantic longing to be close to nature is known as ‘urban gardening’.
They may reside amid the concrete of the city sprawl, but they have picks and spades to hand that have helped them rapidly create a new movement that sees them dubbed ‘urban gardeners’. Beyond the official open spaces of the city in the playgrounds and park facilities, these green-fingered activists are taking over neglected sites in courtyards and vacant building lots. Wherever possible, they plant lettuce, tomatoes and sunflowers. But their motivation is more than just the desire to raise their own fruits and vegetables.
“Re-claim your city” is the motto of these urban activists, and they have already set to work to realise this aspiration. The form that these developments are taking in Germany is exemplified by what is taking place on the site of a former brewery in Cologne. After the beer ceased to flow and the building here was demolished, the extensive plot remained barren for more than six years. Many plans were submitted for the development of the site, which is the size of nearly three football pitches, and investors came and went. But nothing happened. So a local group calling itself Kölner Neuland decided to take matters into its own hands. Where kölsch, Cologne’s own beer speciality, was once brewed and where there was a large beer garden in which it could be quaffed in the sun, a mobile community garden is in the process of being created. “It is our intention to reclaim the urban environment for ourselves, to create something attractive and to bring back to life an area that is being allowed to die”, explains Dorothea Hohengarten, one of the co-founders of the group. Complex negotiations with the landowner, the construction and real estate department (BLB) of North Rhine-Westphalia, preceded the first plantings. The BLB agreed only to temporary use for the intended purpose while, at the same time, reports showed that the soil of the brownfield site was contaminated. “We were facing several major challenges from the very start”, says Hohengarten. The group was formed in autumn 2011 and held public workshops to collect ideas for the design and use of the site. In addition to raised beds in which vegetables and fruit will be grown, there will be a café, a small chicken coop, market stalls and play facilities for children. Only materials that can be acquired cheaply, that are weather-proof and can be recycled are to be used. The design of the project was set as a semester paper for architecture students at Cologne’s university of applied sciences. “Some 30 to 50 people are now working more or less regularly with us and we have a large group of sponsors”, Hohengarten goes on to say. Over the whole of winter, they have been voluntarily building plant tubs from Euro pallets, raising seedlings, collecting gravel and creating plant beds. “It’s really great to get out of the office after work and get your hands dirty, laugh and joke with others and watch the plants coming up around you”, says a happy neighbour, who knows the prototypes on which the concept is based, the urban gardening projects in Berlin called the Prinzessinnengärten.
Although the concept of the urban gardener seems to tap into something deep-seated, it does also appear be a contradiction: aren’t the concrete urban jungles that are our cities the very epitome of artificiality? According to the official estimates of the United Nations, 2009 was the first year in the history of mankind in which there were more people living in urban than in rural environments. But the yearning of the German city dweller for the natural world is demonstrated by the bookshelves in shops filled with publications such as Mein Leben im Schrebergarten (My life on my allotment) and TV journals such as Gartenzeit (Garden time). The sales of each issue of the rural-themed magazine Landlust now match those of each issue of Der Spiegel, Germany’s most prominent news magazine. But what is the rationale behind this developing trend? The pursuit of greenery among the greyness is the symptom of a change that is occurring within society, claim researchers at Hamburg’s trend analysis institute, the Zukunftsinstitut. They see the natural world as a component of new, more active and nature-based lifestyles. “Nature is now more readily within the reach of the individual”, is one of the conclusions of the 2008 study Neo-Nature. “It is no longer an abstract space that is to be admired from a distance but is increasingly becoming part of our everyday life.” However, in the view of the sociologist Christa Müller, who is monitoring the urban gardening movement, most of those participating are interested in more than just growing their own produce. “What is happening is that they are attempting to find pragmatic responses to industrial-scale foodstuff production and climate change. People are getting together to experiment with post-material lifestyles that involve the consumption of fewer resources and which offer a better quality of life.” Essentially, the aim is to achieve more self-determination than is possible within a purely consumer-based existence.
The first self-sown lettuces, carrots, beets and kohlrabi are ready for harvesting in the Neuland garden. They represent a reorientation and reevaluation of an apparently time-honoured tradition. “Gardening has always been a conservative activity”, writes urban gardening author Martin Rasper in his guide to urban gardening Vom Gärtnern in der Stadt, “But now a subversive element has been introduced.”
This idea of crossing boundaries also interests Monika Nordhausen. She is an artist, but does not have green fingers and her favourite tools are knitting needles and wool. For her knitting-based art project Aachen strickt schön, she has produced knitted articles to decorate the urban environment, blanketing paving stones in the pedestrian zone of Aachen with brightly coloured coverings. ‘Urban knitting’ is the name given to this trend that, in common with urban gardening, sets out to blur dividing lines. “When something like knitting that is normally considered a private home-based activity is suddenly put on display in public spaces, this results in some form of change. And it is this transition that is of interest”, explains Nordhausen.
Whether they are planting or knitting, these new urban activists are concerned with the reinterpretation of nature, the environment and consumption. While ecology managers are still using their gas-guzzling SUVs to drive to the organic food supermarket, the activists are creating new forms of urban lifestyles with self-perpetuating mini raw material cycles. The vegetable garden is just one step on the road to ecological autonomy, assert the Hamburg trend analysts in their latest publication, and it is one that is associated with a considerable happiness-generating potential. The urban knitting activist, Monika Nordhausen, sees value in the shared nature of the experience. “Thanks to the project, total strangers who would otherwise never have had anything to do with each other will strike up a conversation.”
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