Urban Gardens

Gardening

• Focus the topic on the concept of gardens.
• Define "garden", is a place of control, collaboration, innovation, exploitation, etc.?
• Think of benefits and drawbacks.

Cf. garden city, city in a forest vs forest in a city, etc.

• Can the whole city or the whole planet be a garden?
• Is gardening ethical in relation to plants and other non-human organisms?
• Who can gardens help and how?

Examples

Is it just participatory design or DIY, non-expert, hyper-local or vocational design that is more closely associated with gardens? Gardens can be a form of resistance, cf. guerrilla gardening, but also a form of control and exploitation, cf. colonial gardens, botanical gardens, etc. Gardens can be a form of collaboration and innovation, cf. community gardens, urban farms, etc. Gardens can be a form of play and experimentation, cf. children's gardens, etc.

• Ritual, religious gardens, e.g. Japanese gardens, Islamic gardens, etc.
• Moss gardens, e.g. Saihō-ji in Kyoto, Japan.
• Botanical gardens, e.g. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.
• Community gardens, e.g. Incredible Edible, UK.
• Guerrilla gardening, e.g. The Green Guerrilla, New York, USA.
• Urban farms, e.g. Growing Power, Milwaukee, USA.
• Children's gardens, e.g. The Children's Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, USA; The Collingwood Children's Farm, Melbourne, Australia; The Children's Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.

References

Clément, Gilles. The Planetary Garden: And Other Writings. Translated by Sandra Morris. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Ginn, Franklin. Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia. London: Routledge, 2016.

Heyd, Thomas. “Plant Ethics and Botanic Gardens.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 9 (2012): 37–47.

Jones, Rebecca. Green Harvest: A History of Organic Farming and Gardening in Australia. Collingwood: CSIRO, 2010.

Raxworthy, Julian. Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

Reynolds, Richard. On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.