City of the Future

“If you want to be happy for a day, drink. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy your whole life long, plant a garden.” Ever more city residents are putting this wise old saw into practice.

Overgrown wastelands and empty building plots are becoming oases of green that do more than improve the urban climate. In some places, they have also developed into flourishing places of integration because community gardening represents a way of bringing people together. Even Germany’s allotments, notorious as bastions of petit-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, are playing a role in this process.

Communal gardens

Two years ago, the Laskerwiese Citizens’ Garden not far from Ostkreuz station in Berlin was still a disused expanse between a supermarket and a second-hand car dealership. Today, the sunflowers and mallows bloom there. Tomatoes and pumpkins compete vigorously, and the wind ruffles the water in the water-lily pond. Local residents have joined together to form an association, laid out beds and parcels, built a fence, sowed, planted and watered. Because it is nice to dig the earth, to eat fruit and vegetables you have grown yourself and to rest in the shade of a birch tree outside your front door. The borough made the plot of land available, the association is responsible for its care and maintenance.

Garden activist Frauke Hehl from the association committee estimates that about 20 community gardens are being cultivated in Berlin: “There is still enough free land here, as well as people willing to get something going with a bit of community spirit, because a garden like this always comes with a whole neighbourhood attached.”

Guerrilla gardeners

The first “community gardens” were created in New York during the 1970s. Local residents cleared away the rubble and rubbish on disused areas of land near their houses, raked the earth and planted flowers, herbaceous perennials and vegetables. They were always aware of the risk that they would lose their gardens again as soon as someone wanted to build on their bit of open space. An experience that allotment holders in Berlin’s Kinzigstraße had to go through recently. Four years ago, they set up the Rosa Rose (Pink Rose) neighbourhood garden at their own initiative. Following a change of ownership, most of the garden has now been bulldozed for a new development.

Some urban gardeners no longer ask for permission before they grass over neglected patches in back courtyards, plant the central reservations of dreary dual carriageways or make sure the trees along a street are surrounded by blossoming life. This phenomenon is known as “guerrilla gardening”. Guerrilla gardeners use Internet forums to arrange joint planting “attacks”, and although their activities are strictly speaking illegal, many local politicians look on them benevolently in view of the reduced budgets local authorities have at their disposal for gardening and green spaces.

Intercultural gardens

There is certainly something mysterious and powerful about seeing flowers blossom and harvesting the fruits of your own labour in the autumn that fosters confidence and gives a great deal of pleasure. This power is now being exploited by what are known as “intercultural gardens”. Traumatised women refugees from Bosnia were able to rebuild their lives by doing gardening work in a pilot project launched at Göttingen in 1996. Since then, more than 100 intercultural gardens have been set up in Germany. The concept involves refugees, migrants and Germans with very different life histories looking after gardens together. Vegetables and herbs are grown ecologically for the participants’ own use, and experience shows that it is not just vegetables and flowers, but friendships, networks and skills that grow as well.

“Mirroring society”

Every garden has its own story. Churches and neighbourhood associations often make a commitment to support these undertakings, or the city council supplies the land, as for example in Marburg, where a community garden run by Russians, Turks, Kurds, Palestinians, Germans and Syrians has born fruit in the shape of a cookbook, a neighbourhood spring-cleaning day and computer courses leading to vocational qualifications.

How should the individual parcels of land be demarcated? How should the communal areas be laid out? What should people be able to put on the compost heap? And what is that interesting, unusual herb in my neighbour’s flowerbed? Allotment holders have to engage with one another in order to sort these questions out, negotiate rules and find compromises when conflicts arise. To this extent, gardens hold a “mirror up to society” as places of communication and cooperation, says Ingrid Reinecke from the Munich-based Interkultur Foundation, which encourages and networks garden projects of this kind.

Integration through contact with nature

Over five million people also enjoy growing their own plants on conventional allotments. Above all, more and more families with children are catching the bug and taking on allotment gardens close to where they live. Theresia Theobald, the chief executive of the Federal Association of German Garden Lovers, even speaks of a “boom”: “In the last three years, 45 percent of new allotment holders across Germany have been families with children.”

The first allotments were created more than 100 years ago as places where city-dwellers suffering from the consequences of industrialisation could go to seek respite. The contemporary allotment boom is connected with the trend for people to move “back into the inner cities”. Many families are now deciding against buying a home of their own in the countryside because they appreciate the advantages of urban life: Work, schools and leisure activities are all close at hand – and with an allotment garden you can have a private oasis of green too.

The increasing diversity of German society has been reflected in the organisations that run allotment sites for a long time now as well. According to figures from the Federal Association of German Garden Lovers, there are about 300,000 ethnic Germans who have moved to Germany from Eastern Europe and migrants with other backgrounds who are active in allotment associations. This constitutes indisputable proof of the practical worth allotments have as places where integration is achieved through contact with nature. However, there are still some associations that uphold their image as provincial stick-in-the-muds hiding from the modern world in their summer houses. For instance, one Hamburg allotment association recently rejected a membership application from a Turkish man who has been living in Germany for decades.

Whether they are intercultural, guerrilla-style or adorned with a summer house: urban gardens provide important opportunities for people in densely built-up areas to reinvigorate themselves by communing with nature. And the benefits also extend to city residents who would rather not spend their days lugging around bulbs, rakes and watering cans.