18^th - 23^th May 2013 at City-Mine(d) in London, Great Britain.

From the 18th to the 23rd of May 2013 city-mine(d) in London invited international and local participants to explore the commons imaginary in the 21st Century city during a UniGrowCity conference. The main venue of the meeting was Nye Bevan Commons in Hackney.

On Sunday 19th we walked to the river Lea and Hackney Marshes. The area was originally a marsh, but was extensively drained already in the Middle Ages. It is one of the largest areas of common land in Greater London with 136 hectares of protected commons. The Olympic Park encroached on it in 2012. Mark Taylor, former city councillor of Tower Hamlets told us about the river and the Lea Valley.

In the afternoon we took turns cooking at the Peoples Kitchen at Passing Clouds and explored the Dalston area. People’s Kitchen works entirely on a volunteer base and provides meals to everybody showing up on a Sunday evening.

Monday 20th was devoted to exploring London rivers and canals: the waterways in the commons imaginary. We met at Laburnum Boat Club and took a narrow boat trip along Regents Canal. We learned how to steer a narrow boat and to operate the locks. We learned about the opportunities and the complexities of living on a boat, which the high prices of London housing is making an appealing resource for many.

In the afternoon Mark Walton, founder of Shared Assets, told us about te realities of living on water and the future of the waterways and the river Lea.

On Tuesday 21st we attended a workshop at the Hackney Marshes Community Nursery and Lucy Tether introduced us to the forest garden.

In the afternoon a group of us attended the presentation “Holistic Management and Avoiding Desertification” by Alan Savory at the House of Parliament. The lecture was followed by a discussion on this interesting and controversial approach. The rest of us helped cooking at vegan Pogo Café, another entirely volunteer run venue, where we all met for dinner, followed by a general public discussion on community and activism, food and our spaces, drawing on different European perspectives.

On Wednesday 22nd we met for discussion at Nye Bevan and visited the Hackney Community Art Center Chats Palace, where the Hackney councillor filled us in on crucial events of the local history. We had our last common dinner at the new experimental communal space Caravanserai in Canning Town.

4^th - 8^th March 2013 at Tromsø Academy of contemporary art in Norway in collaboration with Marijetica Potrc and her students from HFBK Hamburg, Germany.


During the gathering, we entered a world of do-it-yourself building, reusing materials, and growing and harvesting vegetables. In Tromsø water is seen as a precious natural resource and a territory that is less regulated than land. We revisited the concept of the commons at a time when public space is increasingly being privatized, and we rethought the relationship between city residents and nature in an age we call the Anthropocene.

The houseboat project by Kåre Grundvaag, an art student at the Tromsø Art Academy was taken as a case study that articulates out-of-the box ideas relating to existence and co-existence in the city, as well as the possibilities to move the world through artistic practice. Housing is one of most pressing problems for Tromsø residents, as it is extremely expensive and scarce. Viewing the problem as an opportunity for re-imagining the housing problem, Kåre has designed the houseboat, which will be constructed from recycled materials, as a family house on a floating platform by the Tromsø shoreline. During the UniGrowCity gathering we worked with him on the construction of the houseboat.

The program of UniGrowCity Tromsø is based on meetings with local partners as well as thematical conversations related to the chosen focus. Students of HfBK invited us to be part of their research and life in Tromsø based on their interaction and exchange with residents: among other things, we harvested vegetables and shared leftover food, exchanged skills and knowledge, practiced time-banking through living with local residents.

More information can be found under: http://designforthelivingworld.com/2013/04/08/tromso-a-city-as-a-garden/, http://designforthelivingworld.com/interviews/self-organization-makes-up-a-third-of-the-curiculum/

Videos by Valentina Karga:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnJbfouGHzo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr0VBtAUawE

Slideshow by Marco Clausen:
http://www.flickr.com//photos/87641099@N03/sets/72157633020462391/show/

10^th - 13^th July 2012 at The New Beauty Council, Stockholm

During the UniGrowCity meeting in Stockholm we spent our time mapping, meeting and exchanging knowledge with local initiatives and gardens, as well as hosting a public workshop with local and international presentations under the theme Mapping of Stockholm farming activity and edible biotope at the Architectural Museum.

Our first day we toured the million house estate area Skarpnäck and Bagamossen, visiting the community garden Folkodlarna, Matparken, the Japanese Garden in Bagarmossen and Kärrtorps Community Guerilla Garden (all mapped out on the community map Bagiskartan www.opengreenmap.org/greenmap/bagiskartan-bagarmossen-community-green-map). Later in the afternoon we continued to Fisksätra and met with Dante and the organization Tillväxt and we’re given a tour of their forest garden plantations in the high density million house estate area and told about their collaboration with the commune and real estate owners in the area.

The following day we all gathered at the Architectural Museum for an entire afternoon of discussions and short presentations of both international and Stockholm-based groups on informal learning and urban gardening as a sustainable social meeting place, forest gardens, biodiversity, integrated edible structures in cities, mapping as a tool/methodology for urban development, and using the local community map as an example of how to map resources. Questions we thought of in relation to the topics were how do we create spaces where people can participate in the creation/forming of a more sustainable city in the future? What are the questions that a city has to answer in the future and what kind of approaches are offered by the invited initiatives (your initiative) already? What role plays informal, experienced-based learning within this process in the context of active citizenship? Is there also space for non-consensus in these contexts? Are all gardening initiatives good and democtratic per sei?

There was a great turn up to the meeting of both urban gardeners as well as politicians and city planners. The discussion was moderated by Thérèse Kristiansson & Annika Enqvist from The New Beauty Council and held with a low-tech presentation style, in the garden of the museum. We had portable speakers and a huge white paper everyone used to sketch or write things on, and also make connections to other topics. We later transformed the sketches/mind map that was created during the afternoon into a digital version.

Between presentations and discussions there were snacks and drinks, a fluid structure where people could come and go. We used our third day to summerize the meeting and also to plan for our next three coming meetings.

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBrQT3Nz2bA&feature=g-upl
Nils Tiberg, a resident of Fisksätra and member of the forest gardening organisation Tillväxt narrates about the gardening development in his community

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hP_Bo1sccDg
Dante Hellström, a resident of Fisksätra and member of the forest gardening organisation Tillväxt gives a tour of plant beds and a nature museum

Images
http://www.amplife.org/albums/stockholm-july-2012

Digital mindmap
https://www.mindmeister.com/186234814/mapping-stockholm-s-urban-farming-and-its-edible-biotopes#

9^th - 12^th May 2012 at Prinzessinnengarten, Berlin

During the “UniGrowCity” conference in Berlin, we spent three days at Prinzessinnengarten working on the development of some practical and theoretical learning material that encourages education for sustainable development combining different aspects of biodiversity and daily life. One of the main questions was how experience and skills are taught at the bottom-up, self-organized and non-expert places like the Prinzessinnengarten. The main topics of the Berlin Workshop were: experienced-based knowledge generation, knowledge management and informal knowledge transfer.

During the first day of our meeting each organisation gave a short input focussing on informal learning, learning in the city/in the village, combined with challenges and personal interests of the participants. After that all participants of the meeting took part in the “Garden Working Day” and got to know the working structure as well as the daily routines of Prinzessinnengarten. As observers we collected information about how knowledge concerning the work in the garden is gathered and transferred. The second day we started by exchanging and mapping the different observations. During the afternoon we brainstormed wild ideas how the learning materials could grow, look like, be put together… By using collaborative learning methods we built on each others ideas and came up with something that we couldn’t have imagined without each other.

During the next morning we thought with our hands and built a first prototype made out of the already exisitng modular gardening boxes, plexiglas, paper, cardboard, costumes and other materials we found in the garden. This prototype was presented to the public in a short presentation and will be relevant to the development of the learning materials as well as tested in Prinzessinnengarten during the summer. Building blocks of the tool-kit was methodology (in this chapter we had ideas on everything from less tangible qualities such as “creating an un-hierarchical situation” to specific “games” to be used during the learning opportunities),  documentation (to be done by the participants during each meet), information material (what input do we have to bring along), content (this can be specific topics such as biodiversity, compost, food sovereignty etc.).

The “Lernbaukasten” (the modular learning-tool-kit) and its material are designed for collaborations with schools (pupils and teachers) to accompany the set-up of school gardens. But it will also be used within the team of Prinzessinnengarten (which is growing bigger and changing) to combine and exchange the existing knowledge of the different working groups (the focus is offline but could be mirrored online as well).

By working together and integrating the points of view of the partner organizations, we combined various competences of our unique group in something that is useful for the internal development of Prinzessinnengarten as well as the work of the partner organizations.

22^nd - 25^th April 2012 at GAIA, Portugal

In the Grundtvig project UniGrowCity our European network of 6 organizations in Germany, Portugal, Italy, Great Britain, Norway and Sweden is working on informal and experiential learning toward sustainable lifestyles. In this context, Prinzessinnengarten visited the partner initiative GAIA in Lisbon. There we got to know the urban neighborhood garden “Horta do Monte”, with a spectacular view over the city and the Tagus, as well as a growing movement of bicyclists who operate a weekly a bicycle repair workshop and a community kitchen. We accompanied Orlanda and Silvia as they planted a green pharmacy with the children at the German school in Estoril. And in Sintra we visited an ecological cooperative with a learning garden and a group of young people who have acquired a deserted and overgrown plot of land and planted a permaculture garden. All together a very inspiring trip!

2^nd - 4^th November 2011 at Pari Center, Italy

Our first common meeting began with each organization introducing itself and explaining its particular projects, approaches and how they plan to work in collaboration with the other members of the Unigrowcity groups. They also discussed the setting up of a communications system, website and blog, as well as plans for future meetings. In addition to fruitful discussions amongst the members, the groups also interacted with members of the Pari community. Continue reading →