Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

82
Preserving community gardens
in NYC: Strategy in public space
development?
Carolin Mees 1 , Edie Stone 2
1
Dipl. Ing. Architect and PhD candidate, Berlin
University of Arts, Institute of History and Theory
of Design, Lietzenburgerstrasse 45, 10789 Berlin,
Germany (e-mail: carolin_mees@gmx.de)
2
Director of GreenThumb, City of New York
Department of Parks and Recreation, 49
Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007, USA
(e-mail: edie.stone@parks.nyc.gov)
Abstract
The development of community gardens in New
York City since the 1970s is presented in this paper
in regard to the gardeners’ actions to preserve their
gardens as permanent institutions and the concomitant
actions and responses by the city. By focusing on the
general development of community gardens in New
York City’s low-income district of the South Bronx
and on the specific development of the community
gardens’ small houses, the “casitas”, the city’s
strategy in dealing with the gardens is revealed.
Urban land is increasingly used for public gardens
in times of economic crisis, only to be built up again
in times of economic boom. To sustain community
gardens and to permanently preserve them as
public landscape, the gardens need to be legally
defined as a specific form of land use and to be
incorporated into comprehensive zoning plans.
Keywords
Individualized public spaces and preservation, changing
landscape uses, cultural context of landscape and
design on public land
The grassroots activity of community gardening became
a movement that continued over the last 30 years, with
the number of gardens fluctuating depending on location.
Due to the drastic effects of the ups and downs of
economy on low-income districts, the concentration of
community gardens was high in the South Bronx, and still
is today [3].
The city has been involved in controlling the community
garden movement since its beginning. The regulations
issued recently for the construction of small houses on
garden sites are an example of the official measures
taken to control the privatization of public space and are
part of the city’s strategy of public space preservation
and development.
Material and methods
The analysis is based on the experience and research
of Edie Stone, Director of the GreenThumb program of
the Department of Parks and Recreation of New York
City since 2001, and on the dissertation currently being
written by Carolin Mees at the Berlin University of Arts
with the working title “Rebuilt Rubble: the inevitability of
common land use in the inner city from a social-economic
open space planning perspective at the example of the
development of community gardens in the South Bronx
from the 1970s to 2010.”
In addition the results of the design process of
GreenThumb’s “Gardenhaus” that the authors worked on
with a team in 2008 are presented.
Results and discussion
The South Bronx is located at the southern tip of the borough
of the Bronx, near to the global financial center of
Manhattan Island to the south. In contrast to the wealth
of Manhattan the population of the South Bronx is prima-
Fig. 1: A typical community garden is situated between apartment
buildings: the Family Garden in the South Bronx. Foto by Carolin
Mees, 2005
Introduction
When walking through an American metropolis like New
York City today, community gardens are easily recognized:
a fenced, green, public open space next to multistory
apartment buildings, where families and neighbors,
friends and strangers meet [1] [2]. [Fig. 1]
Community gardens appeared first during the 1970s in
the urban environment in New York City. Some residents
of the city’s low-income districts had begun to clean up
rubble-filled, municipally owned vacant lots next to their
apartment buildings to improve the quality of their life by
creating gardens.