The Garden Complex: Addressing, analysing and activating a neglected urban landscape component
Informations
- Funding country
Netherlands- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- -
- End date
- -
- Budget
- 280,000 EUR
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Talent Programme | Grant | - | - | - |
Abstract
Urban green is key in countering the urban climate crisis, the social urban crisis and the crisis of urban ecology. Therefore, gardens are a major source of urban resilience, especially because they occupy 30% of urban ground. Gardens not only help counter climate change effects and urban biodiversity loss; they are greatly beneficial to human and non-human health and well-being. Despite these powerful capacities, the garden complex – the sum of urban gardens – has been largely overlooked by urban landscape research, design and planning. This is a critical missed opportunity at a time when we need all available resources, including private, to counter the urban crises. Moreover, if we do not urgently address the garden complex as a vital urban landscape component, we risk losing this vast reservoir of urban green, because gardens are disappearing, or face critical change due to ongoing densification, environmental stress and changing lifestyles. I will study the garden complex as found, the garden complex as planned and the garden complex as produced, inhabited and consumed. Combining these three perspectives allows me to construct a multi-angled interpretation of the garden complex’s heterogeneous and fragmented urban morphology, and of the complex and hybrid dynamics steering its continuous transformation. Operating across scale levels, the research furthermore unravels how myriad small decisions taken in many small gardens culminate in a considerable large-scale impact. The topic is timely and highly relevant: urban green infrastructure is high on national, European and global agendas. Focusing on the Dutch Randstad metropolis, this VENI generates ample opportunities for knowledge utilization. Major stakeholders (including Amsterdam and Delft municipalities, Planbureau, BirdProtection and BNSP) are committed to participating in the research, and to realizing its concrete impact. As such, my VENI contributes to co-creating a more sustainable, liveable and resilient urban future.