Laure Jaffuel: Mediterranean urban gardens
One crucial element of the public space is the urban garden. The public park, the wild vacant area, even the abandoned land where the grass grows naturally, the balconies, the rooftops, or the yards are spaces that are on the border between public and private sphere. Facing the observation that public space is lacking natural and vegetalized areas, especially in Αthens, the research focuses on the urban garden as a social space in the city, but also as a way to improve our experience of public space.
The research aims to question how we can generate more spontaneous and sustainable green areas with endemic and local resilient plant varieties using vernacular design strategies. Local gardens, indigenous plants and Mediterranean resources constitute a public cultural domain that can implement urban public spaces, but also private commons that are collective semi public spaces. By exploring how to revitalize vacant plots of land in the city and outdoor commons, the project aims to learn from the rural and local endemic Mediterranean plants to create vernacular gardens in public space and to enhance the presence of nature in the city environment.
Urban gardens reflect the need to ‘give space’ within the city, to graft value and nature into public space, so that it becomes place both for political claims and social enhancement in coherence with the Mediterranean climate of nowadays.
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As a starting point, I began to walk in the city, visiting several gardens in Athens and its surroundings, looking at all the green zones I would encounter. Also, my research process always starts by addressing different practitioners, actors, experts on the topic but also amateurs, to get their point of view. I started searching who might have a word to say on this matter, and what place I can visit to learn more about local plants and different strategies to design, create, and maintain Mediterranean gardens. During my two-month residency, I interviewed about a dozen of different people who had something to do with my research subject, intentionally trying to address different artistic, social, and political fields. Among many encounters, I discussed with and gathered information from:
A professional gardener who operates with an activist group creating vegetable and functional gardens in the city of Athens.
A herbalist specializing in Greek herbs and the preservation of knowledge regarding Greek medicinal and aromatic plants.
An artist who is based in Athens and has been researching and making a book about a disregarded weed growing freely all around Athenian abandoned walls and monuments.
A botanist and agronomist, trained at the Agricultural University of Athens, specializing in Greek endemic plants and local flora.
The keeper and head gardener of Sparoza garden, a planted land on a hillside in an Athenian suburb, which became a living plant archive and an experimental garden of the Mediterranean Garden Society.
Local citizens-gardeners who are growing vegetables on the private rooftops of their apartment buildings in Athens.
These several interviews, walks, urban field trips, garden visits, along with various texts that I read, precised for me what are the status, mentality, and challenges around the notion of green areas in the city. From my field research, I identified three key categories of green urban areas in Athens:
- The public park or main square with trees and plant-beds.
- The abandoned areas of land with freely grown weeds and trees, which are mainly empty plots after building demolition or unbuilt wasteland (the socio-political and urbanistic reasons for these areas being abandoned and left in this state are part of a research I am planning to conduct in the future).
- The common, semi-public or private green areas, ranging from plant pots in the streets, balconies, terraces, planted rooftops, backyards with trees/plants, to private and community gardens.
In their article “Setting the grounds for the Green Infrastructure in the metropolitan areas of Athens and Thessaloniki: The role of green space,” published in the European Journal of Environmental Sciences, urban planners Marilena Papageorgiou and Georgia Gemenetzi write: “Green spaces can play a vital role in serving as grounds for developing G.I. and promoting environmental, social and economic benefits. In Athens and Thessaloniki (the only metropolitan areas in Greece) there has been no Green Infrastructure planning. However, existing and prospective green spaces can play a catalyzing role in the development of a Green Infrastructure. In fact, even though inadequate and insufficiently dispersed, urban green spaces present great potentials for embedding the features of ‘green’, ‘connectivity’, ‘multi-functionality’ and ‘accessibility’, which are key to Green Infrastructure planning. (…) Regardless of the concept’s origin, Green Infrastructure is not only a tool addressing environmental theory. It is also a planning tool, concerning socio-economic policy.”
The resilience of the species and the thoughtful selection of plants (endemic or not) are crucial for gardens and green areas to exist within the context of the Mediterranean climate today, combined with water-conscious strategies. Bringing also relatively efficient freshness in the urban environment and helping to cool down in summer heatwaves, the presence of plants/trees in the city has proved itself to be an important tool in urban planning, social enhancement, and togetherness in the public space.
As a next step, I am aiming to develop a mapping of these typologies of green areas within a chosen neighborhood in Athens. Also, as a continuation of the project, I would like to create a restitutive format that can be shared with other citizens, amateurs, plant-lovers, activists, creators, and locals from Athens and the Mediterranean Basin. It could take the form of a podcast, an urban gardening handbook, a publication, a map, an atlas of climate-resilient plants, a seed bombing action, a street campaign or the like.
