(Agropolis) Urban Agriculture – About the Happiness of Harvesting in the City
Agropolis - from the Spoon to the City, Jörg Schröder
It’s all about longing for green, about healthy, competitively-priced food, and about using urban brownfield sites for precisely these purposes. Urban agriculture is an important building block towards a better life for many cities, and signifies a little bit of autarchy in a globalised world. Examples from Berlin and Munich.
By Elisabeth Schwiontek
A freelance journalist based in Berlin.
Translation: Jo Beckett
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
August 2010
The Goethe-Institut is the Federal Republic of Germany’s cultural institution operational worldwide.
“Today and every day: harvesting fresh vegetables and herbs, no kidding!” The sign is a few metres away from the roaring roundabout traffic on Berlin’s Moritzplatz and marks the entrance to the Prinzessinnengarten. Robert Shaw and Marco Clausen, bosses of the non-profit company Nomadisch Grün, are cultivating vegetables to organic standards on 6000 square metres of leased land. A year ago the land was still a brownfield site filled with rubbish, today pumpkins, radishes, potatoes and the community feel are flourishing there. The two garden founders could rely on the active support of their neighbours right from the start.
Robert Shaw: “We create the context for this place. The many and varied people who plant things here, do the weeding and watering, and chat together in the garden café bring it to life.” The young people of Kreuzberg explore the vegetable beds, active gardeners talk shop about potatoes, a teacher and her children come across immigrant women from Russia and Turkey who are experts at gardening. It’s from them that Robert Shaw – as a self-taught gardener – picks up the best tips for cultivating vegetables. Anyone can harvest and buy vegetables and herbs in the Prinzessinnengarten – people who help out regularly can do so at a particularly good price. But unlike traditional German allotments there are no individual plots, with one exception: schoolchildren and pre-schoolers look after their own beds from sowing to harvest.
is developed and promoted by an interdisciplinary team of architects, urban planners and landscape architects, supported by sociologists, engineers and agronomists:
Jörg Schröder and Kerstin Hartig in cooperation with bauchplan).(With spatial concepts for urban agriculture and metropolitan food strategies for Munich, Agropolis won in 2009 the first prize of the competition Open Scale launched by the City of Munich. In 2010, Agropolis elaborated, for the City’s department for urban planning and building regulation, an expert report on Agropolis elements for Freiham; and organized in the context of the fifth Week of Architecture Munich the Agropolis picnic Freiham including the laying of the first herb garden on the premises. Agropolis initiated the school garden on the roof of Montessorischule at Balanstraße in Munich. Agropolis Munich was presented at the German Centre for Architecture in Berlin, the European Convention Green City in Milan and the Festival Communità – Architettura in Parma, Italy. With his drawing “2,040 m2”, Jörg Schröder had been invited to the German Pavilion “Sehnsucht” at the occasion of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
