A community garden programme for Berlin

On the 3rd of March 2021, more than 100 people gathered online to kick-off a long-awaited project by Berlin’s Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate Protection [Senatsverwaltung für Umwelt, Verkehr und Klimaschutz]: the participatory creation of the city’s first community garden programme.

Organised and run by Berlin-based landscape architecture firm bgmr Landschaftsarchitekten with mees architecture on behalf of the Senate Administration’s Referat Freiraumplanung und Stadtgrün [Office for Open Space Planning and Urban Green], the event brought together community gardeners, officials of the Senate and the Boroughs as well as interested citizens. After the Berlin Senate had laid out the objectives of the project with speeches by Stefan Tidow, State Secretary of the Senatsverwaltung für Umwelt, Verkehr und Klimaschutz (SenUVK) and Toni Karge of the Referat Freiraumplanung und Stadtgrün, several expert practitioners introduced their experiences with implementing community garden programs in other cities. The spectrum of community gardens in Berlin was presented based on the Platform Productive Urban Green [Plattform Produktives Stadtgrün] which the AG Stadt & Ernährung set up with Berlin’s urban gardeners for the Senate in 2019.

bgmr Landschaftsarchitekten describe the process that will now follow like this:
‘Subsequent to this initial event, we will continue our collaboration in the next months in different formats and smaller events, in order to develop building blocks and tools that can generate support for existing gardens and activate new land use opportunities for community gardens. With the new community garden program we intend to strengthen together with you the variety and future of community gardens as part of Berlin’s urban green infrastructure as well as the perception of this shared land use by the larger public…
We would like to continue our collaboration via the interactive Plattform Produktives Stadtgrün, as well as in additional small events in the next months. The event[s] will take place in German’.

Katrin Bohn and Beatrice Walthall are founder members of the Berlin-based AG Stadt & Ernährung [Working Group City & Food]. For more than one year, they cooperated with web designers Scholz Constructors to design and deliver a participatory process as well as thematic research that led to the establishment of Plattform Produktives Stadtgrün.

Plattform Produktives Stadtgrün is here.

To participate in the project Berliner Gemeinschaftsgarten-Programm please do go to mein.berlin.de.

For information on the Working Group City & Food see here.

Image: The community garden Peace of Land, one of the guest speakers at the launch event, presented not only its garden spaces but also its managerial structure. (source: Peace of Land 2021)