Update Oct 28, 2014 – The research theme Urban Gardening is replaced by Urban Archiving. This page will no longer be updated but will stay published in order not to break and incoming links.
STIMULATE URBAN GARDENING PRACTICES THROUGH CULTURAL HERITAGE
Allotments are often natural meeting places for people interested in urban gardening. Image credit: St Peter’s Community News CC:BY-NC.
Urban Gardening is one of the themes that researchers in the Living Archives project are working with. The aim is to explore how cultural-heritage archive material, and open-data sets, can be social resources that support and stimulate urban gardening practices, and contribute to social change and sustainable urban development.
Urban Gardening is a phenomenon that cuts across and creates bridges between socio-economic- and ethnic groups. The archives and archiving practices of urban gardening are plentiful, including both private and publicly available plant- and seed databases; publicly available (open) data sets about climate, soil, and pollutants, as well as personal archives of growing conditions on a very local level, and public and private archives of cultural-heritage material related to gardening and farming, as well as to the urban setting.
This theme of the Living Archives project will explore, in collaboration with ‘urban gardeners’, how our public and private archives and open-data sets can, for example, connect the gardeners and practices of today with the past and the future, find “the right crop at the right place”, or how to make use of materials that are considered to be waste.
Researchers Elisabet M. Nilsson and Veronica Wiman will, through a participatory-design and artistic approach – in collaboration with external partners – develop a series of ‘prototypes’ for tools and practices that are based on cultural-heritage archive material and open-data sets, and a workshop ‘toolbox’ that may travel beyond Malmö to other urban-gardening settings. They will also develop artistic and curatorial practices related to urban gardening.
A more detailed introduction to Veronica Wiman’s perspective on the project can be found in the post Approaching Urban Gardening/Farming.
Researchers: Elisabet M. Nilsson and Veronica Wiman.
Greenhouse Artist Talks
The Greenhouse Artist Talks is a lecture series where artistic practitioners explore and present work related to urban gardening and archives. The greenhouse at Slottsträdgårdens kafé in Malmö becomes a site for research and artistic practice, curated by Veronica Wiman. Learn more here.