The Importance of Social Programming in Urban Agriculture: A Practitioner’s Experiences from Norway

Founded in 2013, the Norwegian social enterprise Nabolagshager literally means “community gardens” or “neighborhood gardens.” Urban agriculture, as such, has always been at the heart of the organization’s work. The organization dates back to 2011, inspired by a deep motivation to work on the transition to sustainability by engaging communities in hands-on action. Sowing a seed, watching it grow, caring for the plant, and enjoying the harvest at the end of the season seemed to me like the best pedagogical tool to begin a conversation on sustainability and the state of our urban landscapes. Nabolagshager closed it’s operations in 2023, but the projects described in this text are continuing, and building on the insights from this essay.

From these early experiences, over a decade Nabolagshager grew into a renowned organization in the field of urban agriculture in Norway. Combining hands-on experiences with a focus on developing knowledge, sharing tools and best practices in entrepreneurship, placemaking, social inclusion, and circular economics, the Nabolagshager team was a significant contributor to the popularity and mainstreaming of urban agriculture.

Nabolagshager staff worked with prestigious universities, think-tanks, cities, and municipalities in Oslo, Europe, and worldwide. Our mission embodied the “think global, act local” motto. We played an active role in facilitating the development of urban agriculture by developing and sharing knowledge, providing a networking forum, and seeking visibility in media and social media for agriculture in the city. Some of our key experiences included running a rooftop farm, an indoor aquaponic facility, and an incubator program for urban agriculture startups and entrepreneurs. Additionally, we coordinated a variety of large and small urban gardens with private or public sector partners. More than 2000 people attended our courses and training sessions, and the organization offered hundreds of young people their first job experience, often in community gardens around Oslo.

Today, we think of ourselves as social designers who utilized sustainability and urban agriculture as tools to build better cities. The significant experiences we gained around urban agriculture – both practically and theoretically and locally and internationally – have given us an understanding of urban gardens as projects that produce public life and social meeting places, rather than food alone. In this essay I share some stories of Nabolagshager’s and my journey and vision for the urban agriculture of the future.

When asked to list the key elements for a thriving and resilient urban garden in public space, most people would list seeds, plants, and soil, nurtured by sun, water, and compost. However, from an experienced practitioner’s perspective, I have observed that a project’s success rarely depends on these basic elements but on the active cultivation of social connections and a project team skilled at facilitating community dialogue and nurturing local pride and ownership.

At their best, community gardens are multifunctional spaces where we cultivate zero-km organic food, improve urban biodiversity, engage in physical activity while nurturing urbanites’ biophilia, and contribute to writing a captivating story that illustrates what a transition to a sustainable and resilient urban future can look, feel, and taste like. However, there is a flipside to this coin (Fig. 7.1).

Abandoned pallet garden boxes in a public space, Nabolagshager

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Having seen many projects come and go and having had over the years many informal conversations with urban farmers to find out what worked and what went wrong, I am aware of a few common experiences and answers. Most often, failure of urban agriculture sites is due to an overestimation of the capacity and interest from the local community, or the fluctuating availability and willingness to commit and contribute, even among interested people. Very often the initiators suffer “burn-out” after trying to carry out the project responsibilities – including gardening, fundraising, community outreach, and coordination with the municipality and local civil society, alongside day-to-day chores, watering, and weeding. We all need a better understanding of the complexities of an urban agriculture community, along with communication strategies to connect stakeholders.

Urban agriculture continues to be an emerging field. Across the world, practitioners are still exploring, piloting, and adjusting strategies to ensure the maximum positive impact of a systemic and integrated urban agriculture on our communities. This essay digs deeper into some of the challenges I have observed over the years and shares key lessons and tools for addressing and overcoming current and future challenges.

As practitioners ourselves, we are continuously evolving, learning, and becoming better at connecting people and creating community. We understand our agency and impact as going well beyond a few bunches of leafy greens and a handful of cherry tomatoes. At the Stensparken Community Garden, one of Nabolagshager’s current projects in Oslo, we have applied the lessons we learned over the past decades, gained insights from other “urban farmers,” and explored placemaking strategies to help our projects excel, be impactful, and be sustainable. I share these findings in the sections below as proof-in-point of the power of urban agriculture to transform us and the landscapes we live in.

2.1 Beer and Hotdogs in the Garden (Fig. 7.2)

“We have found beer and hotdogs to be the secret to a successful urban garden,” said Mads Boserup Lauritzen. I met the Danish architect and founder of TagTomat in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2014, when I was researching my first book, Dyrk Byen! (Grow the city), a compilation of experiences from urban agriculture projects in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo.

Beer and hotdogs, Nabolagshager

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Mads soon became a mentor for me, and in many ways we were each other’s only colleagues as we both tried to establish ourselves as professional urban gardeners in two Scandinavian capitals. Mads had developed a design for self-watering raised beds made of upcycled materials that became quickly popular both in public spaces commissioned by city administrators and in private housing associations. The moveable raised beds allowed for an almost instant makeover of any urban space into an edible garden.

“It is extremely important to instantly ignite the social sparks that convert a new garden project into a social meeting place, where people are given a pretext to strike up a conversation and where connections between neighbors are made,” explained the architect. By tapping into the favorite Danish past times of socializing with a beer in one hand and a hotdog in the other, he demonstrated a solid understanding of the social dimensions of urban gardening. Every time he and his colleagues built a new garden with neighbors, they ensured that the sharing of food and drinks was an integral part of the process. Sharing a meal helped define the new garden as a place for social encounters and conversations with neighbors and strangers.

Mads’ experience resonated strongly with my own experiences of urban agriculture in Oslo, as a project manager and volunteer composter. I understood that building garden beds, planting seeds, and watering plants is the easy part of creating an edible garden. Engaging a wider community in the process, ensuring their ownership of the process and their vested interest in the crops that are cultivated, proves to be more complex. Where garden skills fluctuate over the seasons, community building requires persistence and can take years for results to materialize. Often, people with skills or an interest in vegetable gardening will have little or no skills in community building, co-creation, and social inclusion. I came to these conclusions early on, but I did not yet have appropriate tools to address them.

2.2 Urtehagen: Early Experiences with Social Programming

Back in 2012, “Urtehagen” was the first public urban agriculture project I started in Oslo. Before that I had helped out at various other private gardens in the city. I was inspired by the global surge in local initiatives to bring ecologically produced seasonal vegetables to communities that were in one way or another broken (Fig. 7.3).

Neighbors, Nabolagshager

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Urtehagen was one of Oslo’s first “new wave” urban agriculture projects of the 2010s to happen in public space. As a pilot project, it illustrated that to be successful, a public urban gardening project needs to play a “social connector” function. The project consisted of over 30 simple raised beds in the sunny corner of Urtehagen, a public plaza.

I lived in the area, had worked as a substitute teacher at the local primary school, and had firsthand knowledge of the local social networks, needs, and challenges. Spending more time in Urtehagen led to in-depth conversations with neighbors, including the alcoholics, drug dealers, and “troublemakers” that were at the time the most frequent users of the space. I made it very clear to them that I was neither a social worker nor the police. I had no intention to interfere nor judge their buying or using drugs or engaging in daytime drinking.

Through a mutually respectful dialogue, we came to a shared understanding that the space would be a public resource prioritizing local kids, at least during the daytime. By day, when children were around, so-called troublemakers would use a different space. I could appeal to universal values such as kindness and helpfulness – most people inherently want to be seen as useful to others. Many of the current users had younger siblings or family members, could remember their childhood in public space, and could empathize with local children needing a place to play and feel safe and the children’s joy of exploring the urban garden. After all, in addition to being a drug dealer or alcoholic, these were people just like you and me. This dialogue process leveraged the negative elements of the plaza into becoming key players in its success.

The garden witnessed no significant vandalism, and neighbors happily volunteered to water and weed, and many harvested the herbs and vegetables that grew in the garden. Fresh cilantro became a particularly popular crop.

“I have lived here for almost twenty years” said Cecilia, one of the neighbors, “and it’s the first time I sit down on this bench,” explaining how she had never felt safe in the area. Haroon, a young male refugee from Afghanistan, told us about how this garden helped him feel connected to his family back home. “In Afghanistan, my family always had a garden, and we would grow tomatoes there too. When I am here, tending to the plants, I know that my family, far, far away, are doing the exact same thing” he said, “It’s a way of being together, even when we are apart,” he explained.

As the project became more established, we realized that there was no funding to support the social programming and gardening activities or simply to support an active presence in it. A very high turnover of inhabitants in the neighborhood made it challenging to have continuity in the activities, as networks had to be continuously updated and re-established. Gradually the project degraded, vandalism damaged plants and planter boxes, and waste accumulated. We had to retract from the project, formally handling it over to the district administration, who would try to make it part of other publicly run social programs. After a successful season, with children as the joyful users of the space, the area was reclaimed by drug dealers and substance abusers.

2.3 Sjakkplassen: Empowering and Giving Community Members Responsibility (Fig. 7.4)

In 2015, Nabolagshager took on another challenging public space project. Vaterlandsparken, a small downtown public park, with a reputation for being “Oslo’s most dangerous place” was transformed into “Sjakkplassen.” This pilot project by the City of Oslo took place between 2015 and 2016 and explored new design processes to integrate urban agriculture in public space. For years, the city had struggled with insecurity in the space, where a combination of homeless Roma migrants, drug users, and drug dealers occupied the area. The project team again had to emphasize our role as being neither social workers nor policemen and explain this to the city administrators. We did not want to alienate or remove certain groups from the public space, rather to empower and give them responsibilities, while also proactively inviting other groups to join the process.

Sjakkplassen, Nabolagshager

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Early in the process we reached out to many community groups in Grønland but aimed especially at the people lacking access to well-functioning public spaces. We also considered their vulnerability as a factor for whether they would be able to act as “pioneers” in the renewed space alongside current users. This meant limiting the involvement of kids or families with small children (Fig. 7.5).

Seniors, Nabolagshager

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A key target group was Pakistani male seniors that congregated daily in a nearby crowded public space due to its proximity to one of the city’s main mosques. By involving them we hoped that they would have a calming effect and instill a sense of mutual respect on the sometimes rough clientele frequenting Sjakkplassen. These seniors would then become responsible for keeping “eyes on the street (Jacobs, 1961),” acting as a sort of community conscience. By incorporating street chess and adapting some of the designs of the benches – including back support and relatively high seating – we worked to create an attractive future space for a relaxed, peaceful, and mature audience.

The rigging of the garden, done in collaboration with Mads from TagTomat (my first so-called colleague in urban agriculture as mentioned earlier in this chapter), happened over a 2-day intensive weekend event. The core team was instructed to treat each person with the same kindness and respect and to talk to and engage everyone – regardless of their social and economic status. We were consciously talking with people, not at or to them. We broke bread with them and served copious amounts of warm food, coffee, lemonade, and fruit over the weekend.

“By offering tasty food, served in an esthetically pleasing place, in a respectful and enthusiastic manner, and not at all expecting anything in return, we created a unique social dimension to the project,” explains Tatiana, one of the organizers. There were no strings attached to the food, and people were free to continue on with their day, after having a bite to eat with us. However; “it baffles people,” she says, “gestures of receiving something really nice, for free, in a public space is not something we are used to. When there are no expectations to pay, or do something in return, it can trigger kindness in the most unexpected of places.”

By proactively engaging a wide range of current and potential future users, neighbors, and passers-by and engaging them in volunteering for the project, carrying soil bags, planting herbs, or distributing food, participants were empowered and inspired to individual and collective ownership of the project.

“It was a great day, it felt so good to be invited in, being included, and being able to give a hand and feel useful for once,” said one of the local contributors when I ran into him a few weeks later. As an immigrant with a longtime struggle with alcoholism, being included in a community activity meant experiencing something new. “I’m clean now,” said another one of the locals, referring to his history of substance abuse, “but I know everybody who comes here. I will keep an eye on the place to make sure that people respect what we’ve all built” (Fig. 7.6).

Stakeholders, Nabolagshager

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Throughout the summer of 2015, the community garden at Sjakkplassen transformed into a well-functioning, peaceful, and inclusive social space. Families felt more comfortable bringing their kids to play or socialize in the space. Guests of the nearby Oslo Plaza Radisson Hotel were no longer directed to avoid the plaza when heading to the Munch Museum, and employees in nearby offices could be seen bringing their lunches to this sunny space at midday.

Our observations also matched those of the welfare services outreach team and the police forces. In interviews with anthropologist Katja Bratseth for our project reporting (Brantseth, 2015), local police confirmed that the vibe of the space had changed when more people started using it. They noted that the integration of urban agriculture had a soft, but noticeable regulatory, calming effect on the vulnerable groups they work with. Members of the City Administration told us that during the lifetime of the project on their daily walk-throughs, they did not observe any evidence of violence, vandalism, fighting, drug use, or drug selling, with only one account of littering.

By late October 2015, the city removed the planter boxes and furniture and put everything into storage. In spite of the success, this project was discontinued. It seemed that administrators were not yet ready to fully embrace socially inclusive urban agriculture in the public spaces of the city. Perhaps as a side effect of our strong focus on building community, we had failed to build a stronger rapport with the municipal bureaucracy and thus failed to instill a sense of ownership in them.

A few years later, the district’s government tried to revive the project but never managed to actively involve the wider community and ensure their pride and ownership in the project. At the time of writing this chapter, the site has returned to being an asphalt jungle, and there are currently no plans for edible gardens or well-functioning, inclusive social spaces at Sjakkplassen.

2.4 The Search for Better Solutions for Lasting Community Impact

Our urban agriculture examples show that ensuring that plants thrive is not sufficient to successfully cultivate a public space. Design and planning practitioners need to continue to experiment with novel approaches to urban agriculture integration in public space and new practices of community engagement. Similarly, they should look beyond their existing networks to become more inclusive of a diversity of traditions of gardening and new practices for cultivating food, as well as community.

The global placemaking community is a practitioner-led source of practical knowledge and solutions to expand the impact of urban agriculture on our cities. This streetwise, practical knowledge can prove easier for practitioners to respond to than the more formal advice of academics and public institutions. Evidence of successful placemaking is widely available, and stories of human impact are easily found on social media, on TED talks, and other web-based platforms and can be a source of inspiration. I will introduce the placemaking community further in the following section.

Around the middle of the 2010s, the term “placemaking” was gaining popularity, appearing in all sorts of discussions, and it intrigued me. It described community gardens, bottom-up affordable housing initiatives, temporary projects converting parking lots into public parks, and also large-scale urban developments with sustainability ambitions. I could see that the people involved were just like me – they believed in the community superpowers of igniting conversations, giving people an excuse to discuss and untangle local challenges. They were optimists who believed that change was possible and that community could play a key role.

There is no universally accepted definition of the term “placemaking,” but the term commonly refers to human interactions that are key to addressing local and global challenges. Dr. Cara Courage, a renowned expert in placemaking and the arts, explained the term in her 2017 TEDxIndianapolis talk: “Placemaking is a set of tools and it’s an approach to put the community right at the front and center of changes where they live.” She continues “it’s about bringing people together, in their place, and about getting them talking to each other. When people tell stories of themselves and their places, they begin to understand their places better, and they begin to understand they can have an impact in changing these places for the better (Courage, 2017).”

“Placemaking is a form of community organizing, facilitating, bringing together people and challenging communities to get involved” explains Ethan Kent, the Executive Director of Placemaking X, a global network of leaders that work to accelerate placemaking as a way to create healthy, beloved and inclusive communities. “Placemaking is all about how we all help create our public realm, the world beyond our front door, we challenge each other to be participants in shaping that space,” Kent continues “We see it as a new environmental movement that focus on place as a way to bring together many different issues and causes in a city, involving many different departments and disciplines to create value” (Kent, 2018).

In a 2022 article in The Guardian, Charlot Schans, the director of the Placemaking Europe network, explains that “We need people-centered cities and public spaces that work towards public life,” adding “placemaking is the idea that we own and create these spaces together (Yeung, 2022).” As of today, Placemaking Europe network, whose development Nabolagshager has been a partner in, has members in more than 30 countries, ranging from city administrations and architectural and design firms to community initiatives.

3.1 Becoming a Part of a Global Movement That Was Not About Urban Farming

In 2017, I traveled to Amsterdam, Netherlands, to join the Placemaking Week conference. I went there as an urban farmer and left the conference a placemaker. In the keynote presentation by Fred Kent, Project for Public Spaces (PPS) founder, I learned that across the world a huge wave of changemakers are transforming urban spaces like streets, parks, and plazas as stages for community building. Many projects involved some aspect of urban agriculture, seen as a means to bring the community together and get a conversation started, not as the end goal itself.

This way of looking at green urban interventions resonated strongly with me. I had increasingly become uneasy with the term “urban agriculture,” as I felt that it cultivated human relationships rather than just edible crops. These human connections made a significant difference in people’s lives, while edible crops were often negligible in volume and rarely make a significant impact on the local food system. Often, we even hesitated to harvest and eat what was grown in a public space, worried it would be polluted or “dirty” from growing near traffic and litter. The human connections, however, felt like the sparks of something much greater, initiating conversations about making our communities and cities friendlier, more creative, and sustainable.

In his keynote, Fred Kent also observed that public space had become the convergence of many social movements and that this would hold the key to tackling many of our communities’ challenges, including equity, sustainability, and public health. Placemaking would help facilitate community champions, alongside lighthouse thinkers in architecture and design, governance, mobility, arts, innovation, and entrepreneurship to come together in our streets to shape visions of a better tomorrow and take the first steps toward a bottom-up urbanism. Placemaking theory proposes that the most important changemaker can be a local grandmother just as well as an important politician or a famous architect. This democratic aspect is to me its most appealing principle that one does not need to be an expert to have a voice that matters.

Based on decades of work analyzing public spaces and designs that help or hinder human connections, Kathy Madden and Fred Kent, founders of PPS, have developed 11 placemaking principles. These have been shared widely within the placemaking movement as open-source tools, guide PPSs’ design work, and inspire other placemakers globally. Many of these principles can be effectively adopted by urban farmers and used in the context of community gardens. Some examples of these principles, as well as their updated applications related to the cultivation of public spaces, are outlined below.

4.1 PPS Placemaking Principle #1: The Community Is the Expert

The important starting point in developing a concept for any public space is to identify the talents and assets within the community. In any community there are people who can provide historical perspective, valuable insights into how the area functions, and an understanding of critical issues. Tapping into this information at the beginning of the process will help to create a sense of community ownership in the project that can be of great benefit to both the project sponsor and community. (PPS, 2013)

Conventional definitions of community tend to be abstract, encompassing anything from a unified body of individuals to society at large. Placemakers also interpret community broadly, but they always set it in a geographical context. In placemaking, community is defined as “anyone who has an interest or stake in a particular place. It is made up of the people who live near the place (whether they use it or not), own businesses or work in the area, or attend institutions like schools or churches there. It also includes elected officials who represent the area and groups that advocate or organize activities there, such as a social justice group, a gardening club, a bicycle coalition, or a merchants’ association (Madden, 2018, p. 45).”

The principle of letting the community be the expert is important, because they are the ones who know – through personal experience and local knowledge – what are the strengths and weaknesses of a place. They are the ones who will benefit, or suffer, from any changes happening. Some community members may have already identified potentials for improvement, while others may be more aware of the underlying threats. Most importantly, some community members may function as gatekeepers to others and encourage or hinder participation.

Involving a larger number of people at the early stages of a project means more people will have ownership of the process and outcomes in the long run. The ideas and suggestions generated by a larger and more representative pool of participants are likely to also communicate the perspectives of vulnerable or underrepresented groups and individuals. This is particularly true compared to conventional, top-down public consultations, often dominated by NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) attitudes and also not fully representing the average citizen in income or education levels.

4.1.1 “The Community is the Expert”: Experiences from Stensparken Community Garden

At Stensparken Community Garden, a small public space within a larger neighborhood park, Nabolagshager has been creating and running an edible public garden. The community garden is run in close collaboration with the municipal district administration. Getting solid input and triggering community ideas and visions for the future has been a process of mutual learning and inspiration.

We spent the first months of the project performing qualitative and quantitative community mapping and research. We employed a team of young researchers living in the district to help us in this process as part-time collaborators. In order to map ideas and visions from neighbors, we also hosted pilot events to ensure that many demographic groups would be represented. Our collaboration with the district administration was also helpful for sending out digital invitations to residents within a 500-meter radius of the project site.

We began by mapping community ideas, interests, and visions through a quick and effective impact diagnosis. We used the Place Game originally developed by PPS (PPS, 2016) a well-known tool for placemakers worldwide. The youth researchers began by filling out the Place Game questionnaires themselves, before extending the questionnaires to other users of the space.

The Place Game questionnaire evaluates the current status and the potential of a space. The Place Game allows for a group of citizens to dive deep into four categories: sociability, uses and activities, comfort and image, and accesses and linkages. Impressions of the current state of a place are scored in a table, and ideas for short-term and long-term improvements are jotted down and shared (Fig. 7.7).

Alternative Place Game, Nabolagshager

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A low total score showed us where we most urgently needed to take action. The Place Game has been repeated with each group of youth in the Stensparken project, and it has been central to our outreach. In addition to the initial mapping, we have used it over the project life to monitor improvements and prioritize tasks.

Some of the other mapping and monitoring activities at Stensparken included:

• Interviewing seniors at a local senior center about their current but also historical uses of parks

• Sensory exercises to get a better understanding of how the space is experienced if one has some sensory limitations such as being visually impaired

• Quantitative monitoring of different uses and users at different times during the week and during the day

• Interactive and creative sticker voting to rank potential future activities

4.2 PPS Placemaking Principle #8: Triangulate

Triangulation is the process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other. In a public space, the choice and arrangement of different elements in relation to each other can put the triangulation process in motion (or not). For example, if a bench, a waste basket and a telephone are placed with no connection to each other, each may receive a very limited use, but when they are arranged together along with other amenities such as a coffee cart, they will naturally bring people together (or triangulate!). On a broader level, if a children’s reading room in a new library is located so that it is next to a children’s playground in a park and a food kiosk is added, more activity will occur than if these facilities were located separately. (PPS, 2013)

Many urban gardens in public space fail to attract community members beyond the avid gardeners and struggle to keep up motivation throughout the growing season, particularly since the harvest is often limited. Indeed, most community gardens are simply uninteresting to the majority of the community members – especially if the only perceived activity there is to watch plants grow. Inherently, the seasons also affect community gardens, and activity levels drop dramatically during the long Norwegian winter. Every spring, many community gardens find themselves starting practically from scratch, needing to mobilize new volunteers and participants.

Most projects would therefore benefit strongly by thinking of complementary ways to attract other demographics. Applying the triangulation thinking typical of placemaking means adding extra elements, functions, or activities to the urban garden to appeal to a wider audience. This can ensure that more people visit the place, stay longer, and strike up a conversation once they are there – leading to a more vibrant and friendly place overall. The human scale is also important: activities or elements must happen within a short distance, close to people, so that they can easily interact and participate.

4.2.1 Triangulation Experiences from Stensparken Community Garden in Oslo

In Stensparken Community garden, we are working on developing the community garden into an attractive destination for many demographic groups in the neighborhood. A triangulation element that emerged early in the participatory mappings was that several neighbors expressed an interest in getting a pizza oven in the space to use for community events (Fig. 7.8).

Triangulation in the community Stensparken, Nabolagshager

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To build the pizza oven, we contracted a natural building materials expert who built it with the help of youth with summer jobs in the community garden. Other community members added designs and decorations to the oven during one of our open community events. Over the course of a month, the local youth had built a pizza oven in the shape of a frog, an instant hit on social media. Involving the community in its design of the oven ensured a sense of ownership and lots of excitement about the process in the neighborhood.

Other triangulation elements in the community garden included beehives, which were run as a job training program for young adults with learning disabilities and the refurbishment of existing seating and placement of new benches. Simple infrastructural improvements included an outdoor water fountain for dogs and the installation of a recycling station by the gate to invite regular park users to stop by. A small covered patio provided shelter when it rains, and the community garden became a stop on a very popular local “map quest” game called “Stolpejakten.”

A range of events have been crucial to spreading word-of-mouth through community members about the new venue, and local kindergartens and playgrounds have been key targets in our communications. The events did not focus on gardening – creating instead a rewarding social space for the local community. We especially wanted to engage families with small children, a demographic group who has access to few local facilities beyond outdoor playgrounds. The events were scheduled throughout the year, including successful Halloween and winter festivals.

4.2.2 Triangulations Experiences from Sjakkplassen

Triangulation was also key to the success of Sjakkplassen. In addition to the raised beds, there were various seating areas so that people could enjoy the space alone or in small groups. By dividing the plaza into smaller subspaces and appealing to a more human scale, we found that people were more likely to sit and spend time there (Fig. 7.9).

Triangulation Sjakkplassen, Nabolagshager

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A signature element of this space was the large-sized street chess set. Before the project started, we had been unsure whether chess would be suitable for the space. However, it proved to be a magnet for many user groups. For instance, it turned out that some of the homeless Roma people were keen to engage other community members in friendly chess matches. As chess games follow internationally understood rules, I observed people of very diverse backgrounds interacting as players–sometimes communicating through body language and nonverbal chess jokes. Adding the outdoor street chess set was a key factor in creating a positive, 24-hour ambience in the urban garden which in itself contributed to Sjakkplassen becoming a well-functioning public space.

Had the project at Sjakkplassen continued, it would have been a logical next step to add other functions to build off the early successes. Within placemaking this is often referred to as “the power of ten (PPS, 2009)” – a principle of providing at least ten complementary activities for each site, ranging from people watching or newspapers reading (requiring comfortable seating) to playing games or engaging in site-specific activities.

4.2.3 Triangulation Experiences from Sandaker Center and Linderud Manor

Oftentimes, an urban garden can serve as a triangulation element within a larger vision. At Sandaker Byhage in Oslo, Nabolagshager runs a small urban garden for the neighborhood shopping center, and at Linderud Community Garden, we are a part of developing an urban gardening space as a part of the museum and heritage site of Linderud Manor in one of Oslo’s suburban districts.

Sandaker Senter is a small shopping center in inner Oslo dating back to the 1970s. Part of the building complex is made up of public housing apartments often housing inhabitants who struggle with substance abuse or mental health issues. The complex also houses a municipal library and a community center frequented by many elderly people. As a part of an ongoing dialogue with OBOS, the owner and largest housing developer in Norway, we were commissioned to develop and run an urban public garden around a plaza and terrace on the sunny southern tip of the center. This was a part of a larger upgrade and overhaul of the shopping center, coinciding with the expansion and upgrade of the library, indoor renovations, and an upgrade of the municipal park on the back of the complex.

By investing in a public community garden, the shopping center received a visual makeover and also managed to attract a more balanced clientele to the terrace with a positive ripple effect on other nearby businesses. Community members told us that they appreciated walking past the garden and being able to take in nature’s beauty on a day-to-day basis, rather than worrying about hearing cuss words or aggressive outbursts from the heavy drinkers that used to dominate the terrace.

An important part of the success of this triangulation element was our approach in dealing with the locals, who were quite negative to begin with, seeing this as just another gentrification effort. Time and again, we repeated and emphasized that the lush garden would not make beer more expensive or force them to leave their favorite hangout, even as it was becoming more popular and the clientele changed. Over the 5 years we have managed this garden; we gradually built a good relationship with many of the bar guests, who became fond of the beautiful surroundings, were inspired by the seasonal change, and felt a part of a community of caretakers.

This urban garden, which we manage on behalf of the shopping center owners, has also been an important experiment in developing a low-maintenance pollinator-friendly garden that is more visually appealing than edible, although there are several berry bushes, herbs, and edible plants included in the garden design from which one could eat.

At Linderud Manor our role has been more as a facilitator helping to kick-start some of the social aspects of the Museum’s vision. The Manor’s management has over the last few years radically changed the museum from being an introverted, closed-off, “storage of historical artifacts,” to becoming a busy hub of many activities that cater both to the local community as well as maintaining the interest of those with an interest in local history. In addition to their historical baroque gardens, the Museum has set aside a large field as a multifaceted urban farm. This field has now become a large and bustling community garden managed in collaboration with local community groups and startup businesses. There is land allocated for startups related to urban agriculture, such as cultivation of flowers for sale for weddings and events, and a Community Supported Agriculture garden (CSA) providing abundant organic vegetables to their members.

Throughout the year, Linderud Manor hosts market days and workshops and invites local kindergarten and primary school students to garden. Local teenagers are employed as garden helpers during the summer, and once a week there are guided tours, with an eco-philosophical twist. All these triangulation elements help develop a site with a multitude of attractions, ample possibilities for connecting with other people, and multiple partners from the local community.

4.2.4 The Power of 10

The power of triangulation is so effective that, among placemakers, it is easy to think “the more the better.” The most well-functioning public spaces are where a wide range of people can find attractive reasons to hang out, and it’s argued that at least ten such attractions should exist in every place. At a larger level, each city should have at least ten such well-functioning and attractive places.

In the context of urban gardens, few manage to have as many as ten attractions. Prinzessinnengärten in Berlin, Germany, illustrates a successful application of very varied and inclusive triangulation experiments. The site hosts a popular café, beekeeping, plants, seeds, and seedlings for sale for those interested in gardening themselves. The garden organizes solidarity events, features educational gardens for local school children, and hosts a wide range of events catering to all interests, including beer brewing, flower arrangements, upcycling workshops, concerts, lectures, and food-related workshops such as making sauerkraut and spice mixes. Crops from the garden are sold at the café, and excess produce is sold to visitors.

Prinzessinnengärten is a multifaceted attractive destination for local foodies, environmentalists, urbanists, and social entrepreneurs, as well as people simply looking for a green and peaceful corner to spend time with friends or read a book. Children of all ages find great pleasure in exploring the site, roam free, and connect with urban nature. As a space for self-organized initiatives, it is popular among people wanting to share a skill with the community. Activities such as pop-up bike repair workshops or DIY building of insect hotels or garden beds from upcycled materials take place throughout the year. The garden attracts a significant number of national and international tourists interested in sustainable urban development and edible city solutions. Prinzessinnengärten has successfully developed into a multifaceted destination, partly due to the longevity of the project, as it has been an active site since 2009.

The Power of 10 principle also advocates working on the city scale – that every city should have at least ten such hotspots within its city limits. In 2010, the town of Andernach in Southern Germany, with a population of 20,000, launched its initiative to become an “edible city.” All over the city, there are large and small edible gardens, ranging from a public fruit garden along the wall of the medieval castle in the city center to a mobile school garden in a trailer parked in one of the downtown pedestrian streets. At a local archeological site, a historical garden showcases varieties commonly grown during Roman and Medieval times, which has been developed in consultation with local historians. People can harvest freely from any edible garden located within a public space. Schools are heavily involved, as are the social welfare services that use the gardening and maintenance of the various urban garden plots as part of the city job training programs.

4.2.5 When Triangulation Fails

Triangulation in itself does not work if it does not integrate the input from current and future users of the public space and build their capabilities to be involved – the first of all placemaking principles. At Sjakkplassen, for example, after the initial project ended, later top-down attempts to reinstate the urban garden involved adding new chess pieces, a slackline, a community swap shed, and a pop-up art gallery. These initiatives failed however, as they never sought to build the ownership and capacities of the existing user groups and encourage them to see themselves as valuable guardians of an important community asset.

4.3 PPS Placemaking Principle #9: Experiment – Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper

The complexity of public spaces is such that you cannot expect to do everything right initially. The best spaces experiment with short-term improvements that can be tested and refined over many years! Elements such as seating, outdoor cafés, public art, striping of crosswalks and pedestrian havens, community gardens and murals are examples of improvements that can be accomplished in a short time. (PPS, 2013)

This principle emphasizes how top-down projects led by public sector or private investors can alienate genuine participation, while also being costly and taking a long time from ideation to realization. After they have been a part of a community hearing or participatory meeting with the city administration, a community wants to witness tangible change, especially given that the project completion may be years away.

Experimenting with lighter, quicker, cheaper installations is a great way to experiment with these changes within a timeline that is more acceptable to the community, as well as a way to work with a community in prototyping and co-designing the changes that are going to happen and even gently breaking down resistance from potential negative voices.

4.3.1 Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper at Stensparken Community Garden

Although the district administration’s ambitions for the community garden are high, at Stensparken community garden, we have been careful to be experimental and iterative in our design of the public space, testing out formats and adding functions as we have gone along. Throughout the process, we strive to ensure the largest possible buy-in from the local community toward a shared vision. The gradual implementations of changes have helped tame the critical voices from the few, but vocal, neighbors who were initially opposed to any changes or upgrades to the space.

One of the ideas that originated during early discussions was having a greenhouse so that we could extend the garden season. With the limited funding of the first session, we decided to reallocate the funds that we had saved to build a small outdoor tool shed and rather settle for a cheaper, small but multifunctional 5-square meter greenhouse that could work as a shed during the winter months. As the ambition level of the project increased, we are currently looking to hire an architect to design a greenhouse that can provide better storage opportunities and help us activate the community year-round.

Recently, a comment that came up from various of the youth participants as they were doing the Place Game was wanting to add more colors and flowers. We took the youth up on their placemaking idea, went to a garden center and picked out perennial flowers, and built a flower bed. In addition to the instant gratification of making a tangible improvement to the space, it also helped define the place identity. By having two colorful flower beds at the entrance, we hoped to signal to the public that this was a place where they were welcome.

Building on our experience from Sjakkplassen, we have been careful to document these processes and gathered data on the increasing popularity of the community garden and the successful events as we have gone along, building a strong relationship with the local authorities and making it easier for them to formally and informally support this placemaking initiative.

4.3.2 Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper at Linderud Manor

As another local example of experimenting with lighter, quicker, cheaper installations, Nabolagshager has worked with partners in the much larger community garden space at Linderud Manor to do extensive testing over two seasons to find the most functional spots for seating arrangements. Together with youth hired from the local high school, we used hay bales as temporary seating arrangements, and along the way, a wide range of community members gave us their input as they tested different seating configurations.

The temporary hay bales gave us people’s time and attention, soliciting input and building local buy-in for the space. By the time the hay bales were replaced by semipermanent and sturdy wooden furniture made of recycled wood, the community had been active in the space for over a year, and the early critics (some of whom initially wanted the whole area to be cultivated) had been convinced about the need for a more permanent social area.

Having followed the evolution of urban agriculture in Oslo since its renaissance about a decade ago, it has been exciting to see how it has morphed, pivoted, and taken different forms according to the people who are involved. The public sector, especially in larger cities such as Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim, has made significant strides toward including urban agriculture in their other policies and sectoral plans, including urban planning, public health, education, and many other fields.

At the same time, the project lifecycle of an urban agriculture project is remarkably short. Very few projects live longer than a couple of years, and very often the person who initiated the project ends up abandoning the ship, either because they take on all the work and responsibilities or because of challenges in mobilizing the wider community.

By looking to placemaking practitioners, networking with them, and learning from their toolboxes, practices, and examples, urban farmers can help generate projects that are more resilient, last longer, and have stronger community impacts than if the urban farmer had only looked to their green-thumbed peers for inspiration.