Ego-gardens and shared space

I have a thesis: Ego-gardens provide more social life than shared green spaces. Sounds absurd, right? So now that spring has really taken hold, I have set myself to examine whether this is true – you know, studied in a pocket philosophical sense within walking distance of my home.

I am so privileged to live in an area in Copenhagen filled with green and little gardens. As an opening manoeuvre, I just have to stick my neck out over the balcony and lurk a little on the neighbors. From here I can see women on their knees with hoe and plants ready, while their husbands attend the annual spring ritual with a nice cold beer eagerly waiting by the barbeque. In all the small gardens connected to a ground floor apartment it thrives and flourishes. The large common lawn beside the little kitchen gardens - a relic from a time when the local bunker was shut down – is, however, only inhabited by a single, miserable looking tree, a bunch of creepy city pigeons and a huge pile of dog shit. The characteristics are clear: Flower party vs. a flat lawn, though sometimes spontaneously used for a game of soccer.

Originally 'my' building here on Amagerbro shared the apartment on the ground floor and it’s garden, kitchen and housemaid, who took care of the officials and military personnel of higher rank, who resided the house. But after the kitchen closed and the ground floor apartment turned into normal housing, the garden was made part of the private luxury. The owners nearest to the earth got exclusive rights to use the gardens as a form of compensation for the balconies the other apartments had benefited from since the house was constructed – fairness indeed.

Eco-gardens in the year 2010
As you might have read in the magazine KBH from March (2010), ego-gardens are still in focus. Today, the gardens are used as a mediator between different population groups and as a creator of urban life crossing social barriers. The sketch proposal for urban renewal of the old detention institution Sundholm on Amager (close to the new Ørestad North’s deafening lack of green spaces) from Bertelsen & Schleswig Architects shows a number of so-called pixi gardens; utility gardens allocated and cared for by individual residents as to large common areas maintained by communal gardeners.

The difference between the old and the new leisure stamps is that the gardens in Sundholm is placed publicly cut off from the house facades and hence from the residents direct access between the home and the garden. Unlike the old parcel-like conditions, private life is now cultivated in public. A place where we can all come together.

The new - or at least guaranteed different – garden life is maybe best portrayed in the way we relax outdoors. A garden directly connected to the home also means recreation in the private sphere as an outdoor extension of our comfortable and protective framework as a place where we can cultivate ourselves, almost without having to adjust to a life with other people.
From a public point of view the garden is a facility located in a gray area between a full common area and a private garden, where you have to deal with other people when you stroll through the open area to your little garden and when by passers stop and chatter with the happy owner of the garden – as intended in the Sundholm-town plan.

Shared space is created in private?
One can argue that a citizen in the city must adjust to sharing space with his or her neighbors. And the interest in the new gardens have also proved overwhelming. The new garden association Amager Fælleds Økohaver have had to close their waiting list even before the gardens are built. And the waiting list for Ørestad Urban Gardens is interminable, just as the onslaught on the established allotments have made it possible to sell 10 m2 and a rotten shed for more than a million kroner.

But I also, unfortunately, see a great number of areas where the shared, public life is not flourishing, paradoxically, despite the common facilities. Several associations in my neighborhood has chosen not to allow the ground floor apartments to have exclusive rights to the gardens as a misguided interpretation of the notion of ‘equal rights for all'. The result is that they are left as blind, unused spots in the city. A clear sign that even city dwellers can get enough of the common space when the leisure time is cared for.

The common life bloom and grow as long as we can plant a hedge between yours and mine. But once we all have to share on equal terms, the ownership feeling and the urge to use the small pockets often seems to disappear - paradoxically.