Urban community gardens

Following on from the preliminary work of former head of department Prof. Maria Spitthöver and building on the basic research for the exhibition "The Productive City - Carrot City" from 2010, a research focus on urban community gardens is being established at the department, which deals with the question of what specific scientific and practical planning contribution landscape architecture can make to this topic.

The Wiener Straße self-harvest garden in Kassel was initiated as a practical project by Prof. Spitthöver in 2006 and subsequently supervised by the Department of Open Space Planning for 13 years. At the start of the 2018 gardening season, the project's harvesters founded the "Selbsternteacker Wiener Str. Kassel e.V." association with the support of the Department. The continuation of the student project by the association establishes the self-harvesting project as an important location for urban community gardens in Kassel's Nordstadt district.

Research assistant Ella von der Haide has been building up a research focus on urban gardens at the Department of Open Space Planning as part of her dissertation and numerous studies and film works since summer 2014.

In January 2013, a catalog of the exhibition section "The Productive City" was published online, showing urban agriculture projects from Munich and Berlin.

On May 24, 2013, Jeffrey Hou from the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) gave a guest lecture at the Technical University of Munich on the topic of "Urban Gardening as Insurgeant Placemaking" at the invitation of Stefanie Hennecke and Ella von der Haide

On June 27 and 28, 2013, the conference " Freiraum" was held. June 2013, the conference "Open Space Planning and Urban Community Gardens: Cooperation in Sight?" was held by Stefanie Hennecke, Ella von der Haide and Christa Müller at the Technical University of Munich and addressed the question of cooperation between municipal administration and participatory initiatives.