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--- groworld_vegetal_culture [2013-01-25 07:00] – [GroWorld: Experiments in vegetal culture] maja
+++ groworld_vegetal_culture [2013-01-25 07:21] – nik
@@ Line 117: / Line 117: @@
 Gardening can be a purposeful cultivation of plants as food and medicine. It can also be a meditative activity that allows us to contemplate the effects of our actions on our immediate surroundings. Alternatively, gardening can become a collective endeavour that brings communities together to resist monocultural hegemony. Gardening is humanity’s most direct hand-to-leaf interaction with living plants. In groWorld, gardening has taken on all of these dimensions – growing food, meditating, and building a community; whether through growing plants on windowsills, rooftops, back-yards, church yards, unused lots or public parks. To create urban gardens groWorld follows permaculture principles, specifically focusing on the techniques of permaculture guilds and companion planting (Holmgren, 2002). These techniques are based on creating permanent, self-sustaining gardens through “collaborations” between individual plants. Guild gardening is advantageous in urban settings, where it is used to grow a variety of species in small spaces and keep scarce soil fertile for as long as possible. In Brussels, FoAM's experiments focused on medicinal plant guilds that can thrive on roofs and balconies, including native fennel, wormwood and nasturtium. In Amsterdam, FoAM engages local communities in redesigning church gardens to form edible parks, centred around hardy native plants – the guilds of raspberries, marigolds, garlic and many other common edibles.
-groWorld’s vision of urban gardening doesn’t stop at fenced-off back-yards and allotments, but sees cities as continuous green passages from industrial to vegetal culture. For nearly ten years, groWorld’s gardeners have been spreading and harvesting native flora in industrial zones, city centres and abandoned lots – in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK and Australia. We share the views of Urbanibalism that “the city should become a natural source of food and a place for diverse forms of life that grow autonomously from any planned city ecology. The city becomes a spontaneous convivium” (Maas and Pasquinelli, Retrieved 2010).
+groWorld’s vision of urban gardening doesn’t stop at fenced-off back-yards and allotments, it sees cities as continuous green passages from industrial to vegetal culture. Since the begining of the millenium, groWorld’s gardeners have been spreading and harvesting native flora in industrial zones, city centres and abandoned lots – in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK and Australia. We share the views of Urbanibalism that “the city should become a natural source of food and a place for diverse forms of life that grow autonomously from any planned city ecology. The city becomes a spontaneous convivium” (Maas and Pasquinelli, Retrieved 2010).
 Even though postindustrial cities have the potential to become spontaneous conviviums, consumer culture, privatisation of public spaces and propagation of indoor entertainment have taken many a citizen away from the vibrant freshness and wind-blown vigour of urban gardens and parks. Some city-grown children don’t know that meat was once the living flesh of animals; many urbanite adults don’t recognise edible plants growing under their feet. To assist these people with spotting and sharing information about food sources that surround them, FoAM in Amsterdam developed Boskoi, an interactive survival guide for urban foragers equipped with mobile phones. The Boskoi app displays edible species in an area, accompanied by expert advice from seasoned gardeners and botanists. With the assistance of Boskoi, even a novice forager can stroll through the city after work and casually collect herbs, fruits or vegetables to add to their dinner.