How do shared residential gardens change over time, and what can these changes teach us about designing spaces for collective life? This book explores these questions through an in-depth study of shared gardens as lived, negotiated, and evolving landscapes.
Grounded in long-term, on-site research, the dissertation approaches shared residential gardens as residential commons: spaces shaped by design intentions, everyday use, care, and collective governance. Adopting an ethnographic perspective within landscape architecture, it attends to small-scale transformations, incremental adjustments, and moments of negotiation through which gardens are continuously reinterpreted and reshaped by human and non-human actors alike.
Using landscape transformation as an analytical lens, the research examines how spatial composition, social-ecological practices, and governance arrangements interact over time. Shared gardens are treated as landscape laboratories in which patterns of change can be observed, traced, and reflected upon, revealing how design and governance co-evolve in practice. The study is based on fourteen shared gardens in the EVA-Lanxmeer neighbourhood in Culemborg, the Netherlands, and is complemented by two comparative cases: De Kersentuin in Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht, and Vrijburcht on Steigereiland, Amsterdam, totalling twenty-three shared gardens.
The findings show that the long-term quality of shared residential gardens depends less on fixed design solutions than on the capacity of spatial frameworks and collectively negotiated rules to accommodate change. Rather than treating design and governance as separate domains, this book understands them as interrelated and reflective practices that continually inform and reshape one another. In doing so, it positions landscape architecture as a time-based and relational discipline, offering insights for researchers and practitioners engaged with collective spaces and everyday landscapes.

Amid growing urban challenges, designers must navigate the interplay of social, ecological, and spatial systems. Spatial design pedagogy can address this need by fostering hands-on, real-world experiences that encourage collaboration, critical and creative thinking, and a deep appreciation for the existing values of a site. This contribution reflects on two teaching experiences within TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, focusing on interstitial spaces in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The course On Site: Landscape Architectonic Explorations engages master’s students from Landscape Architecture, Urbanism, and Architecture, emphasising interdisciplinary collaboration to develop inventive analyses through immersive experiences and a design proposal using minimal interventions. In 2023, students examined Land van Chabot, a fragmented polder landscape once immortalised by painter Henk Chabot (1894–1949), now redefined by an emerging motorway, the recreational corridor of the river Rotte, and the suburbs. In 2024, they focused on Stadspark-West, a network of programmed and leftover green spaces interwoven with dense urban infrastructure. Both experiences prioritised immersive fieldwork and direct stakeholder engagement with local associations, the municipality, and human and non-human residents, users, and passers-by. While addressing the sites’ dissonant challenges, students uncovered their tangible and intangible qualities. Ephemeral interventions exposed the audience to the existing qualities and potential futures of the site, showcasing the students’ site interpretations and design proposals, but most importantly providing a vehicle to experience the site. This approach demonstrates the transformative potential of reframing urban fringes as laboratories for experimentation, from which meaningful places can emerge.

Urban landscapes are increasingly understood as social-ecological systems, where social and ecological processes operate in complex interaction (Berkes & Folke, 1998; Colding & Barthel, 2019). Addressing the complexities of social systems alongside ecological ones is essential to achieving genuinely sustainable outcomes (De Block & Vicenzotti, 2018). This perspective has influenced how we conceive residential neighbourhoods, encouraging more inclusive spaces in both social and ecological spheres. However, the long-term viability of these social-ecologically inclusive neighbourhoods depends not only on spatial design but also on the governance structures that sustain them.

In several pioneering Dutch residential projects, community-led governance has played a pivotal role in the realisation and maintenance of public and semi-public spaces, shaping social interactions and ensuring access to green spaces while integrating ecological principles into daily urban life. However, tensions arise between actors across public, private, and collectively owned areas, where boundaries are continually negotiated.

This study examines two Dutch examples – Lanxmeer (Culemborg) and Kersentuin (Utrecht) – both established planned neighbourhoods where spatial structure and governance models interact to shape the urban environment. While these projects incorporate public, shared, and private green spaces within a coherent urban fabric, their governance relies on a distributed model involving residents, cooperatives, and municipal bodies. Through detailed field observations and interviews with residents and community representatives, this study analyses the governance structure, key actors, and interactions that determine how these spaces are managed over time.

The discussion critically assesses how spatial design enables or hinders governance viability, highlighting cases where community agency enhances social-ecological inclusivity, as well as instances where governance challenges emerge. Specific tensions include conflicts over land use and accessibility, spatial appropriation, and the negotiation of ecological ideals with individual interests. These dynamics are illustrated through diagrams, satellite images, photographs, and collages, providing a spatial reading of governance practices in action.

By linking urban design plans to governance realities, this study contributes to broader discussions on the role of spatial design in enabling community-led urban management. It raises key questions about how public and semi-public spaces can remain inclusive, adaptable, and ecologically responsive over time, offering insights for the future design and governance of socially and ecologically integrated neighbourhoods.

The human-nature divide has long contributed to the depletion of resources and habitats. Embracing the human-nature interweaving is key to promoting regenerative landscapes for the cities of the future. It is necessary to understand how social processes operate in combination with ecological processes in urban environments from a landscape architecture perspective. In that regard, this work investigates the social-ecological influences acting in residential gardens. It focuses on gardens that 1) are shared among dwellers who self-govern their spaces and resources, and 2) are conceived by bottom-up actions and maintained by community efforts. These gardens are stages and catalysts of complex and continuous processes of negotiation between humans and non-humans actors/factors, in which neither design nor governance could be understood in isolation. Comparing multiple case studies in the Netherlands, this research adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary, and iterative approach to investigate garden design and governance across time and scales. Data is collected through semi-structured interviews with key informants, (participant) observations, and desk research – comprising aerial photos, cadastral maps, design plans, and written regulations. Compositional design analysis (program, image, spatial and basic form) is combined with ethnographic coding and governance analysis – concentrated on mapping stakeholders’ multi-level relationships, spatial ownership and stewardship, as well as changes over time. Overall, this work contributes to society, academia and professional practice by discussing how a joint investigation of garden design and governance can support practitioners, stakeholders and local communities in conceiving regenerative urban landscapes, considering social and ecological processes as equally important dimensions. [...]

De Braziliaanse semi-aride provincie Ceará kampt met terugkerende perioden van droogte. In het verleden zijn in de rivier Jaguaribe stuwdammen aangelegd om drinkwater aan de stedelijke en industriële gebieden aan de kust te kunnen leveren. Dit leidde tot ruimtelijke en sociale problemen. Om de inwoners van Jaguaribara van water te voorzien wordt in dit afstudeervoorstel een nieuw watersysteem geïntroduceerd op basis van het lokale gebruik van water en het idee van 'natheid'. Elke plek op aarde kent een bepaalde mate van natheid. […]

Due to the current housing provision policy for low-income houses in Brazil, a large amount of new houses are being built. These constructions comply with a list of requirements provided by the government and follow the typological patterns arising in the market, but adapted to smaller dimensions and funding. The families benefited receive aid from the government and constitute a new social class, of which little is known about their needs and perspectives of value. Thus, it is necessary to grasp the information about their needs in order to define what adds value for them and therefore improve the projects, which could be better suited to the needs of its end users. In that manner, this paper aims to improve a quantitative technique for capturing the needs of the end users of low-income housing by setting the value perceived by them. First, an existing questionnaire based on the middle class was adapted to the public of low-income housing. Subsequently, the questionnaire was tested, and the tests showed that respondents had difficulty in giving an answer in the appropriate format. Thus, a visual device was created to facilitate the process and then a new test was made. Changes in the data collection technique showed a better understanding of the questions by the respondents, an increase in the speed of application and, consequently, reduced the total amount of time spent in the application of the questionnaire. Thus, the quantitative technique for capturing value from residents of low-income housing has been improved, allowing its application in a large scale and thereby identifying the points that generate value for the research's target audience.

No Brasil, as últimas décadas assistiram à introdução do setor privado nas políticas de provisão habitacional. Nesse novo cenário, o poder público reduziu sua participação no processo, limitando-se à figura de facilitador, através da concessão de crédito para construção e obtenção de moradia; contexto este no qual se insere o Programa Minha Casa, Minha Vida (PMCMV). Paralelamente, as pesquisas de avaliação de pós-ocupação vêm conquistando cada vez mais destaque no diagnóstico da produção habitacional no Brasil, contribuindo com informações essenciais para retroalimentar o processo de projeto e de construção e promover a melhoria da qualidade dos ambientes construídos, gerando maior valor para os clientes. Dentro deste contexto, a pesquisa da qual se trata este trabalho tem por objetivo avaliar a qualidade dos produtos entregues do PMCMV no estado do Ceará, Brasil, a partir de pesquisa de satisfação com os usuários finais. Para tanto, o estudo classifica-se como levantamento (survey) e utiliza aplicação de questionário estruturado, aplicado face a face, como método de coleta de dados. Primeiramente, foi definida a amostra de 364 unidades, divididas entre 23 empreendimentos, localizadas nas cidades: Fortaleza, Aquiraz, Caucaia, Horizonte, Maracanaú, Maranguape, Itaitinga, Cascavel, Juazeiro do Norte e Sobral. Após realizações de testes do questionário, seguiu-se com sua aplicação oficial entre os dias 07 e 10 de fevereiro de 2014. Com a finalização das aplicações dos questionários, os dados foram organizados e analisados. Os resultados apresentam o perfil dos beneficiados pelo PMCMV no estado e os itens de maior satisfação e insatisfação dos usuários com relação à localização do empreendimento, à área coletiva e à unidade habitacional propriamente dita. Com essa pesquisa, esperase contribuir com a retroalimentação de projetos de habitação de interesse social no Brasil, visando ao aumento da qualidade dos novos produtos. O trabalho apresenta os resultados da fase quantitativa de um projeto de pesquisa quali-quanti financiado pelo Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).