Rethinking Urban Domestic Gardens

Abstract

Aligning the urban environment to concrete urban processes, increasing the liveability, is one of the major challenges urban planners are facing. Adapting the built-environment to cope with soil sealing, climate change, the densification of cities with the ‘compact city’ concept and other urban demands, constantly pressure the quality of urban environment. Being part of the Dutch building culture for centuries, urban domestic gardens have played a significant (spatial) role in Dutch cities, taking up a significant part of the urban environment, and providing a private outdoor space for residents. The ongoing urban processes can or will affect the role urban domestic gardens play and how they are being used or implemented into the urban environment. For this research, the neighbourhood the Tarwewijk in Rotterdam has been used to investigate and explore how urban domestic gardens can contribute to a more liveable urban environment through a sustainable urban regeneration, in response to concrete urban demands. The research shows that rethinking the implementation of urban domestic gardens leads to an increase of the liveability in the Tarwewijk, by using specific, transferable values to improve the quality of the public spaces and buildings. Transferring the values related to eating, learning, working, playing and meeting from the social environment, and greening, cooling and infiltrating from the physical environment into public spaces increase the accessibility to values of gardens, without the need to provide urban domestic gardens to every single household, taking up valuable space in existing cities. It also shows that the regeneration of urban domestic gardens to semi-private shared gardens serve as a mechanism for the densification and diversification of the built environment, improving urban structures and physical forms, with related social processes and liveability.