Cultivating Change

Abstract

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.