Shared residential gardens as regenerative social-ecological landscapes in the Netherlands

Abstract

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. [...]