Around the size of a soccer field in Berlin’s eastern Moritzplatz district, Prinzessinnengarten is more than just an urban vegetable garden created on wasteland.
More than a community allotment, Prinzessinnengarten is a self-funded cafe and organic edible haven for city dwellers. Diners sit at tables built from crates and eat meals prepared with produce grown on site.
The vision was created several years ago by Robert Shaw (documentary film maker) and Marco Clausen (ex barman) who saw potential in derelict city blocks in Berlin’s city centre. While neither had extensive growing experience, they did have a vision.
This bombed-out 6000sqm space in Moritplatz (East Berlin) is flanked by a busy roundabout and subway exits, surrounded by parking lots, disused land and concrete buildings.
When we visited last month, at first glance it is an undesirable location, uninviting and rough.
Yet behind tall wire fencing, through the urban billboards and dense vines, is a hive of growing activity. Complete with beehive and a masse of compost nooks and upcycled crannies, food is grown organically, prepared and sold – whether as seedlings, fresh produce or in the garden cafe/bar. Singularly, the garden would have struggled to survive yet with all facets working in unison, plus huge numbers of local volunteers wanting to dig their toes in earth and chat over the chives, it is possible.
This garden can be described as a transportable organic vegetable plot. Seedlings grow in raised beds, modified Tetra Paks, rice bags, plastic tubs and pallet gardens, ready to move to a new location should urban development calls. It has the potential to be picked up and moved-on at any given notice. Shipping containers act as make-shift stalls, food crates are perfectly stacked – avoiding the need to grow beneath ground level, drums collect rain water and irrigation hoses snake across the landscape.
The land is leased from the city, but there is no public funding for this project.
While scheduled opening for the spring season was just days AFTER our visit, the lot was quietly humming. It isn’t the prettiest garden, but it ‘s built to be productive, not pretty…and if I may say, the most progressive inner city project I’ve set my eyes on to date.
In full flight, the community is encouraged to be hands on but nobody owns their own garden bed at the Prinzessinnengarten. The community spirit is alive: a place to learn, talk, share and mix with other cultures and generations – a social experiment to some degree, an instrument to bring people together with a common edible garden cause.
There are around 500 different species grown; from root vegetables to greens, herbs to blossoms of flowers.
Makes you think. Well, it made me think. Not content to be an organic edible allotment, it took advantage and made sense of a useless, abandoned city block. It brought life to a dull, industrialized corner of suburbia; it brought the community together; and it was self sufficient – both financially and in growing terms.
With the building intensity in Auckland, as an example, who would be willing to try this? A glorious, generous space that cuts through the damnation of the commercialized, rabbit-hutch housing projects. And, with only the guarantee of a 12 month lease, the ability to move and morph into another part of the city at a moments notice.
