Naerum Allotment Gardens Denmark
A project that I
have studied as a precedent in the past immediately stuck out to me, when
remembered in the context of community planning, was the Naerum allotment
Gardens of Copenhagen Denmark. I remembered sending it in the group chat that I
have with some former classmates with whom I used to play music and saying,
"Who's up for moving to Denmark and living on this commune". I was
definitely only half joking.
The gardens are
not only an incredible case study in community planning, as a video showing off
the residents of the grounds showed an incredible sense of community through
trade, common sharing practices, and people playing music together at one
another's lots, but it is also a beautiful and evocative design through
rigorous attention to compositional planning and experiential perspectival
moments. This is largely in part to the designer's touch. The project was
planned by the great mid-century landscape architect, Soren Carl Theodor Marius
Sorensen.
Allotment gardens
have been around in the region since medieval times, as they are a sensical,
close-knit community formation that allows for efficient use of land for
individual dwellings to be self-sufficient, and trade goods grown easily around
the neighborhood to round out what cannot be grown on the individual plots.
Naerum was established, with its signature elliptical layout, in 1948. This
made sense in post-war Europe, as many of the communities in the area were
rebuilding and reestablishing themselves. This allowed for residents to form a
close-knit, sustainable community in hard times of reconstruction across
Europe. The gardens are planned for pedestrians, as there is little vehicular
access within the layout. These design decisions force encounter and
connectivity as residents maneuver around the grounds. though there are no
individual drives, and much of the grounds consist of common space, privacy is
established through signature dense hedge rows that visually solidify the
elliptical and amorphous shape of each of the plots.
It is such a
shame looking at how beautiful and effective this sort of project is when
imagining feasibility here in the States. We far too often as a culture are
ready to trade every bit of communal connectivity and social well-being in the
name of retaining vast plots of private property that we can access after a
long drive down the driveway in our sports utility vehicles. We have
figureheads like Ford and McCarthy to blame for this. It is almost comical to
those of us who are educated in design, especially design for people in my two
backgrounds of architecture and landscape architecture, that people are so
averse to something like this that, given the chance, could very likely improve
the quality of life for so many in our country. We have been conditioned that
American conservative ideologies and the "good old days of rugged
individualism" are all that we should strive for. Any projects like these
allotment gardens are "spitting in the face of our freedom and
individuality" and are just being pushed by those "left-wing
commies". Well, we left-wing commies just want a community to be able to
exist in our country that can be equitable, serve all, and, well, actually be a
community rather than sever splinter families living distanced enough to never
have to speak to or see one another.
These allotment gardens
are a beautiful way to possibly achieve something like this. They are
sophisticated looking enough to belong in a trendy burrow of New York, and
simple and rugged enough to be realistically placed in the poor south. Could
you see this working in the rural South?
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