A Garden for the Seeds: Housing a Community
×

A Garden for the Seeds: Housing a Community

Signing a Lease for The Green House

Mariana Bilokin

How can a community garden serve as a model for new forms of governance and collaboration within a city? With the site-specific installation The Green House, Ana Bilokin explores how a contractual relationship to land and communal stewardship can bring about new understanding of how cities are regulated, curated and imposed.

Thematic

Professor

Location

Date

Contract and Relationship

Marie-Sophie Banville

Montreal, Qc

May 2020

As illusions of meritocracy crumble, “survival of the fittest” no longer feels like an appropriate way to manage the housing market. Rather than fighting for a place at the top, what would it feel like to participate in the well-being of a living ecosystem? The Green House invites community members to experience an embodied form of collective stewardship. Through the medium of a community garden, the project challenges  values of competition and speculation at several scales. On a practical level, the project facilitates a new collaboration between neighbours, leading to unexpected interactions. It creates a dialogue between the abstract language of legal documents and the sensorial  practice of gardening. The garden  also serves as a microcosm for exploring alternative values on which urban housing systems as a whole can operate. The seeds and plants themselves are the tenants of The Green House. 

1. The framework

The goal of this project is to break down the perceived barriers between the false duality of ‘city’ and ‘nature,’ and to realign financial tools with the human needs they were created to fulfill. Just like housing,, collective food production is an essential resource and a valuable medium for exploring questions such as: 

  • How do we live in a regenerative fashion? 
  • How do we design mechanisms of mutual obligation with the land? 
  • How can a connection with nature facilitate new ways of thinking about housing? 

Cultivating organic matter in the garden allows participants to experience what it is like to respond to the needs of a dynamic system. As the project unfolds, participants would gain an understanding of the challenge of  creating  order out of living matter. They would encounter the problems real estate developers face when  reducing  people’s homes to numbers on a spreadsheet . The reactions of community members on  this project would be crucial in understanding how this framework could function on a larger scale. Is mutual responsibility the best way to ensure the cultivation of (the “right”) plants? Or does vegetable matter flourish and self-regulate when left to grow on its own, weeds and all? 

2. Regulating the urban wilderness

“What does it feel like to participate in the well-being of a living ecosystem?” This is a question that city planners, local governments and real estate developers increasingly need to ask themselves as the planet moves further into the anthropocene. The fate and function of cities is largely in their hands, but their relationship to it is primarily a coercive one. Co-constructed by the forces of finance and legislation, the shape of our urban environment is more than a question of architecture. Its design depends upon the seen and unseen interests that govern these bodies: interests that prioritize the extraction of wealth and resources. Inflexibility in this regard creates friction with the innate material of the city: life itself. In cities built on speculation, tenants find themselves feeling like weeds, striving to survive among the cracks in the infrastructure. 

Rather than repressing it, we must valorize the untameable nature that flourishes in cities  if we aspire to one day resolve  this tension. Through the language of a housing contract and the embodied experience of gardening, The Green House serves as a model for shifting the relationship between regulators and citizens from one that relies on subordination to multiple relationships rooted in the ethos of mutual stewardship.  Each participant in the project is responsible for it insofar as their actions are concerned, as they cannot control the impulses of other participants, whether  human or non-human.  Through this web of  interactions participants and the work mutually  grow. 

3. What does this look like?

The Green House is a participatory, on-site installation that functions much like a community garden. It is, in essence, a designated space for the cultivation of (potentially) edible plants on a collaborative basis. It has two major components: the physical structure and the contract. 

3.A. The structure

Enclosed on five sides by the semipermeable membrane of a chain-link fence, the garden is simultaneously distinct from its environment and embedded within it.  Members of the public can enter the structure , but only if they agree to the terms of the contract that governs it. Once the contract is signed, they are given the code to the combination lock that shuts the entrance. 

While the garden is demarcated by this physical boundary, it shares the same soil as the grass that surrounds it. The scope of the project extends to any interaction that occurs as a result of its presence. Each participant brings their own baggage into the garden, and leaves with at least a bit of soil on their shoes. In this way, the garden is integrated both physically and conceptually into the urban fabric. 

- See Image 1 -

3.B. The contract

Next to the main structure is a small wooden podium with a waterproof touch screen embedded into it. The primary function of the touch screen is to give viewers access to the contract that governs the space. After reading it, participants are prompted  to sign it and enter their email address.An automatic response system will collect the signatures and send them the combination for the lock on the door. The screen also has a secondary function of emphasizing the abstractness of the binary information it contains in contrast to the tangible reality of the garden itself. 

The podium will also be inscribed with a website URL where people can read more about the project, contact the creator of the work with any questions and, most importantly, access the contract remotely. This would benefit both participants who do not have a mobile internet connection and those who may not have otherwise encountered the project in person. Alternatively, participants could also enter a code embedded in the contract along with their signature in order to receive the combination immediately  without requiring access to an email account.

4. Works Cited

  1. Drolet, Catherine. Cities Held Hostage. Directed by Martin Frigon, Film De L’Oeil, 2017.
  2. “Land.” The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery, by John Callcutt, Communities and Local Government Publications, 2007, pp. 136–141.
  3. “The Rights and Politics of Owning the Earth.” Owning the Earth: the Transforming History of Land Ownership, by Andro Linklater, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 25–38.

“The Urbanization of Nature.” City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City, by Maria Kaika, Routledge, 2005, pp. 11–26.

No items found.

About

×
The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary collective that engages with regulations, the rule of law and cultural norms. These engagements reveal, comprehend, play with, subvert, and transcend current ways of understanding and acting in relation to regulatory forces in order to make room for more equitable alternatives. In its attempts to query legal and behavioral urban infrastructures, the ORN specifically deploys art and design practice, culture, and methods along three axes:
Art as Subversion | Intervening in grey areas of regulation
Art as Pedagogy | Making public various forces and forms of influence
Art as Decision-Making | Reorienting modes of knowing and deliberating