Flowering City

Mapping commons. A new standard tool for citizen involvement in greening of public green areas. An interactive web site www.blomstrendeby.dk [2012–2016], where you directly could adopt public beds for flowers and gardening.

A kinder-garden adopts a bed.

This initiative is part of what we call main-streaming grass-root concepts. In this case it started with seed bombs inspired by the Guerrilla Gardening movement.

The fact, that we work with children, urges us to try to assure the success rate as high as possible.

Mental and physical health.

In this case we combined the knowledge of spreading flower seeds in the city with the knowledge, that the communal gardeners presented us for the option to cultivate flowers on the earth squares around the street trees. The alternative would have been a gravel layer around the trees to easy maintain.

Low maintenance bed (sure?) against high biodiversity bed.

In the course of 4 years we created a web-based tool to adopt 70 public beds as a pilot project. This, as a collaboration with the municipality of CPH and the local environment work in Vesterbro. The project started in 2012 as part of the local environment and nature workshop Træstubben in Vesterbro.

The website visualised all the beds and by clicking to ikons on empty beds, you could easily log in and adopt a bed:

https://www.opendata.dk/city-of-copenhagen/blomstrende-by-bede

In 2016 we were working to upgrade the tool with access and mapping of beds in other areas of Copenhagen without break through. Never the less the communal opendatamap still shows the once accessible beds.

Actually there a still possibilities to arrange plants on common ground — se the manual fortovshaver.

The access and the keeping of earth surface around the street trees increases:

• Biodiversity in cities
• Water uptake
• Beside these solutions the social and even therapeutic (ref. Mændenes hjem) level of having flowers in the city contributes to lower stress and friendly neighborhood chats — both on social media and directly on street level.

All signs and fences are made of local recycled materials.

The project opens up for many seasonal cooperations, partnerships, events and media publications:

• build signs and fences
• Learning about biodiversity
• Schools and institutions adopting beds
• Cross over activities
• Kick off arrangements with sharing of seeds and gardening tools
• Seed harvest
• Publications — “Spis din By — spiselig ukrudt på Vesterbro” — edible weeds in the city.

Seeds in hands.

Event — Eat you City — in collaboration with Byhøst and as follow up of the mentioned publication about edible weeds in the city.

Bed foran Vesterbro Kulturhus engang.

alt godt lever

igen og igen