Meeting Grounds Reader Four: The Community Garden

“Gardens are collective spaces that are continually shaped, maintained and cared for by their users, particularly over time but also through acts of nurturing and care. Community gardens can therefore be seen as the embodiment of a “place as process”. An ever-shifting constellation of trajectories and possibilities, and a representation of the thrown-togetherness of beings, temporalities, realities and experiences. Their sites provide alternate forms for social relations and introduce more sustainable and ethical forms of living and working together. In turn enriching individual autonomy and community cohesion in the process. They hold the potential to construct new forms of knowledge and participation that are open and non-exclusionary, reflecting locality in all of its multiple and overlapping forms, from residents themselves to local customs, cultures, governances, climates and geographies.”

For the final of its four locations of activation, Meeting Grounds has chosen the community garden, in collaboration with local, community food forest Het Kloosterbos. The Meeting Grounds Reader intends to continue the work of the Meeting Grounds Edition 4 program in exploring the key functions of community gardens in creating vital social and “use” spaces for the city, as well as forming foundations for living and being together based on care methodologies and commoning practices, to understand their value both as physical and symbolic spaces and as sites for the exchange of knowledges, histories and experiences across Eindhoven and beyond.