Compared to public greenspaces, private greenspaces seem to function similarly as a way to escape the general stress and chaos of life and provide a green sanctuary for city dwellers, but have some significant differences as well. To find these similarities and differences, we visited public greenspaces in two very different areas of town. The first was the infamous district of Christiania, know for its open policies toward drugs as well as its communal style of governing and dwelling. It is also known for its large amounts of private and communal green spaces.
We later visited a much less well known allotment garden in the neighborhood of Fredericksberg. Here we saw the gardens of very different, more controlled and regulated system. There seemed to be some commonalities between these two types of gardens that revealed how private gardens differ from the public gardens that we viewed yesterday.
The most obvious of these differences seems to be in scale. While the public gardens must accommodate many people at one time, the private gardens only really need to be able to be large enough to fit the owners of the space, and occasionally a handful of guests. Some of the spaces at Christiania were quite small, such as the several compact personal greenhouses, and some small plots directly in front of or beside the houses. At the allotment garden, the same was seen, as the space was compact and intimate. As the private gardens we saw today do not have a professional staff of gardeners tending to them, it is understandable that the are only as big as they need to be, in order to prevent the owners from being overwhelmed with more space and upkeep work than they can handle.
In addition to being smaller, the private plots we saw seemed to be much cleaner that the public ones, probably for the reason that the owners must do the work in the gardens instead of having hired help. Most of the public parks we have visited do not seem particularly dirty, but there were some bits of trash here and there in all of the parks. This seems to be the product of a sense of responsibility that comes from feeling ownership. The people in the private plots have more control over how they're spaces are used, and also are more motivated to keep there spaces clean because no one else will do it for them.
The private gardens also seem to be much more personalized, as the public parks also need to accommodate for many different types of people who likely want to use the space in a wide variety of ways. In them, the owners of these spaces seem to be able to exercise their creativity and design the gardens exactly the way they want to to serve their particular wants and needs. In Christiania, many unique and unusual styles of design for the spaces can be seen, because the people of these plots are able to create and maintain them in any fashion they desire, including with strange aesthetics of reused toys and handmade designs. The small gardens varied quite a bit within the community, some with large open spaces and playhouses for children, others with spaces for vegetables, some dense with thick natural brush, and others well manicured with flowers and ornamental plants. In the private allotment garden that we had the opportunity to see, there seemed to also be a lot of personalization. The man who rents the space shared with us the story of how he acquired the garden in a very different state, when it had many bushes. He didn't like the way it looked, so he has since dug up every bit of the land and repurposed it to make it work better visually and functionally for him. He has added a grill, a patio area, many plants as well as an addition onto the historic small building that was already in the space.
No comments:
Post a Comment