Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the instrument of the intercultural garden as a tool for the facilitation of integration, for the sharing of experiences, for the construction of common identity. The intercultural gardens are places where it is possible to gain a small part of your own house in a new homeland.

Paper long abstract:

The city, even in the new planning, keeps into itself several problems, among which some are related to a distance between the real needs of citizens and planning. This detachment usually leads to a sense of non identification with places, with the clear consequence of degradation and insecurity.

Nevertheless, in the contemporary city, there still exists a space between universal and particular, open to the transformation processes, in which the subject, individual and collective, can practice positive actions of appropriation. Niches continuously produced by the evolutionary process of the city exist, spaces not codified into the global market. These interstitial spaces naturally accommodate the diversity offering themselves as spaces of the possibility, places of mediation in the construction of the citizenship processes.

This paper examines the instrument of the intercultural garden as a tool for the facilitation of integration, for the sharing of experiences, for the construction of common identity and belonging. The intercultural gardens are places where it is possible to gain a small part of your own house in a new homeland. Places where you can work on a common ground and gather together during the year the fruits of collaboration.

Through the analysis of symbolic examples, as the Community Gardens of Lower East Side in Manhattan, the Interkulturelle Gärten in Berlin and Les Jardins portagés in Paris, the paper will focus on which are the physical transformations on space that represent positive acts of spatial reappropriation capable of establishing a sense of community, sharing and integration.