I really wanted to do a Community Garden for the outside space at 1948. Of course they didn't go fot it but this is what I put in the first presentation at Nike :
Background
Evolutionary psychologists talk of a concept called domain mismatch – this idea deals with the distance an organism moves from its intended environment and ultimately, with a terminal point. A place in which it ceases to be able to exist.
People are ultimately highly adaptable; we find ourselves concentrated in cities, for economic reasons, for cultural enrichment and for social contact. However, within this idea of domain mismatch, cities can seem inherently hostile places.
At their worst, they conspire to isolate us from each other; pollution and interpersonal hostility are rife, social divisions can be writ large. Our urban dystopia is a preferred hobby horse of the press at the moment – ‘lets all move to the country and fence off the scourge of the hoody!’
In this collective pessimism, we can forget that cities enthral us, their energy inspires us; they are exciting and dynamic places that showcase the best of what we are capable of.
Carving out connections with those around us, reclaiming space and hope within the city is the tonic to cope with the nay-sayers and doom-mongers.
But it isn’t always easy.
The Community
This theme of community can seem vague and illusory, the kind of word bandied about by politicians.
But as the world gets smaller, as populations move and migrate, as trends are homogenised and distributed in the blink of an eye, more and more people are stopping to take stock of what is happening on their doorsteps.
Community becomes all the more important when times are tough; it is no coincidence that the authorities are encouraging responsibility at a local level (recycling, crime prevention), that companies are investing at the grass roots (supporting schools, bike to work schemes) and that supporting local businesses and suppliers has becoming a defining theme of how we behave as consumers – from restaurants, to supermarkets, to design and fashion.
A Community Garden
Community gardens have always been at the crux of all these themes: whether in post-war Britain, encouraging shared food production: ‘digging for victory’ or in run down districts of New York as a means of social cohesion, fun and beatification.
Community gardens are emblematic of the power of local communities to transcend dark economic times, to reclaim power over the hostile effects of the city and to work together to put something back into the area they live in.
For Shoreditch, where the idea of urban regeneration is evident in every reclaimed industrial space, in the cultural energy coursing through its streets; but also where the money of the city butts heads with the history of the East End, where the tension between the media denizens and long time residents occasionally explodes, a garden has the potential to resolve these forces for the community good.
Nike’s Community Garden
Taking the New York example, the role of Community Gardens, from Bushwick to the Bronx reflects the story of a city working at a neighbourhood level – a localised focus on improving the urban environment, having and sharing fun and stepping outside the madness of the streets for a moment.
The story of community gardens in New York is an inspirational one – starting from the "benign neglect” policy of the 1970s that led to the Ghetto-isation of many of New York’s neighbourhoods. This was a policy that saw the wholesale closure of civic buildings, the refusal to prosecute insurance cases of deliberate destruction and the resultant concentration of drug dealing and gangs in the vacuum that was left.
Against this depressing backdrop, ‘Guerrilla gardeners’ would claw back derelict spaces as gardens – nurturing plants, decorating abandoned buildings, hosting Barbeques and playing hand-ball and basketball.
It is no coincidence that the vivid history of block parties parallels community gardens as a means of revitalising a sense of community, or that Kool Herc’s embryonic Hip Hop culture erupted out of the urban spaces of downtrodden New York neighbourhoods.
Indeed, community gardens are not, by definition, earnest and serious places – they are gardens that evolve to reflect the soul of the neighbourhood they occupy, providing a space for creative expression. In New York, this often meant murals and burners from the founding writers of Graf culture; Lee, Dondi, the sound-systems of Bambaataa and the lino of the Rock Steady Crew.
For Nike, there is a perfect synergy between the cultural markers around New York’s community gardens and the inception of a sneaker culture.
At the same time as the first loops and cuts of Hip Hop electrified New York culture, so city kids were laying their hands on College Basketball specific colour-ways of Blazers, Vandals and Dunks (later re-born in the ‘College pack’ retro’s of 2008).
On the basketball courts of East New York, in the community gardens of Harlem, the scarcity of team issue colour-ways was a conduit to instant kudos on the street – a signifier of getting hooked up and an instant status symbol.
These first baby-steps towards today’s ‘Tier Zero’ culture served to cement Nike’s ongoing dominance of the sneaker game – casting it as the brand with an intuitive grasp of the freshest design and savviest collaboration.
Bateman’s Row
Fast forward to the 1948 Pop-up shop and all these themes and ideas converge – a contemporary community garden, of and from the neighbourhood.
This space should be a hidden Oasis to surprise and inspire, a tonic to the gloom of the recession, a community exercise to bring people together and an echo of the driving spirit behind the reinvention of New York (via. The reinvention of Shoreditch).
Contemporary gardens are often sanitised versions of ‘inside space, outside’, utilising a familiar palette of marble, slate and other premium materials to mask the absence of energy, vitality or mystery.
Their neatly appointed modernism is, in its own way, incredibly twee. Like the identikit style bars that sprang up in the late nineties, repetitive motifs are used to fool us into a sense of individuality – all the time within a rigid and prescriptive formula.
Community gardens can scant afford to deploy a monotonous series of props and styling – they are, by definition, spaces that respond to the environment, the culture and the people that surround them.
This, more than anything, is the vision for your space – drawing on the creativity, energy and identity of locals to make a truly unique space and experience.
