Do you still feel responsible for the city? As a consumer you probably don’t. In the New West borough of Amsterdam, there is a special, communal orchard, where Cascoland and local residents discover together how to sustainably steward a piece of urban land, and how to harvest the fruits together.
The communal orchard on the Van Moerkerkenstraat is a stepping stone for designing and exploring a self-organised social system, a commons. During Joint Orchard, Flourishing Neighbourhood, participants get a glimpse of commons practices: what does it actually mean to steward a piece of urban land together? How does it feel to care and regenerate? What practices are involved and, above all, why is it such fun?
Cascoland hosts exercises in community life, circularity and democratisation, but with our (your!) feet in the clay: we get to work with sowing, picking, harvesting, preparing and preserving, and with the daily ins and outs of collective orchard stewardship.
Interview
Roel Schoenmakers
What is the place at the Van Moerkerkenstraat all about?
For long there has been a ‘lack of eyes’ in the neighbourhood and around this public space; in the evenings there were- I shall say – undesirable activities taking place around a car park. We proposed to the municipality to remove the car park and turn it into green urban space. We planted an orchard and moved into a manager’s house as a studio and steward space.
Many projects coalesce here, projects about collectively developing public space, about shared stewardship and about circularity. We share the produce of the garden and orchard, we work together with the market to process leftover vegetables and fruit into preserve, and we ferment, we dry and practice food production as a connecting process.
What happens during Common In at the Van Moerkerkenstraat?
In the first place, it is about experiencing how such a common space can work. We want to invite people to join us in gardening, cooking, to get to know and collaborate with local residents and volunteers, but also professionals who work here. We invite people who are looking for a meaningful way to spend their time.
What we want to offer is that you can fully experience how such a place works and how you become part of this shared experience and thus contribute to a healthy and liveable city.
So we are going to practice shared stewardship?
What is interesting is that municipal agencies uses criteria that public green spaces have to meet. If you tell them: ‘We’re just going to manage this public green space in an organised way with local residents’, it’s quite a surprising approach for civil servants. Here, we try to demonstrate how you can hand over some of the responsibility to residents. But we are by no means the only place in Amsterdam where people deal with their city in a much more democratic manner.
Biography
Cascoland is an international network of designers, visual artists, performers and academics based in Amsterdam. Cascoland projects are initiated by Fiona de Bell and Roel Schoenmakers and executed with multi-disciplinary teams of creatives.
Cascoland projects/interventions/artworks are tools to be used by participants and audiences rather than artworks to be exhibited. Cascoland interventions aim to challenge and change perceptions and create awareness, not only within communities of participants and audiences, but with planners, designers, organisations and authorities as well.
Cascoland promotes a sustainable use of spaces, skills and resources, empowerment of communities and implementation of innovative social & lo-tek solutions addressing local needs. Our projects aim at bottom-up development and shared ownership of public spaces and a re-valuation of the commons through new democratic experiments based on an intrinsic knowledge of the past.