CASE STUDY
Jardin Citoyen de Grasse
Social Design
Context
The City of Grasse and the territory of the Pays de Grasse Urban Community (CAPG) are committed to nature. "The Prospective Factory," an initiative carried out in the fall of 2022 with the support of national agencies, asked the following question: Nature in priority inner-city: what levers for ecological transition, employment, social and territorial cohesion? Since 2021 the Territorial Food Plan of the CAPG (PAT) has been advocating for healthy eating, an organized fight against food insecurity, a food sovereignty logic and an active strategy of educating the population on the challenges of sustainable development. Interested in this idea of a community garden located in the city center, originally supported by the Citizens Council in 2014, the PAT along with the Social & Solidarity Economy service and the Inner City Policy service relaunched the project in the fall of 2023 in collaboration with Laetitia Wolff and Besign School.
Challenge
How might we codesign a "flagship" green space in Grasse that can enrich city center residents through social cohesion and education, while promoting a sustainable lifestyle.
How can we use nature as a means of strengthening participation of residents in public life? How can we support the Citizens' Council in conceptualizing this new garden, creating synergies, and organizing residents' governance around a common project that meets multiple, sometimes contradictory, expectations?
Solution
As part of a partnership-based course led by Laetitia Wolff, the 9 international students from Besign School led the creation of the community garden project and helped clear the way, design, imagine, engage, and begin to identify the project's key stakeholders. They used participatory design methods to propose an operational garden plan intended as a living space, fighting urban heat island effect, one that fosters as a priority intergenerational social connection before becoming a real place for food production. They designed on-site, recycled furniture to make a place for sharing, composting bins and instructional guide, and devised learning programs, as well as a roadmap in cooperation with members of the Citizens' Council, some local social associations, as well as children from the Gambetta nursery school and students and teachers from the Léon Chiris Vocational High School in Grasse.
Impact
Bringing together various stakeholders to drive change, forge new relationships, and build future projects differently is no simple task. Besign students helped bring this idea to life, showcased its possibilities, and went far in their personal and civic engagement, to create a very professional project proposal, including a detailed step by step roadmap. But the lack of citizen support for action, or operational follow-up by a proper association, and the divergent interests of the city's decision-makers, not to mention the fact that the garden was located at the foot of an abandoned building with no clear development strategy, left the project on hold. “Now all that remains is to find the collective that will lead the project and the pickaxe!?" concludes our partner Sandra Troupenat, PAT project manager.
Best practices
The limit of pro bono
Recruiting volunteers on a community garden project that has to be imagined from scratch can be a challenge. It's demanding, requires time commitment, physical effort, and shared responsibility. Finding the core group to support such vision is not that easy when potential participants and beneficiaries typically belong to an impoverished city center where most inhabitants live in low income, as single mothers, where food precarity is a reality and gardening not always a reflex.
Food justice?
Urban farms have become appealing responses to bringing nature into cities, but yielding enough food and solving food insecurity is another story – especially when the soil is toxic like it was the case here on our 700 m2 and that growing in planters is the only solution. Adjusting expectations to anticipated volume production, roles and responsibilities, and what function this garden could fulfill was important in this community garden, even though it had existed in a previous life, in another location in Grasse, 10 years prior.
Multiple POVs
Coordinating divergent multi-stakeholders' visions, interests and capacities is part of such complex project. The site management became too unclear to embark volunteers, unsure of their future access to this municipal land. The question of governance remains essential, and design can only solve so many problems.
Team
Devshree Sahai, Brooke Hankins, Foroogh Khosravi,
Samridhi Jain, Diane Delaye, Emma Guilhem, Ludivine
Anglada, Jimmy Escoffier
Coach
Laetitia WOLFF
Partners
Conseil Citoyen de la Ville de Grasse
Communauté d’Agglomération du Pays de Grasse
(services Agriculture; Economie Sociale et Solidaire;
et Politique de la Ville)
TETRIS
Ville de Grasse
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