Opportunity Maps: The image produced with residents records potentials for a continuous productive urban landscape.
Urban Orchard: A community garden and orchard was set up as a result of the participatory design process. Image: DQE
Was is(s)t Ehrenfeld?: Exhibition, food mapping and food-related activities curated during Cologne's Architecture Biennale plan10. Image: Bohn&Viljoen and FG Stadt & Ernährung TU Berlin
Inventory of urban food: An installation visualises where in the borough food is produced. The food is then prepared and eaten together. Image: Dirk Melzer
In Urbane Agrikultur, Bohn explored the potential of urban agriculture practice as key constituent of a comprehensive design approach for urban regeneration in Ehrenfeld, a post-industrial housing quarter in Cologne, Germany. Urbane Agrikultur was one of four distinct strands within the ‘Design Quartier Ehrenfeld (DQE)' project, developed by Cologne-based curator Sabine Voggenreiter and financed by the European Regional Development Fund (amongst others).
Bohn was invited into the project as an expert consultant tasked with contributing to the conceptual development, design and practical implementation of Urbane Agrikultur for the duration of DQE (2010–12) and its legacy (2013). With Cologne-based landscape architect Dirk Melzer, she ran three participatory, week-long, consecutive workshops (2010, 2011, 2012) with local stakeholders. These comprised site visits, Inventories of Urban Capacity (following Bohn's CPUL City Actions concept), mappings, case study research, group discussions, proposal formulation, planting, joint cooking and eating and public presentations. The main results of the participatory design process - a communal orchard, the co-development of a ‘green' space network for Ehrenfeld, a vineyard and the productive urban landscape proposal LowLine - were implemented during the project’s duration and/or influenced the future direction of the DQE project.
In 2010 and as part of Cologne's Architecture Biennale plan10, Bohn, with Melzer, also designed and ran the participatory exhibition Ehrenfeld, was isst du? [Ehrenfeld, what do you eat?] acting as a kick-off of the project and aiming to raise awareness of the area’s food production.
Urbane Agrikultur led to invitations to participate in expert workshops (for example: Redesigning Cologne's green belt, 2011) and to interest from the UK’s New Economics Foundation in the participatory workshop methods. A printed legacy of the project exists through related publications, both by DQE and Bohn (for example in: Tyszczuk, R. et al (2012) Atlas: Geography, architecture and change in an interdependent world, London: Black Dog Publishing). The project also resulted in a commissioned exhibition participation at M:AI Museum für Architektur und Ingenieurkunst NRW in Germany which introduced Bohn&Viljoen's term 'Produktive Stadtlandschaften' [a shortened translation from 'Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes'] to the German urban design discourse.
>>> for further details see: * this website's projects listing; * this website's repository.
