Gardening to appropriate the streetscape: The example of Bordeaux’s garden street

Abstract

The garden street (rue-jardin) project was carried out by the City of Bordeaux as part of France’s Programme National de Requalification des Quartiers Anciens Dégradés (PNRQAD, 2009-2017), and illustrates an experiment in the development of public spaces suitable for users. To transform streets into spaces of sociability and collective life, the municipality is seeking to make them into gardens for residents, who are invited to be their gardeners. This article seeks to analyse to what extent gardening may be a vector for appropriating street life. It looks at how the municipality’s intentions actually translate into the public space design, as well as into measures to develop gardening practices. The article also aims to compare and contrast municipal objectives with the way in which residents take the opportunity of intervening in the development of public spaces. It shows that designing changes to streets is not in itself sufficient to bring about change. Gardening may in fact lead to varied and antagonistic ways of appropriating streets. It can contribute to the collective upkeep and the embellishment of public spaces, but also to expressions of individualism and the extension of private domestic spaces. Nevertheless, in a time when we are mainly considering technical solutions, such as planting vegetation or reducing the urban soil sealing to adapt cities to climate change, the garden street project shows the need to think about the ecological transition of cities in terms of its social and landscape dimensions.