Concept

Tromsø: A City as a Garden

“I dream of a recyclable city.”
– Gilles Clément*

The project Tromsø: A City as a Garden looks at the Norwegian city of Tromsø through the eyes of a gardener. In a garden, nothing is wasted. The gardener’s tasks rotate through a cycle: preparations, cultivation, consumption and reuse. And as we know from the example of Sami gardens, a garden is not only about growing food – it is place to live, to share, to gather with friends, and to store materials, such as wooden boards. It is a place rich in resources, even when their use is not immediately visible, like an old car with parts that can be reused in the future.

Tromsø: A City as a Garden seeks to understand the city as just such a sustainable organism, created and cultivated by the people who live there. As they prepare themselves for the dramatic climate change they expect to affect their city, what natural resources do the people of Tromsø rely on? Who are their friends and who will soon be their guests? During our research visit to the city in October, we were shown an enormous number of maps used by local researchers as tools for redefining the city’s position in the Arctic region as well as its relation to the surrounding local area. We learned that the lines on maps are not borders but connections and that surviving is about dependence and adaptability.
 
The project Tromsø: A City as a Garden is, fundamentally, a mapping process that will lead to a new understanding of the city. Over a period of four days, March 4th-8th, 2013, the students of the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, HFBK students from Hamburg, and participants in the UniGrowCity project will join Tromsø residents in an exploration of their city. We plan to work on eight tasks, each of which will generate a new map – and a new understanding of the living environment: gathering (in the “boat-house”), growing (at the HOLT greenhouse), harvesting (“dumpster diving”), preparing resources and materials (at Remiks), improvising (the construction of a houseboat with Kåre Grundvåg, and other workshops), exploring (spaces of living and coexistence), mapping (for example, available spaces with Rakel Fredrikson), and storytelling (sharing strategies at the Troms County House).

Though small, Tromsø is a bustling city proud of its strong universities and global research centres. The city aspires to be a leading force in shaping new power relationships in the Arctic; recently, it became the seat of the Secretariat of the international Arctic Council. How will Tromsø residents negotiate their existence between sustainability and the over-exploitation of the “new” North? (The New North, Laurence Smith)

The UniGrowCity project, working with partners in a number of European cities, explores local conditions with the goal of developing a network for exchanging knowledge and practices about sustainable living. For its part, Tromsø: A City as a Garden seeks to share the experiences and knowledge of the extreme environmental conditions in which the people of Tromsø find themselves in these precarious times.

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*“Conversation between Gilles Clément, Marjetica Potrč and Gillain Roussel” (Oct. 4, 2011), http://www.leslaboratoires.org/en/article/conversation-gilles-cl-ment/la-semeuse-ou-le-devenir-indig-ne; Gilles Clément is a landscape architect, gardener and writer, known for such concepts as “Gardens of Resistance”, “The Garden in Motion”, “The Planetary Garden”, and “The Third Landscape” (http://www.gillesclement.com/).