Designing a Community Garden

Abstract

Politecnico di Milano Coltivando is a convivial garden where people meet, experiment, cultivate crops and share their skills and ideas. Coltivando uses innovative service and spatial design knowledge and community consultation processes. Coltivando is a design research project that is documented throughout its entire process. It is also a social as well as an educational experiment. People from the same neighbourhood yet strangers to one another and design students from the different disciplines of service and spatial design are brought together.This paper is a project review that analyses and explains the context, the main outputs and innovation, the process, the obstacles, the impact, the users’ needs, the transferability of the solution and its dissemination.