Kategori: Uncategorized

Udgivet den

Growing Urban Communities; One Tomato at a Time

By Nicole Andreou

Rooftop tomatoes, planters and homegrown oyster mushrooms are not your everyday social innovator. And yet, TagTomat, an urban gardening initiative based in Nørrebro and spread across Copenhagen, is bringing out the best in us.

The pride and joy of TagTomat was – and still is – their garden installations on Griffenfeldsgade in Nørrebro. Going beyond urban gardening principles and enhancing potential, the project highlights a number of social aspects of life in Copenhagen, as well as a success story in community building.

In collaboration with the local shop owners, TagTomat set up planters, bench booths, as well as a completely new atmosphere in the street.

“The core value of TagTomat is not in the vegetables and plants themselves. It is in everything around it – the community, the knowledge generated, and the creation of urban school gardens”, says Mads Boserup Lauritsen, architect, founder and owner of TagTomat.

Griffenfeldsgade has become an alternative open-space urban garden; a city showroom of what can be, with the residents – or in this case, the shop owners – responsible for maintaining the space. This urban fabric, as Mads explains it, has developed into the mechanism for providing quality community life in the public realm.

Community Action  © TagTomat

TagTomat as a community building project

From its base in the heart of Nørrebro, TagTomat reaches across Copenhagen’s social structure. With bench booths, planters and local support much more is grown than mere tomatoes. A greater sense of belonging and community is spreading alongside the budding vegetables; features like wellbeing, integration and community resilience are now recognised and embraced by people involved and bystanders alike.

The urban scenery has become more than asphalt and vehicles. It now connects to social capacity as well as the residents’ potential to establish collective positive behaviour and a feeling of ownership towards their immediate environment. TagTomat helped lay the foundation stone for this process – it devised a strategy for urban planning that exponentially scaled up to shape change.

Projects like this one tap into the concept of social capital and play a catalyst role in developing trust, collective responsibility and sustainable neighbourhoods.

A hobby forms a sustainable business plan

It was back in 2011 that Mads Boserup Lauritsen started growing tomatoes in his own residence block’s backyard. On the roof of the recycling storeroom, he still keeps a small green space where himself and fellow residents grow the tomatoes they consume.

Between 2011 and 2014, when Mads finally registered TagTomat as a company, he held voluntary workshops in this very backyard, funded by Nørrebro Lokaludvalg. The workshops aimed at illustrating the art of urban gardening, and how Copenhageners could create their own sustainable communities. One of the first things TagTomat did to ensure its financial survival, was to produce planters that they were able to sell. The profits from sales allowed the team the time and resources to develop their green ideas, and ultimately to focus on activities connected to community engagement.

Mads at Taghaven © TagTomat

Beyond the collaboration with Nørrebro Lokaludvalg, TagTomat has also worked closely with several municipalities across Denmark. When a project expands beyond a private garden, and an entire community becomes an active part of it, it is only natural that its institutions will attempt to identify with it. In this respect, institutions often support initiatives in line with the community building cause.

Growing out of Husumgade

In the early months of TagTomat, its two-person team started with guided tours of green spaces across the city. When in August 2012 Politiken published an article about TagTomat and the idea surrounding it, the project skyrocketed. In a similar fashion Social Media as a valuable supplement campaign tool, has lent a hand in communicating and promoting the work done by TagTomat.

Nevertheless, the message advanced by TagTomat’s communication strategy is not a business promotion per se. It is mostly connected to the idea that sustainability is not a foreign concept, and that creating an urban gardening open source that makes ideas, theories and applications available for uncomplicated replication is possible.

“What we do is not rocket science. It is a practical application of ideas that are free to download on our homepage. It’s innovation, but it’s not difficult”.

If Mads had to pin down what it takes to be an urban gardener, he would ask one to take a look at their surroundings and identify the spot where they can make a difference; be it on their third floor balcony, or the City Hall square.

With an idea as simple as greening one’s surroundings, TagTomat, or any other similar initiative, can really make a difference in citizen interaction. Creating a livable city, where one can bring value to an area adjacent to their private or professional setting, can be the organic way to act and react on contemporary social and environmental threats.

2018’s mushroom hit

Mushroom Growing Kits have been around for some time, and have appealed to many, yet, were not as popular within the Danish market. Hence, SvampeBox (Mushroom Box), TagTomat’s latest product, revolutionises home gardening in a fun way.

SvampeBox © TagTomat

The team has developed a very simple model for mushroom growing – mycelium and hay in a used milk carton. Then a recycled paper cover with a touch of graphics was all it took to reach the average private customer who loves oyster mushrooms.

“The more touch points we have with a person, the easier it is for them to be involved. The response was instant.”

The product was developed in mid November 2017, launched in December, and TagTomat has thus far sold over 600 boxes – some even in a Christmas gift box.

Beyond engaging and truly fascinating, the mushroom project could, perhaps, be the deal sealer for sustainable family bonding!

You can:

  •  Visit the showroom and the rooftop tomatoes at Husumgade 2, København 2200
  • Visit TagTomat’s webshop to initiate your own home gardening project, or participate in a masterclass
  • Follow TagTomat on Instagram and Facebook

Read more:

 

Udgivet den

Pioner Goes To SXSW

SXSW, MARCH 9-18 2018, AUSTIN, TEXAS

South by Southwest Conference & Festivals is an iconic annual event that showcases the newest trends in music, film, tech, media, and sustainability.

 

BY MATHILDE LIND GUSTAVUSSEN

Launched in 1987 in Austin, Texas, the interactive festival has grown to become one of the most important gatherings in the world for professionals across industries. The city of Austin, the progressive capital of Texas, is renowned for its music and film scene, and has become one of the central tech and startup hubs in the United States. Conglomerates like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Dropbox have established offices in city, and the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, which began as a small shop in Austin, is still headquartered there.

From Local Event to Global Gathering

South by Southwest (SXSW) was founded in the late 1980s as a music-centered showcase to create exposure for local talent, and eventually grew into the interdisciplinary, internationally acclaimed festival we know today. Film was added to the program in 1994, as was a section called “interactive,” which would come to include media, tech, education, comedy, gaming, and sustainability. In 2017, NBC News wrote of the festival: “SXSW 2017 is a mélange of ideas for those who are willing to think outside the box. . . . By meshing all these fields together, it forces the participant to realize that new, rich ideas emerge when concepts cross multiple boundaries.”

Several technology juggernauts have launched at SXSW, including FourSquare and, most famously, Twitter (although Twitter had been founded nine months earlier, it didn’t gain critical momentum until SXSW). Similarly, musicians like Odd Future, The White Stripes, and Feist attribute their early success to performances at SXSW.

In its inaugural year, SXSW had only 700 participants. But in 2017, SXSW drew over 300,000 festival attendees to Austin, pumping nearly $350 million into the local economy. Each year for ten days in March, Austin is transformed into a city-wide festival with exhibitions, screenings, workshops, panel discussions, and networking events held at venues, hotels, and conference halls across town. The different venues function like the stages at European festivals such as Roskilde and Glastonbury, playing host to a rotating series of events, many within walking distance of each other. Hotel prices soar with the average nightly rate reaching $350 during SXSW in 2016, up 60% from 2011.

The Cities Summit

In 2018, SXSW will feature a new “convergence program,” referred to as the Cities Summit. This two-day section of the festival will interrogate three themes surrounding the future of our cities: City as Narrative, Civic Innovation, and Cities for All. Expanding the dialogue between municipal leaders and creative urbanists, the Cities Summit will feature a variety of sessions with mayors, activists, practitioners, academics, entrepreneurs, and artists, as well as a public-space design competition called Place by Design. The global finalists of this competition rethink how we use and interact with the urban space around us at the intersection of art, design, and technology. As part of the Cities Summit, exhibitions scattered across Austin will highlight sustainable visions for cities in the 21st century and approaches to interactive community building and planning. The summit also features a guided tour of the first code-compliant 3D-printed house in the US.

Over the next few weeks, Pioner will bring you closer to the inspiring events at SXSW’s Cities Summit. Our coverage will focus on inventive approaches to social, economic, and environmental sustainability, and investigate how the innovations presented at SXSW might translate to other cities around the world. We can’t wait!