Urban garden’s ambiances as a key to understand urban space

Karla Berrens, Laura Calvet-Mir

Keywords: urban gardens, ambiance, sensorium, inhabit, space

In this paper we explore how can urban gardens foster the otherwise lost relationship with our sensual bodies and connect us back with our senses. Hence enabling us to re-visit the spaces of our everyday life and bringing a new flair to our ways of thinking and inhabiting place. Our case study focuses on urban gardens in Barcelona. Our fieldwork included a combination of qualitative methods, comprising participant observation (e.g. participation to garden events and assemblies), informal conversations with gardeners, and an ethnographic approach called shadowing. The ambiances that are produced in urban gardens enable us to better understand our own making of place in the city and of our ways of inhabiting it.