A REWILDING LAND ART PROJECT
MEADOW
PARKLET
by Alejandro Haiek Coll @thepublicmachinery
in collaboration with Rebecca Rudolph @lolorebeccarudolph and Tomás Mena @tomasmena
A collaboration between Umeå School of Architecture and Umeå Municipality // Umeå, Sweden 2023
The Meadow Parklet is a network of multispecies biotopes seeking to rewild urban areas and enhance cohabitation and coexistence between flora, fauna, and fungi in public spaces, interstices, and urban pockets. The project use fallen trees to transform techno soils into meadow habitats and edible edens with ecological diversity and autonomy, allowing biological processes to complete ecosystemic cycles, and enriching the predominant homogeneous grass surfaces.
The project questions the exhaustion of natural resources due to urban sprawl by reintroducing lost natural bodies through geometric patterns of pollination gardens in the city grid, following the traces of the local inhabitants. The living land art invites community members to participate and care, developing affection for these oases.
The project was developed and implemented through coparticipation and collective decision-making, collaborating with local stakeholders such as Engelska Skolan, Bostaden, Volvo, Böleäng preschool and Umeå Municipality as a second strage of the GoGreenRoutes Project, funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The EU funded program encompassed public interventions in a network of 6 cultivating cities: Burgas, Lahti, Limerick, Tallinn, Umeå, and Versailles, collecting ideas and visions from community voices toward inclusive public spaces and bottom-up developments.