Garden Streetscapes: Front Yards as Territorial Confi gurations

Urban Farm DB summary

This paper presents a theoretical framework treating gardens (flower or vegetable gardens, front and back yards, allotment gardens, community playing fields) as structural elements of streetscapes, and discusses a case study in Williamsburg, New York. The case is part of the international Streetscape Territories Research Project run by the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven, which compares streetscapes across cities including New York, Barcelona, Ghent, Brussels, Havana, and Addis Ababa. It argues that streetscapes are delimited not only by building facades but also by garden walls, fences, strips of grass, tree lines, muddy roads, and parking slabs as territorial borders, and poses the research question of whether the structural role of gardens in the making and use of contemporary streetscapes can be described. No specific empirical findings are reported in the abstract.