Intercultural Gardens - City Landscapes of a Migratory Society 
For more than a decade intercultural gardens have enriched Germany. In intercultural gardens, immigrants and Germans from different social milieus and with differing lifestyles meet.
New connections and affinities arise when they collectively cultivate the soil within the city.

Intercultural gardens exist in many cities in Germany as well as in other European countries. In an intercultural garden the participants renegotiate their shared reality with each other every day.
Out of this lively – and not altogether conflict free practice of collective gardening, the next steps are taken into mainstream society almost “organically”.

Intercultural gardens make use of vacant inner city lots; they contribute to biodiversity and generate a better micro climate in the neighborhood. They demonstrate that a different city is possible. Environmental conservation happens almost incidentally. Sowing, harvesting and composting without chemicals develops a sensitivity for other aspects of the environment. Methods tested here engender impulses for transcultural forms of environmental education.

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Abundance Instead of Deprivation
Migrants add their personal experiences in gardening and crafts, as well as their social capabilities. Existing knowledge is multiplied by exchange. Gardens are an effective agent against deprivation. They enable abundance and inspire gift-culture and bartering. In this manner, the ground is prepared for a productive relationship with oneself and with others.

Participation
Migrants that come to this country often feel deprived. The daily discrimination that is accurately registered often leads to discouragement and dissociation. An intercultural garden shows ways out of this ghetto of perceived difference. Bit by bit the often felt lack of community engagement can find some space.

Good Life
Enjoying an outdoor picnic, barbequing, preparing freshly harvested vegetables: a good life is one of the strong points of intercultural gardens. In making marmalade, harvesting honey or exchanging recipes, memories are created and connected to sensual dimensions.

Community
At the interface of nature, culture and the social realm, the immigrant society is invented anew each garden season. Vegetable cultivation on its own is not enough. Differences and similarities need to be discovered, interpreted and expressed. A new “we” develops in the intercultural gap.