Angelo Antolino

Prinzessinnengarten

The Prinzessinnengarten is a non-profit organization founded in late 2009 by Marco Clausen and Robert Shaw. The idea came from a trip to Cuba where Shaw was able to see that people cultivate vegetables directly in the city to feed themselves. Two years ago the idea of trying the experiment in Berlin: They choose Moritzplatz, certainly not one of the most beautiful squares of the city, and turned a big corner, which was completely neglected, into a large urban garden. The Berlin urban gardens are not a novelty, in fact, in many parts of the city, citizens own small pieces of land in which to spend free time planting vegetables or gardening. The absolutely innovative and unique idea of Prinzessinnegarten, however, is that in this urban garden there is no private property; anyone is free to enter and cultivate a great variety of vegetables, the same way the vegetables grown here can be taken away without paying anything; the important thing is to devote with constancy to the cultivation of vegetables. This is, in fact, the basis of the project of Clausen and Shaw: sharing an activity, sharing of knowledge. At the end of this process is the direct use and consumption of a product that was not purchased but that is the result of a collective activity. This project, or lab, it’s just at the beginning, but is having so much success that Shaw and Clausen are invited to give seminars and lectures in schools, and even city planners from various countries around the world are studying their case in order to apply it in other cities.