Nursery. 1306 plants for Timișoara

Within the frame of Timisoara European Capitality of Culture 2023, the proposal occupies a symbolic centrality of the city and therefore aims to be an open test for how public space can be used, designed and perceived, where people are invited to understand plants as agents able to regulate climate in cities but also to boost public occupation. Having in mind the future urban transformations of the area, the proposal wants to open new perspectives and debates around the uses and temporalities of the city and its engagement with various communities and institutions. Following a 100% re-use logic, once dismantled, the intervention will provide new plants for the city, they will be planted following citizens and institutions’ agreements.

Timisoara is undergoing a process of urban transformation. The intervention, sited in the city center, had to function for one year as an urban activator opening new perspectives and debates around the uses and temporalities of the city and its engagement with various communities and institutions. The installation is placed precisely in an extremely sensitive, central, and contested place in the city: exactly where the Revolution sparked in 1989, Victory Square, a public space that was designed as a promenade but doesn’t really function as a proper square, with its ornamental non-accessible green area structuring the circulation and dividing the space. Having in mind the future urban transformations of the area, the project is also an invitation to a new understanding of a friendlier and more sustainable public space in which greenery becomes an essential social agent —from its drainage to how it allows ecosystems to live together—.

Its design follows a 100% reuse logic, from its rented scaffolding structure to the plants that will be planted around the City afterwards. The Nursery represents a large circuit of natural processes. It grew in the local nursery and, once the installation is dismantled, will become a diffuse collective garden. Being aware of the role that nature and, more broadly, new forms of urbanism will play in the future of our cities, the landscape office Studio Peisaj added to the proposal a deep contextual knowledge of (bio)diverse compositions that ranged from local species to the cultural tradition of horticulture in the area. From another perspective, the project is also about care and includes a pedagogical and social dimension. Gardens were, among other places, pedagogical spaces, places of encounter. And, as contemporary public spaces, also spaces for dissent and agonism.