Urban Green Retreat

Bernburg, Germany · 2023

Masterplan of The Urban Green Retreat: an entry plaza and outdoor exercise space to the west, a central plaza with a birdhouse and a community art installation, playgrounds, a pop-up market, a fruit and butterfly garden and a quiet zone to the south, and sports courts to the east. The Sensory Garden is marked with a dashed rectangle, north of a water feature and south of a playground. Full size
The Urban Green Retreat, about 23,000 square metres. The Sensory Garden is the parcel marked in red — a playground to the north of it, a water feature to the south, the sports courts to the east.

About 23,000 square metres of public realm in Bernburg, drawn in full. The city is losing inhabitants. Buildings have come down and not been replaced, and it is shrinking around the gaps they left.

The scheme treats those gaps as the site rather than as land waiting for the next building. Its argument is that the identity of the place sits in the ground between the buildings, and that a city losing people needs a reason to stay before it needs more floorspace.

Four things were set as tests: biodiversity, adaptation to a changing climate, ecological and social durability, and cost. The last is not a footnote. A municipality with fewer inhabitants each year has less to spend each year, so anything that cannot be built cheaply and kept cheaply is not a proposal, it is a drawing.

The Sensory Garden, 1,795 square metres of it, is the piece drawn in most detail. It is one of the middle phases and can be read as a pilot for the rest. A public garden fails when it offers only one way to be in it, and this one offers several: open lawn where children can run and a parent can watch from a distance, benches along the paths for people stopping briefly, and woven pods set back from the route for anyone who wants to sit out of the way without going indoors.

Location
Bernburg, Germany
Context
Master’s semester project, Hochschule Anhalt
Disciplines
Landscape
Role
Sole author, masterplan and garden
Site area
About 23,000 m²
Sensory Garden
1,795 m²
Status
Design complete, unbuilt
A circular timber bench set around a tree on open mown lawn, with setts paths curving through the grass, ornamental grasses and a flower bed in the foreground, and people sitting on the ring.
Elsewhere in the scheme. A timber ring set around a tree on the open lawn, setts paths curving through the grass.
Curved seat walls in brick with timber tops around raised planters, a tree in a circular planter with flowers at its base, setts paving, and a playground beyond with a red swing frame and timber climbing structures.
Elsewhere in the scheme. Curved seat walls in brick and timber around raised planters, the playground beyond.
A long section across the whole site, left to right: trees over mown grass, a raised seat wall, a red play frame, a clipped hedge, a white fabric pavilion at the centre, then timber climbing domes and further play equipment.

Swipe sideways to see the whole section.

Section across the whole scheme, left to right.
Detail plan of the Sensory Garden, naming every surface: concrete tiles along the north edge, concrete bricks for the looping paths, grass and a circular lawn, a larchwood platform to the north-east and a larchwood semi-open pavilion, with a semi-private zone at the centre and falls of 1.5 per cent marked in four places. Full size
The garden itself, drawn. Every surface named — concrete tiles, concrete bricks, grass, lawn, larchwood — and the fall written on each one at 1.5 per cent.

What to notice

The pods are woven, not clad. You can see out of one, and other people can see in. A solid shelter in a public garden has a blind interior, and a blind interior gets avoided or misused. The weave gives somebody a place to sit apart from the path without putting them anywhere nobody can see.

The beds run through the whole garden instead of sitting at its edges, and they are perennial: paid for once, where bedding plants would have to be bought again every season by a city with less to spend. Every species was chosen against the biodiversity test, and the hedge closes the boundary only where it needs closing, not all the way round.

The Sensory Garden seen from above: looping paths through lawn, curved timber benches, planting beds, timber pods and a play structure along the far edge.
The garden rendered — the same ground the plan above sets out.
Two curved timber benches facing each other across a paved circle, with a planting bed to the left and the play area beyond.
The seating is deliberately various because the people are.
The lawn in use, with the cobbled path curving through it, timber pods behind and a raised timber deck to the right.
The paths loop rather than run straight, and they are laid semi-permeable, so what falls on them goes into the ground instead of into a drain.
A long section through the garden, left to right: hedge and planting, a timber pod, tree canopy, a second pod, the deck, and the play structure at the far end.

Swipe sideways to see the whole section.

Long section. Large trees carry the shade, which in a garden meant to be used through a warming summer is not decoration.

Where this stops being true

Permeable paving stops being permeable. Semi-permeable paths pass the cost test on the day they are built, with no gully, no pipe and nothing to clear, but silt and leaf litter fill the voids. Unless somebody brushes the surface out every few years, it becomes ordinary paving with a drainage argument attached. Cheap to build still needs someone to turn up. This is written up in full in the note Permeable paving stops being permeable.

The larger risk is the premise. This is social space built for a place that is losing the people who would use it, in one phase of a scheme a shrinking municipality may never finish. If the later phases do not come, the garden is not a link in anything: it is a good park in a thinning neighbourhood. A garden alone does not reverse a demographic trend. What it can do is give the people still there a reason to be outside, which is a smaller claim and the only one worth making.