While Chicago is certainly a green city in comparison to many, there are still other related problems it must face. The mobile garden addresses brownfields and vacant spaces within the city by using hand made seed cards as a device to inform people on the important urban issues.
Stroll around many of the neighborhoods suffering from vacant spaces in Chicago and you'll see many elements that link the neighborhoods together, one of those is trash and unkept property. Residents of these neighborhoods have more power than they often utilize, but bringing stewardship is not as easy as teaching groups how to make seed cards. Residents need empowerment, and control over their lives, in order to feel like they have equity in their neighborhood.

A device, the mobile garden uses is education intentions through teaching about urban agriculture. Additionally, the mobile garden will use events that create therapeutic relief for bureaucratic stagnation. These invite people to bring evidence, in paper form, of any barrier that impeded their dreams and desires to be shredded for the creation of seed paper. The goal of using seed paper arrives from the idea that if thrown away, or discarded, it still has potential to survive and grow given the proper conditions.

All of the devices get folded into the spectacle - that is the installation of a native plant garden onto a open-air flat car of public transit in conjunction with the local transit agency, the CTA - and the installation of knowledge and empowerment into the communities the transit agency serves. The project requires major planning, funding, and inextricably ironic - bureaucracy.

AD 509 - Adv Electronic Visualization, Prof. Daniel Sauter

Mobile Garden Video CLip [ movie clip, 640 x 480 px, 116.95 MB ]

Thesis [ PDF 4.74 MB ]