A Visit to the Garden Life Festival: A Hundred Possibilities for a Green Community
The "Garden Life Festival," held with great fanfare at the end of September, is an annual event organized by the Taipei City "Department of Economic Development." The department has long promoted garden life, from basic setup and creation to agricultural technology consultation and the promotion and connection of the materials industry, encouraging community residents to draw closer to plants.
When work is busy and the pace of life is tight, how should one begin if one hopes to realize a dream countryside life in the city? And as communities gradually incorporate green landscapes, edible landscapes, and herb plants into cold concrete buildings, what changes will come to the residents living within them?
This year's "Garden Life Festival" invited battle-tested garden operators, teams focused on related issues, and professional materials partners to join the event. Four distinctive garden communities in Taipei City also set up booths on site. Through their sharing, they demonstrated how community life full of ecological greenery was built bit by bit under the guidance of the Department of Economic Development, starting from nothing and breaking through limitations such as insufficient space, unfavorable environments, and residents' hesitation.
The first to take the stage was "Health Social Housing" in Songshan District. This is Taipei City's first social housing project that is only for rent and not for sale. In addition to allowing ordinary citizens to move in through a lottery system, the Department of Urban Development launched the "Youth Innovation Feedback Program," allowing young people to obtain rental eligibility through various proposals that give back to local residents. At present, "Health Social Housing" has a total of 31 youth innovation teams that applied for rental housing through this program, including "Parent-Child Co-Learning," "Holy Food Kitchen," and "Life Greenery," which popularizes plant knowledge. These energetic young people full of creativity contributed their own professional strengths and concretely practiced the value of "taking from society and using it for society."
０００
And in Xinyi District, "Heng'ai Development Center," with the assistance of the Department of Economic Development in 2015, built a public rooftop into a parent-child farm, leading people with physical and mental disabilities to experience the natural world through processes such as turning soil, repotting, planting, and harvesting. At the same time, the harvested herb crops were incorporated into handmade cookies or made into alcohol-based cleaning liquid. According to the center's colleagues' careful observations: "Most people with physical and mental disabilities find it relatively difficult to understand external things through knowledge-based oral explanation. However, through experiences of the five senses -- touching soil, the scent of herbs, the taste of crops, and even ecological changes such as digging up earthworms while turning soil, or bees being attracted by crop flowers and birds coming to forage because of fruit -- they can all feel the joy of life again."
