Afrikanerplein is located in Oost-Amsterdam (East Amsterdam) in the Netherlands and belongs to the Transvaal neighborhood. Starting in May 2010, with a subsidy from the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, residents took it upon themselves to turn the pocket park on the square into a community vegetable garden. Covering about 1,300 sq m, the garden includes a total of twenty-five small plots that residents can adopt individually, along with a herb garden, flower garden, orchard, children's educational garden, accessible raised flower beds, and a dog toilet, all run jointly by community members.

Turning an Unsafe Pocket Park into a Community Vegetable Garden

Under a subsidy program called "stimuleringsfonds volkstuinen," forty communities nationwide were selected, encouraging residents to improve community quality through the implementation of green facilities, with each community receiving up to 100,000 euros in funding. In this program, the Transvaal community submitted a total of nine proposals, of which the community vegetable garden on Afrikanerplein was the largest.

The main reason it was selected was that, compared with neighborhoods in other cities, this community needed more improvement in public safety. Residents interviewed expressed differing views on this: some said that a few years earlier someone had been shot dead on the street in broad daylight, but that in principle it was safe day to day; others said a neighbor had once been a drug dealer, that the people coming and going nearby were a mixed crowd, and that sometimes people traded drugs in the empty square or park. Yet whether or not it is subjectively considered a "dangerous" community, it is an indisputable fact that it received extra funding for this reason.

According to residents, before the pocket park on the square was converted into a vegetable garden it was used very little; only dog walkers would bring their dogs into the park to relieve themselves, and because the park was covered in "gold," residents tended to walk only around the edges of the square rather than going into the park.

So when the subsidy program was announced, at the information meeting five or six residents expressed strong interest in transforming the square. For two to three months, they met regularly every week to discuss the spatial redesign of the square and how to organize interested community residents to carry it out together. The plan quickly passed review at the end of 2010, a five-year use contract was signed, and the following spring the organization and the transformation of the space got under way in full swing.