Aulagarden

Aulagarden grew out of Aulabierta. It arose with the goal of building a garden inside the University of Granada in whose design and management there was direct participation of students and other collaborators. It is located around the Aulabierta premises, which is a building built by the students themselves within the boundaries of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Granada.

One of the project’s aims is to make people think about sustainability, resource management and the collective creation of green areas as a way of making one’s own surroundings more habitable. Another goal is the direct participation of users in the design and management of the space. Aulabierta sees the university as a public asset, and as such able to host actions aimed at collective appropriation and the creation of new spaces for socialization and experimentation.

A garden is a pedagogical instrument. Every conception of the garden, from its design to its construction, watering, maintenance, etc., are joint learning processes. The garden is a multidisciplinary space and as such Aulabierta has envisioned it from various points of view, all of which have learned much from each other. Aulagarden is also an open investigation, a set of tools providing keys that can be extrapolated to other contexts in order to carry out similar experiences both within the university and in other parts of the city.

Aulabierta

Aulabierta does not depend on a specific collective of people, but rather on different coordinating groups that use the methodology and tools of which the project consists in order to create activities that expand their collective knowledge. In the case of Aulagarden, the design and coordination of the project are the responsibility of FAAQ – a work group carrying out projects concerning specific contexts in the fields of architecture, education and art. The group arose out of the joint work of its members within Aulabierta, and Aulagarden is outstanding as a key production for the group’s consolidation.

Origin of the project

Aulagarden is one of a number of projects carried out in the context of Aulabierta, which is a learning platform managed by the students themselves in the University of Granada. It goal is to create an autonomous learning space that is more porous, immediate and versatile, that introduces into the university knowledge not available in  formal learning and connects it with other contexts, overcoming the gap between learning and practice.

Methodology and development of the project

On conclusion of the self-building of the Aulabierta premises, some of those involved wished to continue experimenting with the same methods, i.e., use of a spatial design as a means to initiate a process going beyond the conventional design-execution relationship to centre interest on who develops and creates a space and in what way. The fact that the area surrounding the Aulabierta building was practically abandoned and unregistered represented an open invitation.

Aulagarden opened with two seminar-workshops called Sustainable Interventions in Urban Space (I and II), with the intention of testing the feasibility of the process and beginning to map out the possible network of collaborators, as well as sowing the first seeds. These seminars were organised as complementary courses, which involved the assignation of free election credits to be incorporated into the academic records of those taking part – including the instigators themselves. This formula is one of the chinks in the university apparatus through which Aulabierta has introduced the teachings it produces for their academic legitimisation, when necessary. The obtaining of free election credits through conversion of study hours into curricular credits was never an end in itself, but merely a means by which to reveal the potential of students to design, and thereby to intervene in their own academic record. Moreover, the academic legitimisation resulting from recognition of activity as part of the curriculum reveals the students’ capacity to transform from within the contents of university teaching.

Aulabierta has thus provided a context for projects and activities as heterogeneous as a micro-television workshop in collaboration with the part of the city where the Faculty of Fine Arts is located (La Chana), seminars on some of the present questions involving cultural production, the self-building of the premises and the garden itself.

After the two aforementioned seminars, the strategy of using the model of complementary courses was judged to have been exhausted and it was decided that new modes and chinks in the university system should be explored to carry out the academic management of the projects. Aulagarden was presented to a call for Innovatory Teaching Projects (PID)  aimed at the university teaching staff. The project was accepted and in the course of the 2008-2009 academic year an intense programme has been carried out with subjects in the three different areas of Fine Arts, Architecture and Environmental Science.

The practical dimension lead to a different understanding through direct experience: applied landscape design, creation and monitoring of an experimental flower-bed, choice and application of materials and technology, construction of architectonic prototypes, creation of associated artistic projects, sociological research applied to a specific context, etc.

Relations with the context and collaborators

Not only was a garden grown in Aulagarden, but also a broad network of collaborators. The project design emphasized not only technical matters, but also affective and educational questions, giving priority to those of most concern to the members of the university community, such as the excessive specialization of knowledge, scarcity of effective policies in the creation of interdisciplinary research groups, or the absence of university projects attempting to coordinate student groups from different degree courses or areas.

The various projects initiated in Aulabierta were intended to create horizontal learning spaces in which students, teachers, technicians and others could debate and question, on an equal footing, the spatial, social and political, as well as the academic and educational regulatory frameworks of the university. This meant that, in a project such as Aulagarden, the network of collaborations has become dispersed, including over one hundred students from very different disciplines, university teaching staff from six different areas, external collaborators (e.g., the Diputación de Granada, which provided plant species, the landscape artist Íñigo Segurola and members of the therapeutic community adjoining the Faculty, who provided design ideas) and university technicians, such as the gardeners, who advise and monitor the project. Institutional management has been and continues to be complex, committing the participants to continual negotiation with various university bodies, ranging from the Dean’s office of the Faculty of Fine Arts to several Vice-Rectorates and Secretariats, resulting in both agreements and discrepancies and tension.