San Francisco's Civic Center Victory Gardens

In San Francisco last summer, the stately plaza outside of the City Hall became a site of food production. Built by the public, thousands of volunteers from youth, arts, and environmental organisations worked hard to replace the city’s most perfect lawn with a landscape of sprouting lettuces. In the end, it was built for the public - crops were harvested and donated to the city’s food banks. The project was led by Rebar, a collective of artists who are known for calling attention to potential green spaces.

Rebar’s website describes the Victory Gardens as a way to “reconsider the way we think about urban open space, transforming ornamental landscapes into productive landscapes.” The plaza outside of Civic Center, with its orderly rows of local and international flags and perfectly trimmed grass, was certainly an ornamental space before the intervention. However, the resulting vegetable garden was a constellation of circular planters, with prismatic swirls of deep purple lettuce and bright green pea shoots painting the plaza with colour. It was both productive and ornamental.

http://www.rebargroup.org/projects/victorygarden/index.html