A Garden Grows in a Concrete Island
Remember J.G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island? It takes place in London (sort of): the protagonist has spent his life in London, and much of it has been spent in trying to get the hell out of London. But he can’t escape the urban sprawl and he can’t seem to ever get off the motorway that circles the city in concrete. He finds escape, though, when he wrecks: down into a (what we out west would call) a freeway interchange he goes and there he stays, trapped, as high-speed traffic speeds by all around him. It’s a kind of descent into Hell and, being Ballard and all, is very allegorical and Dantesque.
The impersonal hellishness of freeway systems is being mitigated, a bit, in Istanbul. A garden has been planted inside a cloverleaf interchange.
Photos via Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden (inset) and the Istanbul Governor's Office.
The complete story is over on Treehugger, but here’s the jist:
In connection with the Urban Age conference hosted this week in Istanbul, the German bank for the third time issued an open call for entries of projects that “benefit communities and local residents by improving their urban environments.” Out of 87 entries received, a jury shortlisted five — including the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden.
“Located improbably in the ‘urban voids’ created by a vast motorway spaghetti-junction on the Asian side of Istanbul, the Ali Nihat Gökyiğit Foundation has created a series of landscaped spaces that provide sanctuary for plants and people in the middle of a dystopian urban setting,” the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award jury announced.
Established in 1995, the 125-acre botanical garden contains more than 17,000 species of plants and is the city’s largest replanted green area. The facility includes a special children’s garden where schoolkids learn how to grow and care for flowers and vegetables; an area devoted to drought-tolerant plants and those useful in combating soil erosion and desertification; and a section for medicinal plants.
