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Virtual exchange between the cities of Brazzaville and Dresden on project ideas for urban gardening
As part of the Connective Cities learning process on Urban Gardening, a virtual dialogue event was organised and hosted together with the city of Berlin in April 2021. The cities of Dresden and Brazzaville actively participated in the dialogue event and experts from Dresden had the opportunity to present the city’s experiences in implementing urban gardens and urban agriculture projects.
One of the outcomes of the event was the interest in further exchange on the thematic, its challenges and benefits. Therefore, Connective Cities supported the cities of Dresden and Brazzaville by organising a virtual project workshop on 16 November 2021. This exchange built on a long-standing partnership between the cities, as they are twin cities, and gave continuation to two technical visits that took place before the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual session allowed experts from Brazzaville, Dresden and partner institutions to exchange ideas and experiences, share expectations and strategies, as well as to expand their knowledge in the field and further develop the project with a network of partners.
The structure of the session enabled the cities to present their impressions and past actions as well as to benefit from the discussion with the participants on the challenges of sustainable development challenges and the current needs that the cities could work on.
Other topics discussed during the session were:
- activities and experiences in the two cities after the last exchange;
- lessons learned and mutual identification of cooperation possibilities;
- the importance of integrating civil society organisations and research institutions in the projects;
- Importance of small-scale projects and community based initiatives.
During the session, it became clear that demographic growth associated with fast urbanization is a challenge in the Republic of Congo. However, Brazzaville has great potential to develop its urban agriculture give its topography, climate and water availability. In fact, the city of Brazzaville already makes use of this potential by maintaining community plots available to associations and individuals. However, despite this, challenges remain on topics such as soil moisture, floods, commercialization of organic products and management of micro-gardens.
Brazzaville also presented an educational project called “Each child a garden bed”, which combines environmental education with gardening and food production in schools. The city of Dresden showed interest in collaborating with the project and proposed an advanced training program for Congolese community gardeners in Dresden and the Saxony Garden Academy (Sächsischen Gartenakadmie).
Impressions
