About the Garden
The garden in Zürich joined the global network of Gardens of the XXI Century in 2023. As the garden is located directly on ETH Hönggerberg campus, the project is dedicated to learning, teaching and experimenting with regenerative landscape cultivation among students and teaching staff.
The garden in Zurich is located on the northern edge of the Hönggerberg campus and is surrounded by roads on three sides and a daycare center on the fourth. With a size of around 1000 m2 and a rectangular shape of 30 x 40 meters, it is the smallest of the gardens of the XXI century. ETH Immobilien is allowing the Chair of Being Alive to use the site for several years, and we are collaborating with ETH Facility Management to maintain it. The development of the outdoor learning space is financially supported by Innovedum.
The project in Zurich plays a key role in the practical education of students in landscape architecture and related disciplines. It is a proposal for a garden that explores how students can translate fieldwork findings into experiments and interventions with regenerative landscape practices. The garden is guided by the concept of adaptive management, as students will make changes to the site that will create a new condition, which in turn will be the starting point for the next generation of students. Over time, the garden will slowly transform into an intelligent system of human and non-human actors. As the garden has characteristics of an urban topology with heterogeneous and anthropogenically disturbed soils, we hope to find inspiration for the management of similar topologies across urban environments in Switzerland and abroad.
Students enjoy a great deal of freedom in project development and can contribute their own ideas and aspirations. Teaching staff guide them and support them in the implementation. Only a few rules by ETH Immobilien need to be respected:
1. No disturbance of the ground in the root zone of the trees (2 meters around the tree crown)
2. Maintenance of the neophytes
3. No permanent fences or structural installations
4. Clean up after gardening
