Project start: 15.07.2022
Project end: 14.07.2025
Sponsor: Federal Office for Agriculture and Food

Private gardens occupy a significant proportion of urban open space, and garden owners make up about 40% of the people in cities. In current social and environmental policy discourses, private gardens are very present, but often with negative connotations (gravel gardens, prohibition of detached houses). For sustainable urban design, however, both these open spaces and the people who use them have a not inconsiderable significance. They strengthen health and life satisfaction and are meeting places for people and habitats for animals and plants. At the same time, private gardens have hardly been researched. The CitiDigiSpace project aims to address the function of private gardens in cities and the role of garden owners, and to improve their contribution to sustainability (ecological, social and economic) with the help support of digital technologies. With a CitiDigiSpace app including the latest LiDAR technology and a citizen science approach, the status quo of the functions and services of private gardens and the role of garden owners will first be described. On this basis, business models will be developed and tested with which the sustainability contribution of gardens can be improved for their owners and the city. On the one hand, the aim is to achieve a more sustainable design of areas in private gardens. The CitiDigiSpace app uses LiDAR to measure the gardens, links them to climate and geodata and makes recommendations based on existing perennial planting and shrub use concepts. Another business idea to be developed - supported by the CitiDigiSpace app - is to improve the social interaction and communication of people in relation to urban gardening. Garden owners are the focus of the project, because their motivation and activation are the decisive levers for implementing more sustainability in private urban space.