Urban gardening is a common phenomenon in cities today. Vacant areas are activated by citizens, planners or developers who see the potentials of making something grow in – and out of – leftover or otherwise transitional spaces. The cultivation of social relationships is an entangled aspect, for example through the formations of local communities.This paper analyzes gardening practices and expressions ofa current urban project, Grow your City (DK), with a particular focus on how participants create individual spaces and interiors in the urban garden area. The garden project consists of hundreds of standardized, raised plant beds, which are rented by local citizens with an interest in caring for a small garden and participating in the community’s activities. While the starting point – the standard raised bed – is the same for all, a walk through the area shows enormous heterogeneity in how the participants make it their own. Through practices of planting, decorating, and modifying, the participants create their own space while they, simultaneously, express spatial boundaries and relations to the neighbors. Based on observations and mappings of the diversity of gardens and territorializations in the Grow your City project, the paper studies participation through gardening asa creative practice and explores this contemporary phenomenon through the perspectives of pragmatist aesthetics.Urban gardening is a common phenomenon in cities today. Vacant areas are activated by citizens, planners or developers who see the potentials of making something grow in – and out of – leftover or otherwise transitional spaces. The cultivation of social relationships is an entangled aspect, for example through the formations of local communities.This paper analyzes gardening practices and expressions ofa current urban project, Grow your City (DK), with a particular focus on how participants create individual spaces and interiors in the urban garden area. The garden project consists of hundreds of standardized, raised plant beds, which are rented by local citizens with an interest in caring for a small garden and participating in the community’s activities. While the starting point – the standard raised bed – is the same for all, a walk through the area shows enormous heterogeneity in how the participants make it their own. Through practices of planting, decorating, and modifying, the participants create their own space while they, simultaneously, express spatial boundaries and relations to the neighbors. Based on observations and mappings of the diversity of gardens and territorializations in the Grow your City project, the paper studies participation through gardening asa creative practice and explores this contemporary phenomenon through the perspectives of pragmatist aesthetics
