Uae street gardens

Blurring the lines between the private and public realm, these often-untamed street gardens show a side of the country that we rarely see

By Charles Lamb

The interface between the public space outside and the private world within a property’s boundary, conventionally defined by a wall or fence, provides a demarcation of ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’, imbued with the societal knowledge that crossing the threshold requires certain behaviours and social constructs to be adhered to. But what about the ‘ours’ space, that soft line between the public and the private, where life spills out from the house into the street, and which passers-by can also enjoy, but is not fully part of either environment? In the UAE, such edges outside houses are often appropriated by the residents in many of the older, more organically developed areas of towns and cities regardless of

Complete set-up on the street, Jumeirah, Dubai

Stretching the garden into the street, forming a soft boundary, Al Ain, Abu Dhabi

Pomegranates, kale and other produce growing on a repurposed street corner, Jumeirah, Dubai

whether the district is high-end or more down-atheel. With uses ranging from growing plants for pleasure or food to providing areas to sit either as an informal majlis or with individual seats, as well as occasionally rearing livestock, these lived-in strips provide inspiration for the integration of the public and private spheres in developments and designed landscapes, and for creating an environment where life has the opportunity to spill out onto the street and for interactions to occur between people.

The diversity of these edge spaces in itself defines them - without a set design playbook to follow, the undulations in styles and uses of these gardened and inhabited strips between the public and private realm add a patina of age and community to the streetscape that would be unusual to find in a wholly masterplanned scheme. Each area relies on the individuality of the inhabitant: at one house, their desire may be a chair to sit and watch the word go by, or a larger majlis under the shade of a few trees; in others, cultivating productive crops may be a priority, or mixing these with flowers for a more ornamental aesthetic. Elsewhere, the crow of a cockerel occasionally punctuates the air, marking his territory, and bee hives nestle against a wall under the shade of a couple of palm trees. In all these, you will often find places to sit, the chairs placed to provide vantage points to the street beyond, but close enough to the property to be considered belonging to it. By their placing close to the boundary wall and within this appropriated space, these chairs imply they are not for public use but conversely are neither totally private. They acknowledge that there are eyes on the street, and that those who inhabit the area have perhaps only popped out for a minute before they will be back.

Street garden produce, Al Safa, Dubai

It is this concept of ‘eyes upon the street’ that Jane Jacobs highlights, in her seminal work ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, as being a determining factor in the success of a neighbourhood - the constant succession of eyes, or the feeling that they are there, brings a sense of intricacy and safety to a neighbourhood as well as a lived-in quality that may not be the case where backs are turned and the street is left blind. In contemporary landscape architecture literature, this has been expanded to include the concept of the ‘transitional edge’ by academics at the University of Sheffield (Thwaites, Simpson & Simkins), whereby the integration of a street’s social, spatial and material dimensions are taken into consideration in the examination of its current form and potential interventions. Here, the argument is that locally focused, small-scale change and adaptation may be significant to how people interact with the urban environment. Throughout it all, there are the people that inhabit these diverse spaces. Discussing practical matters of maintenance with someone in their street garden in Al Ain, Abu Dhabi emirate, they tend to the spaces every day, and vary their plantings between the summer and winter, with food crops thriving from late October onwards until the onset of the summer heat. For shade, they use street trees, either intentionally planted or self-seeded, providing cover for the chickens and other birds they keep, and for fish in a makeshift pond made out of an old bath. But why keep going with such effort on the street, rather than inside the property? For them, it was for the space and to see people going by, with the inherent energy that comes from social interactions. Discussing the possibilities for including elements of such organic street-side development in contemporary landscape design (either in new developments or retro-fitting into existing areas), Will Bennett, founder of Wilden Design, sees simple ways of achieving this by ‘pushing back boundary walls, or even staggering them from plot to plot, so they are not abruptly separating the public space from the private space’, with this ultimately creating ‘opportunities for variation of the street character, and additional edges where the street can be ‘adopted’ by residents and for life to grow organically.’ Delving into the older areas of towns and cities across the UAE provides inspiration for how this may look, with the piecemeal adoption by residents over time creating a patina of organic development and a sense that the street is cared for by the people who live there. It is this potential to soften the distinction between the public and private realms that the existing stock UAE street gardens provide such exciting inspiration for.

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