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For María José Sepúlveda, having a garden is a way of taking care of herself. It is the first thing she says when she begins to remember how the idea of creating a place to plant and harvest vegetables in a small space of land surrounded by 27-story towers and a lot of cement arose.
“The garden is super important to me in material and immaterial terms,” she says, accompanied by half a dozen members of the Torres Tajamar community, a historic set of buildings next to the Mapocho River, in the Providencia commune.
The idea was born in a complex context: in the midst of the Chilean social outbreak and the start of the covid-19 pandemic. “At that moment when we were all locked up, it was super necessary for my mind and my body to put my hands in the mud. We were between four hostile walls, so making it happen was very fast since we raised the idea of the garden in the assembly”, says Sepúlveda.
At first glance, Santiago seems like a rather gray city, with little vegetation. According to a study conducted by the Observatory of Cities of the Catholic University of Chile, most of the green areas in Chilean cities are private. Even within the list of member countries of the Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD), Chile is far from what was expected: while other cities average 20 square meters per inhabitant, Santiago reaches only 3.46. The enthusiasm of the communities to have their own green space where they can plant their own food has generated enthusiasm and has multiplied each year.
The case of the residents of the Tajamar towers is one among hundreds that have arisen since the pandemic. Today it seems to be a trend that proliferates in spaces as diverse as neighborhood and social councils, cultural centers, municipalities, private spaces, and even Family Medical Centers (Cesfam) that have created their own with medicinal plants that the community uses as a complement to their treatments.
Enthusiasm in the Chilean capital has been such that urban gardens have grown rates of 15% per year, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, although as admitted by Minister Esteban Valenzuela, the country is still in debt. For this same reason, in July 2022 it announced that it would promote the First Metropolitan Community of Urban and Rural Gardens for Good Living, with which they intend to cover the entire Metropolitan region and encourage family horticulture and urban agriculture.
The residents of Torres Tajamar had a first approach in a council that they formed to discuss the political situation that Chile was experiencing in 2019, in the midst of a social outbreak. The idea arose for the first time at that meeting, but it was materialized months later, for We Tripantu in 2020, the celebration of the Mapuche New Year and winter solstice where the harvest begins.
They chose that symbolic date to start their project and from then on they began to meet every weekend to shape a space of earth and stones that was abandoned at the foot of the esplanade that extends in the middle of the towers where they live. . First they created a vertical garden with a pallet and from that moment they began to project what they wanted until they ended up in what it is today: a green spot with six terraces, those horizontal surfaces that are used for agricultural work, where today tomatoes peek out. , corn, lettuce, fruits and medicinal herbs.
The process has been a journey of learning and alliances with other communities to exchange knowledge, seeds and experiences. Between trial and error they found workshops offered by the Cultural Center of Spain (CCE)located across the street, which allowed them to improve the irrigation system and compost bins.
Francisca Santamaria says that the garden has been a meeting space and a commitment to food sovereignty. “It is super important to become aware of where the food comes from, how it comes and how it is transported,” explains Santamaria. And she adds that this awareness process has been important especially for the children of the neighborhood, who have begun to relate to the land in a different way.
Gabriel Ilabaca is another of the 12 active members of Tajamar and was the one who brought the first compost bin. For him, it is about integrating a circular economy “and preventing nutrients from ending up in landfills, from being mixed with other toxins and chemicals,” he says. “I also feel that it helps the garden circulate in itself, since the waste does not go to the garbage, but is reintegrated into the earth.”
Esteli Slachevsky has participated with her 2-year-old son Amaru since the beginning of the project and says that managing its operation has been a challenge, since the community in which they live is very large and diverse. Not everything has been rosy: there have also been conflicts and rejection from some residents who do not look favorably on the initiative. “There are people who say that the orchard is populational [una forma despectiva de aludir a las villas de la periferia] and they don’t want him here”, says Slachevsky to explain what he considers classist comments from some residents of Providencia.
From the countryside to the city
Rosa Guzmán feels strange surrounded by concrete. This summer afternoon, she accompanies the tour of the small orchard of Torres de Tajamar, amazed by what she sees: a green and living space in the middle of the big city. Guzmán, national director of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri), an organization with a presence throughout the country, is in charge of the department of producers and agroecological urban gardens. “It’s such a gray city, full of cement, nothing is respected here,” says Guzmán as he looks around and is anguished to think that children play like this, without green spaces, with the heat that radiates from the concrete floor. She then looks at the orchard and smiles, recovering her enthusiasm.
Guzmán believes that the pandemic created an opportunity for the proliferation of urban gardens, as people wondered what they could do in the midst of the confinement. But not only that: there was also hunger. “In Anamuri we saw what was happening in some towns in Santiago: people had no food,” says Rosa Guzmán to explain why in Anamuri they decided to give workshops via Zoom.
It was a logistics and coordination job several kilometers away. They organized among the members of their organization to get the inputs from the Anamuri seed bank to the orchards of the capital. Faced with this reality, the organization decided that the most productive thing would be to create a school that they called Bringing the countryside closer to the city.
The director of Anamuri believes that the increase and development of urban gardens can be a contribution to rebuilding the social fabric. “People are very motivated and enthusiastic when they come together to make a garden. Many things happen there: neighbors start to get to know each other, because although we live in the same physical space, we don’t greet each other, we don’t know each other or know what’s happening to the other. But with the orchard these links are built”, explains Guzmán.
For this woman who has lived her whole life working the land, hope is in the new generations, who will make the changes and educate their children in contact with nature. “So those children will know where everything comes from. That food does not come from a box, but from the earth”.
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