Chicago's mobile garden
Day in day out you commute to work looking at the same dreary
skyline. Wouldn’t a
little more green be a welcome distraction? That’s the idea behind the
railcar
garden attachment, born in September 2008, in the midst of a graduate
seminar
class on sustainability and design at the University of Illinois.  To
make
this turn into reality, artist Joe Baldwin scraped together total
fundraising for his organization noisivelvet,
which
supports artists and their missions. The organization, as of late
January, got the consent of having 501(c)3 non profit status. 
The project—Mobile
Garden

—would have cost the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) about $350,000. The
return? A maintenance
fleet flatcar attached to a regular service train on the CTA subway and
elevated system that will carry a bountiful garden for regular commuters
to relish
in for only three to four weeks this April. Having the mobile garden in
exhibition for a brief glimpse during spring is understandable: The
Chicago
weather, composed of harsh winters or aching heat, wouldn’t allow it to
flourish in any other season. But given that the garden is mobile,
couldn’t it
travel to, say, California (or any other metropolitan city) where the
weather
could serve to benefit its commuters’ year-round? Baldwin’s idea is not
just to
give commuters something nice to look at on the way to work, but to get
them to
engage with their natural surroundings: The garden will be composed
entirely of
native Chicago plants, which means maintenance will also be easy and
sustainable. I just imagine the same concept being applied to my
familiar Bay
Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Not
to say
that I don’t enjoy gazing out at San Francisco’s fog-topped cityscape
while
commuting from the East Bay, but a glimmer of California poppies or
various
sages would be the perfect recipe for a green urban commute. After
learning
about this project on Treehugger,
I was fueled to look up what other designers are similarly doing.  To no surprise, the CTA mobile garden is not the first of
its kind. For years urban dwellers have been scheming up green
innovations so as
to enjoy a piece of the garden pie without requiring the space of a
conventional garden. But it feels like this past decade has had more
than its
fair share of artistic sustainable endeavors.  Gionatta Ginno, a
Netherlands-based Italian designer, for example, devised a mobile garden
in a
suitcase. Called UrbanBuds,
the suitcase garden is composed of soil-filled bags on each side, with
36
edible plants throughout it. The suitcase serves as a metaphor for the
urbanite
who wishes to pack up everything — even their food source — when they
move. Sometimes those within the urban green space movement get a bit ahead
of themselves,
particularly those who see the spaces more as a quirky design element
than
anything else. San Francisco’s Old Bay Bridge, for example is faced with
many
renovation options, and one of them happens to be a multi-leveled park,
called The Bay Line,
filled with
gardens, swimming pools, rock climbing walls, and tennis courts. You
know, just
your standard park suspended above water. The park would serve
pedestrians and
bicyclists, as well as provide theaters, commerce, and museums. While
the ideas
of preserving the bridge and incorporating a green aesthetic are lovely,
the
proposal seems to run counter to the initial vision of a community park,
proposing instead a futuristic playground of artificial entertainment.Though conceptually simple, Baldwin’s Mobile Garden is the
influential spark of something prodigious, linking global cities to
their
native plants. And if we start with smaller garden innovations that are
easier
to implement, then places like New York, Tokyo, and Sydney can see how
simple these
improvements are and jump onboard. City-dwellers have always had the
need for the
escape provided by city parks. And who knows? Maybe one day, every one
of us
will be basking in the sun at our nearest bridge park. For now, we’ll
have to
make do with the small portable green spaces.