Urban Future series #2- Tallinn gardens
with Maria Derlõš, Tallinn Environmental and Municipal Affairs Department
How can a municipality encourage local residents to lead their own community garden project? In this second episode of the What’s That Green? podcast to be recorded LIVE at the Urban Future conference, we speak to Maria Derlõš, an urban gardening project manager at the City of Tallinn, Estonia, about how to develop trust between the city and citizenry, and why non-permanent gardens are a good place to start.
Like many neighbourhoods built during the Soviet era, parts of Tallinn, Estonia, are characterised by a stark form of urban planning, which today is seen as challenging.
Despite not being human-centric, these areas do offer a lot of value, says Maria Derlõš, an urban gardening project manager at the City of Tallinn.
She should know: Maria grew up in one of the last of these Soviet residential neighbourhoods to be built. As an adult, urbanist, and community strategist, she’s now determined to bring about changes that improve the quality of life here.
What is a Community Garden?
The work Maria does with the municipality largely involves helping local people to rethink the places that matter to them. Community gardening is central to these efforts.
“I think every garden in some way is a community garden,” Maria explains.
However, there are some basic rules, she says. A community garden should offer open access to the public and be community driven, regardless of who runs it – which could be a group of residents, the municipality, a private developer, a cultural association, an NGO, or a business.
Like any private garden, one designed and managed by the community provides a chance to grow flowers and vegetables, but it is also a “tool for social change or for social connection”. There’s also an emphasis on involving residents in improving the local natural and built environments by bringing them together for a shared cause. “I would say there is no community garden without a very strong aspect of co-creation,” Maria stipulates.
Pelgu Community Garden in Tallinn
Change in Tallinn began in 2017 when Maria – back then an activist – created the first community garden to show residents what was possible.
It was set up in one of the most deprived neighbourhoods of the city, “because if it’s possible there, it’s possible everywhere”.
Not only did this project make urban transformation visible to citizens, but it also caught the eye of decision-makers: the municipality proposed to scale the initiative and invited Maria to join their ranks to lead an official community gardening project.
Two years later, one of the first to emerge was Pelgu Community Garden.
Located along a corridor which runs through the city, this linear park makes use of a stretch of green space formerly impossible to build on because it housed electrical apparatus. Now that infrastructure has been moved below ground, the site has become a pollinator highway, adorned with wildflowers.
It’s now a largely recreational space, complete with benches, dog walking areas, playgrounds for families, and of course a community garden.
The Pelgu Community Garden didn’t just emerge because the city wanted a purpose for the green corridor, though; it was developed in stages, following idea-gathering sessions with residents. The city provided funding, but the work was taken care of by the people.
Challenges of Community Management
They have taken a lot of learning from a successful community garden in Estonia, where members meet regularly to manage the area as a collective.
This requires a lot of supervision from the city, Maria says, which they wanted to avoid at Pelgu.
To soften the dependency, Pelgu offers individuals a choice of either their own garden plot or a raised planter.
This has implications, in that it sometimes generates an isolationist attitude among gardeners. To counteract this, there are communal features which everyone is encouraged to use: compost bins, water tanks, and a large luxurious greenhouse, for example.
We are trying to push people to talk to each other more, to collaborate more, to delegate more responsibilities,” Maria explains.
That’s tough for people who have never managed projects of this nature before, and sometimes Maria and her colleagues are asked to step in to act as informal consultants – especially when the community swells.
This happened at the Peribüna garden. Interest was so high, the community rapidly increased from 20 to 100, almost “overnight”. Ambitions are just as high in other parts of the city: one garden received 2,000 applications for plots. Only half could be accepted.
Those who were unsuccessful in that case were encouraged to contribute in other ways, such as helping with the financial reports or documenting the project as a photographer. However, if Periboun is any indication, this non-direct involvement gets much less interest than direct gardening – a challenge Tallinn is still working on.
The Benefits of Raised Flower Beds
Pelgu is a pilot for this idea that people can register for either a raised bed measuring 1m2 or a plot of 5, 7, or 10m2.
Maria assumed more people would choose the larger plots, but this wasn’t the case. Many of them are first-time gardeners and want to start small.
It’s worked out quite well, though. Early on, some residents voiced their concerns that the community garden would not suit the neighbourhood’s aesthetics.
Raised beds – which look “like a container garden” – turned out to be a smart move, as they do not break ground, so people get to test the idea and it can be removed later if it’s unpopular.
There are plenty of other advantages to the raised beds, too:
- The local soil layer is very thin, so a tub of nutrient-rich soil provides a deeper space where plants and vegetables can develop.
- Natural soil quality is unpredictable. Applying certified compost guarantees a uniform standard and is “very important for the quality of food” grown.
- Raising the soil level makes planting, harvesting, and weeding less labour intensive and does not require so much bending, making the activity so much more accessible for some people, e.g. elderly residents.
- Mobile tubs allow flexibility for the design of the allocated space.
- They remain free from dogs’ mess.
Needless to say, “raised beds are very impactful,” Maria concludes, although she admits that there are extra drawbacks too. “You need a lot of resources,” she explains. “You have to build them or buy them. It’s a lot of money. You have to water it more because it dries out easier, so the environmental impact is bigger.”
Success So Far
So far, it seems that the gardens are being well received – both in terms of subscribers for plots and in how it’s been accepted aesthetically.
But it probably only happened at all because the residents trusted Maria.
Citizens can be sceptical of municipalities, especially when they seem to suddenly care about an issue or offer a project which they have never mentioned before.
Maria has bridged that gap. She represents the municipality now, but many people remember her for a background in neighbourhood activism or when she worked for NGOs – two fields that people trust.
Therefore, she was in a good position to produce “a series of open workshops, lectures, community events” that showcase the project and raise awareness of the kind of benefits it can bring.
Aside from developing trust for the community garden project, the aim of this was to enable residents to understand that they can shape “what kind of living environment you would like and the fact that you as a resident can make a change yourself.”
Advice for Other Cities
We asked Maria if she has any words of wisdom for other locations that want to replicate what Tallinn has done.
- Choose Partners Wisely
First, she explains, it makes sense “to find like-minded people” – and identify those who you want to work with. It’ll be a long-term initiative, so it’s important to get along – but also that it’s fun.
In Tallinn, a brief call out for partners on social media returned interest from a library and a youth centre, of all places. But what better examples of the community!
Don’t be fooled into thinking that’s a done deal, however. Even those who are willing initially may be slightly sceptical, “so we even have to prove to them that it will work”.
- Benefits Unlock Funding
“The second is really to look at the landowner,” Maria advises.
She explains that a community garden offers diverse benefits, but communicating the pet interests of the people giving you use of the land can help really secure support.
You may have to present the project primarily as having “an integrational aspect, cultural aspect” or an environmental tilt, rather than purely as a garden.
Be honest. Even if these impacts are secondary, it’s important that you can deliver on the promise.
For Tallinn, where there’s a large Russian-speaking minority, funding for the community garden was provided by “a foundation that works with a topic of integration”. The land was secured on the understanding that the garden will bring “different cultures and nationalities” closer together. And it does.
Next Steps
Maria says that Pelgu Community Garden stands as an example of what is possible if people are given the chance to really make bottom-up change.
Today, there is at least one community garden in every district of Tallinn, Maria says, making it more than 50 in total.
When she created the strategy, Maria’s aim was for the city to manage to set up 12 community gardens in 12 years, but they smashed this target in just two years after a spike in interest in 2024, the year after Tallinn was European Green Capital.
“Now the challenge actually is to sustain all this development,” Maria says cheerfully.
In the coming months we’ll be bringing you more episodes recorded live at Urban Future. So stay tuned!
Host and co-writer: Fanny Téoule
Guest: Maria Derlõš
Audio editor and writer: Karl Dickinson
Music composer: Jenny Nedosekina
Graphic designer: Julia Micklewright
Missed the last episode of the series?
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