Plan

During the replication phase of the EU Cultivate project, WUR will travel with the Library of Citizen engagement to the Food Sharing initiatives in each of the six spoke locations.

Our first stop ? Freiburg im Breisgau – where WUR & CASCOLAND visited CULTIVATE partner Zusammen Leben.  

Zusammen Leben – (German for Living together) have been managing a 3500 square meter community garden – as an intercultural meeting space since 2016. And as part of the ten year anniversary of this intercultural civic space, Zusammen Leben hosted a Lab &Kitchen at the garden. As explained in our library, Lab & kitchen is a creative methodology that fosters collaboration, bridges knowledge systems and engages communities through participatory cooking and good sharing activities. Importantly, Lab&Kitchen evolves with each iteration, responding to specific community needs. In designing this Lab&Kitchen, Zusammen Leben and CASCOLAND agreed that engaging people with a migration background should take priority.

Around 250 people from 16 countries regularly garden at this lush oasis sitting alongside the Dorfbach. What began with modest ambitions of being an intercultural community space, the community garden now offers potatoes, carrots, sugar snaps, berries and even a banana tree – all of which are grown organically with no synthetic fertilisers. It is also a venue for workshops, cooking nights and much more – all of which benefits greatly from Zusammen Leben’s experience of cooking & eating together at their Zuka Solicafe.

The Lab & Kitchen offered the opportunity to bring these activity lines together in a new way in the space of the community garden. CASCOLAND proposed building a coal fired tandoori oven for the garden, to create a community infrastructure for people from diverse backgrounds to prepare flat breads and skewers.

Tandoor (तंदूर / تنور / تنور‎) – a form of an oven – has widespread appeal across the Asian, Arab and Persian cultures, and is used to bake eclectic varieties of bread and skewers. We hoped that this intervention would be appealing to community members with Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic backgrounds and invite them to share aspects of their culinary traditions with the rest of the community.

CASCOLANDs previous experience of making mobile Pizza ovens using accessible everyday materials like Terracotta flower pots made them quite enthusiastic to build “Tandoori ovens”. And to makes things more interesting CASCOLAND also built a Mobile Pizza oven for the garden.

Process

In addition to the Lab & Kitchen intervention, another important aspect of this replication journey was to test the serious games designed by Txell Blanco Diaz. Together with Ana-Maria and Rohit, Txell planned to test “Let’s Eat” & “Common Ground” – two of the three serious games designed under the Cultivate project. (Both are available as print & play in the games section of the Library).  

Common Ground is an interactive board game designed to take players through the challenges of starting up and maintaining a community garden. The original game was designed with food sharing initiative Utrecht Natuurlijk and the playing boards are based on three community gardens in Utrecht. For this replication visit, we translated the game to German and created new game elements cognizant of the reality of the Zusammen garden.

Let’s Eat! is an interactive board game that encourages storytelling to aid recipe development, foraging, cooking and eating together. This serious game was originally developed by Txell and residents in Utrecht’s edible neighbourhood, but can be played anywhere there are plants, people, and curiosity.  

You can notice a pattern in both of these games. They are meant to be inviting and to be played while sharing a meal. So, as Txell prepared to host a game night at the garden; Ana-Maria and Rohit got together to prepare a meal, as an accompaniment to the game.  

If Zusammen garden were an author, she would describe this evening of fun, games and food as follows

Golden hour in sunny Freiburg.
CASCOLAND, busily navigates the gentle chaos of setting up a Tandoor oven (the nervousness of a maiden attempt is palpable ) alongside a Pizza oven – both to be ready for the big festival in a couple of days.

Meanwhile, Ana-Maria & Rohit, strangers only hours ago – now find themselves nervously commanding a pop up kitchen to feed the members about to join in Txell’s fun-interactive-serious game.

People who love cooking, know the joy that comes from seeing you labour nourish other. I only wonder if humans feel this so deeply, how should I describe the pleasure I feel – watching, holding, sheltering – even if I do not cook, but I host, I nurture, I grow.

Beyond the serious game, the days before the anniversary festival– the garden hosted several workshops – making syrups, jam and trial naan’s. Conviviality doesn’t always require a big event with planned engagement and serious games. Sometimes it is the simple act of harvesting and de-pitting berries together. Yes, even these mundane yet tranquil acts can bring people together.

We saw people who couldn’t speak a common language communicate with food. Recipes connected to these berries passed down generations as heritage serving as a language in itself. The group wanted to test a recipe of “Naan” – a version of flatbread cooked in Tandoor Ovens popular in the Indian Subcontinent.

Party

Some moments are better told in pictures than in words.

The ovens were ready in time for the Anniversary Festival & final Lab & Kitchen event on 28 June 2025—and the pictures below capture the spirit of the day far better than any description could.  

Along the way, we also spotted citizen engagement tools in action at the Garden. Perhaps you, the reader, can identify more of them in the photos – or share your own stories of using similar tools in your initiatives.

And just like that, all the preparation and hard work culminated in the ten-year celebration of Zusammen Leben’s curation of community, conviviality, and shared stories. This Party was not only a moment of joy, but also the living outcome of the plan and process we’ve traced above.