A CATALOGUE OF USE(R)S

Empathy Park is a garden for the 2020 edition of the Seoul International Garden Show in Seoul, based on the theme “Link garden, think Life”, with the primary goal of using gardens to link disconnected urban spaces and improving inhabitants' quality of life with greenery. 

The garden offers to spatialize each use of the garden the same way the cities usually spatialize human movements. For example, roads are generally a spatialization of car use, just like sidewalks and alleys reveal pedestrian practices. Empathy Park develops a toolbox for a physical interpretation of all the different uses that can be found in a garden, not only human uses and not always usually visible in the urban space. 

The way those different use(r)s intersect, the way they meet have also been added to the toolbox. Just like zebra crossings spatialize the meeting point between pedestrians and cars, the Empathy Park offers to interpret and give a physicality to the intersections. 

The catalog of users considered for the garden are representative of the main users of Seoul’s parks : urban harvesters, strollers, critters, birds, pollinators, kids and sight-seers.

A PROTOTYPE FOR SEOUL

In order to highlight all the different users within a city and to create awareness of the potential interaction between the users, Empathy Park explores the possibility of an urban laboratory of users and intersections. For each of the indicated users and the way they interact with each other, a complete toolbox has been established. Thanks to these elements, it becomes possible to give the same physical strength to everyone, which is the core concept of the garden.

Each use is associated with a type of pathway, materialized in various ways and paired with specific planting. The flora comes as a support to the different uses of the garden : fruit-bearing species for the harvesters, tree lines for the birds and a blossoming meadow for the pollinators.

Gardens in public spaces can therefore become places where all those primarily hidden links can be revealed. Developing around a toolbox, the link gardens find a physical interpretation of their usage of the city and the way they meet and interact with each other. Once proven successful in the Seoul International Garden Show, this tool could be used to create parks in the various neighborhoods of Seoul, enhancing the particularities of their users.