Backyard Community Garden

The Backyard Community Garden in Osu, Accra forms Phase 2 of the Backyard Urban Campus, extending the masterplan's ambition to create a contemporary public realm rooted in West African spatial traditions. The project questions the inherited model of the urban park, where lawns and ornamental planting often define public open space. Across much of West Africa, communal landscapes have traditionally been organized around everyday use rather than ornamental composition. Open ground accommodates gathering, markets, festivals, play, and informal exchange, while vegetation provides shade, food, and medicine. Rather than separating landscape from daily life, these spaces bring cultivation, recreation, and community together. Building upon these longstanding spatial qualities, the project explores how a contemporary public garden can emerge from the social and material traditions of its own region, creating a community-oriented public realm that reflects contemporary urban life while remaining rooted in local ways of inhabiting the landscape.

The design draws from agricultural planning systems found across West Africa, where simple grid layouts organize cultivation, irrigation, and shared access to land. Rather than reproducing these patterns literally, the project adopts their underlying logic to organize planting beds, circulation routes, shaded gathering spaces, and communal activities. The grid provides a clear organizational structure while allowing the garden to evolve over time through changing patterns of use, cultivation, and community stewardship.