Project type                      Living lab project

Partners                            ProGIreg, Zagreb city council

Beneficiaries                    Zagreb municipality

Dates                                   2018 – 2023

Website                             ProGireg Living Lab: Zagreb case

The new proGIreg Zagreb Living Lab therapeutic garden held its first public event on June 10, 2021. At the event, representatives of the City of Zagreb, the “Mali dom – Zagreb” Day Centre for the Rehabilitation of Children and Youth, the “CeDePe” Association – Association of People with Cerebral Palsy from Zagreb and the “Novi Jelkovec” Centre – public social care institutions took part, and their clients were the first to explore the newly developed urban gardening infrastructure. These new gardeners were able to learn how to plant herbs and vegetables. For this reason, specially raised garden beds have been adapted to make access easy and accessible.

The therapeutic garden is laid out and designed as a multi-sensory park so that users can experience, explore and get to know the space around them using all their senses. A therapeutic garden is an space that improves well-being by providing accessible and serene spaces for socialisation and contemplation. Such gardens include diverse plant species and are tailored for varied users. The plans in Sesvete entail involving and making the garden accessible for people living nearby that have disabilities.

The park is designed with the help of local institutions catering for people with various disabilities, including ‘Little Home’ day-care centre that hosts a variety of therapeutic and interactive activities for disabled children. The children will be involved in learning activities by planting herbs, making natural cosmetics, and ‘making money’ by also selling some of the produce. The idea is to help visitors to the garden to observe nature with all senses, by various activities such as games and art classes with nature taking centre stage.

This project is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme running from June 2018 to 2023. ProGIreg stands for ‘Productive Green Infrastructure for Post-Industrial Urban Regeneration – Nature for Renewal’. Dortmund (Germany), Turin (Italy), Zagreb (Croatia) and Ningbo (China) host the project’s Living Labs in post-industrial districts where nature-based solutions are developed, tested and implemented. Other cities involved in the project are Cascais (Portugal), Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Piraeus (Greece) and Zenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina), participating in city-to-city exchange to replicate nature-based solutions.

• Integrating traditional building techniques provides cost-effective, locally sourced, and easily replicable climate-resilient solutions that are more accessible to poor urban communities.
• It is expected to promote cultural continuity, empowering local communities to engage in climate adaptation initiatives while preserving traditional crafts and knowledge.
• The combination of heritage-based principles with modern urban planning leads to more sustainable, resilient cities that can better withstand the impacts of climate change while fostering vibrant, socially cohesive communities.