Marco Clausen, the co-founder of the Prinzessinnengarten and the Nachbarschaftsakademie, talks about the development of the urban agriculture project in Berlin Kreuzberg, which was founded in 2009 and was considered a pioneering project for a social, ecological, and participatory approach to free, open spaces in the city. He talks about the hype surrounding the project, the fight against the privatization of land, the relationship to rural areas and agriculture, the role of neighborhood-based projects, and grassroots forms of collective learning. He builds a bridge to his current work with the Spore Initiative, to the question of environmental justice, sacrificed zones, the un-mourned dead, and why non-European, Indigenous, and traditional knowledge must play a much greater role in fundamentally challenging our ideas of sustainability, green transformation and resources, and nurturing new forms of caring, inhabiting the earth and living the good life.
Marco Clausen cofounded the Prinzessinnengarten and the Nachbarschaftsakademie in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where he organized programs on topics such as urban-rural relations, food sovereignty, and social-ecological justice. Marco grew up in a family of farmers, gastronomes, and millers in the countryside and studied history. As Community Facilitator at the Spore Initiative, Marco develops and implements learning programs using community-based collective knowledges and everyday practices to engage in agroecology, seed and food sovereignty, and the protection and defense of water, forests, soil, and the web of life.