People mill about the tactical urbanism garden.
The public event also included music, free snacks and a farmer’s market booth with The Howdy Farm, a student-run organic, sustainable farm at Texas A&M, selling food grown on campus.
Due to several factors, the installation didn’t quite alter pedestrian behavior as the team anticipated, Merrill said, however, the lessons learned will influence and enhance the planning of future installations.
“This experiment is not a culmination of our work, it’s a first step,” he said. “We learned a lot for next year. The tactical urban agriculture group will strike again.”
Next year’s class, he said, will stage a pop-up garden somewhere on campus that will stay up for most of a semester for the students to study and people to enjoy. This year’s garden experiment, installed April 1, was dismantled at the end of the month.
“I think a lot of people really enjoyed it. Something like this is great for stressed students,” said Mackenzie Anderson, an environmental design student from Montgomery, Texas. “People were writing on the whiteboard every day and saying we should make it a permanent installation.”
The plants were donated to The Howdy Farm.
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This story by Sarah Wilson was originally posted on ArchOne.