Collective creation: links between city and nature
The City Museum is located in the old San Juan de Dios Hospital (1565-1974). It is one of the oldest health centers and civilian buildings in the city. It generates a museum tour through its permanent and temporary rooms and promotes educational spaces, recreation, and community dialogue to recognize the history of the city as a field of debate, memory as a social practice, a dispute and a common good, and the celebration of the cultural diversity of Quito.
Rewilding the City Museum is a proposal for the improvement of the gardens of the southern cloister courtyard, called the Republican Courtyard of the museum, which consists of the landscape design of the garden and the incorporation of native and endemic vegetation, so that it serves as an educational space, useful in the tours about the memory of the building but also to refer to the native flora in the history of the city and to perceive the principles and values behind the idea of rewilding gardens in the city.
The intervention model carried out in the south cloister courtyard comprises:
- The replacement of the current gardening, a weak sample of foreign landscaping that required permanent maintenance for its exhibition; by a redesign and implementation based on technical guidelines of rewilding, which incorporates criteria for the use of native species in the planters and generates an aesthetic of urban gardens that can be used for the learning of its 20,000 daily visitors.
- We offer the Museum and its visitors a representative sample of the native vegetation of the Quito plateau, for informational and community education purposes, using didactic tools that aim at a closer reading of its true plant landscape.
- The garden is gradually enriched with specimens of Quito flora and with the training of the Museum’s workers for its management and care.
