Funded by the Bamberg Smart City initiative, the World Heritage Office Bamberg has produced a short film about the Market Gardeners’ District in Bamberg. The film presents current challenges and opportunities of Bamberg’s urban horticulture and features aerial views, stakeholder interviews as well as background information on this historic district.

The Town of Bamberg was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1993 due to its medieval layout and its very well preserved historical buildings. The Market Gardeners’ District together with the City on the Hills and the trade-oriented Island District forms an integral part of the site. It features long, narrow gardens that hide behind the single-storey gardeners’ houses with their large gateways. Urban horticulture has been practiced in Bamberg from the Middle Ages until today.

Yet, commercial horticulture has declined sharply in recent decades. As a result, large parts of the inner-city open space structures have fallen into disuse. At the same time, new models of cultivation such as self-harvest gardens and solidarity farming projects have emerged. Historic liquorice cultivation has been revived. Old crops that are ideally adapted to Bamberg’s climate and soil are being preserved for the future in Bamberg’s Heritage Garden.

In several families, the next generation has taken over the gardening business. Some of those young people even have a seat in the City Council to ensure that the interests of gardeners are heard in the political arena.

Urban gardening is not a new trend in Bamberg, but looks back on centuries of tradition. The knowledge of growing and harvesting crops as well as seed propagation is passed down from generation to generation. This knowledge and skill is so valuable that it was included in the German Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016.

The video can be found on the YouTube channel of the City of Bamberg at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vQHvOInOq4.

For further details:

CITY OF BAMBERG, World Heritage Office Bamberg.

Untere Mühlbrücke 5, 96047 Bamberg, Germany

Tel.: +49(0) 951/87-1811, e-mail: [email protected]