Common Ground: Who Owns the Space Between Buildings?

Shared space, responsibility and life beyond the plot.

Between buildings there is usually a great deal of space, and somehow almost nobody is responsible for it.

On drawings it is pale green. There are trees at three incompatible scales, people walking in several directions, and a child running with impressive confidence towards something outside the frame.

In reality, that same space has to absorb access, fire routes, parking, drainage, waste, deliveries, bicycles, planting, play, privacy, and occasionally a person who would simply like to sit down.

This is where the idea of common ground meets the technical plan. The technical plan tends to arrive with more regulations.

Shared by whom?

The legal categories look clear: public, private, shared. Use is less obedient.

A privately owned courtyard can feel like part of a neighbourhood. A formally public space can feel strangely closed. A shared garden may be available to everyone and used by nobody.

Ownership alone does not make a place common. Access, visibility, scale, comfort and the buildings around it matter just as much. People need to understand where they can go, what they may use and whether sitting somewhere will make them feel welcome or faintly criminal.

Complete openness does not necessarily help. Neither does complete separation.

Low walls, planting, level changes, thresholds and orientation can create understandable degrees of privacy without dividing every site into fenced territories.

The important thing is to think about these relationships early.

Common ground cannot be designed after the buildings, access road and parking have taken everything they need. By then what remains may still qualify statistically as open space, while being narrow, shaded, fragmented or full of infrastructure.

At Gratwein am Grünanger, the seven buildings are positioned to create a sequence of connected outdoor spaces rather than one undefined lawn. Public play areas and open green space sit alongside residents’ gardens, raised beds and private gardens.

They overlap visually but remain different in use.

Residents can meet without being required to participate in some architectural idea of community every time they take out the rubbish.

That distinction matters.

Maintenance is architecture too

Shared space becomes much less romantic when someone has to look after it.

Who waters the planting? Where is the water connection? Where are the tools? Can residents change the garden? What happens to the raised beds planted with enormous enthusiasm in April and abandoned by the second week of August?

These questions tend to disappear from competition drawings, but they have spatial consequences.

Planting has to match the maintenance that will actually exist. Storage should be reachable. Materials have to survive use rather than only handover photography.

A shared garden without a maintenance strategy is optimism drawn at 1:200.

People also need to be allowed to change things.

Furniture moves. Children invent shortcuts. Plants grow unevenly. Somebody puts a chair where no chair was drawn. That is not architecture failing. It is a place becoming inhabited.

A courtyard that only works while it still resembles the architect’s photograph is probably too fragile.

Beyond the plot

The space between buildings also affects everything around it.

Paths can connect to existing routes or stop at the property line. Ground floors can address the street or turn away from it. Shared rooms can contribute to neighbourhood life or remain completely internal.

Not every housing development needs to provide a public square.

But every building participates in a larger spatial situation whether the architect intends it to or not.

Entrances, edges, paths, planting and circulation affect people who may never enter the building.

For us, common ground is therefore less a particular type of space than a question of relationships: between ownership, use, privacy and responsibility.

It works when boundaries are understandable, participation remains voluntary, and somebody has thought about what happens after the landscape architect leaves.

Including where the garden hose goes.