Al-Hadiqa at the Arab American National Museum

Anishnabeg Country, Dearborn, Michigan, USA

The Brief

After staff at the Arab American National Museum saw one of our previous projects, they approached us about their rooftop heritage garden.

With all these project elements - cultural education, seeds sharing, a challenging landscape, food growing, amazing staff - we were eager to be involved.

Before long, we were standing on the museum’s old, neglected rooftop garden, re-imagining how it could become a space that was uplifting, productive, and beautiful. Soon after, our team was ferrying loads of soil, tools, and plants up and down the museum lift, and the project came to life - energized by collaboration between our crew, museum staff, and the surrounding community.

Learn more at the Arab American National Museum (AANM) website and Al-Hadiqa featured articles from PBS and NPR.

Challenges

• Navigating the cultural context
• Dismantling the old structures
• Creating the co-participatory design process
• Cleaning & painting to renew the space
• Encouraging community engagement 
• Bringing things up and down from from the 3rd story via a small lift
• Exposed site with heat, cold, and wind

Design & Implementation

An exciting and important project that inspired us - but we had to deliver workable designs and positive project outcomes. In this important cultural place we were in the spotlight throughout the process. In some ways we felt the pressure - reminding ourselves to always be cool-headed and gracious. 

The design process had to be genuinely inclusive. With the museum staff we held a design evening in which we presented early ideas to a large community gathering - for feedback and suggestions. Throughout we were so helped by Bede Brennan's professional landscape architectural drawing to present ideas clearly. Feedback was received and taken into account as we finalised the details of the project implementation. 

Works were carried out, by the amazing Garden Juju Collective crew, in this order - clean up, remove old structures and materials, pressure-wash everything, paint several walls and fences, bring up timber poles and install, bring up lattices and attach, bring up planter boxes and assemble, bring up soil mix, compost and mulch, bring in plants and seeds... Fantastic community and staff, working bees, assembled new furniture and shade umbrellas, and also planted, mulched, watered and cleaned up. 

As the photos show, this was, and still is, a fun, inclusive and important project. Further rounds of design and negotiation were followed by the grand re-opening of Al-Hadiqa. More of Bede's drawings conveyed the vision of the project. The media was there, along with our staff, museum staff and most importantly, much of the Dearborn community. 

Coda: we have rarely seen such successful gardens. Our fears that this might be a difficult place to establish lush gardens turned out to be unfounded. We return to Al-Hadiqa frequently!

Ideas in Action

• Preserving and celebrating heritage gardens 
• Seed saving and sharing
• Connecting food growing and cooking 
• Connecting food and community
• Learning as we design and install

• Movable planters
• Place-making
• Workplace enrichment 
• Co-creating community space
• Beautiful gardens!

Outcomes

• We were able to successfully collect, grow, harvest & redistribute heritage seeds
• High levels of AANM staff & community participation, and personal investment, on the design process, implementation and pure enjoyment 
• Al-Hadiqa’s rooftop space conditions are capable of growing significant amounts of summer food 
• A variety of pollinators found their way up to the rooftop space!
• We built foundations of relationships between AANM, Hope House & Garden Juju Collective
• We were able to be adaptive in our design and implementation process
• We at GJC really value this working relationship, this project and we have deeply enjoyed ourselves

2023 by the numbers:

• 6 AANM Staff members were on the The Rooftop Garden Committee 
• 70 people attended the Co-Design session 
• 250 people attended the garden opening celebration
• 10 stories were collected from the community (Click here to listen to the interviews from the oral history project)
• 20 events were held in the garden in 2023

“What we do is we tell stories.

We’re using this medium of gardens and plants and growth

as a sort of canvas through which we can tell stories about the community.”

Diana Abouali

Director of the Arab American National Museum

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