| Summary: | The massive exodus provoked by the civil war in Syria has breathed new virulence into the public debate around the rather ill-defined concept of ‘dominant culture’. In the recent clashes between the proponents of multiculturalism and the supporters of a strict requirement of ‘assimilating’ immigrants into the society which welcomes them—always seen as something stable—there is an aggravation of this dualism. But these debates often leave out the concrete realities of the lives of immigrant men and women. At the time of the movement which exiled many from Bosnia, during the war there in the mid-1990s, an innovative project was developed which tried out a constructive approach to the question of cultural differences, and which can be seen as a practical answer to the exacerbation of underlying tensions. In this project of intercultural gardens, the act of gardening together gives rise to transcultural processes of meeting and exchange. In these collective gardens, the resources brought from their country of origin by immigrant men and women serve as a point of departure for a process of empowerment, in a constructive way. This contribution examines the development of intercultural gardens since 1996, through the example of the ‘International Gardens of Göttingen’ and looks at the different possibilities of this social innovation.
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