DeRoche Projects Transforms Accra Community Garden into a Productive Public Landscape

DeRoche Projects has broken ground on the Backyard Community Garden in Osu, Accra, marking the second phase of the wider Backyard Urban Campus. Rather than treating the campus as a single enclosed destination, the masterplan distributes buildings, landscapes, and public spaces across the neighborhood, connected by short walks through the city. Following the completed Backyard Community Club, the new garden extends that concept into the landscape, asking what a contemporary civic space might look like when its starting point is not the imported urban park, but the ways public space has long been inhabited across West Africa.

Lawns and decorative planting are deliberately set aside in this design. Instead, the landscape is organized around gathering, cultivation, play, food, and informal exchange, drawing on environments where vegetation has traditionally provided shade, medicine, and produce alongside social spaces. Gardens planted with species used in Ghanaian cooking and traditional medicine sit alongside areas for leisure, contemplation, and education, while produce grown on site feeds directly into the café's seasonal menu. The result positions cultivation not merely as scenery, but as an essential piece of everyday civic infrastructure.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

Materially, the project continues research initiated with the Backyard Community Club. DeRoche Projects is developing stabilized rammed earth mixes that reduce Portland cement usage by incorporating locally available lime and pozzolanic ash, exploring how a construction method with deep roots in West Africa can operate as a contemporary, durable, and lower-carbon system. This approach deliberately connects material experimentation with local resources, labor, and building knowledge, rather than treating earth construction as a nostalgic architectural gesture.

That thoughtful approach extends directly underfoot. Instead of imported paving or a manicured lawn, the garden utilizes crushed palm kernel shells, an agricultural by-product selected to create a permeable surface that remains accessible during Ghana's rainy seasons while preserving the tactile feel of an earthen landscape. Below ground, a system of pipes collects rainwater for irrigation, turning the ground itself into an active part of the garden's maintenance infrastructure. Scheduled for completion in 2027, the Backyard Community Garden suggests a modest inversion of the conventional city park: rather than asking visitors to admire the landscape strictly from a distance, it invites them to actively engage with it.

Source: designboom