RheinauA Landscape of Care: Beyond the Utopian IslandLazar Riva and Lelan Yung

Rheinau is a place of many places – a rural patchwork, thanks to its geography, history, and development of social program. Observations and perceptions of the village can be heavily influenced by the location one finds themselves in.

The historic accumulation of territory enabled the emergence of unique institutions. With the observations of this diverse and multilayered landscape, knowing how these territories came to be gives hints to explain today’s current programmatical conglomerations in Rheinau.

A fourth structure emerges from Rheinau and today holds arguably the most stake in territory. With land from the Canton, Gut Rheinau has become a full-scale biodynamic operation, but its full potential as a participator in the village is yet to be fully realised.

Because most of Rheinau’s residents are commuting to work in other parts of the Canton, their influence on the territory they live in is minimal. The employees of Gut Rheinau live and work the land of the village, but most, if not all, of their production goes away to bio stores and markets in the cities. What if these flows of production and consumption could merge?