🍃 This abandoned stadium has become a food garden

Most cities have places that quietly fall out of use.

- A factory that closed years ago.
- A warehouse that never found a new tenant.
- A stadium that once hosted thousands of people but now sits empty.

The usual options are predictable.

- Demolish it.
- Redevelop it.
- Or leave it to slowly decay.

In Taipei, an abandoned football stadium followed a very different path.

Instead of tearing it down, the city chose to redesign it.

What used to be rows of empty concrete now holds more than one hundred small garden plots. 

Local families grow vegetables there and workshops bring neighbours together. 

What was once a forgotten structure has become a shared space for food, learning, and community life.

The building itself barely changed.

What changed was its purpose.

And that decision reveals something important.

Progress rarely comes from asking people to care more or behave differently.

It usually comes from redesigning the system around them.

In this case, the same city, the same people, and the same physical structure produced a completely different outcome simply because the space was given a new role.

Unused assets stopped being seen as problems.

They became resources.

That is what systems-level thinking often looks like in practice.

Not necessarily building something new, but looking again at what already exists and asking a better question about how it could serve.

👉 Where in your organisation might unused assets already hold the potential for new value?

If you’d like to watch the short video I shared with a post about this on my LinkedIn page, click here.

Best,

Jasper