Seeds of something different

In Berlin in the early 1870s, tourists began visiting a neighborhood called Barackia. It did not have museums, palaces, or any other typical attractions. Barackia was a working-class neighborhood where people grew their own food, lived in small dwellings, and established communal arrangements outside the normal reach of government. For a while, anyway: In 1872, authorities moved in and cleared out Barackia.Still, the concept of small urban farming caught on, and by 1900, about 50,000 Berlin households were growing food, often in so-called arbor colonies. The practice has never really been abandoned: Today, by law, Germany provides residents the right to garden, still a very popular activity in urban areas.“In a little space, you can grow a lot of produce,” says MIT Professor Kate Brown, author of a new history of urban gardening. “Once you set things up, it need not take too much of your time. You can have another job and still grow food. You go to Berlin, and many German cities, and you’re surrounded by these allotment gardens.”But as the residents of Barackia found out, there is a politics that comes with growing your own food on common land. Other interests may want to claim or at least control the land themselves. Or they may want to tap into the labor being applied to gardening. One way or another, when many people start gardening for themselves, core questions about the organization of society seem to sprout up, too.Brown examines urban gardening and its politics in her book, “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City,” published by W.W. Norton. Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science within MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In a book with global scope, ranging from Estonia to Amsterdam and Washington, Brown contends that urban gardening has many positive spillover effects, from health and environmental benefits to community-building — apart from periods of pushback when others are trying to eliminate it.“Community after community, people work together to create food provisioning practices,” Brown says. “And after people come together for food and gardening, then they start to solve other problems they have.”Whose land?“Tiny Gardens Everywhere” was several years in making, featuring extensive archival research, with firsthand material interspersed too. Brown’s story begins in England, which had a very long tradition of people farming on common land, often in ingenious, productive ways. “Every bit of space was used,” Brown says.Then in the late 18th century, the advent of “enclosures” for wealthy landowners privatized much land and changed social life for many. Poorer residents, even when given allotments, found them not big enough for self-sustaining farming.“Private property is largely an English invention of the late 18th century,” Brown says. “Before that, and in many parts of the world to this day, people live with a communal sense of the ownership of the land.”In Brown’s interpretation, the enclosure movement did not just claim more land for Britain’s upper class. In an industrializing society, it forced peasants into the factory labor force, whether in cities or in rural mills.“Really what they were doing when they were enclosing land was trying to control labor, as much as controlling land,” Brown says. “Because of their reliance on the commons, peasants were self-sufficient. Who wants to go work in a factory when you could be out having fun in the forest? Expelling people was a way to force them to become homeless, the landless proletariat, with nothing to sell but their labor, for 10 or 18 hours a day.”As Brown chronicles in detail, conflicts between communal agriculture and propertied classes have often arisen since then, in varying forms. And sometimes, in now-surprising places, because urban gardening has been more extensive than we realize.A core section of “Tiny Gardens Everywhere” focuses on Washington, in the middle of the 20th century. During the Great Migration, which started a few decades earlier, African Americans moved north en masse, resettling in cities. They brought extensive knowledge with them about agricultural practices. In the part of Washington east of the Anacostia River, Black neighborhoods relied heavily on local gardening.“They set up workers’ cooperatives and food cooperatives,” Brown observes. Despite often living in difficult circumstances, she adds, “I think it’s very interesting that people found really smart ways to adapt. If the neighborhood had no garbage collection, they’ll compost. No sewers, they’ll compost.”Over time, though, authorities started claiming more land, designating homes to be torn down, and restricting the ability of residents to garden. And as Brown chronicles in the book, local officials have used restrictions on urban gardening as a form of social control, with one outcome being a homogenized social and physical landscape characterized by grass lawns for the affluent.How much food?Even if urban gardening has been fairly common in the past, it is natural to ask: How much food can it really provide? As Brown sees it, there is not one simple answer to that question. At one point, victory gardens provided about 40 percent of all produce grown in the U.S. during World War II, for one thing. More recently, In 1996, 91 percent of the potatoes Russians ate came from urban allotment gardens on 1.5 percent of the country’s arable land.As Brown also points out in the book, we may not be growing as much produce on giant farms as we think. Only 2 percent of agricultural land in the U.S. is used to produce fruit and vegetables, for instance. The U.S., as a variety of analysts and writers have observed, has corn-and soy-heavy agricultural systems at its largest scales, principally yielding corn-based products. That means, Brown says, “They’re really inefficiently [working] to produce ethanol, corn syrup, chips, and cookies.”In sum, she adds, “Yes, I do think it’s possible to take an urban space and grow a good part of the fruits and vegetables that people need there.”It is possible, Brown believes, for things to change on this front. For instance, Florida, Illinois, and Maine, three fairly different states in terms of politics, all have laws providing the right to garden. Oklahoma has a similar bill in the works.“I think this approach to looking at our right to grow food, to self-provision, to step outside of markets for our most essential needs, is something that represents a unifying set of desires in our hyperpolarized political landscape,” Brown says.Other scholars have praised “Tiny Gardens Everywhere.” Sunil Amrith, a professor of history at Yale University, has said that Brown uses “enviable skill, craft, and insight” to show “that the past of small-scale urban provisioning contains the seeds of a more resilient future for us all.”For her part, Brown hopes the book will not only appeal to readers, but spur them to become more active about the issue, as gardeners, local policy advocates, or both.“One of the drumbeats of this book is that people do — and maybe we all should — win the right to garden,” Brown says.