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Gardeners in cities and suburbs are reclaiming lost commons, transforming vacant lots into vibrant plots, and recreating what was once the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. Working-class gardeners have consistently played an outsized role. In London, they devised ways to feed themselves when wage labor fell short. In Paris, they grew vegetables for two million Parisians at the turn of the 19th century. In Berlin, they built social safety nets for those marginalized by the state. In post-Soviet Estonia, shared gardens became lifelines for survival amid economic upheaval.
Yet, these stories have been hidden in plain sight because they clash with ideas of urban development and imagined divisions between urban and rural, nature and culture, production and consumption. Join Kate Brown, author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere (forthcoming), to discuss the way these histories reveal how a vegetable-powered wealth not only underwrote urbanization and industrialization, but became the means by which working people created urban food systems that could be implemented today.
