URBAN AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY GARDENING: THE EXAMPLE OF BERLÍN

Abstract

Without urban agriculture and gardens to feed them, cities are inconceivable. To understand cities, we must ask how they feed themselves. From old Persia or old Egypt over Arabic Spain to middle age monasteries, gardens are an important cultural center. Kitchen gardens surrounded early modern towns and when they vanished in the late nineteenth century, garden cities movements and allotment gardens replaced them. After the Second World War, as the ComeCon agricultural collectivizing was completed, peasants, as well as town dwellers, were offered a piece of land, where they could grow fruits and vegetables. Within the 20th and 21st centuries, the demand for garden land by city dwellers is growing. The new worldwide community gardening movement seems to be just the peak of a new kind of urban agriculture. Growing urbanization necessarily brings back the idea of reclaiming the commons for the common needs of nature and gardens.