How Urban Gardens Can Bolster American Democracy
But when Kate Brown, an environmental historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), looks at urban gardens, she sees a deep-rooted history of activism and sustainability—one that spans centuries, continents, and communities. Brown distilled her research on the subject into her forthcoming book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning […]
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When people walk or drive past urban gardens, they often just see what’s on the surface. Raised beds on a small plot. Seedlings poking through the dirt. Perhaps bright pops of colorful produce, like tomatoes or peppers.
But when Kate Brown, an environmental historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), looks at urban gardens, she sees a deep-rooted history of activism and sustainability—one that spans centuries, continents, and communities.
Throughout, Brown reveals a common thread: Unused urban spaces disparaged by the powerful as “wastelands” were, in reality, areas where working-class and poor communities used gardening to build self-sustaining livelihoods.
Brown distilled her research on the subject into her forthcoming book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City. The chapters cover feudal England, 19th-century Berlin, and early 20th-century Washington, D.C., as well as modern-day Chicago; Mansfield, Ohio; and Montgomery, Alabama, traversing time and space to illuminate their connected stories.
Throughout, Brown reveals a common thread: Unused urban spaces disparaged by the powerful as “wastelands” were, in reality, areas where working-class and poor communities used gardening to build self-sustaining livelihoods.
Civil Eats spoke with Brown about her book, the histories of urban gardens, and why she thinks urban gardeners can transform people and society.
You’re known for your writings about nuclear disasters, particularly Chernobyl. This book seems to be a slightly different turn in your work. What made you focus on urban gardens?
When I was in the Chernobyl zone, I came across all these people who were picking berries in the radioactive swamps and selling them to people [there]. So that really got me thinking about plants—because plants can be sources of pollution [and toxins].
Or you could think of these plants as our allies, doing what an army of soldiers had not managed to do: They were cleaning up the environment. They were taking radioactive isotopes and bringing them in neat little round purple packages. If we’d taken those berries and deposited them as radioactive waste, it would [have been] a really affordable and fantastic form of cleanup.
So then I started to think, “How else do people in tough circumstances use plants as their allies?” I started looking at cities. [In the] 1850s, people were getting pushed out of their peasant villages, where they farmed the land and foraged and raised animals, and they went to big cities for industrial jobs.
What I noticed is that they go to the edges of the cities, and they find [underdeveloped] areas they call “wastes.” They can use the wastes around them to procure food, fuel, and shelter. Around Berlin in 1850, these urban gardeners took whatever they could find—garbage, beer mash, pulp from sugar beet factories, kitchen scraps, animal manure, human manure—and they built human-engineered soils and created a green shantytown.
They started to build the sinews of the social welfare network that we so rely on today. My sense is they were doing what plants and microbes and fungi do in soils: They’re sharing, creating mutual aid societies, supporting each other. And what comes of that is not a realm of scarcity, but one of abundance.
People thrived in these infrastructure-less, green shantytowns, and then wherever I started to look, I found places like this.
Your book reveals how urban gardens nurture health, despite a prevailing stereotype of cities as dirty or unclean, particularly during the industrial era. Can you describe a bit about what you found at the intersection of public health and urban gardening?
Take Washington, D.C., for example. . . . People know the Potomac River, but very few are aware that there’s a second river called the Anacostia River. If you cross it, there’s a part of town that has been historically Black, where Black people could buy lots of land.
What we found east of the Anacostia is that in these communities that got going around 1910 to 1920, people bought not one lot but two to six. And when they did that, they put a tiny house in the middle and then used all the rest of the land around it to garden.
Where sanitation comes in is that these neighborhoods were ignored by the congressmen in charge of D.C. at the time. These were mostly Dixie Democrats, they were racist, and they just didn’t put any infrastructure in that part of town. . . . So there’s no sewer systems, there’s no garbage pickup, there’s no paved surfaces. And it’s pretty densely populated.
So if you’re following the germ theory, you would expect to have all kinds of outbreaks of disease, especially fecal-borne diseases. But there doesn’t seem to be any sign of this. In fact, people had outdoor privies, and then they would either compost what was in the privy themselves, or nightsoil workers would come and bring [that compost] to the dump, which was run by a company called the Washington Fertilizer company. And the Washington Fertilizer company had hundreds of pigs running around this area. Composted nightsoil, digested by the pigs, would be brought to local farms but also to these gardens, and people would use it with their other household compost.
They’d [also] take water that came down from their roofs and kitchen water, run it through gravel, and then have pretty clean water that they could use to water their plants. They were doing all the things that would be considered green architecture today, that they had invented themselves in the 1920s and ’30s.
Your book emphasizes that working-class people are often at the forefront of urban gardening. What is it about urban gardening that makes it an effective or necessary tool for marginalized groups?
People are drawing from the bounty of their gardens [and] they’re creating these kinds of societies that then start to solve other problems. These are communities that are not getting the benefit of state largesse. They’re often either overtly discriminated against or they’re just simply ignored. So they’re using their spontaneously created mutual aid societies, which includes plants and microbes and animals, to share this bounty as a kind of public wealth.
You feature stories of people who have started up urban gardens to feed themselves and their communities, but faced interference from bureaucratic forces. Municipal laws prevented a couple living in the Chicago suburbs from building a hoop house to grow food during the winter, for example. Can or should urban farming be advanced by policymakers, or do you see it as mostly an alternative to our political and food systems?
This family had a hoop house safely in the backyard. They grew a lot of food in the summer, and then they were always sad in November when it was starting to get cold. So they put up this hoop house, and they could be in there with T-shirts and grow the cold-weather greens that they really enjoyed all winter long.
A neighbor complained, the city told them to take it down, and they kept fighting it. They pursued this for seven years. The city leaders would say things like, “What are you growing there? Why don’t you just go to Whole Foods? We’re a suburb, not an agricultural region.”
And so [they] pursued this all the way down to the state legislature and passed the Right to Garden law. Just a couple of states in the country have this right, [that] says no matter the municipality, no matter [the] homeowner association rules, people have the right to grow food on their private property and on other property that’s not being used.
That’s one of the motivations for writing this book. We’re facing major environmental and ecological problems that are going to lead to all kinds of other problems, like wars and economic distress. I think a lot of people feel like we can’t do anything about it. We can’t get anything changed at the U.N. level. We certainly can’t get an act of Congress passed. But we can get our municipalities to change code.
What if every time you build a new condo, you have to have a garden spot the size of a parking space? Suddenly everything can start to change. There’s more green space, which means there’s more places for rain to fall that prevent flooding. There’s more green space, which means the cities are cooler and people are outside on the streets [more]. In this time, when so many people feel lost and alienated and lonely, this simple change in zoning on a municipal level could change the whole nature of American democracy.
You described your book as part manifesto. What do you hope people take away from it?
What I’m hoping people take away is that we still have commons that we devote to moving and parking cars, and we should ask for those back. For humans—not machines—and for plants, animals, insects, and microbes.
Part of this manifesto is that these commons are not a free-for-all. What the commons provide is common bounty, a common wealth, that is off the market. My hope is that we start with these commons in cities, where by 2050, the majority of people in the world will live, and from there, that understanding of transactions starts to spread.
So that’s my manifesto, to think back to common right: the right to food, fuel, and shelter. More useful, I argue, than the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody can eat those. Very few people can attain those without having access to money and power. But common law rights provided food, fuel, and shelter for everyone. And that’s, I think, where we need to start again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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