Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

Caption (image above): A thriving allotment garden in a bomb crater. London, 1943.

In the heart of European and American cities lies an overlooked yet vibrant space for resilience, ingenuity and magic: the garden. Part history, part reportage, part manifesto, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City follows the 300-year history of urban gardening—from feudal England to the Paris Commune, to Berlin’s green shantytowns, to contemporary Amsterdam, Chicago, and beyond. 

Throughout, acclaimed MIT historian Kate Brown weaves in her own gardening experience, exploring the political and the practical while painting a picture of the necessity of self-provisioning in an increasingly chaotic world. Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self-provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most fertile agriculture in recorded human history, without the use of fossil fuels. 

The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: In Nazi Berlin, working class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership. The Soviet superpower survived so long only because of its urban gardens. In Tiny Gardens Everywhere, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid of past and present, archive and experience, showing how down-to-earth gardeners, through resourcefulness, intuition, and inherited methods, can reap abundant, local, diverse and organic harvests while fostering mutual aid, community, and political engagement.

About the Speaker

KATE BROWN is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival, an NBCC Award finalist. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, MA, and in Vermont.