How Urban Gardens Can Bolster American Democracy
Environmental historian and MIT professor Kate Brown discusses her new book, ‘Tiny Gardens Everywhere,’ about the power of urban gardening to transform people and societies.
By Sam Delgado
Civil Eats
January 7, 2026
Excerpt:
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.
Read the complete article here.
Source: https://cityfarmer.info/how-urban-gardens-can-bolster-american-democracy/
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