Urban communities

In the heart of bustling European and American cities lies an overlooked yet vibrant corner of resilience, ingenuity and magic: our gardens. From pre-Industrial England to modern-day Washington, via the Paris Commune, Barrackia in pre-war Berlin, Soviet allotments in Estonia, the orchards tended by Black migrants in Washington and food forests in contemporary Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other and with nature, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Over the past three hundred years, these tiny gardens, often born from necessity and shaped by precarity, immigration and environmental crisis, thrived by recycling nutrients, remedying contaminated soil and transforming how we think about our relationship to the earth. This title is a hymn to the most fertile agriculture in recorded human history, showing that it occurred not on farms but with little effort in small garden beds.