Growing in rooftops and city gaps: a database of citizen urban farming

Farming a dry city — Southern Europe has held its farmland without owning it

Water is short. Land sells. And still Milan fixed some 46,300 hectares at the city's edge in 1990, and Barcelona 3,473.26 in 1998 — without buying any of it

When urban farming in Southern Europe comes up, we tend to draw one of two pictures. One is the tourist's: Mediterranean light, stone streets, pots on a terrace. The other is the story of people who lost their jobs in an economic crisis and took to tilling vacant lots. Neither is wrong, and neither explains a mechanism. This short series enters from somewhere else: what binds urban farming here most tightly is water, and what the region invented most distinctively is not the allotment plot but the agricultural park. According to the European Environment Agency, water scarcity conditions covered 28% of EU land area and 32% of its population in 2023, and in southern Europe around 30% of people live under permanent water stress with up to 70% under seasonal summer stress. Meanwhile total EU freshwater abstraction fell 14%, from an average of 224,000 million cubic metres in 2000–2009 to 192,600 million in 2020–2023 — and yet agricultural groundwater abstraction alone rose 52%, from 11,000 to 16,500 million cubic metres. As water thins, farming reaches downwards. On top of that constraint Southern Europe placed the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano (1990, about 46,300 hectares, over 1,400 farm businesses) and the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat (1998, 3,473.26 hectares, some 621 holdings). In neither case did the authorities buy the land. Holding it without buying it — this article unpacks that technique, and prepares the ground for visiting Italy and Spain over the next two days.

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