A Munich foundation that links 1,000 gardens — anstiftung and the network of self-making

The Federal Allotment Gardens Act examined yesterday bundles into a single statute a cap on plot size, a limit on shed dimensions, a ceiling on rent and restrictions on termination. That is strong protection — but it reaches only gardens that fit the legal definition of a Kleingarten: form a club, divide the ground into numbered plots, enter into a lease. A garden that does not take that shape is, legally, simply a use of land. And the gardens that multiplied in German cities from the 2000s onward were precisely the ones that did not take that shape: worked in common, undivided, with the harvest shared and the land re-leased each year. Gardens the law never anticipated.

So in the absence of law, what keeps these gardens going? A large part of the answer is a Munich foundation called anstiftung. It owns no gardens and buys no land. It nonetheless puts community gardens on a national map, runs a knowledge base, advises people setting one up, hands out small start-up grants, and brings people together at meetings around the country and at a summer camp. Not ownership, not statute, but a map, a grant and a gathering. What follows examines what that model actually does — and where it runs out.

The foundation has two lineages. The first is the ERTOMIS foundation, set up in 1973 by Erich and Charlotte Mittelsten Scheid. Erich had taken over the running of the Wuppertal firm Vorwerk with his brother in 1943; the family did not found the company but came to own and lead it during the twentieth century. ERTOMIS made research into the Nazi era, architecture and medicine its priorities — not gardens. The second is anstiftung, the charitable research body founded in 1982 by their son Jens Mittelsten Scheid, born in 1941. Raised in a Calvinist business family, he served an internship at the family firm, read philosophy, sociology and politics in Heidelberg and Munich, and worked as a social pedagogue in a Munich church parish; he broke off a doctorate. The purpose he set was to research and support self-directed work, subsistence and sustainable everyday practice.

The two merged in 2008 into the Stiftungsgemeinschaft anstiftung & ertomis gGmbH, and in 2017 re-emerged under the anstiftung name as a charitable foundation under civil law. The executive board today consists of two people: the sociologist Christa Müller, and Daniel Überall, a co-founder of the Munich community-supported agriculture cooperative Kartoffelkombinat. The board of trustees comprises the founder's children Anna Mittelsten Scheid, who chairs it, and Jonas Mittelsten Scheid, with the lawyer Nina Petrasch. Kartoffelkombinat, begun in 2012, now supplies vegetables to more than 2,300 households and ranks among Germany's largest such cooperatives. The point is that a researcher and a practitioner run the foundation together.

One feature of that history is easy to skip past and worth pausing on. The foundation's capital is a business family's private fortune, earned in the market — not public money. So it need not align its grant conditions with any government policy target, and no one obliges it to measure results. The pressure examined in last week's series, where nothing gets funded that cannot be evaluated, barely operates around this foundation. Whether that is a good thing is a question for later; as a fact it is worth fixing first. In May 2010 Jens Mittelsten Scheid received the German Founders' Prize from the Federal Association of German Foundations.

The earlier country report on Germany devoted a section to the founding of the international garden that migrant families started in Göttingen in 1996. That story is not retold here; what matters is what came next. Incorporated as an association in 1998, the Göttingen gardens today occupy three sites totalling 11,000 square metres, worked by some 70 families from 25 countries. Not large in itself. It is called the prototype because the same form was replicated nationwide — and the replication was the foundation's work. In 2003 anstiftung launched a project called Stiftung Interkultur, whose specific remit was to research and support intercultural gardens.

The work itself is unglamorous: connect garden projects across the country, advise people setting one up, help with publicity and fundraising, and in some cases provide start-up money. Not going out to build gardens, but handing whoever wants to build one a precedent, a procedure and a small sum. The result is that more than 400 intercultural garden projects existed across Germany as of 2025, with more in preparation. The earlier country report cited roughly 190 as the figure for around 2013. That is close to a doubling in twelve years.

By the foundation's own account, anstiftung has accompanied this new urban garden movement from its beginnings as the Network of Intercultural Gardens. In time intercultural gardens came to be handled alongside every other kind of community garden, and the national network now lists 1,000 garden projects. They differ widely: some exist for environmental education, others for biodiversity or climate work, and they are spreading beyond cities into small municipalities and villages. The foundation's role is not to standardise that variety but to make the projects visible to one another.

The foundation's funding guidelines are short and concrete. Applications take no set form — the stated reason being that the foundation wants projects to have an effect rather than process mountains of paperwork. There is still a minimum: aims, content, measures, a cost and time plan, and a 22-digit IBAN. The project description must not exceed three A4 pages, and must contain no photographs. Submission is by email only, with a copy of a current tax-exemption certificate attached. Only charitable bodies may apply.

The line on what gets funded is equally clear. Eligible: garden tools, materials for the group to build its own infrastructure, materials for craft activities and practical workshops, plants, peat-free soil, and seed of open-pollinated varieties. Not eligible: ongoing operating and personnel costs, land acquisition, contracted-out construction and other services, fences, and bought-in finished products such as composting toilets or raised beds. It will not pay for a finished product but will pay for the materials to build the same thing yourself — that single line contains nearly the whole of the foundation's thinking. Three further conditions apply: the people who will use the garden must take part from the planning stage; no synthetic fertiliser or pesticides; and short-term interim uses of land are not funded.

The reporting demand is distinctive too. Grants are non-repayable; goods bought with them must be used for the stated purpose; immobile investments such as a well must remain in use for at least five years; items must be inventoried. Accounting is discharged by a short factual report, and the receipts stay with the project. Set that against the four-stage cycle of pre-, interim, post- and follow-up evaluation examined in last week's series. There is a cost, though. No personnel costs means no one can be paid out of this grant. The funding is designed on the assumption that unpaid labour is already there.

The platform the foundation runs, urbane-gaerten.de, carries a national map of community gardens, each garden's own short description and contact details, and a knowledge base organised into organisation and communication, infrastructure and garden design, horticultural questions, and other practical themes. There is a self-study course on how to start a community garden. New gardens register themselves. The repair side has a platform of the same shape at reparatur-initiativen.de, covering events, materials and how to found an initiative. Most of the foundation's day-to-day work is these two sites and the advice desks behind them.

The movement found its words in 2014. Berlin community gardens — Allmende-Kontor, Prinzessinnengarten, Kiezgarten — together with Neuland in Cologne, the group Another World Is Plantable, and anstiftung, produced a manifesto whose final version was presented at the third summer camp of urban community gardens in Nuremberg at the end of that August, and published in October. Its motto: the city is our garden. More than 60 garden initiatives signed at launch and the figure later reached around 200 projects. The demands are plain: recognise community gardens as public commons; keep public space usable without an obligation to consume; support the gardens in urban planning; and oppose the privatisation of public space and public goods.

The summer camp continues: Dresden from 30 August to 1 September 2024, Leipzig from 12 to 14 June 2026. Scan the programmes and, alongside the technical sessions — mycelium in the garden, fertilising with urine, fruit trees, irrigation, coping with heat and drought — sits an item titled securing gardens: ideas and strategies for holding on to land. How to keep hold of the ground is an annual agenda item in this movement. In the law-protected world of the Kleingarten, it is an item that scarcely arises.

anstiftung does not support only gardens. Its remit covers three kinds of initiative: urban and intercultural community gardens; open workshops, including fab labs and bike kitchens; and repair initiatives, the repair cafés. What they share is a non-commercial orientation, the opening and sharing of knowledge, and the democratisation of tools and technologies along open-source principles. The repair side is not small either: of the roughly 2,000 initiatives founded in Germany by 2024, more than 1,800 are active in the network the foundation started in 2014. A national network conference, regional education and exchange events, and joint webinars and workshops run there in the same shape as they do for gardens.

The word that binds the three is Selbermachen — making it yourself. The foundation's research arm treats that binding as an academic question too, working with concepts such as conviviality, the commons, self-provisioning and urban subsistence, and drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory and the care economy. It describes its own stance as methodically controlled proximity: sympathetic engagement with the projects while keeping scientific distance. It conducts accompanying research, joins publicly funded transdisciplinary projects, and runs studies of its own. The research department is led by Christa Müller, who also chairs the board, and Robert Jende.

The vocabulary of the movement came from a run of books out of this foundation. Christa Müller's Putting Down Roots in a Foreign Land (oekom, 2002) took up intercultural gardens; her Urban Gardening: On the Return of Gardens to the City (oekom, 2011) took up the urban garden as such. Stadt der Commonisten, by Andrea Baier, Müller and Karin Werner (transcript, 2013), framed gardens as a practice of making commons, and Die Welt reparieren, edited by Baier, Tom Hansing, Müller and Werner (transcript, 2016), extended the argument to repair. A further volume, on urban gardens as sites of transformation, appeared in 2024. A foundation that funds gardens has also, in the same hand, built the language in which gardens are discussed.

The limits of the model are visible at Berlin's Prinzessinnengärten. The earlier country report covered its founding in 2009, so only the land question concerns us here. The roughly 6,000 square metres at Moritzplatz had lain empty for over sixty years, and the site is rented from the city on a yearly basis. That is why the beds themselves were built to move — planted in recycled baker's crates, Tetra Paks and rice sacks so the whole garden can be shifted at any time. This was not a poetic flourish but a technical answer to the absence of legal protection. Under the 1983 act, an allotment enjoys protection from termination. Here there is none.

That answer was actually used. Preparation began in 2018, and in spring 2019 a new garden opened on a disused part of the New St Jacobi cemetery in Neukölln. Nomadisch Grün, the non-profit company that had run the site, moved there at the end of 2019 and continues as the Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv Berlin. The reasons given were too little space and too little quiet at Moritzplatz, together with a reading that changing burial culture is freeing up cemetery land across central Europe. The Moritzplatz site itself remained as a Kreuzberg initiative, working with an association called Common Grounds to keep the ground green. The garden did not disappear — but in ten years it moved.

From here the two-layer structure of German gardening comes into view. The lower layer is law: the 1983 act protects plots, but reaches only gardens shaped as a club holding a lease. The upper layer is the network: the foundation cannot protect land, but it protects the knowledge of how to begin, and it introduces the people who have begun to one another. Neither layer suffices alone. With only law, gardens that do not fit the legal definition die before they are born. With only the foundation, a garden that loses its land is finished. And the foundation's own guidelines state plainly that short-term interim uses will not be funded — so even it does not back the yearly-lease garden unconditionally.

Retrace today's path. It began with yesterday's fact: the Federal Allotment Gardens Act of 1983 protects allotments and nothing else. From there the question was who holds up the community gardens outside that law, and the Munich foundation anstiftung was examined from four angles. First its origins — ertomis in 1973, anstiftung in 1982, the 2008 merger, independent foundation status in 2017, capital drawn from the owning family's private fortune rather than the public purse. Second how it gives money — an application of no fixed form, three pages maximum, no photographs; a line that funds tools and materials but not rent or salaries; accounts discharged by a short factual report. Third its programmes — the map, the knowledge base, the advice, the 2014 manifesto, the annual summer camp. Fourth its ideas — gardens, repair and workshops bound under self-making, and studied as commons.

Three figures are worth restating. First, scale: 1,000 community gardens are registered in the foundation's national network, and intercultural gardens numbered more than 400 as of 2025 — while the Göttingen prototype is only three sites, 11,000 square metres, some 70 families from 25 countries. Second, reach beyond gardens: of the roughly 2,000 repair initiatives founded in Germany by 2024, more than 1,800 belong to the network started in 2014. Third, the precariousness of land: Prinzessinnengärten rents about 6,000 square metres on a yearly basis, and after preparing from 2018 moved to a former cemetery in Neukölln in 2019. What the numbers show is a model good at producing spread and poor at fixing a location.

The uncertainties belong on the record too. First, the foundation's annual grant total and endowment could not be confirmed from public sources, so this article cannot state what supporting 1,000 gardens amounts to per project. Second, the figure of 1,000 on the map is a count of self-registered entries and may not match the number of gardens actually active. Third, the more-than-400 figure for intercultural gardens does not rest on a unified definition or a register. Fourth, there is a counter-argument: a grant that funds no salaries presupposes unpaid labour, and can be criticised for entrenching that burden as a matter of design. The foundation offers no explicit answer on this point.

Today's place in this series is as the complement to the story about law. Days two through five followed how law and organisation kept gardens, from the 1919 allotment ordinance to the 1983 federal act. Today took up the ground that law does not reach. Tomorrow's final instalment tests whether this two-layer structure is peculiar to Germany by setting it beside the neighbours: Britain has placed a duty of provision on councils through its Allotments Acts since 1908; France has its jardins familiaux under the 1952 law; Poland's family gardens match Germany on registered gardeners. Does any other country have both the law-protected garden and the foundation-networked one? And when Japan imported the Kleingarten through its 1990 allotment-promotion act, what did it take and what did it leave behind? What keeps a garden in the city — law, a network, or both? Tomorrow answers the question this series has been building toward.