Disaster and the urban farm — in every crisis, cities have turned to the soil

When Detroit's Mayor Pingree opened vacant lots to jobless families in the depression of 1893; when governments called for 'victory gardens' through two world wars; when the Soviet collapse of 1991 left Cuba without oil or fertiliser — each time, cities weathered the crisis by tilling the ground at their feet. Gardens discussed in peacetime as hobby or welfare transform, in an emergency, into machinery that supplies food, work and solace. This mode-switch is urban farming's oldest and most overlooked function.

And the country that has designed this function into its institutions before disaster strikes, rather than after, is Japan. 'Disaster-cooperation farmland' — urban plots registered in advance as evacuation space and emergency food sources — is a Japanese invention with few parallels worldwide. After a 300-year overview of crisis and urban farming, this column digs into how that system works, and what post-pandemic research has learned.

The value of urban farmland has mostly been described in terms of scenery, food education and community. Yet by March 2020, 76 municipalities across Japan's three great metropolitan areas were running disaster-cooperation farmland schemes covering roughly 1,353 hectares. Fields block the spread of fire; open, unfenced ground becomes temporary refuge; growing vegetables become fresh emergency food. Counting farmland as disaster infrastructure is an idea already moving through policy.

From here we walk through the lineage of crisis-born urban farming, how disaster-cooperation farmland actually works (and where it struggles), what the pandemic changed in gardens worldwide, and the research explaining why communities with gardens recover faster.