Germany among its neighbours — what is actually different from Britain, France and Poland?

This series has spent six days walking through Germany: the gardens for the poor, the 1919 allotment ordinance, Migge's estates, the organisation of the plots under a Reich league, the East-West division, and a Munich foundation. Read only that, and you are left with the impression that the citizens' allotment is a German invention. It is not. The international body for allotment gardens was founded in Luxembourg in 1926 and today, under the name Fédération Internationale des Jardins Familiaux, unites the national federations of twelve countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. It claims more than two million affiliated garden families and holds participative status with the Council of Europe. Handing out small plots in the city is not a German idea; it is an institution Europe has shared for a century.

What is striking is that Poland is not among those twelve. Poland has one of Europe's largest national allotment organisations by plot count, yet it is not a member federation. Counting the membership roll, in other words, does not tell you what actually exists. This article compares the substance of the institutions instead. Line Germany up against Britain, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria, and what is left that only Germany has? Earlier country reports on urban farming in France, in the Netherlands and in the United Kingdom told each nation's story. None of that is retold here. What follows sets out only figures and statutory text.

Start with the numbers. Germany's allotment federation, the BKD, publishes 867,092 Kleingärten covering 44,000 hectares. Around 900,000 gardeners are organised in the federation, and five million people use a plot once family and friends are counted; the average plot is 370 square metres. In Poland, the national board of the PZD announced in a communiqué dated 16 April 2024 that as of 31 December 2023 the organisation held 4,582 family allotment sites (ROD) covering more than 39,964.45 hectares, with 901,869 plots. Slightly more plots than Germany, on slightly less land. The Netherlands is said to have about 240,000 allotments, Denmark about 60,000.

So 'Germany kept them because it had many' does not hold. If anything the reverse: the country that once had most was Britain, with roughly 1.5 million plots at its peak, down to about 300,000 by the late 1990s. In 1918 the country of gardens was Britain, not Germany. The question is not how many were created but how many survived, and under what rules. The paid section that follows examines Britain, France and Poland in turn, then verifies the three German particulars against the statutory text, and closes on what Japan imported in 1990 and what it left behind.

British allotments are protected by a line of parliamentary statutes: the Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908, the Allotments Act 1922 and the Allotments Act 1950. Their core is an obligation on the council — where there is demand, the local authority must provide plots. On that point alone British law is stronger than Germany's Federal Allotment Gardens Act, which nowhere orders a municipality to create anything. The German statute protects gardens that already exist; the British one compels new ones into being.

Britain nonetheless lost its gardens and Germany did not. A 2024 study by Bloomfield and colleagues in the peer-reviewed journal The Political Quarterly records the fall from roughly 1.5 million plots to about 300,000 by the late 1990s, with the peak in 1950. Demand did not disappear. Freedom-of-information work supported by Greenpeace, cited in the same paper, puts more than 150,000 people on English council waiting lists today, up 81 per cent in twelve years; Birmingham alone has 7,300 plots across 113 sites and still cannot meet demand. A duty to supply, plots vanishing, lists lengthening: the contradiction shows that a supply duty does not bite at the moment of disposal. The acts since 1908 set no ceiling on rent and do not narrow, as German law does, the circumstances in which a plot can be taken back.

The distinction to draw is simple: a duty to supply and a guarantee of tenure are different instruments. Britain has the first, Germany the second. When housing demand pressed on urban land, it was the second that held.

France's national body, the Fédération Nationale des Jardins Familiaux et Collectifs (FNJFC), was founded in 1896 and marks its 130th year in 2026 — a history as long as Germany's. Yet the scale it publishes on its own site is 86 member associations, 81 gardens run by the federation itself, and 13,092 gardeners. Germany's BKD, by contrast, has some 13,000 allotment associations, 502 municipal, county, district and regional bodies and 20 state federations beneath it, organising around 900,000 people. This is not a claim that the French do not garden; France has other networks besides. It is that the single organisation able to negotiate nationally, keep a legal department and defend land is two orders of magnitude smaller.

The Netherlands holds up well on numbers: around 240,000 allotments, a high density for the country's size. But there is no national statute equivalent to the Federal Allotment Gardens Act. Set the two side by side and it becomes clear that Germany's difference is not the enthusiasm of its gardeners. It is the density of the intermediate layer wedged between the individual cultivator and the municipality: the association.

Why that density matters is written into the statute. Section 4(2) of the Federal Allotment Gardens Act defines a lease of a whole site taken in order to sublet individual plots as a head lease, a Zwischenpachtvertrag, and its second sentence provides that a head lease not concluded with a recognised non-profit allotment organisation or with the municipality is void — nichtig. A landowner cannot legally bypass the association and let directly to individuals. Subsection 3 goes further: where the public interest requires it, the lessor must transfer management of the site to such a recognised organisation. The association is not a convenient self-governing habit; it is a component the law has built in. When a city wants the land, its counterparty is one body with statutory standing, not two hundred individuals.

Poland's family allotment gardens — rodzinne ogrody działkowe, or ROD — stand level with Germany on numbers. The PZD national board's communiqué records 4,582 sites, more than 39,964.45 hectares and 901,869 plots as of 31 December 2023. Of that area, over 31,725 hectares lie under the family plots themselves, the remainder being common ground. PZD holds more than 24,843.67 hectares in perpetual usufruct, 15,044.35 hectares in use and over 76.42 hectares in ownership. Against the previous year the count fell by five sites and the area by more than 79 hectares — a decline, but a gentle one.

The legal architecture, though, differs from Germany's. The turning point came on 11 July 2012, when Poland's Constitutional Tribunal, in case K 8/10, found 24 provisions of the 2005 family allotment act unconstitutional: PZD's monopoly on establishing gardens, the requirement that plot-holders be PZD members, its exemption from taxes and fees, and the obligation on local government to hand over land. A replacement act was passed on 13 December 2013 and came into force on 19 January 2014, re-enumerating the purposes of an ROD as meeting recreational needs through horticulture, improving the social conditions of members of local communities, assisting families in difficulty and equalising their chances, integrating multi-generational families and educating children in healthy conditions, keeping pensioners active and well, integrating older and disabled people socially, and returning degraded land to society and nature.

Set side by side, the difference is visible. Polish law redefined the allotment in the language of social function. German law binds the contractual terms themselves — price and termination. Both are locks, but they are fitted in different places. A social function is a matter of assessment and interpretation; a ceiling of four times the commercial horticultural rent is a matter of arithmetic. When land values rise, the second is the harder one to move.

First, the rent cap. Section 5(1) of the Federal Allotment Gardens Act reads: 'Als Pacht darf höchstens der vierfache Betrag der ortsüblichen Pacht im erwerbsmäßigen Obst- und Gemüseanbau, bezogen auf die Gesamtfläche der Kleingartenanlage verlangt werden' — the rent demanded may not exceed four times the locally customary rent in commercial fruit and vegetable growing, calculated across the whole area of the allotment site. What that single sentence does is halt the ordinary mechanism by which urban land pushes out low-yield uses. An allotment cannot be let at what the market would pay. There is no counterpart to this provision in Britain, France, Poland or the Netherlands.

Second, the closed list of termination grounds. Section 9 confines ordinary termination by the lessor to six cases: continued non-horticultural use or breach of obligations after written warning, expressly including using the hut as a permanent dwelling; reorganising the site, improving its paths, or creating play or parking areas; the owner or a member of the household needing the plot for their own cultivation with no other suitable land available; another use being legally permissible and continuation causing the owner substantial disadvantage; the site being converted before long to another use fixed in a local development plan; and the land being needed before long after completed planning approval or under the land acquisition act. That is the whole list. Termination can moreover only take effect on 30 November, and section 11 provides for compensation. The British acts contain no such enumeration.

Third, the two-layer structure. The legally protected Kleingarten layer is 867,092 plots, 44,000 hectares and some 13,000 associations. Outside it lies the network of community and intercultural gardens supported by the Munich foundation anstiftung — the subject of day six. Germany did not choose between the two. The legal layer holds the land; the foundation layer carries the experiment. That the country with Europe's strictest allotment statute is also the site of its liveliest community-gardening movement is not a contradiction but an answer to a limitation. The Federal Allotment Gardens Act protects only what fits the definition of a Kleingarten. Mobile gardens, gardens on land leased year by year, gardens begun by refugees and migrants — everything the definition excludes needed a different support, and got one that is private rather than statutory. The 2014 Urban Gardening Manifest, which anstiftung backed, was signed by around 200 projects.

The impression that German protection is settled does not match 2026. On 9 December 2025 the Berlin Senate adopted a bill to protect allotments on state-owned land, the Kleingartenflächensicherungsgesetz, covering 56,280 plots on roughly 2,283 hectares of state land. Conversion would require the assent of the House of Representatives, would be limited to explicitly regulated exceptions, and would oblige the authorities to provide equivalent replacement land within the catchment area of any site given up. The bill passed the House of Representatives on 26 February 2026. Criticism came from three directions: the Greens argued it works only if the coalition changes its wider policy, pointing to the Späthsfelde housing scheme that would take up to 500 plots; the Left called the exceptions too open to interpretation; and the AfD, the only faction to vote against, dismissed it as insufficient. Protection here is not a finished state but a negotiation in progress.

Excess demand is shared too. The BKD reports a national average wait of three years after registering for a plot in a big city; four to six years in the large cities of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, up to seven in Berlin and eight in Hamburg. England's list of more than 150,000 points the same way. The only difference is whether supply keeps shrinking. The distribution, incidentally, is far from even: on federal interior ministry data from 2018, the eastern states excluding Berlin hold more than half of all German allotments with 15 per cent of the population, at four gardens per hundred inhabitants against 0.5 in the western area states — five in Saxony, just under 0.2 in Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate. 'Germany' is not a single case.

Vienna shows the other ending. The city created a zoning class, EKLW — allotment district for year-round living — in which a Kleingartenwohnhaus of up to 50 square metres of floor area may be lived in all year. Beyond permitting it, the Land of Vienna grants housing subsidies, Wohnbauförderung, for building one. The consequence appears in Vienna's own statistics: since 1996 both the total area and the number of classic allotment plots have declined steadily, while the number and area of plots zoned for year-round living keep rising. No developer took these plots. The people holding them converted them into housing from the inside, one house at a time. That is precisely the route section 9(1) of the German act blocks by naming permanent residence in the hut as a ground for termination. Denmark took the opposite road: under the 2001 Kolonihaveloven, most areas established before 1 November 2001 became permanent allotment areas, which may be given up only where essential societal considerations require the land for a purpose that cannot be met elsewhere in the municipality, and only once a replacement area has been provided before clearance — with housing construction and new commercial building expressly not normally counting as such a consideration.

Japan brought the word Kleingarten into its statute book with the Act on Promotion of Development of Citizens' Farms (Act No. 44 of 1990, promulgated on 22 June 1990). Article 1 states the purpose: to take measures for the proper and smooth promotion of developing citizens' farms principally for the recreational and similar use of urban residents, thereby securing a healthy and unhurried national life and contributing to the formation of a sound urban environment and the revitalisation of rural areas. Article 2 defines a citizens' farm as the combination of agricultural land and farm facilities — tool stores, rest facilities and the like. That 'rest facility' is the legal footing for the cabin standing on a Japanese stay-type allotment. The Laube was imported.

What was not imported: the act contains no ceiling on rent and no restriction on termination. Designating a citizens' farm zone and certifying a development and operation plan are administrative and planning devices; they do not reach into the terms of the lease itself. So a Japanese stay-type allotment can have the German hut and the German look and not one of the German locks. When a landowner's arithmetic changes, nothing in the statute makes keeping the field more attractive than selling it.

Two practical implications follow. First, the lever is neither the hut nor the landscape but the basis on which the rent is calculated: write into the lease a formula tying the rent to agricultural rather than residential land value, and you have reproduced the work of section 5. Second, make the tenant an organisation rather than an individual. Section 4 made the association legally indispensable by voiding any head lease not concluded with a recognised body. A Japanese municipality can write both of these into its ordinances and its leases without waiting for a change in national law. And Germany's second instrument costs nothing: the 13,000 associations were not created by the 1983 act — the act recognised what already existed. The order matters.

Retrace the seven days. Day one set out a two-hundred-year map of Germany, from gardens for the poor to community gardens. Day two took 31 July 1919, the allotment ordinance that hunger wrote — how material scarcity produced law. Day three walked Migge's gardens, checking what became of Britz, Römerstadt and the Bauhaus estate at Törten a century on. Day four covered the Reich league of a million members, how the Nazis organised the allotment. Day five weighed 1.5 million in the East against the 1983 law in the West, the two gardens that division made. Day six followed the Munich foundation anstiftung and the network of self-making it links across 1,000 community gardens. Today is the comparison. Relief to law, law to material form, material form to organisation, organisation to division, division to foundation, foundation to comparison — the order is itself part of this series' argument.

Three threads run through it, restated with figures and names. First, the law bears the load: the ceiling in section 5(1) of four times the commercial fruit-and-vegetable rent, and the six enumerated grounds for termination in section 9. Together they arrest the ordinary force by which urban land expels low-yield uses. Second, that law rests on organisation: some 13,000 associations, 502 regional bodies, 20 state federations, 867,092 plots, 44,000 hectares — and section 4, which voids a head lease with anyone but a recognised body, makes the association a legally required part. Britain, with a stronger supply duty, lost 1.2 million of its roughly 1.5 million plots. Third, what the law cannot protect, a foundation took on: mobile gardens, intercultural gardens, plots on year-by-year leases — everything outside the definition — are carried by a private Munich foundation rather than a public scheme.

The reservations belong on the record. First, this series has not proved that German law caused the survival. Poland holds 901,869 plots without any four-times ceiling, and the skew by which the eastern states hold more than half of all plots with 15 per cent of the population owes more to forty years of the GDR than to a 1983 West German act; readers should discount for the possibility that this is correlation rather than cause. Second, the protection is not a finished thing: Berlin's February 2026 law drew fire from the Greens, the Left and the AfD alike for exceptions open to interpretation. Third, read the numbers carefully. A national federation's published figure is what that federation organises, not what exists in the country. France's 13,092 is the FNJFC's own count of its members, not the total of French allotments.

Three things a reader can do next. First, read a single lease from a citizens' farm or community garden near you: how is the rent calculated, and in what circumstances may the lessor terminate? Those two points alone tell you how well that field is protected. Second, check whether the tenant is an individual or an organisation — and if an organisation, whether it is in a position to negotiate with the municipality directly. Third, if you take something to the council, put the request as a clause rather than a plea: tie the rent formula to agricultural land value; make the lessee the operating body, not the individual. What Germany's 150 years show is that a garden is kept not by memory or culture but by two or three specific lines written into a contract and a statute.