Urban farming in France — how the City of Paris turned land it does not farm into farmland

A story about urban farming usually begins with 'who is doing the growing.' In the French case, trying to answer that head-on returns a slightly unexpected name: the City of Paris. The city is not a farmer. It does not raise tomatoes, nor sell the harvest. And yet one cannot speak of France's urban agriculture while leaving the municipal authority out. Whether land becomes farmland, and to whom and on what terms it is let for use — that framework itself has been designed, as an institution, by the public sector.

Seen from this angle, France's urban agriculture looks like a structure built up from several 'layers of institution.' The 'family gardens,' born at the end of the nineteenth century and given official standing by a law of 1952. 'Main Verte,' begun by the City of Paris in 2003 to bind together citizens' collective gardens. And 'Parisculteurs,' the call for projects that the city launched in 2016 to open roofs and walls as stages for farming. What this report pursues is the policy story of how each of these institutions, one by one, rearranged the way the city's land is used.

The question that runs through this report is simple, yet it has depth: how can a city that does not farm turn land into farmland? What a city holds is not a hoe or seed but resources of another kind — the land it owns, the power to make by-laws, the procedures of tenders and agreements, and the budget for grants and support. What the French experience shows is that, by combining these 'instruments of administration,' a city can bring farming into being across the town without tilling a single plot itself.

For that reason this report treats history and individual gardens not for their own sake but only insofar as they serve the argument about policy. The worker gardens of 1896 and 'Nature Urbaine,' said to be Europe's largest rooftop farm, appear here as cases that show 'how an institution made them possible.' From here we trace, in turn, the 1952 law, Main Verte in 2003, Parisculteurs and the 100-hectare charter in 2016, and on to their results and limits, drawing the design of the urban farming that the public sector built.