Urban farming in Germany — 150 years from Schreber's garden

When people name a country where fields remained inside the city, they often think of Japan. But Europe, too, has a country that has preserved a similar landscape by a different logic: Germany. Inside the administrative boundaries of great cities like Berlin, Leipzig and Hamburg, neatly divided clusters of garden plots are still scattered about. Many are called Kleingärten ('small gardens'), spreading along railway lines, over former factory sites and into the gaps of residential districts, each with its hedge and its little hut, the Laube. On weekends people travel out to them to grow vegetables, drink tea and let their children play.

This scenery is no accident. Germany's Kleingärten form a vast, institutionalised network of urban agriculture: roughly 900,000 plots organised under a national federation, covering an area said to reach about 40,000 hectares. And what sustains it is not custom alone but a law at the federal level — the Bundeskleingartengesetz, the Federal Allotment Gardens Act. A nation with a law for its gardens: this is the first fact to grasp in understanding Germany's urban agriculture. In this report we trace, in turn, the history from which this institution grew, the culture it nurtured, and the people to whom it is now being opened.

The affectionate name 'Schrebergarten' derives from the Leipzig physician Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (died 1861). He did not, however, start the garden movement himself. In a city where industrialisation had packed people together and left children short of places to play and of fresh air, Schreber preached the importance of physical exercise and the outdoors. Carrying on his ideas, around 1865 the teacher Ernst Hauschild and others opened a 'Schreberplatz' in Leipzig with a playground for children. In time, garden plots tended by adults were laid out at its edge — and this is said to be one of the direct sources of today's Kleingarten.

Germany's urban agriculture, in other words, carried two social motives at its very start: health and the relief of poverty. For a worker living in a cramped rented flat, a small plot was a source of fresh vegetables, a place to move one's body outdoors, and an extension of the family living room where relatives could gather. This notion of the 'field as social device' would later crystallise into a legal institution. From the next chapter, we follow how this small garden grew into a matter of state — passing through the twentieth-century ordeals of war and division.