Urban farming in Italy — the 59 farmsteads a city owns, and the 41 meadows it counted

When we talk about preserving urban farmland we tend to think in areas: how many hectares were saved, what share stayed in cultivation. The roughly 46,300 hectares of the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano, which yesterday's instalment described, is usually recounted in exactly that register. Yet stand inside the line and the landscape refuses to be explained by area. What is there is a brick farmstead built as a square around its courtyard; a spring where groundwater surfaces of its own accord; a meadow engineered to stay green through the winter. Each is a particular thing, and each has a name. The decisive fact for understanding Italian urban agriculture is that preservation here has always taken objects, not areas, as its subject.

The clearest expression of this is the Milanese cascina. As the Italian Wikipedia entry sums it up, the cascine still surviving in Milan number 'un centinaio' — about a hundred — and 'cinquantanove delle quali fanno parte del demanio comunale': fifty-nine of them belong to the municipal estate. The role Milan plays here is therefore double. It is the regulator that decides, through planning, how farmland may be used; and it is the landlord that owns the farm buildings themselves. The Southern European technique yesterday's article described — holding land without buying it — turns out, in Milan's case, to have been only half the story.

It feels intuitive that owning something is how you protect it, but that is not quite right. The same source goes on to record that, of the hundred-odd cascine, 'diciotto sono diroccate' — eighteen have fallen in. Even with a public body that intends to preserve them holding the title, close to one building in five has become a ruin. This is less a matter of negligence than of what ownership is as an instrument. A boundary, once drawn, costs almost nothing to maintain; owning a building entails an outlay every year — roof, beams, drainage, and, where the structure is listed, the whole protocol of proper restoration. The concreteness that is the strength of the inventory approach is also, precisely, the concreteness of the cost.

What follows first traces why the cascina, as a form of building, survived inside the city at all, and looks at the thirteen of them still being farmed by tenants. It then establishes that the city is not the only landlord — a hospital, a public housing agency and the diocesan curia each hold farmland too — before turning to the most refined version of the inventory method, the 41 marcite that the southern agricultural park has counted and placed under protection. Finally it considers what it means that, under this method, failure takes the shape not of a cleared lot but of a ruin.