Urban farming in the Netherlands — farming as design, born of a small country

When people hear 'the Netherlands,' many picture greenhouses stretching to the horizon, precisely controlled horticultural halls, or the agronomists gathered at Wageningen. Its territory is roughly the size of a single Japanese island, and a considerable part of it was reclaimed from sea and lake — yet the country ranks among the world's leading exporters of agricultural produce by value. This is a form of farming unlike 'grow a lot on plenty of land': it is agriculture through intensity and technique. The very constraint of expensive, scarce land has pushed this country's farming toward efficiency and design.

But what this report examines is not that export industry; it is the 'other farming,' in which citizens living in cities put their hands in the soil. In fact the Netherlands retains a tenacious tradition of citizens' gardens that began in the nineteenth century. At its centre is the volkstuin ('the people's garden'), of which the country is said to have some 240,000 plots. Add to this a hundred-year tradition of school gardens, children's farms in the middle of town, and the cluster of 'city farming' (stadslandbouw) experiments that spread from the 2000s on. How have citizens on a small land come to terms with the field? We follow that accumulation from two sides: the foundation of history and the cases on the ground.

The first citizens' gardens in the Netherlands are said to have appeared in 1838. Through the nineteenth century, municipalities across the country laid out plots for working-class families — to give people crammed into small rented flats amid industrialisation and urbanisation both fresh vegetables and a place to be outdoors. This motive closely resembles that of the German Kleingarten of the same era. As a prescription for the poverty and overcrowding pressing in on them, Europe's industrial cities often chose the 'small field.'

Around the First World War, the users of the plots began to demand that 'the gardens should be run by the tenants themselves.' Then, in 1928, the local garden societies came together to found a national body, the AVVN — the General Federation of Allotment Gardeners' Associations in the Netherlands. From here we watch, place by place, how this citizens' garden changed into a site of leisure, opened itself to schools and to children, and eventually leapt out onto rooftops and into city blocks.