A history of urban farming

From antiquity through the Middle Ages, cities kept gardens, orchards and animals inside and just beyond their walls, supplying much of their own fresh food. Markets connected to nearby fields, and waste returned to the soil as fertiliser — the loop between city and farmland was far shorter and tighter than it is today.

It was nineteenth-century industrialisation and the railways that pushed farming out of the city. Cheap food arrived from afar, land values rose, and agriculture was relegated to somewhere beyond the city. The history of citizen farming can also be read as a quiet resistance to that separation.

The industrial city suffered from smoke, overcrowding and poor nutrition. In 1864, in Leipzig, an association named after the physician Daniel G. M. Schreber (1808–1861) created a playground for children's exercise. Parents began tending flowerbeds along its edge, which grew into plotted gardens — Schrebergärten — widely seen as the origin of Germany's allotment gardens (Kleingärten).

Around the same time in Britain, 'allotments' — small plots leased to landless workers — spread, and a 1908 act obliged local authorities to provide them. From the start, citizen gardens were bound up with ideas of social reform: health, morality and self-provision.

After the financial panic of 1893, Detroit's unemployment topped 40%. In 1894, Mayor Hazen Pingree opened about 430 acres of vacant city land for cultivation, letting jobless families grow potatoes and other crops. Some 945 families joined in the first year, harvesting around $14,000 worth of food. This 'potato patch plan' spread to other cities and later helped inspire wartime gardens.

Meanwhile, Ebenezer Howard's 1898 Garden City proposal envisioned planned towns combining the best of city and country. Its vision of a town ringed by farmland — a greenbelt — profoundly shaped twentieth-century planning and the idea of building agriculture into the city.

The two world wars elevated citizen farming into a national movement. As food transport and supply came under strain, governments urged growing on vacant lots, parks, backyards and rooftops. Britain's 'Dig for Victory' became its emblem.

In the United States during WWII, Victory Gardens exceeded 20 million plots and, by 1944, are said to have supplied roughly 40% of the nation's vegetables. The extremity of war proved that citizens could be real producers of food.

After the war, amid affluence and suburbanisation, citizen farming receded. But in the 1970s, in cities facing fiscal crisis and derelict land, it revived from the grassroots. In 1973 in New York, Liz Christy and others formed the 'Green Guerillas,' leased a neglected lot at Bowery and Houston for a dollar a month, and over 1974 turned it into a garden with some 60 vegetable beds.

Its success spread, igniting a movement of citizens reclaiming abandoned urban land — and eventually leading to public support programs such as New York City's GreenThumb. The relationship between citizen initiative and the institutions that support it became a defining theme of urban farming, right up to today.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union stripped Cuba of oil, fertiliser and imported food overnight. During this crisis, known as the 'Special Period,' citizens began cultivating vacant lots, rooftops and balconies. The government backed organic, low-input urban farms — organopónicos — and by 1995 Havana alone had over 26,000 gardens and farms.

By 2002, an estimated 90% of Havana's fresh vegetables came from urban and peri-urban farms. When external conditions collapsed, Cuba showed that urban agriculture could become the very core of food security.

While allotments in the West and Japan were discussed in terms of leisure and community, farming in the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America was a far more urgent affair. Through the 1970s and 80s, amid rapid urbanisation and economic crisis, residents of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala and other cities cultivated vacant land, roadsides and riverbanks to support household budgets and dinner tables. Most of it was 'informal' — outside the institutions, often merely tolerated or even policed.

What brought this invisible mainstream to light was the 1996 UNDP report 'Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities,' led by planner Jac Smit. Its estimate that hundreds of millions of people worldwide were engaged in urban agriculture redefined city farming from a temporary phenomenon of developing countries into a pillar of urban food security — paving the way for programs by FAO and others, such as the micro-gardens of Dakar, Senegal.

In Argentina, where the 2001 economic collapse sent poverty soaring, the city of Rosario launched its Urban Agriculture Program (PAU) in 2002, opening idle public and private land to low-income households. The gardens were folded into the city's green-space planning and made permanent as 'garden parks.' The program won the 2020–21 WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities — proof that urban farming born of crisis can become a core of city planning itself.

During the postwar food shortages, vacant lots in Japanese cities were widely cultivated. In the high-growth era, urban farmland was rapidly lost to development — even as 'shimin nōen,' citizen allotment gardens where residents rent a plot, spread.

The 1974 Productive Green Land Act created a tax framework to protect farmland inside urbanisation areas (its current form dates to a 1991 amendment), and new models such as farmer-led 'experience farms' emerged. The 2015 Basic Act on the Promotion of Urban Agriculture reframed urban farmland from land to be built over into a desirable part of the city. Japan's urban farming keeps evolving alongside its institutions.

In the twenty-first century, urban farming is increasingly valued for far more than food: community-building, food education, biodiversity and pollinators, stormwater management and heat mitigation, welfare and places for older people — its role reconsidered in the context of climate change and urban resilience.

Incredible Edible, begun in 2008 in Todmorden, England, turned public space into gardens anyone could harvest. The 2010s brought commercial rooftop farms such as Brooklyn Grange, and countries and cities began institutionalising urban agriculture as policy. The cases, research, policies and events gathered in this database all sit at the far end of this long history.