Town’s land. Social experimentations of urban agriculture in Milan

Urban Farm DB summary

A paper on Milan, Italy (2014) interprets the rising interest in urban agriculture in Milan as driven both by a desire to revive city design and by concrete attempts to realize it. Constructing a taxonomy of experiences to compose a hypothetical scenario of a "cultivated Milan," it focuses on initiatives that use cultivation not just as individual satisfaction or environmental reflection but as a tool for addressing urban issues and organizing common life; it argues that the English term "community gardens" — despite perhaps overemphasizing the community aspect — better describes these practices than the conventional Italian term "urban orchards," since the observed projects, in different ways, all aim to rediscover shared urban space, both physical and relational, through small projects that offer tangible immediate satisfaction while implicitly pointing toward wider horizons.