Between Village, Utopian Settlement, and Garden City

Urban Farm DB summary

A paper on Eisenheim, a company housing settlement founded in 1844 near Oberhausen in Germany's Ruhr region by the mining company Gutehoffnungshütte, historically situates today's discourse on urban agriculture. It examines urban gardening and agricultural facilities at Eisenheim, then places the case within the broader development of urban agriculture from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, comparing it to four other "model villages" — including those of Krupp, BASF, and Farbwerke Höchst — with differing ideological and socio-economic backgrounds. The analysis centers on how access to land was organized and what property regimes affected long-term preservation of agricultural land use, how subsistence agriculture affected residents' food resilience, diet quality, and household income formation, and how subsistence gardening and settlements' green-space layout contributed to residents' community life.