Research & reports

· Wikipedia (de) · Germany

Prinzessinnengärten was founded by the non-profit 'Nomadisch Grün' in July 2009 and operated an urban farm at Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg (between Prinzenstraße and Oranienstraße), on roughly 6,000 m² of land that had lain fallow for over 60 years. Within a month of opening it had 100 growing beds, later expanded by 300 more, using a mobile container-based structure with plants grown in recycled bread crates, Tetra Paks, and rice sacks. It kept four beehives from September 2009, opened a garden café in 2010, expanded a garden kitchen in 2011, and won the Utopia Award in 2010.

· Wikipedia (de) · Germany

The city of Andernach's 'Edible City' (Essbare Stadt) project plants vegetables, fruit, and grain on municipal green spaces under the motto 'picking allowed' (Pflücken erlaubt), letting residents harvest freely. It was first presented in 2010 at the federal 'Entente Florale' competition, where Andernach received several awards, and was subsequently extended to further areas in the city center, along the old city wall, and near the train station.

Buglife · Buglife · United Kingdom

An introduction to Buglife's 'B-Lines' initiative, which states that over 97% of the UK's flower-rich grasslands (an area the size of Wales) have been lost since the 1930s, and describes a nationwide network of flower-rich habitat 'stepping stones' linking existing wildlife areas across the countryside and towns. B-Lines have been mapped across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, with a target to create and restore at least 150,000 hectares of flower-rich habitat across the UK.

Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Germany

The national statistics page of the German federation of allotment garden associations (BKD). It gives the base figures — 867,092 plots, 44,000 hectares, an average plot of 370 square metres — along with the three-tier structure of roughly 13,000 clubs, 502 district federations and 20 state federations, membership by state, and a ranking of plots in the 15 largest cities (Berlin about 66,000, Leipzig 39,000). The nationwide average wait for a plot is three years, rising to seven in Berlin and eight in Hamburg. It also shows the skew by which the eastern states excluding Berlin, holding 15 per cent of the population, contain more than half of all allotments.

Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte · Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte · Germany

An encyclopaedia entry from the Society for Schleswig-Holstein History. It dates the appearance of 'poor gardens' in the duchies to the end of the 1820s and records that by 1826 they existed in 19 towns. In 1830 the Society of Voluntary Friends of the Poor in Kiel allocated plots on the municipal land at the Prüner Schlag at a size of 400 square metres — a size the entry says still holds today. The initiative is attributed to the governor Landgrave Carl of Hesse (1744–1836); the entry notes that the later allotment movement begun by the Leipzig physician D. M. Schreber (1808–1861) turned the poor gardens into Schrebergärten.

VGT Gartenfreunde Treptow e. V. · VGT Gartenfreunde Treptow e. V. · Germany

A source page in which the Berlin-Treptow garden association explains the Allotment and Small-Lease Ordinance of 31 July 1919 clause by clause. Section 1 put the rent for non-commercial horticultural land in the hands of the lower administrative authority, to be set in light of local conditions and land values after consulting agricultural and horticultural experts. Section 3 barred the landlord from terminating the lease, gave the holder a right to convert a loan for use into a lease, and a right to demand renewal once a term expired. Under section 4 an allotment office was set up in the Treptow district administration, which lasted until 1938. The association's 1948 statutes, the page notes, still referred back to the 1919 ordinance.

· Wikipedia (Deutsch) · Germany

The article on the history and scale of Germany's national allotment federation. Founded on 21 August 1921 as the Reich federation of German allotment associations, it later became the Bundesverband Deutscher Gartenfreunde and took its present name on 9 September 2023. It now covers more than 13,000 clubs and 20 state bodies, some 900,000 plots on 44,000 hectares used by around five million people — an area equal to 0.25 per cent of Germany's agricultural land. The article also carries the historical figures for 1938: one million members on 45,000 hectares, producing 350 million kg of fruit and 300 million kg of vegetables.

Landesverband Berlin der Gartenfreunde e. V. · Landesverband Berlin der Gartenfreunde e. V. · Germany

The Berlin state federation of garden friends tracing its own history. It counts roughly 40,000 'Pflanzer' in Berlin between 1890 and 1910 and places the origin of today's federation in the April 1901 union of all planter associations of Berlin and its surroundings. After a series of First World War emergency decrees capped rent increases and obliged municipalities to provide land for cultivation, the Allotment and Small-Lease Ordinance of 31 July 1919 imposed rent control, banned leasing for profit and allowed land to be secured compulsorily. On 20 October 1919 the board of Berlin's colonists voted to rename their body the central federation of German allotment associations; by 1929 the Berlin provincial federation had 66,570 members, and that year Rehberge in Wedding opened as what the page calls Germany's first permanent allotment colony.

Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Germany

The national allotment federation's own history page. It sorts the nineteenth-century origins into six lines — poor gardens, factory gardens, Red Cross workers' gardens, the Berlin arbour colonists, gardens of the natural-healing movement and the Schreber gardens — and states that these lacked state legitimation and legal rules, with the absence of termination protection and the head-tenant system (Generalpächtersystem) in particular obstructing lasting protection. It records the passage of the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung by the National Assembly in Weimar on 31 July 1919, which banned commercial head-leasing and required rents to be fixed; the 1909 founding of the central federation; the Reich government's 1916 establishment of a central office for vegetable growing in allotments; the founding of the Reich federation of German allotment associations on 14 August 1921 at the second Reich allotment congress in Bremen; the Nazi-era Gleichschaltung; the post-war split into the VDK (Bochum, 1949) in the West and the VKSK (Leipzig, 1959) in the East; the 1973 renaming to BDG; and the renaming to BKD on 9 September 2023.

Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin · Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin (berlin.de) · Germany

An exhibition text in which Berlin's Pankow district office traces the history of allotment sites in the district. It describes the spread of Red Cross workers' gardens in the early twentieth century and their consolidation in 1906 into the Verband deutscher Arbeitergärten vom Roten Kreuz under Alwin Bielefeldt (1857–1942); the head-tenant (Generalpächter) system common around the turn of the century, in which land was leased and sublet with contracts often running for a single year; and the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung of 31 July 1919, which gave legal protection and prohibited head-leasing. On the arbour colonists it records the first permanent municipal lease in Blankenburg on former sewage fields in 1910 and the 1911 formation of a unified federation of arbour colonists of Berlin and surroundings, and cites a 1912 survey finding that 70 per cent of Berlin schoolchildren had never seen a sunrise and 54 per cent no sunset. For the GDR period it notes the founding of the VKSK in 1959, more than a million members by 1988 and its dissolution on 27 October 1990; more recently, that of Berlin's 900 allotment sites roughly 600 were given permanent protection and about 160 only time-limited protection.

Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission · Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission · Germany

The German UNESCO Commission's page on the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, inscribed as World Heritage in 2008. It lists the component estates: Gartenstadt Falkenberg (built 1913–1916), Siedlung Schillerpark (1924–1930), the Großsiedlung Britz or Horseshoe Estate (1925–1930), Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf (1926–1932), Wohnstadt Carl Legien (1928–1930), Weiße Stadt (1929–1931) and Großsiedlung Siemensstadt (1929–1934). Alongside the 2008 inscription it records that the Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf was added in July 2026; that estate has more than 1,900 dwelling units on 70 hectares. The architects named are Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolf Salvisberg.

Landesdenkmalamt Berlin · Landesdenkmalamt Berlin (berlin.de) · Germany

A short notice issued by the Berlin State Heritage Office on 27 July 2026. It reports that on 26 July 2026 the 48th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting in Busan, South Korea, inscribed the Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf as the seventh component of the World Heritage site 'Berlin Modernism Housing Estates'. The estate was built between 1926 and 1932 by the housing cooperative GEHAG and comprises 1,917 dwellings — 1,108 in multi-storey blocks and 809 single-family houses. The architects were Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolph Salvisberg, with the open spaces designed by Leberecht Migge and Martha Willings-Göhre. It lies around the U-Bahn station Onkel Toms Hütte on line U3 and along Argentinische Allee in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district. The nomination process began in 2021.

Berliner Forum für Geschichte und Gegenwart e.V. · Welterbe Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne (Berliner Forum für Geschichte und Gegenwart e.V.) · Germany

The page on the Britz Horseshoe Estate from the official site for the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage property. Construction ran from 1925 to 1931, with Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner responsible for the overall plan and urban design and Leberecht Migge and Ottokar Wagler for the garden design. The estate comprises 1,963 dwellings — 679 single-family rowhouses and 1,284 flats — ranging from 1.5 to 5 rooms. The World Heritage property covers 37.1 hectares with a 73.1-hectare buffer zone, and the emblematic horseshoe-shaped main block is 350 metres long. It was inscribed as World Heritage in 2008 and designated a garden monument in 2010.

Sandra Mallet, Baptiste Colin, Thomas Zanetti, Marc G. Dumont, Annette, Groux · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · France (Bordeaux)

The TransUrba project investigates how different temporalities of action in urban space can be articulated by studying temporary urbanism initiatives. Through an analysis of three areas in France (Bordeaux, Lyon, and Lille metropolitan area), the project aims to understand how temporary urbanism is implemented, its innovative features, its impact on urban space, and how local public action can strengthen transitional urbanism.

Nihat Karakuş · Journal of Agricultural Production · Turkey (Antalya)

This study quantitatively assessed the cooling effect of an urban agricultural area (a citrus orchard) in Antalya, Turkey, using Land Surface Temperature (LST) data from Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS satellite imagery on July 30, 2024. The mean surface temperature of the urban agricultural zone was 42.69 ± 1.26 °C, which was, on average, 1.46 °C colder than adjacent urban districts within a 600 m buffer zone. The cooling impact extended effectively up to 270 meters from its boundary, with effects ranging from 0.06 °C to 1.65 °C, diminishing statistically significantly with distance (p < 0.001; R² = 0.93).

Agnieszka Dudzińska-Jarmolińska · Bulletin of Geography Socio-economic series · United States, Europe

This paper aims to present the author's spatial typology of community gardens by defining their spatial characteristics, forms of development, and socio-cultural context in urban spaces. Based on field research conducted in three U.S. cities and three European cities, it was determined that community gardens can be classified into six distinct spatial types.

Amy Bogaard · Journal of Urban Archaeology · Europe

This paper frames agroecological expectations for different urban forms based on Roland Fletcher’s model of settlement population scale and density. It hypothesizes that low-density urbanism allows labor-intensive land management, while high-density urbanism requires lower inputs per unit area and stress-tolerant crops. The study applies these expectations to early urban forms in western Eurasia, finding that diverse farming strategies in high-density areas and flexible low-density urban agroecology offer lessons for future urban farming.

Grassl, Philipp · reposiTUm (TU Wien) · Europe

The diploma thesis "hydro ponos" at the Vienna University of Technology addresses a new type of agriculture in Vienna's urban context. The project proposes a hydroponic system in a vertical farm, choosing the vacant Flakturm (anti-aircraft tower) in Augarten as the construction site. The study suggests a solution for the city by utilizing the existing Flakturm as a storage and supply element and adding a new timber skeleton structure as an extension.

Magdalena Roszczynialska · Przestrzenie Teorii · Poland

This article characterizes the edible landscape, a non-visual approach to landscape, by identifying landscapes where the cultural component is weakened in favor of the environmental one. The author develops a typology of edible landscapes in 21st-century Polish prose, including consumption landscapes, edible mnemotopos, terroir, and urban gardens, interpreting them as practices of "hacking the Anthropocene" and interventions for socio-environmental justice. The edible landscape is presented as a way of literary manifestation of nature and a means of survival in the face of ecological catastrophe.

Julián Briz Escribano, Isabel de Felipe Boente · Revista española de estudios agrosociales y pesqueros/Revista española de estudios agrosociales y pesqueros · Spain

This study addresses various climate change-related functions and climate issues, particularly in urban areas. A holistic analytical method for green infrastructure is proposed as a nature-based solution, based on its structure, behavior, and functioning. Dimensions emerging with climate change and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), such as urban agriculture and agrifitness, are identified, and the situation in Spain is described.

Mykola Blyzniak · Naukovì zapiski Nacìonalʹnogo unìversitetu Ostrozʹka akademìâ Serìâ Ìstoričnì nauki · Ukraine

The 1767 inventory of Ostroh contains information about the hereditary part of the city owned by Princess Anna Yablonovska. It describes the state and development of Zamkova Gora and the city's topography at the time (Old Town, New Town, Mokra Volya, Kordyshivka, city farms). The Christian community comprised 160 households (43%), while the Jewish community had 210 households (57%), with Jews traditionally dominating trade and crafts.

University of Liège, Reframe.food, ASTREDHOR · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Europe

This catalogue presents over 30 innovative Urban Agriculture initiatives from across Europe. These projects were selected for their originality, relevance, maturity, and potential to address urban challenges, demonstrating several years of successful operation. It provides an comprehensive overview of diverse urban farming systems and their potential to transform cities into more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient places.

Katja Hombrecher · Gefahrstoffe Reinhaltung der Luft · Germany

A pilot study in Germany investigated the impact of road traffic emissions on food plants grown near roads. Bioindicators like kale, chard, Lollo Rosso, and lettuce were exposed for four weeks at four roadside locations and compared to plants in a garden away from roads. While pollutant levels generally did not exceed background or EU maximum limits, significant traffic-related inputs of PAK 4, antimony, aluminum, chromium, and vanadium, and lesser inputs of copper, iron, and lead were detected compared to the control. The findings indicate a potential contamination risk for certain vegetable plants from road traffic.

Blanche Collard, Quentin Dutertre, Emmanuelle Baudry · Landscape and Urban Planning · France

This study investigated the relationship between vegetable growing and biodiversity conservation in domestic gardens in France, using a nationwide online survey and ecological monitoring in a suburban area near Paris. 67% of surveyed gardeners nationwide had a vegetable garden, and no significant conflict was found between vegetable production and biodiversity conservation. Instead, synergies emerged, particularly in the stronger commitment of vegetable gardeners to their gardens, wild species, and nature, and in practices like more frequent planting.

Mar Loren-Méndez, Celia Chacón-Carretón, Pablo Manuel Millán Millán · ACE Arquitectura Ciudad y Entorno · Spain (Málaga)

This study examines the urban dimension of agricultural heritage, specifically urban orchards, in cities where agrarian activity is deeply intertwined with their origin and evolution. Using Nerja, Málaga, Spain, as a case study, the research highlights that accelerated urban transformation in recent decades has led to a rupture, undermining agrarian logic by abandoning historical growth practices. The study emphasizes the fundamental role of agrarian activity in built environments and advocates for the protection of urban orchards.