This post is part of a series by Todd Forsgren on his project Post-industrial Edens — photographs of urban and community gardens worldwide. His project has been ongoing since 2004.
In the UK and Ireland they’re called “allotment gardens.” The Czechs call them “zahrádkářské kolonie.” It’s “schrebergärten” in the German speaking world, and in France they’re known as “jardins-familiaux.” The Italians call them “orti urbani,” and in Spain they are known as “hort comunitari.”
Though traditions and practices of urban and community gardening vary from country to country, city to city, and even garden to garden, there are also some similarities. For example, these gardens are often found on the margins of cities, where a group of people have come together and pooled resources to cultivate the land. The land is normally not owned by the gardeners themselves but leased at a discounted rate by municipalities or utility companies (in marginal places such as those next to railroad tracks), which make these spaces affordable to diverse social classes. In other instances, the gardeners are squatters on unused or undevelopable parcels of land.
The gardens are popular among retirees, where many grow heirloom varieties of produce that they remember from childhood, but which are difficult to find in chain grocery stores. Local flower and fruit tree varieties mix with seeds from more widely cultivated and homogenized plants. In other gardens the idea of recreation is more important than production; gardeners have built small cottages, some simple and others with elaborate architecture, to visit on the weekends, spending more time sipping coffee, tea, wine, or beer than they spend gardening.
Often, the popularity of these gardening cultures has been punctuated by geopolitical trends. For example, gardens became quite popular in many regions during the communist era. During this period the gardens offered urban residents an opportunity to escape from the vast concrete housing projects. The little garden plots offered relatively free reign over a small piece of land and often also provided a substantial supplement of fresh produce, a scarce commodity in some nations during Communism.
Today, the gardens are also becoming more popular amongst environmentalists, younger generations of Europeans, and the “Slow Food” movement, which is a response to mass-produced farming and fast food.
These gardens are places to experiment with the balance between growing traditional produce and environmental concerns relating to overpopulation and consumption. They are also spaces where I look for unusual and unexpected ways that the urban and rural come together.