2.00 pm – 6.00 pm, University of Bremen: in the SFG, Room 2080
From pre-Industrial England, industrializing Berlin to modern-day Washington and Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other, with plants and microbes, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Tiny Gardens Everywhere explores how urban gardeners reactivated commons in European and North American cities in the long 20th century. Using the deluge of nutrients that flow into cities, working class gardeners regenerated wasteland, built the first garden city communities, created the first sinews of the social welfare state, and engaged in the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. Following the plants and microbes, urban gardeners also built mutual aid societies that advocated for equity, social welfare and common law rights to food, fuel and shelter. Tiny Gardens Everywhere follows urban growers in the past and those today engaged in the same struggle to reclaim public commons for healthy people, ecologies, plants and animals.