Chapter 3 Background and History_version 1

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Chapter 3 Background of the Case studies

History of Urban Gardening in Germany and France

>shorten radically!!

>poss. little excursion into the diggers movement in 17th cent. Britain

We can currently observe a trend or come back of vegetable gardens in cities

and urban areas in Europe. The movement was born in New York City with the

movement of the green guerillas and is booming since the 1970s. This

example seems to spread with so called community gardens that are emerging

in the centres of many cities. They have been described as places of rest from

the everyday routines, and as green spaces in the middle of grey cities (Mller,

2011).

Community gardens are in the scientific literature not consistently defined. In

fact they can be as diverse as their community of gardeners. For the purpose of

my thesis project I refer to community gardens as plots of land collectively used

and managed by urban dwellers for gardening (including growing food). However

the forms as the objectives for creating of these gardens cannot be described in

generally applicable formula. They range from gardens for beautification ofabandoned and forgotten places in the neighbourhood (ornamental gardens),

over mainly wild green spaces with space to sit, meet and play in (focus on

biodiversity), to experimentation grounds of hobby gardeners to produce crops

and vegetable (edible or useful gardens).

Nevertheless, it seems not to be a very new idea to install small gardens in

cities. We have known amateur gardens since many decades and the picture of

unexpected spaces with collective gardens detached from the houses with many

small garden patches, so called allotment gardens, have become a common

feature in many cities around Europe (and elsewhere) in the course of the 20 th

century.

This chapter seeks to shed light on the ambitions and historical moments that

brought the project of community gardens into movement but goes also back

into the history of allotment gardens. When where these gardens in urban areas

build and what where their ambitions? I will try to provide some perspectives on

these questions while focusing on France and Germany. The variety and


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complexity of gardens and the questions they evoke, made it impossible to be

exhaustive. I also have to admit that my background on the history of the

allotments is rather recent and mainly gathered for this expos which makes

that the information is mainly based on secondary sources and literature.

However, I hope to open up some perspectives and questions on the history andsociology of urban gardens and to show the richness of this topic as an object for

history, sociology but also public health.

Community Gardens

Community garden projects are usually created on public spaces, abandoned or

vacant land. The ground which is cultivated is typically owned by local

governments or nonprofits (Okvat & Zautra, 2011). Different from allotment

gardens, where land parcels are assigned to individuals of families, a community

garden is a single piece of land gardened, sustained and cared for collectively by

a group of people mostly on a voluntary basis. Community gardens are self-

governed and regulate collectively access and management. Urban community

gardening projects are also political battles over power and disposition over

(urban public) space (Rosol, 2010). I am furthermore using the term community

gardening projects (CGP) to refer to the fact that these are not only green spacesand gardens but bottom-up, community based efforts creating socio-ecological

spaces serving as social meeting points. It has been proposed that CGP are

functioning as a common and thus have a social dimension.

In France, we can trace the first activists for community gardens back to the

middle of the 1980s. There have been several rather singular projects, however

with the support of the Fondation de France they could finance 189 projects in

France and organize several meetings and colloquia. In a meeting in 1997 in

Lyon an informal network of garden activists the Jardin Dans Tous Ses Etats

was created, which strongly promotes from now on with the creation of

community gardens throughout France managed through regional

representations. Today there are over 400 community gardens in France and

around 60 in the centre of Paris alone. Most of them have been created after

2001. This was the year when the municipality of Paris with new (and current)

Mayor Bertrand Delano, embedded in a city-greening program, launched the

initiative of the Main Verte. This municipal project has as objective to foster


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the creation of new community gardens in the city area and to provide them with

a regulatory institutional framework la Charte de la Main Verte. It has been

argued that this initiative has been a reaction to first existing occupations and

wild gardens on abandoned places in Paris and thus supposedly has been a way

to discipline them but in the same breath a response to a concrete citizenrequest (Caggiano, 2010). An explicit ambition in all of these garden projects

was the reinforcement and fabrication of social links through openness and

sharing.

In Berlin the development was much less explosive because a concrete support

of the senate of Berlin is lacking until today. In the absence of consistent city

politics and an institutional framework, several community gardens have been

put in place since the late nineties. Some of them have been installed on

occupied grounds others fought for many years for the permission to cultivate

abandoned grounds before they got the permission (Mller, 2011). After the city

of Berlin engaged in a greening policy (with for instance its local Agenda 21)

many gardens have been tolerated. At the same time around 2004 the first so

called intercultural garden

was created in Berlin with support of the districts government, following atrend that has started with the creation of a garden in Gttingen in 1995 by

refugee and immigrants. In Berlin, many new gardens were created (there are

currently around 30), however many of them only have temporary permissions

to use the land. Expulsions of gardens (for instance the garden Rosa Rose) have

created huge media and public interest. To understand the ambitions and

motives of the initiatives of the community gardens created both in France and

Germany we might have to move across the ocean to the USA and Canada. Theidea has swapped over from the first working community gardens mainly in New

York City and many community garden projects still today see their roots and

motivations in these working utopias, as Crossley called such positive examples

that can be movement triggering (Crossley, 1999).

The beginning of the community gardening movement went together with so

called guerrilla gardening, which has been defined as the illicit cultivation of

someone elses land (Reynolds, 2008). Reynolds (2010) and many others date

the beginning of the community gardening movements to the year 1973 when in


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New York City the young artist Liz Christi started to spread seeds and plant trees

on vacant plots or corners with garbage in their neighbourhood in Manhattan.

This project which started as an occupation or use of waste land has motivated

many followers and attracted medial interest. She called her group the green

guerilla which was also the origin of the term guerrilla gardening. When in thecourse of the feminist and emerging environmental movement, citizens and

habitants started to use vacant and abandoned spaces in cities to create little

green oases, they usually did not ask for authorisation for doing so (Jahnke,

2010). When those occupied spaces become tolerated by local governments

(respectively the owners of the land), or spaces are allocated to activists groups

in order to turn them into CGPs we are speaking of community gardening.

Richard Reynold points in his book about Guerrilla Gardening (2008) on one

crucial event in 1969 in the USA, known as the Bloody Thursday as the first big

mobilisation for guerrilla gardening. Students of the University of Berkley planted

on vacant land on the university campus a park which they called the peoples

park. This would be a park but also a free and open place to exchange ideas and

discuss freely. However the Californian governor Ronald Reagan perceived this,

by Berkley University the owner of the ground tolerated occupation as threat

and decided to fence the ground and prohibit any further use. When on a

protest, organized initially on a different occasion, a speaker drew the attention

to the park and was cut of by the police, the protest started moving into

direction park shouting we want the park back which ended in violent battles

with the police and resulted in the death of an uninvolved person (Reynolds,

2008). The peoples park, became emblematic of the movement. Today the

peoples park was again attacked and the part with community garden beds was

completely bulldozed a couple of weeks ago for maintenance and more

sanitary conditions (Denney, 2011).

However surprising, new or innovative this grass root movement might appear to

some, many people in Europe have an immediate association with a

phenomenon that Europe has known for more than a century now: areas with

garden patches scattered in urban or periurban areas. In England they are called

allotments so we will use this term in this essay to refer to what is called jardins

ouvriers or familiaux in France and Schrebergrten or Kleingrten in the German

speaking world. These allotment gardens or simply allotments are plots of land


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subdivided into parcels that are made available for individual, non-professional

and non-commercial gardening. The most striking difference as compared to

community gardens is the individual use and the often fenced or hedged

demarcation between the parcels that is prevailing in allotments.

Allotment Gardens

I will in this chapter try to shed light on the history of those gardens and try to go

back up to their beginnings, and to their founders and promoters in Germany

and France.

Generally, we can find in the secondary literature on history of allotment

gardening a differentiation between at least three phases: the beginnings (dated

varying from country and publication at a point between 1814 to 1896) to 1914,

the period of war and in-between wars 1914-1945, and after warperiod from

1945 to 1980/1990. After that I would argue for a fourth period since 1980 or

1990 with on the one hand the legal framework for protection of allotments and

hand in hand a new ecological and environment idea that is establishing we get

the revival of gardens and new forms of gardening such as community gardens

as described above (see also Meyer-Renschhausen, 2010).

In Germany the first Federation of small scale gardeners and the Armengrten

(garden for the poor) were founded in Kappeln in the Land Schleswig Holstein

around 1814. It was mainly the initiative of Carl von Hessen. He became a

promoter of this idea, after having very positive experiences with leasing parts of

his own estate to poor families for subsistence economy (Katsch, 2001).

Simultaneously in the industrial centres of Berlin and Saxony, industrialisation

and urbanisation brought forth housing shortage and a social question.Especially in Berlin after becoming the capital in 1871, we saw a very rapidly

growing number of workers in the cities and with that a housing and sustenance

crisis. With the intensification of the production processes in the end of the 19th

century less manual labour was needed and the conditions for first very modest

regulations of working hours and limitations of the work of children and women

took place.

A very limited amount of leisure time could emerge. This was the context in

which philanthropists, clergy, local politicians sought to improve the situation of


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the families and the working class by providing land to workers and poor

families. Not all of them were acting purely out of benevolence, it was as well a

way lease out otherwise unused ground against some small fees (e.g. in the

Lauben or planters movement in the city of Berlin garden tenure was not

following social criteria). Moreover, also industrials installed workers gardensclose to their factories or close to the tenements. It has been argued that this

was mainly to keep the workers and attach them to the place, provide them with

a base for subsistence so that they would not have to ask for higher wages and

furthermore to keep them from gathering, drinking and preparing uprising, thus

a prolonged form of dominance. Coming back tot the philanthropists we could

ask ourselves what ambitions they had with the provision of allotments. Many

documents and writings of the first associations formed show that they weredriven by the motivation to reduce moral degradation that was introduced by

urbanisation, and to fight poverty (and its dangers) and misery. Many believed

in, what was already introduced by Carl van Hessen, that gardening was not only

producing food but also a healthy morally strengthening activity, since they

believed giving money was only demoralizing. Especially idleness was seen as

demoralizing.

In Leipzig a movement named after the physician Dr. Schreber was taking form

of an association in 1864. Dr. Schreber called for more playgrounds and open air

spaces following the idea that the new conditions of precarious urban life are

damaging youth and health and he proposed physical activity in the open air as

the best mean to promote health and sanity of the youth and the families. As a

tribute to his work a teacher Dr. Haussschild founded the Schreber association

which installed in 1865 the Schreber square as a play ground and space for the

healthy and varied education of the youth in Leipzig. Schreber has already been

dead when this association was founded and it was only three years later that

Karl Gesell installed little gardens around the square. First it was the children

that were supposed to take care of the garden patches but they quickly lost

interest and it became a family task. To secure the garden and harvest they

were fenced and little huts installed to protect from rain and storm- this way the

typical picture of what we call Schrebergrten today was born. It was seldom

the really poor that had those gardens since the board and commission of the

Schreber association usually appointed the garden to those that offered most.


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The term Schrebergarten has in many parts become synonym for all

allotments (German: Kleingrten) in Germany today. With clear similarity to

Schrebers ideals were the natural healing association founded (German:

Naturheilvereine) that were installing institutions and spaces to guarantee

people access to air, light, water, physical exercise and healthy nutrition. Onecurrent among them was the Lebensrefombewegung (life reform movement)

with proclaimed the necessity for a return to nature to cure morals and health

also some of these associations installed gardens later on. Out of the foundations

that were just described around 1900 an even more differentiated multitude of

ideas and associations was founded reaching from women and nature protection

associations, cooperatives (Bodengesellschaften), to the garden city movement.

In France we could just as in Germany see the phenomenon of workers gardens

installed by industrials (e.g. close to the Saint Gobin factories and the railways

company). The probably most influential movement in France was the Ligue du

coin du terre et du foyer founded in 1896 by the democrat christian Abb

Lemire, who created the term jardin ouvriers. He was very much influenced by

the ideas of Le Play and the hygienists and driven to improve the condition of

working class families. Next to some initiatives for social security legislation, and

better housing conditions, his main project was the idea of providing gardens to

families of workers. These gardens combine both Schrebers educationalist

function (The garden is the means, but the family the aim )and the ideas of

improving alimentary conditions of the poor. With the workers gardens (jardins

ouvriers) the green belt around Paris, an idealistic idea that hygienists promoted

already before, became slowly real in the beginning of the 20 th century. These

form of workers gardens inspired the foundation of the Red Cross workers

gardens in and around Berlin in 1901.

In the beginning we see a multitude of currants and ideals that are finally leading

to an establishment of allotments. To generalize we could speak of an initiative

of patriarchal employers, a philanthropic bourgeoisie and left oriented engaged

workers (Weber, 2008). We could identify two independent major currents which

however influenced each other: one that reacts to the social question and installs

allotments for workers, poor families and workless or sick for growing food for

sustenance. In the other to react to the negative effects of urbanisation on

education and health and that installs gardens for the education and health


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promotion of youth and families. In general they were undertaking a rather

moralizing and protectionist social reform project.

From 1914 on we can speak of a second period. The initiatives of formerly small

alliances and garden associations became boosted by national interest. In the

light of the war authorities acknowledge the gardens as sources of resilience to

alimentary crisis and times of hardship and penury. Hence both the German and

the French Government promote the creation of allotments by providing more

land and funds to the associations. In consequence the number of gardens

explode in this period in both Germany and (to a little smaller extend in) France.

In this period furthermore, military gardens, hospital gardens, gardens for

refugees, school gardens and gardens for former combatants and invalids

emerge. Associations build larger national Federations that represent the entity

of allotment gardens however in the fascist regime the formerly self-governing

structures have become party structures that have been prone to

'Gleichschaltung', the alignment of the complete life of Germany to the Nazi

ideology.

In the period after the Second World War Germany relives a new start as a

divided country. In western Germany (FRG) the former association culture of theallotment gardens gets reinstalled as an autonomous structure. But the general

context has considerably changed since the turn of the century: social security

systems are completely developed and managed by the national state, the

relation between bourgeoisie and working class has been but upfront in the

political discourses (and paternalism questioned) and workers gain in autonomy

all over Europe. At the same time especially in the capitalist sector of Germany

and in France we can observe some social and cultural changes such as anemerging consumerist society and the elimination of the necessity for self-

sufficient alimentation. These socio-cultural changes diminished the necessity of

allotments and a massive ongoing urbanisation favoured an expanding real

estate speculation. Consequently, many allotments where torn down and

buildings were constructed. Moreover there was a trend to the nuclear family in

the course of the 19th century provoking also the dream of a one family house

with a private garden emerged as a middle class ideal (Dubost, 1984). Taken all

together allotments in France experience a massive decline until the

establishment of law in 1976, which grants allotments


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a protection by giving the SAFER (Socits damnagement foncier et

dtablissement rural) and local communities the pre-emption right and by

allowing to expropriated associations a compensation area. In western Germany

a federal allotment garden law came in 1983, which defined several

characteristics of allotments and also the security of tenure of certain types ofgardens then called Dauerkolonien. From the 80ies or 90ies on we can see again

an upward trend in numbers of allotments in France.

In the Eastern socialist sector of Germany, in the contrary, the popularity of the

allotments has never been broken and especially due to limited availability of

gods a certain level of self-sufficiency was maintained until the reunification.

However in the early years of the German Democratic Republic allotment

gardens have been encountered with an enormous amount of scientism and

mistrust, allotment gardeners were accused of not being political and not having

resisted the nazi-regime, they were perceived by the political leaders as a

symbol for conservatism and petit-bourgeois mentality. The local association

acted under strict control of local political committees and the re-creation of one

central allotment gardeners federation has hence been rejected in 1952 and

was only approved 7 years later. Only in 1977 decided the central party in the

face of economic austerity to adopt a different program towards the allotments

and started to promote their creation. Until the end of the Regime were the

numbers of adherents to gardening associations constantly growing.

Bringing together both ends

Even though, allotment gardens arguably appeared as a new form of urban

gardens around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, urban agriculture as such

exists much longer in different forms of gardens. Due to the limited scope of this

paper and expos I started the reconstruction of the history of urban gardens in

the 19th century, following the lines of the documented past of associations and

the alliances of the organized gardening movement

. We have in this paper been revisiting different currents of allotment gardening

movements in France and Germany. What differentiated those from most earlier

urban gardens was however that they where not aspiring to sell the productsproduced and in differentiation to private gardens were locally often detached


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from housing.

If we make an attempt to extract some mayor motivations and patterns from the

manifold history of urban gardens, we should keep in mind that most garden

history has until now been analyzed in a national context and that, as in many

generalisations, some specific historical and cultural contexts and

representations of smaller movements will get lost. In the beginning the function

of thejardins ouvriers in France andArmengrten

in Germany was mainly a nutritional one, created by philanthropists in order to

help workers and the weakest parts of the populations to sustain. At the same

time concerns arouse about that urbanisation and industrialisation devastates

health of the people and the development of children. Thus doctors, industrials,teachers and politicians formed a movement that did only bring nuisances of

urbanisation to the public attention but aimed at fighting this development by

promoting outdoor activity, in fresh air, with physical activities for youth and

families and hence created gardens (origin of the German Schrebergarten).

Nevertheless, also in the former group of gardens a rather hygienist and

normative idea of re-socializing the dangerous classes can also be found in many

documents of that time. After the war, the social question became lessprominent and allotments as a source of sustenance lost their importance. In the

context of the pressure of real estate markets, and in the transition into a

consumerist society (Dubost, 1984) we see a decline in number of allotments. In

many ways they were transformed into private spaces of leisure, as an extension

of the home and interim to the pursuit of the dream of the own family house with

garden. Since the 1970 in the USA and in Europe today, urban gardens have a

revival and also took a new form as community gardens. The new importancegained legitimacy from the environmentalist movement and from what has been

described as the post-industrial society. Today, people of all ages and social

classes rediscover the urban garden as means to (re)connect with nature. In

times of economic crises and discussion about social-economic inequities both

community and allotment gardens fulfil a new integrative function aiming at

integrating marginalised groups of society (these are in France les jardins

dinsertion and in Germany mainly Intercultural Gardens). Besides greening the

city the community garden, as a quasi-public space, is furthermore supposed to

be a product and producer of neighbourhood ties and source of social cohesion.


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We see that in some crucial elements the emerging forms of gardens are indeed

new. Firstly the initiators shifted from external benevolent philanthropists to

gardening city dwellers themselves, as the examples from guerrilla gardening as

a frequent precursor of community gardens impressively shows. Moreover also

the motivations and ambitions changed. As Florence Weber (1998) puts it, thereasons for the promotion changed considerably between the beginning and the

end of the 20th century from charity and hygienist ideas to environmental

education and social inclusiveness. An idea, that seems to me equally

noteworthy and which is also rather strongly represented in many community

gardens is the critical consumer notion, which started to reverse the

representation of industrial produced food as higher quality than home-grown

products. All community gardens adhere to the principles of organic farming. Butthere is also a structurally decisive difference between the two forms of gardens:

community gardens in their self-governed manner decide how to cultivate one

piece of land collectively, whereas allotments assign one garden patch to each

family/gardener which serves for his individual and private use.

We could in this essay elaborate on the novelty of the community garden

movement as compared to the currently existing form of allotments as well as

giving some historical perspectives. These could possibly serve as interesting

points of historical or sociological investigation. We could for instance go as far

as asking ourselves in which ways the re-discovery of nature is a revival of the

natural health movement idea founded over 150 years ago or into hygienist

ideas persevering in the movement today. An attempt of an answer to this

question at this state would be pure speculation, since I know no study that is

explicitly investigating into the perceptions of health amongst community

gardeners in France or Germany. However, opening up the case of gardens

seems to be a rich source of cultural history, notably of the often less favoured

socio-economical classes.

Situation of community gardens in Berlin and Paris

How are gardens managed in Paris. How are gardens managed in Berlin.

References


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Burchardt, J. (2002). The allotment movement in England, 1793-1873. Boydell &Brewer.

Cabedoce, B., & Pierson, P. (1996). Cent ans dhistoire des jardins ouvriers : 1896-1996, la Ligue franaise du coin de terre et du foyer.

Caggiano, M. (2010). Les Jardins Partags in Paris : cultivating visions and symbols Cultivating Paris : the experience. WS2.4 Farmings relation to

unconscious systems: pictures, images and symbols for (non)sustainablefutures. 9th European IFSA Symposium, 47 July 2010, Vienna (Austria) (pp.1214-1221).

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Denney, C. (December, 28. 2011). UC Berkeley Bulldozes People's Park to MakeIt More "Sanitary". The Berkeley Daily Planet. Accessed Jan. 3.2012 athttp://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-12-23/article/39060

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Katsch, G. & Walz, J. B. (1996). Kleingrten und Kleingrtner im 19.und 20.Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Bundesverband Deutscher Gartenfreunde e.V.

Mrkisches Museum (1988). Parzelle, Laube, Kolonie: Kleingrten zwischen 1880und 1930. Austellungskatalog zur Ausstellung Berliner Arbeiterleben um1900. Groenhain: Union Druckerei.

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285-289).Mller, C. (2007). Urban Places for Subsistence Production and Diversity. GermanJournal of Urban Studies, 46(1). Retrieved fromhttp://www.difu.de/publikationen/dfk/en/welcome.shtml

Mller, C. (2011). Urban Gardening: ber die Rckkehr der Grten in die Stadt(Neuausgabe.). oekom.

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Reynolds, R. (2008). On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening WithoutBoundaries (First Edition.). Bloomsbury USA.

Rosol, M. (2010). Public Participation in post-fordist urban green spacegovernance: The case of community gardens in Berlin. International Journalof Urban and Regional Research, 34(3), 548-563. Retrieved fromhttp://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-77956260483&partnerID=40&md5=7fc8627a3324efd981598c02b81056ae

The telegraph (2009). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/4967971/Englands-oldest-allotments-celebrate-200-years.html

Weber, Florence. (2008). Une enqute dans l'histoire. Le travail -ct, apoged'une culture ouvrire europenne, in Arborio Anne-Marie et al. (2008).Observer le travail. Histoire, ethnographie, approches combines, LaDcouverte: Recherches, Paris, p. 201-214.
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Chapter 3 Background and History_version 1

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