Coltiviamo la città: dagli orti operai ai giardini condivisi

Vegetable gardens have always been present in western cities or at their fringes, but, paradoxically, it was only after the industrial revolution that their presence was consolidated. For the workers, former peasants, vegetable gardens were a bond with the land; a compensation for the hours spent inside the factory and often, a significant economic integration. At the end of the 19th century, a true movement for workers’ gardens rose in France, having its theoretician and staunch defender in the abbé Lemire. A significant diffusion occurred in most of Europe, particularly coinciding with war periods, for its function of alimentary support, and then it decreased – in the fifties and the sixties – almost to extinction in front of new cultural models and town-planning needs. The first signs of reversal, in a process that seemed irreversible, were captured – in our Country - by Italia Nostra, already in the early nineties, by means of an articulated survey on a sample of 19 Italian cities, which revealed the return of vegetable gardens, especially in great cities. The present contribution pays attention to the discontinuity in the history of vegetable gardens that appeared with the onset of an innovative model, the community gardens, which appeared in New York in the early seventies, and were also present in major North American urban areas. These gardens, at the same time productive and ornamental, had their roots in low-life neighbourhoods, in a spontaneous movement of conquest, care and use of degraded vacant lots, and have been the inspiration of a variety of initiatives in major urban areas in the western world. In Paris, as in Milan, the “green guerrillas”, citizen associations also followed by public administrations, have made flourish community gardens and jardins partagés, in which the aspirations and the needs of city dwellers to create and to live new species of public spaces become manifest.