Harvard University Offers Course on Urban Agriculture
What do gardens in cities do for people? Urban agriculture is a catch-all term
Runs January 4 – January 23, 2021
Register by January 4, 2021
Zachary Bostwick Nowak, PhD
Lecturer on History, Harvard University
Course description
What do gardens in cities do for people? Urban agriculture is a catch-all term that covers community gardens, vegetable plots at prisons, didactically-minded gardens in schoolyards, gardens planted illegally on vacant lots, high-tech hydroponic companies, and farmers’ markets. Students develop knowledge about how these spaces differ across variables like legality, goals, and actors. Students in this course learn about how growing food in Global North cities has a long past.
We debate whether urban agriculture is an excellent way for city dwellers to reduce hunger and assert their control over urban space, or whether it’s just another subtle manifestation of neoliberalism. A core goal of this course, above and beyond the content, is to develop research skills in multiple disciplines that will be useful for other courses.
Zachary Nowak received his PhD in American studies from Harvard University in 2018. He is a Lecturer in the Harvard History Department, where he teaches courses on food, environment, and urban history. He is also the associate director of the Food and Sustainability Studies Program at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy. Nowak is a historian of the built and natural environment. He is the author of Truffle: A Global History (Reaktion, 2015), the translator of Why Architects Still Draw (MIT Press, 2014), and the editor and translator of Inventing The Pizzeria: A History of Pizza Making in Naples (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). He is also a co-editor (with Peter Naccarato and Elgin Eckert) of a collection of essays on Italian food, Representing Italy Through Food (Bloomsbury, 2017).
