When Planting Gets Political: Urban gardening for social reform
PART I: Combatting a Global Food Crisis
By Galia Pakman Arrojo
McGill International Review
Aug 21, 2023
Excerpt:
City populations are not only physically distant from their food sources; growing up with limited access to nature or environmental activities, younger urban generations may face an imminent loss of agricultural knowledge. Some researchers have argued that a “global generational amnesia” on how to grow food is already occurring as “spaces and skills related to local food and water management rapidly vanish on a grand scale” and residents lack practical, on-the-ground understanding of plant life. Others have gone as far as to claim a widespread “cognitive disconnect” from nature in cities, where individuals are removed from experiences displaying humans’ deep-rooted dependence on the natural world.
Amidst this bleakly anticipated future, can widespread gardening truly generate global change? Community gardeners argue that, yes, while urban gardening is certainly not a be-all-end-all solution to such a vast issue, it is a potent tool that can both offset food scarcity and overcome detachment from the natural world.
sing urban and community gardens to combat food shortages is not a particularly novel idea. In 18th-century Europe, rapidly industrializing nations faced mass rural-to-urban migration, and garden plots were allotted to the poorest of urban masses to combat resulting food shortages. During both World Wars, relief or ‘Victory Gardens’ were established and encouraged by governments in order to alleviate hunger; England’s World War I campaign was particularly notorious for its takeover of parks, sports fields, and even parts of Buckingham Palace to combat war-time shortages, successfully producing two million tons of vegetables in 1918.
