Five-thousand Parisian farmers grew vegetables for two million Parisians at the turn of the 19th century. German citizens won the right to garden in the midst of famines in 1919-1920. Black residents of Washington, DC paid down on their homes during the Great Depression by maintaining vegetable gardens on their urban lots. While Soviet collective farms failed, Soviets farmed urban peripheries to produce most of the food people ate. These stories have been missed in plain sight because they clash with ideas of urban development and imagined divisions between urban and rural, nature and culture, production and consumption. Yet these histories reveal how a vegetable-powered wealth not only underwrote urbanization and industrialization, but became the means by which working people created urban food systems that could be a solution today.
Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her latest book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past and Present of Urban Self-Provisioning was published by Norton and Bodley Head (UK) in February 2026.
This event is part of the lecture series “On Environment.” The series is organized by the Chair of Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
Environment is a broad conceptual idea with a history and many meanings. Today, the term is used ubiquitously. We are closely connected to what surrounds us and live in an environment more and less shaped by humans. In this series of lectures scholars from different disciplines address the concept, providing a lens into what it may mean to think environmentally.