Online talk: Possibilities of Urban Gardening: Tiny Gardens Everywhere
Prof. Kate Brown, MIT: Book presentation and discussion of Tiny Gardens Everywhere (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026)
Organiser: START: Centre for Sustainable Agrifood Systems, Collaborative Landscapes Hub
Time: 2 November 2026, kl 14-15:30
Zoom/Teams link: To be posted later
Invited speaker: Prof. Kate Brown, MIT: Book presentation and discussion of Tiny Gardens Everywhere (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026)
Abstract:
From pre-Industrial England to modern-day Washington and Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other, with plants and microbes, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Tiny Gardens Everywhere explores how urban gardeners reactivated commons in European and North American cities in the long 20th century. Using the deluge of nutrients that flow into cities, working class gardeners regenerated wasteland, built the first garden city communities, created the first sinews of the social welfare state, and engaged in the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. Following the plants and microbes, urban gardeners also built mutual aid societies that advocated for equity, social welfare and common law rights to food, fuel and shelter.
Bio:
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. Brown’s work on Tiny Gardens has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has published short segments from this work in the New Yorker, Mother Jones and Lithub. She is also the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into eight languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History and the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. Manual for Survival was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.