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Kate Brown, "Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City" (W. W. Norton, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stout and today I'm here with Kate Brown to talk about her new book, Tiny Gardens the Past, Present and Future of the Self Provisioning City, which is out now from Norton. Kate Brown is Distinguished professor in the History of Science at MIT and the author of four previous prize winning books including A Manual for Survival, A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Vermont. Kate, welcome to the show.
- [00:35]
B
Hi Michael, thanks for having me here.
- [00:37]
A
Great. Well, I'd like to begin by asking you about the tiny garden practice that goes by many names. What is it and why has it appeared again and again and in so many places throughout human history?
- [00:49]
B
Well, what this book is concerned about is what happens when cities get really big. Industrializing, urbanizing cities, density, tons of resources coming in, lots of waste going out. And so tiny Gardens is about what we haven't really seen. We have this normal story in history about cities get big animals and tiny gardens and any kind of food production enterprises are moved to the peripheries of the cities or out into the countryside. And cities become that one way street of industrialization, pavement, skyscrapers, et cetera. And that's the story we like to sell stories that have a really simple narrative. But what's happening? Something new is happening as cities get big. People are coming from rural areas where they mostly have held land in common and they've enjoyed the rights of commoners. Common rights and common law. Right means the right to food, fuel and shelter. And that meant that you go into the forests and forage and get small game and forest for greens and pick up sticks or pollard or coppice sticks to turn trees into an ever renewable source rather than deforest. It meant that you could. Everybody in the village had basically put their sheep or cattle or goats in one herd and somebody looked after them on common lands and along the waists and often meant that people farmed together. So when they get to cities, these same people enclosed, whether it was in England or Poland or wherever, they come to cities and they're in these miserable tenements and they're working these miserable factory jobs, but they go to the edges of cities or they see a vacant lot somewhere and they're like, I could grow something there. And say, take Berlin, 1870s. People find sand all around the city. There have been wetlands, wetlands have been dried out, farmed for a generation or Two and then exhausted, there's just sand dune and looks like the Sahara, literally. And these people like rent them. Like 30 households would get together, they would rent a, what becomes a Berlin city block. They divided up into equal proportions. They put a tiny house in the middle and they'd start growing food around them. And they'd have some small animals, chickens and pigs and it's no fun to grow food on sand that nothing really thrives. But they had something that people in the countryside didn't have. They had this River Nile of nutrients flowing in. Sugar, wheats from Ukraine, beef from Argentina, wheat from the American west, rice from India, and all of these, you know, as this is all processed and turned into food waste or industrial food waste, they take it. You can take that stuff and you can dump into the rivers and canals. And people did do that in Berlin and created a stinking mess. But you could also use it to build soils. And that's what these people did, is they took the nutrients of the newly industrializing, densely populated cities and made human generated soils on tiny tracts of land to produce what I'm arguing is the most productive agriculture in recorded human history.
- [04:04]
A
Right, right. Well that's great because it's like in some ways this is an urban history, or at least a history of the relationship between the urban and the rural in ways that I think was really unexpected for me as I was reading through it. But as we're kind of like on this just at the intro here, I wanted to know what you meant exactly by the self provisioning city. I mean, I think you've given us a hint of it, but what is that conceptually for you?
- [04:27]
B
Well, since the middle mid century there's been a narrative like how are we going to feed the world? How do we feed 9 billion people on earth? Now that's a false question. No one has ever tried to feed a world. You can imagine a globe with a huge mouth. And that's an abstraction. What people do is they feed themselves and their immediate communities historically. And if you do it in a way that's the most efficient, if you're not engaged in a huge scale industrial enterprise. The vast majority of fields that we have today in the United States are devoted to growing. If they're not devoted to growing turf grass, that's our number one crop. Our number two and three crops are corn and soy. Corn and soy don't really feed humans. We don't meet that many corn chips and soybean products directly. But they're fed to animals or they're fed to machines. And then those animals feed us directly, but very inefficiently. And those machines service us also inefficiently and quite indirectly. So we don't need all that territory. And that's what a self provisioning city is, is that a good majority of the food that people can possibly eat can be grown right in the city and in the urban periphery. And let's take the Soviet Union as example. Here's a big industrial country, a superpower, and they had food crisis after food crisis after they industrialized agriculture in 1932 and engaged in a massive and violent process of enclosure. In 1933, in the midst of a huge famine, five to seven million people dead. The Soviet government offers the Soviet people the right to garden. And that means they can take public land and privately self provision on it. And so around Soviet cities there develops a green belt surrounding cities with allotment gardens and people form in garden associations. By 1960, there are more people in garden associations in the Soviet Union than in the Communist Party. It is the biggest civic organization in the country. We've overlooked it completely. I mean, people have written about these allotment governments, but not as this massive civil movement. Each time there's another food crisis, the state hands out more land. The big crisis is when Soviet agriculture collapse collapses in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet state and agricultural production declines by half. At that point, the factories are not paying their workers, they're just handing out more land here. Go garden, go grow your own food with this free land. And that's what people did. So by 1996, 91% of the potatoes people ate, and that's the major staple in the country, comes from these tiny allotment gardens and 1.5% of the arable land. Imagine that, right? Like we don't need the entire country to feed the world, we just need the city to feed the city. Right?
- [07:39]
A
Right.
- [07:40]
B
And as you know, the majority of people on earth right now live in cities. And the prediction is by 2050, 2/3 of the world will live in cities. Cities are super important places for us to think about. Like why not grow food at the source where people are? And you know, in the States we have a real crisis in nutrition. We have the problem of people being both obese and and malnourished. And that's because they don't get enough fruits and vegetables. And that's because fruits and vegetables are expensive and hard to get. 2% of our fields are in specialty crops, which are fruits and vegetables. 2% the rest is all these three other crops I've talked about. But cities can grow them very effectively again using the nutrients that people pool in cities. And these nutrients also include animal waste, which also includes human waste. We dump lots and lots of feces in our rivers because we take perfectly good human waste, we add clean, perfectly good, clean water, and we make a mess. And then we spend lots of energy and lots of municipal funds to separate what we've mixed together in the toilet to separate water, make it as clean as possible from the perfectly good human poop, which then is cooked and given over to farmers as fertilizer. But it's also, by then other industrial waste has gone in. So then there's PFAS and other chemicals in there. And it's not a good process. It's an expensive, costly process that is not perfect where we could just return to dry, cooked, composting toilets, keep, not add water, save our clean water for clean human bodies. And use this just as farmers are doing now, but do it in a more direct way, use this human waste to build soils.
- [09:39]
A
Right, right. That's a powerful. There's kind of an element of envisioning the future, envisioning alternatives that kind of pervades this book, which is great. Now, there are a lot of cities in this book, and in the introduction you describe your methodological criteria for including the locations that you did as I quote, places where I happened to be. I found that refreshing, actually. Oftentimes people choose a location which is frequently the one in which they attended graduate school, and then backfill the rationale for that place as the, as the important site for their, for their study. But this, this approach also reveals another important decision that you made in the book, which was to include yourself as a character in the story. So they're kind of related. So can you, can you talk about that decision and how it help helps you tell the story that you want to tell?
- [10:25]
B
Yeah. Well, there's two things going on here. One is I'm attempting to decolonize my history, my historical method. And the second thing going on is something I've always done, which is I don't think that there is any objective truth to history that's always like there's some subjective. There's a great deal of subjective interpretation going on there. So then I've always written, starting with my dissertation, my histories, with the intermittent first person narrative, because I want the reader to know that this is just me. I didn't know anything about this topic. I'm learning about it as I go along and this is what I found and there's, and I'm making mistakes and there's all kinds of my subjective experience included in it. So I've always taken my reader along on my quest, on my path of discovery, what I'm doing. But that discovery in the past has been like places of war, deportation and Holocaust nuclear disasters. And so these are histories in uppercase letters. No one misses that. Chernobyl, of course, that's a historical topic. Tiny gardens is trickier. Why would that. And I myself questioned, doubted myself. Is this really a topic? Is this really something I should be writing about? Is this just my own pet project? Is this my late in life dementia project? Because it's not. It's because it's history in lowercase letters. It's all around us, you know, I mean, simple front yard garden with tomatoes, that kind of thing. And so I figured this is such a common phenomenon, I could write this book anywhere, and I should write it exactly where I am. Because in the past I've gone off, I've parachuted into communities, I've, you know, raised. You know, I had small children. You know, like I was racing to get back home. You know, I was often in a rush. And I don't think that's a very, that's a stressful research experience for me. And I think it was stressful for the people I talked to and dealt with. And so in this project, I just decided wherever I happened to be, I would start looking around, going into archives, talking to people, exploring, and let that research play out in a way that was less, you know, sort of resource intensive. Was it a research method that be available to anyone regardless of what kind of research funds they had? So that's what I did.
- [12:53]
A
I mean, it's great because it feels, and this is not meant as a cruise, it feels naive or like guileless in a way, but it actually, the way that you describe it suggests kind of like a really sophisticated insight into historical practices. And you know, as you said, I really like the thing that you said about how you're subjective, you're learning this as you go, because we so often portray ourselves as experts when in fact that is the process that we're engaged in.
- [13:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, we are doubting narratives all the time. You know, is that really true? You know, what's that spin? So let's just be upfront about it. You know, if somebody's writing about medical issues, I think it's really important that I know that they Once were a nurse, you know, whatever the case is, or, you know, on and on and on. I often find I edit a section of the Historical American Historical Review that's called History Unclassified. And it's exactly about. That is exactly, you know, part of that experimental historical narrative process that we engage in in History and classified is to think about what brought the author to these topics in the first place. And for instance, for me, it took me a long time to realize that I was writing about the project of modernist wastelands, in part because I grew up in a Rust belt city in the United States. And I wanted to look at these outsized examples in order to understand the much less violent, but also somewhat quite sad process of a town dying around me as I grew up.
- [14:35]
A
Yeah, that's great. Well, as a native Detroiter, I can sympathize with that approach. Well, I wanted to ask you a question about the book structure kind of while we're on that topic, because I was looking through it. I don't know if this is too writerly of me, but I was sort of like, Is this a 21 chapter book with seven turns, as you call them, or a seven chapter book with 21 sections? How did that. Do you know what I'm getting at?
- [14:58]
B
Yep, yep. Well, I start, you know, I, I just started writing short chapters when I wrote a book called Plutopia, which is about the first few cities in the world to produce plutonium. And it, it tacks back and forth between this, the Soviet city that produced plutonium, Mayak, and the American city, Richland, Washington. And I first started that when I. The first draft of that book were these long 30 page chapters. But then I realized, you know, I didn't really want to actively compare Hanford and Mayak. I wanted the reader to do the, to think along with me. And so by using basically montage tactic of placing short chapters next to each other, the attack back and forth between the Soviet and American context, I could get the reader to think about these juxtapositions and come to their own conclusions about they. Like, are they different, whatever. But I didn't need to point that out. I thought that would be heavy handed. And then I really. So I wrote these short chapters, 42 chapters in that book. My editor said, you can't have 42 chapters. And I said, why not? And she didn't know why. So we did it, but there just wasn't done eight chapters is the norm kind of thing. But why do we have norms? I think boilerplates are maybe out of date. So I got attached to short chapters. And yes, these are, each turn is in a different place, a different city. But I like to think that in terms of concepts or ideas, each little tiny. Each little chapter, what, maybe five, six pages, seven pages is telling us about a different episode that's quite novel for that city. So I still call them chapters.
- [16:45]
A
Yeah, well, whatever we call them, it's just a thoughtful way to organize it that I again found refreshing and was like, okay, it makes sense. It's like, like you're saying there's a lot of thought behind how we're doing it in this way. And, and you know, as opposed to these much longer chapters that are so frequently the norm, the 35 page Word document is, is kind of like the, the, the standard or whatever.
- [17:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think I call them turns, not sections or head chapters because I think of this as a kaleidoscopic history. You know, there's stories we know about cities and urbanization and modernization, et cetera. But if you, if you take a kaleidoscope and you shift, you turn it, the light comes in in a different way and it re. And it refracts and creates new patterns. And that's what I'm trying to do is here's the stories we know, but here's the stories we don't know and if we just shift the light, we start to see them.
- [17:42]
A
Right. You know, and I had forgotten about that, actually. You make that reference, that metaphor in the introduction and I missed the connection. That's on me. So I wanted to return to one of the topics that we just covered kind of at the outset here. And that is the idea that allotment gardening grows out of the enclosure of the commons. Can you talk a little bit more about that history for folks that are not familiar with that?
- [18:04]
B
Yeah. So we're in England for this turn and I use English enclosure because there's so much written about it. And I read and I read and I was trying to figure out, okay, we know about enclosure. We know that landlords said, oh, the peasants don't know how to farm. It's really small and inefficient. And they're using commons and so they're not caring for the land properly. And the landlords take over and close and start farming supposedly more efficiently on bigger plots of land. And that's sort of the beginning of these mega farms we have with 5,000 acre farms and 7,000 acre farms. And that was called improved agriculture at the time. That was self dubbed improved Agriculture by people like Jethro Tull, who invented the seed drill and the harrow, who himself was a failed lawyer and just went to a family, his family owned this farm. The English aristocrats, landowners had mostly just collected rents. They weren't interested in farming until, you know, mid 18th century. And then when they got interested it was often because they were having financial problems and that they messed up in other parts of their life. And their interest was really just in generating cash, not well being and the commons. And you know, the village was set up and common right was set up to generate on the opposite well being. And so I looked and looked and looked and tried to figure out, well, how were the commoners who were supposed to be so bad at farming that for centuries they had grown in these villages, how did they go about what were their agricultural practices? And that was not easy to find. There's lots of histories about yields per acre, that kind of thing, but not really about how people are going about doing it. But what I found was really interesting that in short, the commoners practices are akin to good regenerative agriculture practices. Day after 300 years we're back to where the English and many other European peasants left off. So as these people's perfectly sound and sustainable agricultural practices were denigrated, they were pushed off their land and made into a landless proletariat. We know that story well. And then they're just milling, you know, they're going from, you know, every after every harvest they're going from town to town looking for new jobs. They're, they're, they're just a bunch of hungry vagrants on the street and they're really causing a problem. And then they end up in cities and they're also hungry vagrants who are taxing the poor tax, you know, and that's getting too expensive for the people, the elite people who want their money rather to be in, in bank accounts rather than being paid out in poor tax. So they say, hey, just after they've enclosed 6 million acres from common land, taken it from the peasants, they'll say we'll give these people these small allotment gardens and we'll calculate to make them small enough so that they cannot feed themselves because if they work for themselves, they won't work for us. And so they make these, you know, like one parish would have enclosed 2,000 acres of common land. They give the commoners 20 acres together back as like poor compensation for common land. And then they have this little square box of private property. It's in A private property mode like here's your boundaries. Don't go out of them teaching the peasants to switch from communal ownership of land to private ownership of land. And that's a really awful, violent, nefarious history of allotment gardens. And I make this point in the book that not every allotment garden is the same. Many of them are founded on paternalistic extractive labor, controlling origins. And many allotment gardens, and I've been members of some of them in some of the cities I've lived in, still work that way. I was one garden, my Japanese friend and I, we were growing shiso. It's a delicious green. The allotment heads, they thought it was a weed. And we kept getting fined for having this weed. I kept saying, but we eat the weed and we eventually kicked out. So, you know, the allotment gardens can be rule bound and controlling. But there are other kinds of what we now recognize as allotments that emerged kind of spontaneously, anarchically working by, you know, people coming together, usually working class people coming together in mutual aid and self governance. And they created these really, you know, what elite observers even at the time, they went into these green shanty towns and they'd say, this is an idol, this place is amazing. And they coveted it and they tried to take it, gentrify it, turn it into, you know, villa, you know, garden villa districts or garden hospitals. But that is the origins of allotment gardens. And it, you know, evolved at the same time. You know, the loss of common land and the privatization of common land came at the same time with the loss of common right, the right to food, fuel and shelter transformed into the rights of man, which is the rights to, to freedom and liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Now, I don't know if anybody's ever eaten any of those three things or found shelter with them, but I doubt it. And that's kind of, that's very much a poor compensation. It's like the shift from 2000 acres to 20 that we should be demanding. Again, not the right to the pursuit of happiness, as bizarre as that seems. And what kind of how do you cash in on that right, but the right to food, the right to shelter, the right to be warm, and that those are, those human needs should not be something that should be commercialized or privatized, that people shouldn't be making profit on our need to be sheltered.
- [24:27]
A
Yeah, you know, that gets me to one of the things that I thought was so interesting, which is like the contrast between allotment farming and this industrial agriculture and other forms of for profit agriculture. So one of the innovations now just to kind of like praise these allotment gardens a little bit further, one of the innovations that they make is this thing. I don't know if they come up with it, but they recognize its value. And that is this thing called the dung community. What the heck is that?
- [24:54]
B
The dung community, you know, cows in a field, A cow lives its tail and it poops. And even before the poop reaches the ground, flies have flown in and laid their eggs. And once they lay their eggs in, there's some maggots and worms and they come in and they want those eggs. And they start, they climb in and they start. You know, everybody piles into that dung pile and starts breaking it down and digesting it. The last step is the fungi, you know, move in at the very end and turn it into beautiful rich hummus and tilt. And I think the dung community is a really fantastic metaphor for some of these green shanty towns where everybody sort of piles in and starts creating even before, even before anything happens. I've got an idea, I've got an idea. Let's try this, let's try that. It also talks about metabolic cycles. We now have what we call forever chemicals. And we have nuclear waste that has a half life of 24,000 years. That's like, that's like 240,000 years. We can't even calculate that on a human scale. But waste normally just breaks down and becomes some other form of life. And that is how these urban gardeners, just like commoners before them, thought of organic waste as something that was valuable. You don't even throw away. Everything in the privy in the backyard is super valuable. Why would you throw that out? They had to pass a law in Washington D.C. one chapter is about Washington D.C. where I lived for 20 years, about how they had to pass a law in 1919 saying you can't pick, collect garbage from other people's neighborhoods. You can't steal garbage. And the contractor that won the contract, the Washington Fertilizer Company, won the contract to pick up garbage in the city, paid to collect garbage because that garbage was so valuable in the city dump. They had 300 hogs roaming around biodigesting everybody's human and animal waste and food scraps and turning it into a rich, valuable fertilizer that then they then sold to farmers outside the city and to gardeners inside the city. But gardeners in the city that, you know, next door, east of the river neighborhoods I write about, they just had Outhouses. And they used their waste themselves, break it down, along with the waste from their pigs and their chickens, and along with their vegetable scraps and food scraps, and they made these fantastic soils. And so at the end of the Great Depression, these black communities east of the river again, green shanty towns. City fathers, congressmen who ran the city, invested no money in these neighborhoods. No. There was no paved surfaces, there was no sewers, there's no running water or garbage collection. But that was okay. They took this structural racism and they turned it into a vegetable powered wealth. And so at the end of the Great Depression, when millions of white Americans have lost their homes, even with federal subsidies, these black residents, without any help at all, have doubled the rates of homeownership in Washington D.C. than their white neighbors.
- [28:17]
A
Yeah, yeah, well, that is, I'm glad you brought that up. It's a really important story about that. As you say this, from structural racism to vegetable powered wealth. That's, that's, that's exactly what they did. It's amazing. There's a similar story that's, that's happening in allotment gardens around the world, as you suggest. And there's also kind of like a, a transmission belt between the ideas and innovations that they come up with and more theoretical breakthroughs. Can you talk a little bit about the way that these tiny gardens fuel theoretical innovations by more well known urban theorists?
- [28:51]
B
Yeah, well, let's go back to Berlin in the late 19th century. People started to show up, journalists, people, landscape architects, people who later become the first urban planners. And they go to these green shanty towns and they come away saying, wow, these, these places, I'm totally surprised, are pretty amazing. They're beautiful. The infrastructure is more botanical than it is human generated. You know, there's just these vines and fruit trees growing up around these little shacks. And you know, when people got together in these communities again, I said there'd be like 30, 40 households, about 150 people, and they would elect a council and they would, the council would, you know, everybody would elect a president and they would govern themselves and they'd run up to some problems. They'd say, you know, the kids have nothing to do all summer, so let's have start a summer camp or some people are showing up with tb, so let's build a shack over there and that's our sanatorium and quarantine people. We have problems with neighbors having disputes, so we'll create an arbitration court. It's over there under the oak tree, things like that. So people Come together and they start. And my intuition is that these urban gardeners mimic the mutual aid societies that plants and fungi and microbes form under the ground and that they know that when you work together you have such bounty. You have more zucchini and tomatoes and beans and you know what to do with. Then you're handing them off. You have more seeds than you can possibly deal with. So you're handing them out to anybody you want. It doesn't, it doesn't matter to you. Please take them. And I think that is how these green shanty towns became these mutual aid societies that were super effective, solved a lot of problems. So we think of Germany, historians talk about Germany as this is the place where the social welfare state first was founded and is usually attributed to this guy named Otto von Bismarck. But before Otto von Bismarck turned this, these practices into law, these urban gardeners were working them out with their hands and their voices in these urban green shanty towns. And then when these observers come in, they're like, what a great idea, you know. And so like Ebenezer Howard comes up with the idea of a garden city where workers should live and grow their own food and prosper and help each other out. Like, yeah, you know, and another guy, Librex Migue, the German landscape architect, you know, in the middle of the hunger in Germany in World War I, says, you know, every working man a garden. And so these plagiarists who are, you know, these theoretical leaders, you know, other people say, you know, we should use human poop to create, you know, fertile soils and we should take the, you know, the urban waste streams and turn them into soils again. They're already doing all this. What happens when people plagiarize? It's an immoral, unethical thing to do. But one of the major reasons why I think it's considered so immoral is it takes what is real, existing practices, successful practices, and projects them onto a future utopia. And by creating them something by stealing and saying it doesn't already exist, but it could exist in the future if you just listen to me, it robs us of our imagination of what a human organization that's been successful in the past. So the people go, oh, that's utopian, not possible. People can't work together. There can't be a bounty where people happily, generously give things away. That's not volunteer help each other out. That's not possible. That's not human nature. It's a dog eat dog world. Haven't you read Sapiens?
- [32:54]
A
What's that?
- [32:55]
B
Haven't we read Sapiens? Let me repeat that. That's a book of our ages. That's a book that our billionaires love to read because it justifies their actions.
- [33:05]
A
Yep, yep. Yeah.
- [33:07]
B
That's not how all humans have worked through history.
- [33:10]
A
We could, we could have a whole discussion about Sapiens. And I'm on the same page as you about that book. Let me think here. Now, kind of on that level that you suggest throughout the book and in the conversation that we were just having, that there is actually a politics to tiny gardens, right? There's a difference between what you call a gardening state and a gardener's state. So what are the politics of tiny gardens everywhere? They're coming up with the welfare state. What's, what's, what are some of the politics that are, that are involved in this practice?
- [33:46]
B
Well, we know the Garden State. The Garden State is where, you know, social, so called social welfare networks emerge and they curate the human population. They selectively breed, you know, in a eugenics fashion. They, they offer largesse to certain populations and deprive others of basic rights. And that way they call the population kind of like a good gardener weeds his or her garden. But that's not a very good gardener, we now know. And the English peasants, they would sow weeds, they'd broadcast seeds widely and the plants would grow thickly, which suppressed other plants from coming in. It was a weed suppression. And birds would swoop in and they'd pick up some of the, the seeds and they'd go off not far away and they'd poop out those seeds. And those same wheat plants would grow just off to the side and they would become sort of wild cousins that would cross pollinate with the cultivated seeds. And that cross pollination made those plants stronger, hardier, more resilient. And that is how the gardener's state works, is that people come together, they share, they collaborate, they cross pollinate ideas and also they do a lot of sharing of seeds, helping raise each other's kids, help each other build each other's huts and dig a new well when a new well needs to be dug and nurse people when they're sick. The interesting thing in, in this neighborhood in D.C. east of the river is that we found when we looked in the recorder of deeds is that a lot of houses passed hands from 1910 to 2009 for the cost of $10. $10 is the minimum you can sell a house for in D.C. and so what people were doing is they were giving their houses not only to family members, but they're passing them on to neighbors and to other people in the neighborhood. One fellow told the story about how in his family there was an old woman who lived next door and she didn't have any offspring. And she said, hey, why don't you take my house if you look after me into my old age? And he said, that's what we did. And so what is that doing? Black Americans are punished in capitalist markets. They pay higher interest rates, higher brokerage fees, higher tax assessments. You know, they don't get adequate elderly care and health care. And so staying out of those markets was a super smart thing to do. Working within the community. The gardeners state supports one another and takes those functions of the state upon themselves, and they do it with more care, and they do it without having to hand lots of fees to other people who prey on them. Now, I'm not saying this sounds like a very libertarian message, like everybody's on their own, the state should step out. But the state is stepping out, and all over the world, not just in Trump's America. And we do have to figure out how to keep going. We do have to figure out not to have, you know, ruined lives all around us. And I think one of the political messages of this book is that in the Gardener's State, there's a lot of bounty, that the narrative of scarcity is a capitalist narrative. There's not enough, you better buy it soon, buy low, sell high, buy it now, pull out your credit card as frequently as possible, because you never know what's going to be there. You know, there's a politics of inflation narratives, et cetera. But if we think of a different kind of rhetoric, of one of bounty, then we think, oh, I've got plenty and I don't need to store it all in a bank account. I can share it, I can loan it out to a friend and the friend will go back to me. I can loan it out to a neighbor. I can certainly give away these zucchini because nobody can yell these zucchini. That kind of mentality. We certainly have a lot of fertility in this neighborhood. If we didn't flush it away, but created a neighborhood composting center, we certainly have a lot of food. 40% of our food goes into waste. So if we set up a way to glean from the dumpsters, or before they go into the dumpsters and set up community kitchens, everybody would be fed. And then once they're fed, they're in community kitchens. They get to know each other. When we start talking, meeting, we have lots of land for urban people say, well, you know, there's this narrative in New York City with Mandani, you know, it's either public gardens or public housing. And that's a false choice, right? Like, why is the narrative not public housing or parking lots or public housing and office towers? There's plenty of all of those things. But we have lots of commons in our cities. 60%, I bet you in Detroit, 80%, is given over to moving and parking automobiles in Motor City. Now, we could now as this, we have small electric people movers. Increasingly, the most successful cities in the world from, you know, Shanghai to Amsterdam to Paris to New York are. There's, they're, they're filling in streets because people are just moving around with excellent public transit and people mover, electric people movers, little scooters, bikes. So we could say the city will just become a real estate developer and sell off that land, and we have a real tide of privatizing public space. But we can act on the local level and we can say, rather than turn that into this public space into yet another condo or office tower, why don't we turn curbside parking into curbside allotment gardens and big four lane arteries into edible boulevards. Nut trees and fruit trees and berries and foliage in the understory. Now we have this new thing happening. People are holed up in their houses with their devices, digesting the politics of fear and anger, but they're out in the street growing their tomatoes and beans and say, you don't like Michael? You know, like, I don't really like the garden much at all, and it's just not my thing. And I'm like, that's fine. I'll take your plot and I'll grow food for both of us. And so then I'm out there and I pull up a big bunch of beets, and you come out and you're like, ooh, I'd like some beets. And so I pull them out of the ground, they're still a little dirty. I hand into you and I give you some carrots too. And the carrot's so orange and delicious looking. You brush it off and take a bite. And now something has happened. You have just imbibed the microbes from the soil, the microbes from my hand. I'm eating the same. And now you and I share our microbial complex together. And microbiologists tell us that when people have much more in common in their human gut, microbiome, for instance, they get along better, they come to decisions better. And you Know, that makes a lot of sense if you think of human evolution, that humans have evolved to have really strange practices. Like when they meet, they shake hands, they hug, they kiss, they offer each other drinks, like chicha in Peru, which is, you know, women chew it with, ferment it with a bacterial saliva, and then that's the first thing you have to drink when you come in to a village is. Is that drink bringing the visitor into the circle of that community? You know, Christians go to church and the entire community drinks from one palace. Right. Crazy. Those are crazy practices, especially in the post Covid world, the post pestrarian world. But we do it and then we do it because somehow our. Even before there were microscopes, our ancestors understood that something about sharing microbes helped form community, helped humans get along.
- [42:21]
A
Yeah, well, that's. I mean, that's a great answer about the politics of tiny gardens and. Because also it kind of demonstrates the. What the book does in general, which is sort of like to put things like a change in perspective, I think there's one line, and I don't want to misquote you, where you say a weed is just a plant that's out of place. And that's kind of like the shift in perspective that you're doing throughout is like, no, that's not a weed, it's a plant that's. That you think is in the wrong place in a way. And the whole thing, there's just so much like that. Another thing that you suggest is like the scale of change happens through, like local ordinances and not necessarily big structural changes, which I thought was actually very empowering. You know, so there's a lot of that throughout the book that. That's like refreshing.
- [43:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. We mean, you know, we know we've got climate change bounty and. But we can't get a UN resolution that sticks. We certainly can't get an act of Congress passed, but we can't change. We can't go to our city council meetings and change zoning. Right now, in many American cities, every time you put up a condo, you need to have a parking spot. But what about just shift that over time? There's. And here the parking spots in Cambridge, Mass. Are right in the front lawn. That's really ugly. That's hot. It induces more floods. So what if we just, you know, there was all kinds of diminishes biodiversity. What if we just flip that. Every new condo needs a garden spot. And then, you know, there's no gardeners in the building file. You just go fruiting perennials if people don't want, you know, okay, so now you have this boulevard of fruit trees and the city managers say, but there's going to be all that messy fruit squishing on the sidewalk and people will slip in it and we'll have lawsuits. You know, again, the politics of fear amidst the politics of bounty amidst the reality of bounty of bountiful fruit. But so, okay, so like last night I was at Chelsea, a poor migrant neighborhood in Boston, and I was at a community kitchen and they were having a cooking class and we all like learned a dish from a neighbor who's from Palestine and we ate a delicious meal and they do that every Wednesday night. So say there's all this fruit growing in the streets. And we had community kitchens. The neighbors, just as they do in Barcelona when the orange trees that are throughout the city, the oranges are falling from the trees one weekend, everybody comes out, boop, boop, boop, boop. They pick all the oranges, they go to the community kitchen together and they make marmalade and they hand out the marmalade to whoever wants it. It again, we're building community just like they did in those green shanty towns. We're building mutual self help networks. We know who our neighbors are and so then we know when somebody's just had hip surgery, we can bring them some groceries and some meals and we start caring for each other rather than expecting these impersonal profit driven companies to do it for us.
- [45:19]
A
Right? Right, Right. Now, you mentioned Nita, you said this thing about replacing parking spaces with gardens in local ordinances. That reminds me, there's a moment where you talk about just that in the Netherlands, if I'm not mistaken. And that just on that note, the book has a number of these great micro histories. One of them is the history of land improvements in the Netherlands. But one that I found particularly captivating had to do with Georgette Norman and her battle to keep her own tiny garden in the face of the kinds of municipal ordinances you're describing. So can you talk a little bit about the fraught history of, of tiny gardens versus turf grass?
- [45:58]
B
Yeah. So Georgette Norman lived lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and she's African American. She lives in the African American section of Montgomery, but she had a boyfriend who was white, her life partner, Nomad. And they decided they had this post war brick house that she inherited from her parents and they decided to. That front line was really boring. So they started building a garden and they didn't have any money, they didn't want to spend Any money on it. So they got like big chunks of concrete that was taken up from other places. And they were building a wall, and they'd take. Houses were falling down. They'd take beams from the houses, and they built this beautiful terrace and sort of gazebo. And then they started planting. And she said, I was vegetarian and there was no place to get fresh produce in my neighborhood, so I just decided to grow my own. And so they started growing corn and rye grass and all the other vegetables. But the rye grass was the offensive. It was too tall. And most cities in America passed around about 1960s. In fact, after 1968, passed vegetation ordinances, very vague. Can't grow plants taller than 6 inches unless they're ornamental in nature. What's ornamental? Who's out there measuring the height of plants? These vague ordinances were rarely enforced. We found when we looked at case law, they're kind of like. But they worked kind of like vacancy laws in the Jim Crow South. When they were enforced, they were enforced against usually people of color living in white neighborhoods or mixed race couples living anywhere because they never belong anywhere. And 1968, passage of the Fair Housing Act. It's no longer legal in America to pass a law or an ordinance or have a secret covenant to discriminate on housing. But plants are apolitical, supposedly. I'm sorry, your lawn is. You're growing things on your lawn that don't belong, and you just slap fines, slap fines, slap fines on people. People lose their houses with these fines. And that's how you get rid of people you don't want. That's how you discourage them from coming in the first place. That's why we still have a highly segregated landscape, American landscape. The lawn is not a neutral institution. It's an instrument. It can be and has been used as an instrument of segregation. So Georgette. So the city slaps and finds on her. And then they cited her as a criminal, and they drew her into court and they convicted her as a criminal along with the drug dealers in her neighborhood and the auto theft people. And so she fought it and she appealed, won an appeal, lost an appeal was taken in all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court. And she had a black city councilman. And she's like, you know, can't you help me? And he's like, why don't you just cut that down and just grow a lawn? What's wrong with you? And she said, you know, had Rose. She lived on. She lives on Rosa Parks Avenue. And she said, you know, had Rosa Parks done that you wouldn't be where you are today. And I think what Georgette, you know, I was just down in Montgomery and Georgette and I shared a stage to talk about tiny gardens everywhere. And I was really struck sitting there in Montgomery, Alabama, where the Brian Johnson's justice project is so visible. There's a monument to lynching, there's the legacy museum of the history of slavery, that at some point, when we have laws that are unjust, we have the right to violate them, to fail to obey them. Just as Rosa Parks refused to stand up on the bus and just as Georgette refused to plow under rye grass in her corn and an absolutely stunning garden. And I think that's the problem with the institution of the law, which is the law of the land, that in many communities it's not possible legally to grow food on your front yard. And that is a set of laws that keeps us dependent on markets, on chain grocery stores, on big industrial ag, on our automobiles to get us to those far off grocery stores. A whole chain of things happens when we're not able to produce for ourselves, even minimally. The first real vegetation laws were passed in the post war period, and the lawn was pushed in the post war period. The Levitt towns, the Levitt brothers famously made people sign in their mortgage contracts that they would maintain lawns. This is after the victory gardens were so successful During World War II, 40% of the food Americans ate came from victory gardens. Imagine how frightened the chain grocery stores must have been. Imagine how frightening the big food processors must have been. Imagine how useful it is to pursue the lawn as an alternative. So now 158American households grow turf grass. A crop that you cannot eat. That's no good for the birds or bees. That's quite toxic. If you treat it with things to get rid of dandelions and ticks, it doesn't make any sense. We can have a network of growers throughout this country who now grow turf grass. More land is devoted to growing turf grass than any other crop. More water is devoted to turf grass than any other crop. Turn those spaces into food production areas and we defeating the country.
- [51:38]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's great. Well, I wanted to ask. Now it's been, it's been a lot of fun talking about this book. Kind of. On that note, as we, as we conclude, I wanted to ask, is this, is this a manifesto? It has manifesto energy. What do you, what do you think about it? I mean that in a good way.
- [51:54]
B
Yeah. I say in the book, it's part history. Part memoir and part manifesto. And you know, I think that the manifesto. I know I don't mention anarchism in the book, but there's a lot of cooperative and collective energy and there's a real call for taking seriously our common space and caring for it and loving for it in a way that's not big asphalty machines and jackhammers running across them, but for our to have our hands in them. I think if we were out caring for our urban ecologies, we'd also be out caring for one another and we'd. In a healthier, happier communities.
- [52:44]
A
Well, yeah, when there is sort of like an anarchist intellectual architecture to the thing you're mentioning Kropotkin, you're clearly inspired by David Graeber. I don't remember if Murray Bookchin makes a formal appearance, but you are talking about a post scarcity society. There's all those kinds of things. And so I was. It's a very well done fusion of ideas about cooperation and which can seem very kind of like high minded, but then also the practices that are involved in that stuff. So I thought it was great.
- [53:19]
B
Right? Yes. Thank you very much, Michael. And you know, I guess I'm trying to think is like we dream Since World War II about fixing things on a national scale and then later on a planetary scale and maybe we just have to think on tiny scales. And that's where the tiny garden comes in. Just try it. Just try it. Take a space the size of your dining room table and start, make sure there's good soil in there and start putting some plants in and some seeds and see how things change all around it. It's kind of remarkable.
- [53:57]
A
Well, Kate, it's such a timely book, so thank you very much. It's been a pleasure doing history with you. You know, thank you for your time.
- [54:04]
B
Thank you, Michael. Thanks for interviewing me.
- [54:07]
A
Well, for our listeners, Tiny Gardens Everywhere. The Past, Present and Future of the Self Provisioning City is available now from Norton. And you can find it, of course, wherever the very finest books are sold. Kate, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [54:21]
B
Thanks very much.
- [54:22]
C
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