Join us for a conversation with acclaimed MIT historian Kate Brown, author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere, in dialogue with Antoine Picon, as they explore the deep, surprising, and often radical history of urban gardening.

Part history, part reportage, part manifesto, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City follows the roots of urban gardening from feudal England to a late nineteenth century utopia outside of Berlin to 1960s Washington DC to contemporary Amsterdam, Chicago, and beyond. Throughout this history, Brown weaves in her own gardening experience, exploring the political and the practical while painting a picture of the necessity of self-provisioning in an increasingly chaotic world.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self-provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working-class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership. The Soviet superpower survived so long only because of its urban gardens.

Copies of Tiny Gardens Everywhere will be available for purchase and signing after the talk, courtesy of the MIT Press Bookstore.

February 18
6pm – 7pm
$5

We have a limited number of free tickets available for students. Please reach out to museumregadmin@mit.edu.