Tiny Gardens and the Self-Provisioning City

TRANSITION Talk with Kate Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

How have city dwellers historically sustained themselves in times of scarcity and transformation? What role did small-scale urban gardening play in bridging the rural and the urban — and what can these practices teach us about sustainability today?

In this TRANSITION Talk, renowned historian Kate Brown explores how everyday gardening practices shaped life in 20th-century cities. Drawing on her current book project, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The History of the Self-Provisioning City, Brown traces the histories of people and plants who resisted urban dependence by growing their own food — from Eastern Europe to North America.

Brown is the M. Siebel Distinguished Professor of History of Science at MIT and known internationally for her award-winning work on nuclear landscapes, urban life, and environmental histories. In this lecture, she connects her historical inquiry to the themes of TRANSITION, asking how welfare landscapes emerged as lifelines — and what urban gardening might mean in the face of today’s ecological and structural transitions.

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