Von der Allmende zur urban agriculture: Kleinstlandwirtschaft und Gärten als weibliche Ökonomie

Abstract

Abstract Sixteen years after its inception, a lot of hype has developed around the term ‘urban gardening’. In order to underscore its importance for a subsistence economy, the author therefore prefers the term ‘urban agriculture’ (Agrarkultur). The thesis of the article is that community gardening is a social movement dominated by women that brings previously hidden housework back into public view. In older European societies, the house and garden of a homestead were women’s domains. The garden was part of the ‘household economy’. The significance of both female housework and the subsistence economy is often overlooked. The Stein and Hardenberg reforms of 1806–1813 promoted the suppression of peasants’ rights to use the commons: land, meadows, woods, lakes. One result was that widows lost their means of homesteading (subsistence farming) and poverty drove them into cities and towns. But a female-dominated subsistence economy would return. In the late nineteenth century, Max Weber described how farmhands’ ...