Seminar: "Tiny gardens everywhere", by Kate Brown

We are pleased to announce that Kate Brown, Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will give a seminar at ICTA-UAB.
 

Seminar: “Tiny gardens everywhere"

Speaker:  Kate Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: Wednesday, 22nd January 2025
Time: 12h
Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 - Z/023) ICTA-UAB
 

Five-thousand Parisian farmers grew vegetables for two million Parisians at the turn of the 19th century.  German citizens won the right to garden in the midst of famines in 1919-1920. Black residents of Washington, DC paid down on their homes during the Great Depression by maintaining vegetable gardens on their urban lots. While Soviet collective farms failed, Soviets farmed urban peripheries to produce most of the food people ate. These stories have been missed in plain sight because they clash with ideas of urban development and imagined divisions between urban and rural, nature and culture. Yet these histories reveal how a vegetable-powered wealth not only underwrote urbanization and industrialization, but became the means by which working people created urban food systems that could be a solution today.

Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including A Biography of No Place (Harvard 2004) and Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into eight languages, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. Norton will publish in January 2026 Tiny Gardens Everywhere: A Kaleidoscopic History of the Food Sovereignty Frontier.