Seminar Antonia Weiss: Sprouting pasts. A counterhistory of urban gardening in Amsterdam, ca. 1970-present

In this Cultural History seminar, Antonia Weiss (Wageningen University) sketches a counterhistory of urban gardening in Amsterdam from 1970 onwards. By looking at the obscured history of gardening amongst migrants, she demonstrates that migrants are knowledgeable contributors to shaping our future food systems and cities.

Urban gardening

Scholars have noted that the increasing interest in urban gardening amongst the social elites in recent decades obscures a longer history of sustenance gardening amongst subaltern communities, especially migrants. This gap in historical record arguably also contributes to the widespread failure to recognise migrants as informed contributors to a more sustainable urban future.

An interdisciplinary body of scholarship has begun to connect urban gardening practices to histories of migration, arguing amongst other things that growing food has traditionally allowed migrants to maintain their culinary culture in a new food environment. Yet, most of the scholarship on migrant gardening practices in recent history (20^th and 21^st century) concentrates on suburbs in the US or Australia. 

Denser urban contexts – as they prevail in the Netherlands – are left out of the picture, raising the question how migrants from rural regions have navigated urban environments in which garden land has traditionally been scarce. 

Nieuw-West

This seminar centres on the Amsterdam neighbourhood of Nieuw-West, built in the 1960s according to the principles of the garden city, where today about 70% of residents have a migration background and where, in recent years, various bottom-up gardening initiatives have sprouted. 

Using a combination of oral history methods and ethnographic techniques, and taking the physical gardens shaped by Nieuw-West’s residents as its springboard, the paper skteches a counterhistory of urban gardening in Europe’s metropoles. This revised historical narrative simultaneously serves to delineate migrants as knowledgeable stakeholders in the making of our future foodscapes and cities.