The Nowe Muzeum Sztuki (New Art Museum, NOMUS), with its cozy atmosphere and factory feel, is the youngest contemporary art museum in Poland. This small museum is a branch of the Modern Art Department of the National Museum. Located between the Old Town of Gdańsk and the Stocznia industrial shipyard, its aim is to provoke conversations about the contemporary world. This month, it is hosting American photographer Todd Forsgren’s exhibition Post-industrial Eden. Forsgren takes us to explore how citizens regard allotment gardens and community gardens worldwide.
The exhibition gives a broad overview of the history, meaning, and purpose of these urban, suburban, and family gardens. It displays photographs of gardens in Europe, Cuba, Japan, Mongolia, and the U.S. One of these pictures is from Gdańsk, where the most famous allotment gardens are in the Zaspa district: 50,000 inhabitants live in large slab buildings separated from the railway on one side by allotment gardens. Between anthropological records and environmental awareness, Post-industrial Eden allows us to delve into an intrinsically political theme.
Allotment gardens and community gardens are places where a small group of people grow their own fruits and vegetables, allowing them to be self-sufficient and not rely on mass production. Always following the climate conditions and specific landscapes of the region, they are respectively a piece of land divided into small parcels for several individuals (allotment gardens) and a piece of land shared by several individuals (community gardens). Not just places to grow fruits and vegetables, they are also places to socialize and reinstate interpersonal relationships.
“I found that these gardens had some sort of strange connection between the wilderness and the city landscape”, Forsgren said to NOMUS. He sees these initiatives as part of the “think global, act local” movement, and the exhibition argues that these gardens all have the same roots: the intensifying of political and social crises. Often perceived as places free from politics, where people are seen as part of nature, the reasons for shared gardens’ existence vary across the world.
In Europe, shared gardens are usually on previously vacant land, now owned by the city. Just like in Gdańsk, they are often close to railways. Maria Lapland (name changed for anonymity purposes), a member of a community garden near Paris, describes them as “a permaculture experience on land lent by the municipality where people garden in groups and share the harvests.” Since she joined the group nearly three years ago, she goes almost every weekend “despite the rain, although sometimes it’s less enjoyable than others.” In these gardens, we stay for tea after a morning of work and discuss with the other members while enjoying a time far from the constant busyness of the modern world.
The “social capital” of those gardens is important. In Japan, where the population density is high and 90% of the inhabitants live in cities, recent years have seen a resurgence of urban gardens. Dr. Naomi Shimpo, associate professor at the University of Hyogo, says in an interview with Dr. Jonathan Kingley that community gardens, because they bring people together, are necessary in times of crisis. Not unlike in Europe, a large part of these gardens used to be vacant lots in residential areas. Further from the cities, in the countryside, rural farmers have seen a revitalization of villages, with some even deciding to rent small parcels to eco-tourists. Keeping the traditional country lifestyle alive was not the only benefit; it also improved Japan’s health.
With Forsgren’s camera, we travel to Cuba. There, urban, suburban, and family agriculture started as a survival reaction to the food crisis that followed the cutting off of Cuba from the Eastern Bloc. With a country already struggling under the U.S. embargo, during the “Special Period in Times of Peace” (1991–2000) that followed the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 35% in four years, and the island’s inhabitants lost on average one third of their daily calorie intake, with an average weight loss of 20 pounds per person. To survive, they developed community gardens and self-sufficient farming. However, Cuba remains in another difficult political period, still dependent on rice, wheat, and dairy products.
Self-sufficiency is also the main reason behind the Mongolians’ gardens. In the country, severe health issues (such as high rates of stomach and liver cancers and cardiovascular diseases, which are responsible for 44% of deaths annually in Mongolia) are mainly due to the dry and cold weather, which is unsuitable for growing crops. Dzuds, the extreme winters with temperatures of -30 degrees or less, provoke great losses of livestock, Mongolia’s main food resource. Exacerbated by the mass closure of factories after the Democratic Revolution of 1990, which led to minimal importation of products and limited relations with reliable trade partners, gardening projects have flourished out of necessity, with small-scale horticultural projects where mainly cabbage, carrots, and potatoes are grown.
In conclusion, Todd Forsgren's exhibition highlights the growing importance of allotment and community gardens in our contemporary world. These green spaces are more than plots of cultivated land; they are a collective response to the political, social, and environmental crises that affect our planet. By growing their own fruits and vegetables, citizens regain a sense of resilience in the face of global challenges. They also rediscover the relationship between people and the environment, while strengthening social cohesion in communities. Diverse in form and context, shared gardens all have the same mission: to create self-reliant cities.