How ‘Tiny Gardens Everywhere’ Can Sustain Us

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In her new book, “Tiny Gardens Everywhere,” MIT environmental historian Kate Brown uses the global history of gardening to help us imagine cities that are resilient and self-sufficient. She unearths a rich history of the role small urban gardens have played in supplementing wages, keeping families fed and nurturing community and resilience in times of economic upheaval, war and environmental damage. We’ll talk to Brown about the past, present and future of gardens as critical infrastructure of cities that can help sustain communities even when our systems fail. Guests: Kate Brown, author, "Tiny Gardens Everywhere" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:38.3	From KQED.
0:41.4	Welcome to Forum.
0:42.8	I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:44.5	MIT environmental historian Kate Brown's new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere.
0:50.0	It's a surprising tour through the history and current practice of urban gardening.
0:55.2	By looking beyond established narratives about what's important in agriculture, she finds
0:59.4	a hidden working class history of food production, around the home, and in community allotment
1:05.4	gardens.
1:06.9	These stories suggest not just an alternative food system, but something larger.
1:16.6	A roughly democratic, high freedom, almost anarchic kind of system that people within very different societies have discovered again and again when times got or stayed tough.
1:23.2	That is to say, Brown's research is into hyperlocal food systems, but the implications of her work are as much about the governance of societies as they are about the best ways to produce fruits and vegetables.
1:36.1	And she joins us here this morning.
1:37.7	Welcome, Kate.
1:38.7	Hi, Alexis. Thanks for having me on your show.
1:41.1	So good. Thanks for joining us.
1:42.2	So this really is a bottom-up history of urban gardening,
1:46.2	both like in terms of socioeconomic status, kind of really thinking about the ways that working
1:50.2	people are gardening. And you're also looking at agriculture kind of from the soil up in particular.
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