Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 247

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Greening Rome

Rediscovering Urban Agriculture

ferruccio trabalzi

a s in many other cities in the world, urban gardening and farming are gain-
ing space and relevance in Rome. Community gardens, vegetable gardens, play-
grounds with a garden attached, cultivated tracts along the tiber River and plac-
es in between buildings, under freeways in the periphery and in urban parks are
slowly revitalizing abandoned or underutilized areas of the city and bringing
them back into the public arena. The city is not new to urban farming. Vineyards
and vegetable gardens existed within the old city walls until the nineteenth cen-
tury; war gardens in the 1930s and 1940s were planted in the periphery as well as
amid Roman monuments in the center; while post-world war ii immigrants
from the countryside of central italy squatted empty plots on private and public
land in the eastern periphery and along the tiber and aniene riverbanks to plant
vegetables and fruit trees without official permission. urban farming is thus both
a new and an old feature of this city; the recent revamping of the practice, how-
ever, departs from local tradition in at least three distinctive ways.
The first is the nonprofessional nature of the actors involved. instead of being
experienced farmers, as was the case in the past, the new urban agriculturalists
(individual citizens and civic associations) are city people with little or no expe-
rience in farming. The second characteristic is that farming and gardening are
taking root in what Gilles Clement (2004) calls “third landscapes,” that is, on
marginal, polluted, or abandoned areas near roads, railways, or rivers, and more
generally on fragments of empty land. The third difference is that contrary to
past practice, today's urban farmers do not cultivate for profit, for sustenance, or
out of a desire to become entrepreneurs. indeed, the long-term objective of the
movement is mostly symbolic of a different approach to the city and to city living,
one that is civically responsible, environmentally sustainable, and associative.

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