Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 249

which residents of all ages and social conditions in different parts of the city use
farming and gardening (on different scales and with different degrees of suc-
cess) to manifest the desire to take control over fundamental issues of everyday
life for a better city with a qualitatively higher sense of community and urban
living.
The methodology used for this research includes literature reviews and in-
terviews with relevant actors. The work does not aim to exhaustively cover all
urban farming and gardening experiences in Rome; however, the cases chosen
are indicative of the typologies and heterogeneity of the movement in general. as
one of the first studies in english of this feature of contemporary Rome, its goal
is to map the situation and provide a foundation for further and more in-depth
research.
what is urban agriculture?
urban agriculture is the practice of producing, distributing, and selling food;
raising livestock; and growing plants and trees within the urban and peri-urban
boundary (smit et al. 1996). as such, the practice can be geographically limited
within a village or a town or, as in the case of Rome, spread throughout the over
128,531 ha of its administrative boundaries, of which 82,000 ha are considered
“green” (i.e., safeguarded and protected by law) (Comune di Roma 2004). The
most striking feature of urban agriculture is its interaction with the wider urban
ecosystem. such linkages include the use of urban residents as laborers, the uti-
lization of typically urban resources (like organic waste as compost and urban
wastewater for irrigation), the direct link with urban consumers, participation
in the urban food system, and the direct competition for land with other urban
functions.
urban agriculture is not a new phenomenon. in the mid-1960s, ester bos-
erup (1965) addressed the issue of population growth in (asian) primitive so-
cieties as the impulse to further rationalize agricultural practices, while in her
Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs (1969) made the argument of a coevolution, indeed
coexistence, of cities and agriculture. more recently, edward soja (2000) took on
the same argument, analyzing the evolution of proto-urban places such as Çat-
alhöyük in southern anatolia as an urban agro-artisan node in a geographically
vast trading network.
The urban-rural divide as we know it today did not emerge before the mod-
ern understanding of plant nutrition developed by Justus von liebig, among oth-
ers, in the nineteenth century (brock 2002). a real impulse which stimulated
the separation of agriculture from the urban environment was the invention of
ammonia synthesis by German chemists Carl bosch and fritz haber (the haber-
bosch process) which allowed the German manufacturer basf to mass-produce
synthetic nitrogen, the fertilizer that sparked the green revolution, that is, the
industrialization of agriculture (smil 2001). such technological innovations al-