Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 251

tiful movement, for example, promoted urban gardening because uncultivated
backyards and vacant lots were seen as eyesores (bassett 1981). During the two
world wars, urban farming took the form of war gardens that continued and
expanded on the tradition started in the 1800s.4 war gardens prepared the basis
for what would become, from the 1970s onward, a veritable international con-
cern for realistic and desirable land use options in urban areas and sustainable
urban productive systems. since the 1990s, such a concern has found renewed
energy within many cities in europe, the united states, and australia, develop-
ing urban programs aimed at distributing plots or “allotments” to foster com-
munity-managed gardens on vacant or unused parcels of land (armstrong 2000;
baker 2004; bartolomei et al. 2003; englander 2001; lawson 2005).5 There is a
crucial difference among them, however: whereas in rich and polluted western
europe (from Germany to sweden), the main interest in urban agriculture is on
environmental management and recreational activities and only secondarily on
income-generating activities, in poor and polluted eastern europe the focus is on
urban agriculture's potential for enhanced food security, employment creation,
and small enterprise development. similarly, in the united states, the rhetoric on
urban farming has been constructed as a concern over a new urban productive
system and a potential way out for the urban poor in central districts. to this end,
it is interesting to note that until 2005, the american planning association (the
association of professional planners) did not have a food section among its inter-
ests. since a landmark american planning association conference in san anto-
nio, texas (2005), where a food working group was funded for young planners,
a growing number of planning schools—including architecture—deal with the
issue of food from the points of view of policy and design, recognizing this grow-
ing interest in urban agriculture, which has now spilled into the mainstream
(pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000; Quon 1999).
The forgotten landscape of Rome: The Disabitato
a frescoed bird's eye view of Rome by simone lagi (1631) in the map Room of the
Vatican museums shows the mausoleum of saint helen along Via Nomentana at
the boundary between city and countryside. The fresco highlights the nonbuilt
area internal to the city walls known as the disabitato, that is, the once urbanized
part of Rome that reverted into countryside at the end of the Roman empire. The
presence of farmland inside the urban area well into the nineteenth century is a
peculiarity Rome shares with no other large city in europe, the majority of which
grew progressively from a central nucleus toward the countryside.
in Rome: Profile of a City, 308-1308, Krautheimer (1980) reminds us how from
the Rome of Constantine to the early fourteenth century what had once been a
bustling city of over a million inhabitants had reverted to an urbanized country-
side. important temples at the center of the city were stripped of their precious