Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 255

will see another slice of its precious countryside cemented over to the benefit of
the usual unnamed real-estate speculators.
urban farming as habit
a second category of urban agriculture in Rome includes private vegetable gar-
dens scattered throughout the city as parts of single-family homes. This category
is particularly interesting because it reflects not only the rural origins of many
Roman residents but the very process of the formation of modern Rome discussed
in other chapters of this topic (especially chapters 13 and 14). hese gardens are
in fact part of the “illegal” and “informal” Rome built on small plots of land in
the periphery which help to create a sense of community or small-town feeling
in an otherwise anonymous and drab urban landscape. within this category fall
the myriad vegetable gardens located in between buildings and in leftover spaces,
both on public and private land, occupied and tended by private citizens. indeed,
such examples are not far from the contemporary notion of “agrarian urbanism”
trumpeted as the new way of thinking about cities for the future (lindsay 2010).
a prototypical example of such vegetable gardens is located in the neighborhood
of primavalle, where an entire ravine abandoned for decades and full of debris
has been occupied by a couple of bosnian refugees, Drazen and Dzenana, who
have transformed it into a highly complex vegetable rain garden and one of the
best maintained green areas in the whole neighborhood of over 160,000 residents.
The Rediscovery of urban farming and Gardening
a third category is communal gardens, which are the closest thing Rome shares
with other world cities. The motivations behind the phenomenon are in part glob-
al, as an answer to environmental, economic, and health concerns (as michelle
obama's efforts at promoting urban gardening clearly show), and in part local,
that is, addressing specific Roman concerns: economic, historical (see the previ-
ous discussion about the Nolli map), and sociocultural (community making).
it is this last aspect, namely the retrenchment and disappearance of spaces for
socialization, that is sparking the contemporary phenomenon of urban garden-
ing in Rome. as emphasized by architect luca d'eusebio, a founding member of
Zappata Romana (Digging Rome), shared gardens “conquered” by groups of citi-
zens “provide the opportunity to generate a number of social activities through
which new social relations are forged, especially in marginal areas among disad-
vantaged groups that often lack such opportunities, such as seniors, people with
disabilities, women, children, and the unemployed.”13 indeed, shared gardening
allows these groups the possibility for further social and economic integration
via the learning of sustainable environmental practices. shared gardens in Rome
usually follow an established procedure which includes a formal request by a
civic group to the city government for permission to occupy an area, and, if ap-