Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 258

local residents have created another communal vegetable garden in collaboration
with environmental groups such as legambiente and Roma Natura. The only
urban garden managed by the city administration itself is in Via della Consolata,
in the pisana neighborhood.
The different categories of urban farming in Rome summarily presented
here show a creative civic society, which is highly heterogeneous, made up of
different associations, cooperatives, families, private citizens, and professional
farmers. The city authorities, although familiar with the need to protect green
areas in Rome, are a reluctant partner to say the least. urban farming is thus
left to the individual efforts and will of private citizens and associations for
whom it represents a political platform functional to expressing a multitude of
needs and demands as well as to connecting with similar events and associations
internationally.
During world war ii, over 40 percent of u.s. vegetables were produced in
the backyards of patriotic citizens. in Rome, urban war gardens, although useful,
were more of a folkloric phenomenon organized for fascist propaganda than a
real alternative to commercial farming. today the enemies are not foreign armies
but high prices, squalid and anomic peripheries, environmental degradation,
and carbon footprint, that is, the impact of human activities on the biosphere.
urban agriculture in Rome is the latest and most interesting manifestation of the
refusal of concerned citizens to give up the idea of living in a cleaner, healthier,
and more humane city. slowly yet progressively, vegetables, flowers, and trees
have started to grow where garbage previously dominated. open-air dumps are
at times reclaimed, fenced off, and brought to new life by the energy and passion
of dedicated citizens' associations and private individuals amid the indifference
of public institutions. but the movement fueling agriculture in Rome is not yet
formalized. immigrant families denied refugee status, seniors living on meager
pensions, urbanized farmers longing for a plot where they can cultivate fruit and
vegetables, and residents of illegally built neighborhoods far from the center and
isolated from social services and infrastructures, take over and maintain veg-
etable gardens out of passion, for leisure, and for subsistence without necessarily
being in contact with each other. Could this be a possible future for the eternal
City, creating a city that is tended and loved, that is gentler, more delicate, health-
ier, and more sustainable? major structural changes for a more just and equitable
city need to happen before urban agriculture and gardens can become a viable
alternative to conventional urban planning and socioeconomic development in
Rome. Nevertheless, what is emerging with a lot of effort is one way for this city
to climb out the dark hole that institutional neglect of the public good, collective
disregard for the environment, disenchantment, lack of opportunities and of po-
litical vision have excavated in the last fifty years of its history.