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Erich Landsteiner, University of Vienna, Department of Economic and Social History, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna, Austria, erich.landsteiner@univie.ac.at; Tim Soens, Universiteit Antwerpen, Centre for Urban History, Stadscampus, Sint-Jacobsmarkt 13, S.SJ.306, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium, tim.soens@uantwerpen.be

1 This is also mirrored by research networks such as the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action TD 1106 Urban Agriculture Europe (2012–2016), which has produced the “Barcelona Declaration on Urban Agriculture and the Common Agricultural Policy”. See Frank Lohrberg et al. (eds.), Urban Agriculture Europe, Berlin 2015, and http://www.urban-agriculture-europe.org/files/130624_barcelona_declaration_on_urban_agriculture.pdf (last visited 2 Feb. 2020). On the global scale, the “Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and Framework for Action”, launched in 2015 by FAO and signed by 167 cities from 63 countries, is a major initiative in this context. See Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (ed.), The Role of Cities in the Transformation of Food Systems: Sharing Lessons from Milan Pact Cities, Rome 2018, http://www.milanurbanfoodpolicypact.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/CA0912EN.pdf (last visited 2 Feb. 2020).

2 See, for instance, the recent Herrenhausen Conference in Hannover on Urban Agricultural Heritage and the Shaping of Future Cities, 6–8 May 2019. A conference report is available under: http://www.ua-heritage.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Conference-Summary_Urban-Agricultural-Heritage.pdf (last visited 2 Feb. 2020).

3 Ruth Glasser, The Farm in the City in the Recent Past: Thoughts on a More Inclusive Urban Historiography, in: Journal of Urban History 44/3 (2018), 501–518.

4 See, for a recent example of this approach to defining a ‘town’, Ferdinand Opll, Das Werden der mittelalterlichen Stadt, in: Historische Zeitschrift 280 (2005), 561–589, 564.

5 To cite only two prominent authors: Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities. Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, 3rd revised printing, Princeton 1939, 212: “If we wished […] to sum up its essential points in one phrase, perhaps it would be possible to say that the city of the Middle Ages […] was a commercial and industrial commune living in the shelter of a fortified enclosure and enjoying a law, an administration and a jurisprudence of exception which made it a collective, privileged personality.” Susan Reynolds, English Towns in a European Context, in: Jörg Jarnut/Peter Johanek (eds.), Die Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt im 11. Jahrhundert (Städteforschung A 43), Köln/Weimar/Wien 1998, 207–218, 208: “My definition […] has two parts. The first part is functional: a town is a permanent and concentrated human settlement in which a significant proportion of the population is engaged in non-agricultural occupations […]. A town therefore normally lives, at least partly, off food produced by people who live outside it.” Reynold’s second criterion is the identity and the self-perception of the inhabitants of town and countryside. See also her study Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd ed., Oxford 1997, 155–158. A thoughtful discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of a purely functional definition is found in Stephan R. Epstein, Introduction. Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, in: idem (ed.), Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, Cambridge 2011, 1–29.

6 Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800, London 1984, after opting for a functional definition, set the threshold “for separating urban from rural places” at 10,000 inhabitants and is convinced that, “so long as the threshold level used for one of these criteria, population, is as high as 10,000 the others hardly need to be examined” (53). His other criteria are “population densities, percentages of the workforce in non-agricultural occupations and a measure of diversity in the occupational structure” (22).

7 Epstein, Introduction, 1.

8 Peter Clark, Introduction, in: idem (ed.), Small Towns in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge 1995, 1–21, 1; see also Epstein, Introduction, 1–2.

9 This method, originally devised by E. A. Wrigley, Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period, in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15/4 (1985), 683–728, is further developed by Robert C. Allen, Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800, in: European Review of Economic History 3 (2000), 1–25.

10 See, for example, Allen, Economic Structure, 4: “Clearly, some people lived in small cities and cultivated the surrounding fields or grazed stock on meadows and commons. There is no easy way to estimate the number of urban farmers, but their number was small as is the error from assuming it was zero.”

11 See Epstein, Introduction, 3 and 9, for a ponderation of similar questions.

12 See, for that matter, the contribution by Tim Soens in this volume.

13 Annika Björklund, Historical Urban Agriculture. Food Production and Access to Land in Swedish Towns before 1900 (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 20), Stockholm 2010, 103–153, 135. See also the discussion of this matter for towns in Lesser Poland by Piotr Miodunka in this volume.

14 For east-central Europe, see Maria Bogucka, The Towns of East-Central Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, in: Antoni Maczak/Henryk Samsonowicz/Peter Burke (eds.), East-Central Europe in Transition. From the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge/Paris 1985, 97–108; Vera Bácskai, Small Towns in Eastern Central Europe, in: Clark (ed.), Small Towns, 77–89, and Jaroslaw Miller, Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500–1700, Aldershot 2008, 197–235. For southern Europe, see Juan E. Gelabert, Cities, Towns and Small Towns in Castile, 1500–1800, in: Clark, Small Towns, 271–294, and Daniel Curtis, Is There an ‘Agro-town’ Model for Southern Italy? Exploring the Diverse Roots and Development of the Agro-town Structure through a Comparative Case Study in Apulia, in: Continuity and Change 28/3 (2013), 377–419.

15 Corrado Vivanti, Città e campagne, in: Ruggiero Romano (ed.), Storia dell’economia italiana, vol. 2: L’etá moderna: verso la crisi, Torino 1991, 243–283.

Tim Soens

Urban Agriculture and Urban Food Provisioning in Pre-1850 Europe: Towards a Research Agenda

Abstract: “Feeding the city” has been a prominent topic in historical literature for many decades. Most of this literature, however, remained based on the assumption that cities above a certain population level are essentially fed through the market, with rural agricultural surpluses being exchanged for the products of urban industry and trade. Stimulated by recent articulations of alternative ways of urban food provisioning, this article reconsiders the importance of urban agriculture in European towns before 1850 from the perspective of “urban food alternatives”. The scattered evidence suggests that in many European towns a significant part of the urban population was directly involved in food production, but also that important differences persisted both between towns and between households in a town. While traditional interpretations – for instance, those linking urban agriculture with small towns, poverty, or the rise of commercial horticulture – fail to explain this spatial, social, and temporal variation, a better understanding of the success and decline of urban agriculture in different market configurations and in different social contexts might offer an important historical contribution to present-day debates on the viability and social dynamics of such urban food alternatives.

Key Words: urban agriculture, urban food supplies, horticulture, market gardening, famine

Introduction: reconsidering urban food provisioning in the past

How to feed a premodern city? For Henri Pirenne, founding father of European medieval history, the answer was quite simple: cities were based on industry and commerce, while food was produced in the countryside.¹ Hence city-dwellers were obliged to convert part of their income into food, for which they had a wide variety of markets and shops at their disposal. Six centuries before Pirenne, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, painter of the famous Buon Governo fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, presented us with a similar picture of a bucolic, though hardworking, contado supplying the urban shops and markets with a perpetual flow of food. In neighboring Florence this was estimated to be 4,000 oxen, 60,000 sheep, 20,000 goats, 30,000 pigs, 25 million quarters of wine and 474,500 bushels of grain per year for a pre-Black Death population of about 110,000 inhabitants.² And yet a small detail in the cityscape of Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo fresco reminds us that urban food supply might be more complex than the straightforward case of rural supply meeting urban demand at the market: within the city walls a man is herding a small herd of goats. Does the tiny scene represent the delivery of fresh meat from the surrounding countryside to the urban butchers? Possibly. However, the goats are clearly being guided towards the city wall, not the urban market. The goats remind us of the importance of animal life within the medieval city, as witnessed by their appearance in countless urban regulations and, increasingly, restrictions in an ever more complicated urban “environmental law”.³ One of the key goals of such regulation was precisely to manage the access to alternative forms of food supply that parts of the urban population enjoyed, thereby bypassing the market. Apart from animal husbandry, urban households might engage in horticulture, wine-growing, or even cereal cultivation. Also, these foods might be supplied by tenants or sharecroppers working a piece of land they owned in the countryside – in a city like Siena in the fourteenth century, urban households, and not just those of the elite, owned massive amounts of land in their contado.⁴ In addition they might benefit from occasional or regular gifts of food distributed by charitable foundations, elite families supporting their retinue, confraternities sharing a meal, or close relatives making a testamentary bequest.

When focusing on the level of households, the history of urban food supply might be much more complex than food history allows us to believe. Since Fernand Braudel and other historians working in the tradition of the French Annales school started to investigate the material conditions of urban life in the 1960s, urban food supply automatically became a central issue in historiography. In an environment which was inspired by both Malthusian and Marxist models, food was about calories and class. It was considered in terms of access to staple foods like grain, beer, wine, and the like, which had to ensure the subsistence of the average city-dweller.⁵ Feeding the city hence seemed above all a question of acquiring sufficient quantities of grain – and to a lesser extent, meat – and assuring that there were enough foodstuffs available even during difficult times such as those of harvest failure or war. Since Braudel, numerous studies have been published about the food supply of individual cities before 1800, in addition to the organisation of comparative roundtables.⁶

Scholarship has usually distinguished between two basic strategies enabling such a massive transfer of food from the countryside to the hungry city: coercion (usually the coercive power of the “state”) and the market. In European history, the importance of providing food to cities through coercion probably had its heyday in the annonae politics of the Roman Empire, when free grain distribution had to feed – and appease – the imperial capitals of Rome and, later, Constantinople.⁷ Moreover, it was also a strong defining feature of the privileged position of Paris in the grain policies of Early Modern France⁸ and in the close link between food supply and territorial expansion in Renaissance Venice.⁹ On the other hand, the standard example of market-driven food provisioning is provided by the strategies of medieval London before 1300, as elaborated in the very influential “Feeding the City” project. Elaborating on von Thünen’s model of concentric land use surrounding the “isolated city”, Bruce Campbell, Derek Keene, and others were able to demonstrate how growing urban demand induced a gradual intensification of land use in an expanding hinterland, with supply and demand being matched through a relatively “open” market which included multiple buyers and sellers.¹⁰ Research on other premodern cities arrived at similar results.¹¹ The demand-driven logic of the “Feeding the City” model was underpinned by the work of urban geographers explaining the gradual demise of food production near the built environment of the city: in a context of urban growth, higher bid-rents for residential and industrial land use inevitably pushed out agricultural and horticultural activities.¹² Explaining evolutions in urban food supply thus requires economic historians to be attentive both to the development of the coercive power of cities and their rulers, and to patterns of population densities and market integration.¹³

The dichotomy between a food-producing countryside and a food-consuming city is even more prominent in recent literature on “urban metabolism”, which aims to map the continuous flows of energy, food, and raw materials imported from the hinterland and needed to sustain urban “life”. Existing work on the urban food metabolism is based on two binary pairs of almost antagonistic categories: “town” and “hinterland”, “consumption” and “production” – the so-called “metabolic rift”.¹⁴ Hence, metabolic thinking is intimately linked to commodification: food and other resources are processed as commodities and traded through or from the city.¹⁵ From a metabolic view, urban growth is conceived as an expanding wave gradually encroaching upon low-productive land and transforming its natural resources into commodities transported to an ever-hungry city.¹⁶

On the other hand, the awareness that urban food supply may work very differently from one household to another has been an essential feature of famine history over the past three decades. Inspired by the work of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, famine history saw an important shift away from the aggregate level of cities or regions to the level of individual households.¹⁷ According to Sen, food shortage was usually not induced by insufficient food availability in society as a whole, but rather by the insufficient “entitlements” to food enjoyed by some groups and individuals within a given society. Entitlement, conceived by Sen as “the ability of people to command food through the legal means available in that society”, is a powerful concept capable of embracing all kinds of access to food. These include food production on one’s own land, the “endowment”, which produces “direct entitlements”; the conversion of labour and capital into food via the market, referred to as “exchange entitlements”; as well as other legal rights to food mobilised through distributions, gifts, or solidarities. While the concept of entitlement provides us with an ideal analytical tool for grasping the multiplicity of paths of food supply at the household level, most entitlement scholars, including Amartya Sen himself, were primarily interested in the role of the market as an – imperfect – allocator of food in times of famine.¹⁸ Direct entitlements as well as entitlements via other legal rights have received only scant attention.

But what about Lorenzetti’s goats, then? Is it possible that historians have dramatically underestimated the importance of such alternative entitlements to food provisioning in cities? Food studies of present-day cities increasingly point to the myriad ways in which urban households experiment with alternative ways of providing for food, outside regular market arrangements and outside direct involvement of the public authorities. Consumers themselves are producing food in all kinds of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) – from rooftop gardens via guerrilla gardening to community farms.¹⁹ They are also exploring other “alternative food networks” by buying food on farmers’ markets or engaging in community-supported agriculture, or they acquire access to food through a new kind of “sharing economy”.²⁰ While the motivations behind these practices are highly variable and the notion of “market independence” is often questionable,²¹ they all challenge mainstream food systems based on traditional agro-industry and on the anonymous globalised food distribution chains.²²

Given the potential multiplicity of sources of food supply at the level of individual urban households, historians too have to question the self-evidence of markets and/or states as allocators of food. For pre-industrial cities, scattered literature already suggests the importance of urban gardens,²³ the presence of rural “food farms” directly supplying elite households,²⁴ and the importance of food gifts.²⁵ However, because of the lack of systematic research on food strategies at the household level (and not only for urban upper-class households), it remains difficult to explain why such alternative ways of food provisioning disappeared in particular contexts while they persisted and grew in others. Based on the available, and highly fragmented, literature, the rest of this contribution hence offers a very preliminary survey of the changing importance of such alternative sources of urban food supply in European history before 1850, with particular emphasis on the role of UPA.

Mapping the variety and significance of urban agriculture in European history

In the preceding section, we argued that historians should broaden their analysis of urban food supply to include all kinds of alternative food supply chains. The direct production of food through forms of urban agriculture – and urban husbandry – constitutes an important aspect of such alternative urban food supply, although the two are not synonymous. While alternative food supply can include food produced by rural producers, urban agriculture – defined here as food production by urban dwellers – can also be firmly embedded in market arrangements.

Mapping the variety and significance of urban agriculture in the past, however, is far from easy, just as it is today,²⁶ given that many activities take place in the private sphere, out of sight of official registration and taxation. Generally speaking, the available literature tends to distinguish three contexts in which urban agriculture flourished. First of all, few historians will doubt the importance of agricultural activities in the many small towns which constituted the backbone of the European urban network before 1850. In a small town like Colchester in England, two thirds of all taxpayers in 1301 were involved in some form of food production.²⁷ Rodney Hilton saw a figure of 2,000 inhabitants as the threshold in distinguishing between town and countryside.²⁸ Such small towns, or Ackerbürgerstädte as they are labelled in German literature, can even be considered an integral part of medieval peasant society.²⁹ And although most urban and even rural historians would argue that involvement in food production did not necessarily diminish the industrial or commercial essence of such small towns, nor their urbanity in regard to culture, legal status, or identity,³⁰ access to food that was unmediated by the market is by and large considered as incompatible with urban growth, or as Peter Clark has argued: “accelerating urbanization was only made possible by increasing agrarian imports from urban hinterlands and the growth of […] markets”.³¹

Secondly, alternative urban food entitlements are often associated with contexts of poverty and crisis. For nineteenth-century municipalities and charitable organisations, the promotion of allotment gardening proved an ideal instrument for improving subsistence levels without having to raise wages, while at the same time “protecting” workers from subversive socialist influences.³² During both World Wars, bare necessity drove urban households to direct food production on a massive scale.³³ In the pre-industrial period as well, the persistence of food production by urban households might be associated with the typical makeshift economy of the urban poor: one pig, some poultry, and some home-grown vegetables might foster survival in uncertain times.

And thirdly, on the opposite face of the same coin, we find the rise of commercial horticulture – the specialised cultivation of fresh products such as vegetables or dairy – for the urban market, typically found in the inner circle of a von Thünen model. In different parts of northwestern Europe, horticultural activities apparently experienced a tendency towards professionalisation in the Early Modern period. English historians even speak of a horticultural “revolution” from the late sixteenth century onwards, which tends to be associated with Dutch immigrants fleeing the horror of religious persecution during the Eighty Years’ War.³⁴ Near London in particular, some districts saw a proliferation of horticultural activities providing the growing city with an increasingly diverse supply of vegetables such as melons, asparagus, cucumbers, and so forth, produced by professional horticulturalists who continuously refined their production techniques throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from glass bells to hotbeds. In 1718 the post-mortem inventory of one Robert Gascoine listed no fewer than 1,240 bellglasses in three gardens.³⁵ For Paris, a recent study by Gurvil revealed a similar tendency towards professionalisation in a somewhat earlier period. Whereas fifteenth-century Paris was still home to quite a few proper farmers (laboureurs) practicing a rather mainstream agriculture, sometimes even within the city walls, in the sixteenth century the laboureurs gave way to jardiniers, organised in a guild.³⁶ While most of the gardens were situated at the outskirts of the city or in the banlieue, each new extension of the city walls paradoxically entailed an increase in the amount of gardens and fields intra muros. At the same time some professional gardening areas persisted at a short distance from the city centre – such as the Couture du Temple, which from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century transformed from a cereal field into a gardening space and then into a residential quarter.³⁷

Mediterranean Europe had a much older tradition of urban horticulture, often concentrated in irrigated areas of intensive cultivation near the city. Like many Iberian towns, Valencia had an important irrigated zone of intensive agriculture and horticulture in its immediate neighborhood: the hortas or huertas, which built on elaborate irrigation structures pre-dating the Christian conquest.³⁸ In the later Middle Ages, agriculture in the hortas was based on intensive smallholding farms which increasingly incorporated commercial cash crops like sugarcane and mulberry trees.³⁹ Even though parts of the horta laid outside direct urban jurisdiction, it was profoundly urban in terms of how it was regulated (the guardia de l’horta), in terms of landownership (parts of it belonged to the city-based nobility), and in terms of its labourers, who were recruited among city-dwellers. Finally, apart from horticulture we should not underestimate the importance of dairy production within or near the city walls. Milk was one of the most difficult food products to transport over long distances. As a consequence, even mid-nineteenth-century London, at that time the largest city in Europe, saw 80 percent of its milk consumption still produced in the immediate vicinity of the city.⁴⁰

Over the past years, however, new research has increasingly shown that many instances of urban agriculture do not fit into any of these categories. First of all, urban food production by non-professional producers (“home food gardens”) was not limited to small cities or Ackerbürgerstädte. In Rennes in the 1450s, 43.5 to 59 percent of the houses in the medieval parts and still 17 percent of the houses in the densely built Roman town centre had a vegetable garden or potager.⁴¹ Fifteenth-century Rennes, the capital of the independent duchy of Brittany, was a medium-sized city of about 12,000 inhabitants. In his study of medieval Toulouse, which numbered 20,000 to 30,000 residents, Philipp Wolff also noted that only a few urban households were not self-sufficient in both grain and wine – although their fields and vineyards were not necessarily situated in the immediate vicinity of the town.⁴² Geoarchaeological research also provides compelling new evidence for the importance and persistence of urban food production in both smaller and larger towns.⁴³

Secondly, in some contexts home food gardens may have been more important for the middling and upper layers of society than for their poorer neighbours. Control over food supply was an important asset in a premodern society and hence an excellent social indicator. In the Catalan city of Manresa, most households disposed of food stocks exceeding 100 daily rations. The 20 percent poorest households, however, did not possess such food stocks, and hence were more dependent on daily market purchases than their wealthier neighbours.⁴⁴ In a late medieval Mediterranean context, drinking one’s own wine was a matter of status: Francesco di Marco Datini, the famous fourteenth-century merchant of Prato, produced a wine befitting “great gentlemen” and used it as a gift within his extended commercial network.⁴⁵ However, it was probably the middling classes – ranging from the rank and file of the urban craft guilds to the administrative professions and small merchants – who were crucial in the history of urban agriculture. Through their household and occupational model, they disposed of both access to land, from the backyard of their shop or house to a rented plot of land outside the city wall, and family labour, which was theoretically available to grow food. In present-day Central Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic) as well, middling groups have a much higher probability of engaging in home food gardening than labourers.⁴⁶ It would hence be interesting to see if and how urban agriculture was impacted by the increasing social polarisation and the erosion of middling groups visible in many parts of Europe throughout the Early Modern period.⁴⁷

And thirdly, the Early Modern professionalisation of horticulture was not a universal phenomenon. In the Low Countries, for instance, many cities did not display an inner von Thünen circle of specialised horticulture.⁴⁸ In some cities professional guilds of gardeners (hoveniers or fruiteniers) existed, but as in the case of Antwerp, they might be more active in retailing vegetables and fruit rather than producing them themselves.⁴⁹

So, while urban agriculture should certainly not be seen as limited to contexts of poverty or immature urban development, we should not a priori overestimate its historical importance either. We should keep in mind that a city of 10,000 inhabitants in 1600 needed about 90 square kilometres or 9,000 hectares to produce the bread grain it needed.⁵⁰ Strictly localised food provisioning was thus out of the question. Even in a sparsely populated country such as Sweden, where cities were granted large swathes of agricultural land by the crown, urban food production seldom accounted for more than 30 percent of urban food consumption.⁵¹ There were notable exceptions, however, both in Sweden and elsewhere, and in many cases demography alone cannot explain why urban experiences with regard to urban agriculture were so divergent. At present, we remain largely ignorant of the importance of both home food gardens and professional or semi-professional horticulture for most parts of Europe throughout their history. Historians hence should urgently engage in mapping the contribution of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) as well as other alternative urban food entitlements to the quality and quantity of urban food supply in different contexts.

Explaining the resilience and decline of urban agriculture

Confronted with a still very uncertain geography and chronology of urban food production, we can only formulate very modest suggestions on why urban agriculture boomed in one context but disappeared in others. Based on the available literature, a few questions and hypotheses can be formulated.

Access to land

From a supply-side perspective, historical variations in UPA might first of all be explained by access to land. Most forms of agriculture are land-based, and variations in access to land may strongly affect involvement in urban or peri-urban agricultural production. Access to land depends on the social distribution of land, which may have evolved in parallel to wealth inequalities, but also on institutional arrangements of landownership and land use, both within and beyond the city. In the urban hinterland, the rise of short-term leasehold or sharecropping provided a different potential for urban food production. In some cities, customary law was flexible enough to allow the fragmentation of property rights to urban real estate, which significantly increased the number of citizens owning parts of houses and gardens.⁵²⁵³