Urban gardens has become a fun and healthy choice of food self-sufficiency by eating the fruits of our own ecological farming.
The country is entering the city from the hands of urbanites. Several interconnected phenomena have grown in recent years and indicate that in times of globalization, pollution, speed and consumerism many people are choosing to turn back to earth. Urban gardens, in all its forms, proliferate in the asphalt, a trend without social or generational allegiances. A trend that is linked to the increase in ecological farming and consumption of local products.
Fifteen years ago the sale of material to build urban gardens in terraces was testimonial. In 2010, the increase was considerable, and last year, it was overwhelming. Some people just plant tomatoes, others have mounted a small structure to teach their children the origin of food, the sense of time and care. Many choose to cultivate their space with ecological criteria, and others simply create an orchard because it is fashionable.
The range is vast and different, but indicates the growing interest in recovering the origins, as an individual or collective act by citizen movements, organized already a few years ago in order to reclaim green spaces between buildings exploiting underused spaces. It is the implementation in Spain of what was and is the New York’s Green Guerrillas, an organization that encourages and helps people to grow and landscape obsolete urban areas and that mounted its first garden back in 1973. There are also groups inspired by the Transition Town movement, born in Britain in 2005, which enacts a transition in the cities towards a lifestyle that requires less energy, creating sustainable communities able to deal with climate change and the foreseeable exhaustion, sooner or later, of the oil.
Green sprouts growing on the asphalt in the entrance of this city field that also shows the search for new values. It is not the same, but history is full of references. The Renaissance that ocurred in the darkness of the Middle Ages, with pests and death in the cities, regained the Latin Beatus Ille, praise of the simple and detached country life over that of the city.
