Workers’ Gardens and Urban Agriculture. The Belgian Allotment Movement within a Global Perspective (from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century)

Allotments are nothing new; they have their own and interesting history. Today’s advocates of urban agriculture have rediscovered their ‘success story’, but is it permitted to compare allotments anno 2014 with their predecessors? In this article, we examine how the function of the allotment has developed over the past two centuries and what changing or constant meanings gardeners, initiators and controlling organizations have assigned to it: economic, social, political, recreational and environmental. Point of departure is the Belgian case, which can be considered representative of the story in several countries of Western Europe. The article sets the Belgian story within a broad international perspective spanning a large horizon in terms of time and space, and, moreover, confronting the past with the present. Allotment gardening exhibits a remarkable long-term durability, thanks to its organizational tradition dating back to the (late) nineteenth century, its ability to fit in with various ideologies and policy lines (including democracy, communism and fascism), and its inherent and variable hierarchy of meanings.