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Allotments are a very specific type of garden: usually of small size, not attached to a dwelling, they are cultivated by their tenant and family for individual consumption of the produce they yield. Flowers, herbs, berry bushes, or fruit-bearing trees may also add to their harvest. Their most common names are allotment in England,1 jardin ouvrier or later jardin familial in France, and Kleingarten or Schrebergarten in Germany. With or without sheds, small gardens are visible along rail lines, most prominently in Germany.2 Whether seen along the rail loop between Brussels’s stations, during travels in Germany, or along Philadelphia suburban regional train lines, these small gardens and the people in work clothes who tend them appear incongruous amid today’s urban or railway landscapes. The curiosity sparked by these railway-side gardens prompted the investigations that led to this study. Railway allotments or railway agriculture (in German Eisenbahnlandwirtschaft) can be considered a subcategory of allotment gardens, akin to employer-provided gardens. Their trackside location attracts the attention of the train traveler, but these gardens are only one aspect of the more widespread and diversified practice of allotment gardening. Initial research on the practice of allotment gardening quickly revealed that much more was at stake in these gardens than the provision of vegetables and a few flowers. Poor relief, access to land, social reform, public health, education, civic agency, and the political voice of the worker were all imbricated in the cultivation of these small garden plots. The cultural institution of the allotment garden as it developed in Britain, France, and Germany in the decades just before and after 1900 is the focus of this book. During these decades, allotments became primarily an urban phenomenon. In England, the British historian Jeremy Burchardt proposed the date of 1873 as the beginning of a third English allotment movement, documented with extensive printed evidence. Burchardt ends his own study of allotments in that year, when detailed national statistics about these gardens became available.3 In Germany, the garden plots created by the Schreber Association in Leipzig assumed a form akin to allotments around 1869–70. In France, although allotments did not acquire a significant presence until the Introduction The Working Man’s Green Space 2 1890s, the Third Republic, which provided the political, social, and cultural context for their development, was instituted in 1870, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. As for the closing date of this study, the food shortages of World War I led to a large increase in the number of allotments, and in all three countries significant legislation was passed shortly after the end of the war. This legislation codified the status of allotments at a pivotal moment in European history. Three Questions The powerful societal changes of the nineteenth century engendered the creation of new building types such as administration buildings, railway stations, and museums. New types of gardens also emerged, including public gardens, sport fields, garden cities, kindergartens, and allotment gardens for the working class.4 As a vernacular intervention on the landscape and a form of land use, the allotment warrants study. For an art historian drawn to social history, allotment gardens raise three main questions that have guided this research: the effectiveness of allotments as a social measure, their land use implications, and their aesthetic dimension. First, as a form of assistance to the poor, how did allotment gardens perform that function within the social, political, and cultural context of the time when they became a significant phenomenon? This first question seeks to define the role played by allotment gardens between 1870 and the end of World War I, the decades when they developed most extensively in England, Germany, and France and when they acquired some legal standing. During the decades considered here, allotment gardens were a small component of the social safety net developed by these three countries through their legislation and other institutions. These social measures responded to unprecedented urban growth and increasing pressure from the left, as well as some factions on the right, to give labor a voice in the political arena. Beyond the social safety net provided by allotments, a second question pertains to landscape studies, as well as to urban planning and design, while also tapping deeper roots in the nature of landownership. As green spaces, allotment gardens had the potential to contribute to the efforts of urban planners seeking to insert “lungs” in cities. In the last decades of the nineteenth and first...

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