One Hundred Years of Allotment Gardens in Poland¹

Collectively, Polish allotment gardeners represent the largest land managers or users in Poland. Policies that today dedicate the use of this often prime city space reflect a history of social stability that spans the political and economic transformations of the 19th, 20th, and earliest 21st centuries. In 1997, the gardeners celebrated 100 years of formalized urban allotment food production that is rooted in Poland's agrarian past and efforts to move rural labor into urban settings without an infrastructure to meet their basic needs. Poland's allotment garden arrangement provides an important, though fraught, model for food security and urban open space policy. The system combines local and national government policy, administration and management by a non-governmental organization (NGO), and deeded private use by individual gardeners. Today this arrangement produces ongoing tension among the stakeholders and a contentious, even healthy, debate about the private and public uses of urban land.