In this Cultural History seminar, Antonia Weiss (Wageningen University) sketches a counterhistory of urban gardening in Amsterdam from 1970 onwards. By looking at the obscured history of gardening amongst migrants, she demonstrates that migrants are knowledgeable contributors to shaping our future food systems and cities.
The Cultural History seminar series is organised by the Cultural History section of the History and Art History Department.
Date and time: 10 February 2026, 15:00-16:00
Location: Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, 1.06
Registration: registration not needed
Urban gardening
Scholars have noted that the increasing interest in urban gardening amongst the social elites in recent decades obscures a longer history of sustenance gardening amongst subaltern communities, especially migrants. This gap in historical record arguably also contributes to the widespread failure to recognise migrants as informed contributors to a more sustainable urban future.
An interdisciplinary body of scholarship has begun to connect urban gardening practices to histories of migration, arguing amongst other things that growing food has traditionally allowed migrants to maintain their culinary culture in a new food environment. Yet, most of the scholarship on migrant gardening practices in recent history (20th and 21st century) concentrates on suburbs in the US or Australia.
Denser urban contexts – as they prevail in the Netherlands – are left out of the picture, raising the question how migrants from rural regions have navigated urban environments in which garden land has traditionally been scarce.
Nieuw-West
This seminar centres on the Amsterdam neighbourhood of Nieuw-West, built in the 1960s according to the principles of the garden city, where today about 70% of residents have a migration background and where, in recent years, various bottom-up gardening initiatives have sprouted.
Using a combination of oral history methods and ethnographic techniques, and taking the physical gardens shaped by Nieuw-West’s residents as its springboard, the paper skteches a counterhistory of urban gardening in Europe’s metropoles. This revised historical narrative simultaneously serves to delineate migrants as knowledgeable stakeholders in the making of our future foodscapes and cities.
About Antonia Weiss
Antonia Weiss is a historian and architect whose work explores the intersections between urban pasts and futures, focusing specifically on human-nature relationships and questions of gender and equity.
She holds a BA in Architecture from Cambridge University and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. In 2025, she received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam for her dissertation The City of Nature which examines the role of women in shaping urban green spaces in 18th-century Amsterdam and Berlin.
Antonia currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University’s Rural Sociology Department. Her ongoing research project Deep Foodscapes uses multidisciplinary methods to study the horticultural and culinary heritage of migrants living in Amsterdam today. She is also a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute), where she collaborates with Amsterdam’s policymakers on developing a more inclusive food strategy for the city.