The Working Man's Green Space: Allotment Gardens England, France, and Germany, 1870-1919

Standing at the intersection of a number of disciplines—including landscape studies, horticulture, and urban history— focuses on the development of allotment gardens in European countries in the nearly half-century between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, when the French Third Republic, the German Empire, and the late Victorian era in England saw the development of unprecedented measures to improve the lot of the "laboring classes." Nilsen shows how community gardening is inscribed within a social contract that differs from country to country, but how there is also an underlying aesthetic and social significance to these gardens that transcends national borders.