Urban allotments are making headlines. Growing vegetables in the city is becoming an educational practice, an aesthetic pursuit and a resource for the regeneration of our urban areas. Yet one need only look back to the last century to understand that there is nothing new about it.

In municipal regulations, it is now almost commonplace to find the entry "urban allotments". For truly modest annual fees, these small patches of land are entrusted to the care of over-65s, social centres, schools or the collective stewardship of a neighbourhood's residents. There are so-called corporate gardens — company allotments — which find passionate growers behind office desks. And then there are our balconies, increasingly populated by parsley, basil, rosemary and, in some cases, courgettes, lettuce, tomatoes and many other vegetables.

Horticulture is a shared passion. A rediscovery that is proliferating spontaneously, driven by the search for food quality and the desire to re-establish a connection between city life and agriculture. Balconies, abandoned areas, gardens and rooftop terraces are thus becoming slivers of nature within the city's walls. A micro-reality that offers an alternative to intensive production — healthier and more environmentally sustainable.

Yet urban allotments have always integrated with urban and social transformations. The wartime allotments of the 1940s and those tended by workers who had migrated from southern Italy are the examples closest to our own time. A symbol of hardship, they were forgotten during the years of the economic boom, only to be reborn in times of crisis. Today, urban allotments are remedying the damage done by food consumerism by forming the green network of our cities, reclaiming degraded areas and, above all, educating people in sustainable environmental practices and in an awareness of a world that, though very close to the city, is sometimes unknown.

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The initiatives are truly numerous. In Rome, for example, the piante al telefono project transforms telephone boxes into urban greenhouses, where vegetables are grown by passers-by. In Milan, the verdepensile di Harpo division offers low-cost energy regeneration interventions by installing gardens or allotments on the rooftops of residential buildings. Meanwhile, the Miraorti project aims to regenerate Mirafiori sud, Turin's historic industrial area, through civic farming programmes and agricultural production.

These initiatives demonstrate that today's urban allotments seek to build a community by also integrating those who have been marginalised by society; they seek to remind us that human beings are born cultivators, and they tell us that the land is the starting point for improving the future of the planet.