MIT historian Kate Brown reads from “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City” to explore the surprising and often radical history of urban gardening. The book – part history, part reportage, part manifesto – follows the roots of urban gardening from feudal England to a late 19th century utopia outside of Berlin to 1960s Washington, D.C., to contemporary Amsterdam, Chicago and beyond. It looks at how gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots, composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels, and how the ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, with examples from even Nazi Berlin, where working-class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews, ant the USSR, which survived so long only because of its urban gardens. She’s joined by Antoine Picon of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.