I remember visiting a former army officer's apartment in a comfortable neighbourhood in Havana in 1992 and smelling the putrid stench of a pig sty, kept in the bathtub of an adjacent apartment, invading the living room on a hot July afternoon. This also happened to the Argentine-born, Canadian-trained sociologist who penned this book, and it prompted her to pursue facets of urban agriculture (and husbandry) in the Cuban capital for both her master's and doctoral theses.

The value of Sowing Change comes from the author's outlining of the major protagonists who drive urban agriculture: international solidarity groups, a dozen or more government agencies (whose acronyms prove distracting in the book), characters/informants who illustrate the opportunities and challenges of the programme, and the weight of time that leads to collapsed buildings and cleared lots. Mass organisations such as the Cuban Federation of Women were kept out of the loop in some cases and therefore felt somewhat threatened by the gardens (pp. 46–7). This reaction is typical in Cuba because state agencies (everywhere, it is true) have to justify their existence and yearn to take credit for lots of things. In this regard, the great value of Sowing Change is that it offers an understanding of the opaque maze through which community or non-state projects must travel to seek official approval, and what land mines exist to thwart those good intentions.

The introduction and conclusion frame seven substantive chapters. The introduction, entitled ‘A New Global Sense of Place and Rooted Landscapes’, argues that Havana's turn to urban agriculture manifests the global turn that Cuba has commenced in a post-Soviet era. Using Lefebvre's concepts of the social production of space, the author contends that urban agriculturalists – who are fixed in place – have been forced into a ‘symbolic and material production of some of the places where urban agriculture has taken root’ (p. 2), hence the ‘rooted landscapes’ of the introduction's title. Chapter 1, ‘Shifting Socialist Spatial Dreams’, outlines the post-Soviet concern with food security and quotes Fidel Castro from 1993, when he claimed that it was inconceivable that Cubans should go to sleep hungry when there was uncultivated land on the island. The balance of the first chapter then reviews the shift from macro-scale food production to smaller aggregations.

The chapters are beautifully titled. ‘Urban Agriculture, Politics, and Unwanted Deviations’, chapter 2, is a bit of a roller-coaster ride through the author's interpretation of the tensions at play among the national, local and international actors who get urban agriculture launched. Chapter 3, ‘Place-Bound: Becoming an Urban Farmer in Havana’, returns to the idea of rooted landscapes by exploring the experiences of the authors' key informants and their foray into this work. ‘Claiming Space, Questioning the Order of Things’ celebrates, among other things, the value of eating fresh versus frozen rabbit, and highlights innovative approaches to producing food. ‘State Land, Green Agendas, Old Ideas, and Community Work’ contends that benefits beyond producing food accrue to those (and their neighbours) who toil in turning parcelas and patios into gardens. The sixth chapter, ‘Private Plots, Needed Dollars, State Power, and Sustainability Models’, portrays the high-wire act that private producers must walk in order to fulfil their own production goals and accommodate state agencies who monitor producers' behaviours and outputs as well as international NGOs who may have different agendas: ‘if acting in ways that circumvent established power hierarchies, patio owners can quickly be reminded that they cannot act as independent actors’ (p. 113). ‘Global Networks and Cuban Urban Agriculture’ is an interesting chapter in that it discusses, in part, how Pablo, a key informant, travels to international conferences but does not present permaculture experiments as if he were a government spokesperson. International conferences create the kind of global linkages that give Havana's urban agriculturalists hope, limited material rewards, and external validation.

Perhaps the main difficulty is the use of the gerund in the book's subtitle. Who is doing the ‘making’? How is it done? What impact is it having across the city, and not just among the authors' local contacts? It is hard to determine from Premat's work whether food production is making a dent in the diets of many Habaneros. No one can argue that urban agriculture is ecological, sustainable and meaningful for hundreds and even thousands of Cubans. At just 181 pages, this thin tome is more about the author's key informants – Pablo, Ina, Martina, Eugenio and Jorge – than it is about a social history of an interesting experiment in post-Soviet Cuba. While Ina the gardener is listed in the subject index, words like ‘calories,’ ‘protein’ and ‘diet’ are not. Herein lies the major weakness of Sowing Change.

Seminal works on Havana's urban farming in Havana (Mario Coyula) and internationally (Bill Mollison) are missing from the references. One wonders if the text really needs three photographs of Rafael's rooftop garden, or four photographs of doorways and alleyways near Calle Amanecer (Dawn Street) versus, say, a map of where these gardens concentrate in the city, a tabulation of yields over time or an organisational chart showing the approval process these farmers must navigate? We learn that urban gardening frees up state resources to pursue other social needs (p. 108), which is a huge practical and conceptual finding, but the issue is not deepened in the conclusion. Nor does the discussion on inter-agency collaboration and profit-sharing (p. 38) get fleshed out fully. Interesting aspects such as the illegal selling of the crops from these urban gardens (p. 109) receive scant attention.

One conclusion is that civil society and government agencies are in ‘constant dialogue’ with each other (p. 151) and that urban agriculture is a window for examining how the revolution is changing. In my mind, the qualitative-data-to-inference ratio is stretched way too thin. The reader is treated to interesting participation-observation accounts about friends and key informants of the author that make for a fine journalistic lens on a few aspects of urban agriculture. We learn that global forces shape the lives of individuals, and urban agriculturalists in Havana are no exception. I suppose this is so, but the finding seems axiomatic. One will have to look elsewhere to comprehend how these idiographic accounts of Havana's urban agricultural experiment lead to a nomothetic understanding of the social production of space.