The urban farming explosion
 

The urban farming explosion


March 24, 2010

By Peter Ladner

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Read More: http://www.vancouversun.com/life/urb...736/story.html

Vancouver City Hall has a farm plot on its lawn, and now it's installing beehives on the roof for honey production. Urban farming is an interesting trend.

As usual (especially with anything kooky), we are way ahead on this one:

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...BA4V1CJP4C.DTL

I think something like this, if cost effective, could help poorer people in cities who don't eat very healthy. It has to make economic sense though, and it'll be interesting to see if they can produce the volume needed through vertical farming or whatever.

In practical terms, I think programs that utilize food, including veggies, that supermarkets pull off the shelves and used to throw out are probably more effective. That can amount to huge amounts of perfectly good food.

I'm fine with urban agriculture too, properly used. But San Francisco for example, converted the central open space of Civic Center Plaza into a farm plot last summer and, to my eye, it looked ridiculous plus I doubt much of what was grown actually got used. Cities need parks and flower gardens too. This vegetable gardening can be taken too far. And chicken coops? Chickens are nasty, smelly birds. What's next? Urban pig stys?

Way ahead?

The guy in the article has been doing this for 17 years.

:previous: People have been doing it forever here too, but it was 8 months ago the mayor decided to run for governor and took up the cause to look progressive.

The headline talks about an "explosion" and I am saying SF is ahead of the curve in the sudden popularity of urban farming. I won't say we were the first to do it at all. I'm sure there are some cities in which farming never died out since they were, actually, farms.

Though the story has been done to the death over the last year, Detroit's community gardening is notable simply because of the sheer scale of the plan:

This can work well for any city that has sufficient empty plots of land, and much agreed it's a great idea. I wish Houston would take some initiave to have more urban gardens. I only know of four that are inside the loop (thankfully, one is my neighborhood garden).

What's so urban about agriculture? Dar es Salaam development planning must include farming to secure food security for all


By Afton Halloran

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Read More: http://www.thisday.co.tz/?l=10795




A Zero-grazing Goat
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It seems a bit ridiculous and reactionary to convert valuable urban space, often near mass transit lines, into low intensity inherently unurban farm land. I realize that there are urban food islands and urban youth who have no access to anything but doritos, but are urban farms really going to aleviate this problem? The entire concept seems to have been created by The Onion to caracature urban out of touch elitistists. "Oh if only the poor black kids from the ghetto could grow their own organic tomatoes all our problems (povery, global warming, etc.) would be solved".

If the plots are empty anyway, I don't see how it hurts to use them for farming, it's a hell of a lot better than a dumping ground for abandoned cars...

A concept I find interesting is vertical farming, essentially farming in a skyscraper, it may be very beneficial in order to grow most types of fruits and vegetables organically (isolated environment, no need for pesticides), year-round in the middle of the city, with no need to transport it halfway around the globe. You could even raise fish in the water used for crop irrigation. And it reduces the need for farmland outside the city, hopefully allowing some of it to revert to forest.

Photo Gallery: Urban Farming in Berlin

Around 80.000 of these allotment gardens, usually in a colony, exist in Berlin.
It has a very long tradition and is popular in all of central/northern Europe.

Wikipedia - Allotment garden: Nevertheless, the importance of allotment gardening in Germany has shifted over the years. While in times of crisis and widespread poverty (from 1850 to 1950), allotment gardening was a part time job, and its main importance was to enhance food security and improve food supply, its present functions have to be seen under a different point of view. In times of busy working days and the hectic urban atmosphere, allotment gardens have turned into recreational areas and locations for social gatherings. As green oases within oceans of asphalt and cement, they are substantially contributing to the conservation of nature within cities. What was previously a part time job is nowadays considered as a hobby where the hectic schedule of the day becomes a distant memory, while digging the flowerbeds and getting a little soil under the fingernails. It appears young families are also rediscovering gardens as a place where children can grow up within a more natural environment

http://www.berlin.de/binaries/asset/.../?t=1247218780

I agree with this. Unless you were to utilize one of those crazy-looking vertical farming towers (which are costly enough that they defeat the purpose in most cases where urban farming is suggested) it seems extremely short-sighted. If the ultimate goal is the recovery of the region, fostering dependence on surface-level urban farms for jobs and food seems counterproductive.

Mixed used vertical farms could be the way to go. Especially if most highrises dedicate a few floors to them in their buildings across the city.

Yeah, but the places this is being suggested aren't places that can afford to build vertical farms. It would be great in San Francisco or Chicago, but those aren't areas where urban farming has been suggested as a solution for the economic problems of the region. Places like Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis don't have the money to build vertical farms, and farming at the surface level would make the region dependent on the income from said farms, making it difficult to rebuild urban-level density in the areas converted to farmland when the economy recovers. It seems like they'd be amputating a limb when all they need to do is stop the bleeding until it can heal.

Agreed. It's low density sprawl that separates us from our food. If we stopped eating up farmland with cookie cutter subdivisions, we would have food close to the city. Let's grow people in cities, not tomatoes. And again, if we did have that farmland, there'd be little need for high-rise farming except for specialized high value crops.

I agree in theory but after witnessing development patters for some time, once a chunk of land goes towards one use, it is virtually impossible for it to ever be converted to any other use. Even same but more intense use (ie a proposal for a 3 story building instead of a 2 story building) will likely be rejected. Too many NIMBYS and monied interests. Once a lot is identified as an urban farm, there is almost zero change it will ever become anything else.

Exactly. By the time the economy recovers enough to actually rezone for residential, office, or industrial and start rebuilding the city, people in the area will be too dependent on the money from the farms to want the lots redeveloped. As a result, development will either be forced outside the city limits, or forced to demolish perfectly intact existing structures to build new ones with higher capacity. Neither way is efficient, and both lead to characterless, sprawling suburban-style landscapes.

I have a hard time reconciling this version of events to reality. In my experience, most American cities outside of a select few "superstar" cities have vast stretches of unused or deindustrialized land. I think an urban farm in some of those plots is better than letting the land law fallow or hope for some distant recovery. An acre here and there is not going to seriously effect the city's ability to attract residents, in fact our local urban farm http://www.greensgrow.org/farm/index.php is actually a big selling point to potential residents.