[M II A II R II K]

Greening—and feeding—the city with a ‘garden block’


7 Jul 2010

By Daniel Nairn

Read More: http://www.grist.org/article/food-gr...a-garden-block

It looks like one of the main take-aways from the Congress for the New Urbanism 18 conference is something being labeled "agrarian urbanism." Fast Company is calling it the "new new urbanism" and Treehugger has described the notion as the next phase in the evolution of this 30-year old movement. New Urbanism leader Andrés Duany, in particular, has been pushing pretty hard in this direction for the last couple of years. Briefly, the idea is that walkable neighborhoods could be intentionally structured so that food production is integrated into the physical form and the lifestyle of the inhabitants. In other words, it's a synthesis between urban and rural.

Of course, this new new urbanism is really no newer than the old new urbanism was (but that's fine). One of the primary motivations behind Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow concept was to connect working-class households with a viable food supply to relieve some of their financial stress. He landed on the number of 12 dwelling units per acre (DUA) as the magic density for self-sufficiency with affordability, and he worked out a form of common land ownership to help it along. Urban planner Christopher Alexander thought that something more like a tenth of an acre was necessary to supply vegetables to a family of four. He had plenty of practical, timeless advice for arranging an urban living space accordingly. More recently, some architects have been using the word "rurbalization" to describe this sort of synthesis. Having recently passed through the grad-school circuit myself, I can attest to a strong interest in food systems among new graduates.

I think these are good trends. Local food systems should inform urban design and vice versa, but I'm not sure the new developments being modeled have been able to find this synthesis without swallowing one side with the other -- specifically, subsuming the urbanism into the bucolic landscape. This seems to be the case with Southlands in British Columbia and Serenbe in the exurbs of Atlanta. Kaid Benfield has this to say about these "farming is the new golf" developments,

"In theory, these "new towns" are great -- self-contained entities providing walkability, efficiency, and all the services of a community within the development. So, their proponents (nearly all of whom profit from them, one way or another) claim, it is a good thing to build them almost anywhere. In practice, though, the nearby once-remote locations soon become filled with sprawl, in no small part because of the initial development, and the theoretical self-contained transportation efficiency never comes. They become commuter suburbs, just with a more appealing internal design than that of their neighbors."

(Daniel Nairn renderings)