Jerry Kaufman pays tribute to Jac Smit at the American Planning Association Conference

Remarks about Jac Smit by Jerry Kaufman at the Minneapolis APA conference session, April 27, 2009, on Urban Agriculture’s Future.

Jac Smit was one of the founders of the urban agriculture movement; some even consider him to be the father of the urban agriculture movement. In his absence from this panel today, I would like to honor him by telling you a bit about him and sharing with you some of his thoughts about the future of urban agriculture. When I learned he was terminally ill a few weeks ago, I spoke to him by phone. I said I wanted to bring some of his views about the future of urban agriculture to the APA conference audience at this session. He was pleased to have me do so.

Some background on Jac Smit.

He was a planner by training. He received a Masters degree in city and regional planning from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1961. In the 1960’s he worked for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission and led the team, as project director, that developed the Chicago Region 2000 Year Plan. I first met Jac in Chicago when I worked for ASPO in the 1960s. Our paths didn’t cross again until 30 years later when I discovered, at that time, that he was a leader, in the emerging urban agriculture movement. A relative newcomer to the food planning arena myself in the late 1990s, I asked him to join me in 1999 to speak at the first-ever session at an APA conference on food system planning.

What were Jac Smit’s credentials as a founder of the urban agriculture movement?

He was the principal author of a book (coauthored by Joe Nasr and published by the United Nations Development Program in 1996) titled, “Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities”. It was the second best selling book ever published by the UNDP. He founded TUAN, The Urban Agriculture Network, in 1992, an information and consulting organization.

Jac’s interest and expertise in urban agriculture were honed over a 30 year period after he left NIPC to work as a planning consultant to help prepare city and regional plans in far away places like Calcutta in the West Bengal State of India, Karachi, Pakistan, Bangledesh, the Suez Canal Zone, Dar Es Salaam,Tanzania, the Sinai Peninsula, and in 1990 (working for the government of Japan), he was technical director of the tri-part Central Iraq, Metropolitan, and Baghdad renewal planning project. Urban agriculture was a focus of several of these city and regional plans. Jac also made major contributions over the years to urban agriculture plans in cities as diverse as Abidjan, Asmara, Baltimore, Bogota, Calcutta, Dhaka, Jakarta, Kampala, Philadelphia, Port au Prince, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C.

Let me now turn to some of Jac Smit’s thinking about the future of urban agriculture.

Continue reading Professor Kaufman’s remarks here in this Word doc.

See Jac Smit’s web site here.

See From the Desk of Jac Smit here.

See American Planning Association web site here.