Posts from — November 2009

An artist’s sketch illustrates the possibilities for rooftop urban agriculture and the rich potential for community connection. Credit: Durante Kreuk, 2009

The Challenge Series tells the story of Vancouver’s Olympic Village at Southeast False Creek: Millennium Water. Published in eight monthly installments, available on the web and in print, it focuses on the visioning, planning, design and construction processes and celebrates collaboration and sustainable innovation.

By Roger Bayley Inc.

Excerpts below.

Community Demonstration Garden

Located west of Parcel 4, the community demonstration garden will be designed and constructed after the Olympics. “The idea isn’t to have little plots for people to garden, but rather a space that is programmed with the school, community centre and neighbourhood for all to use and to learn about urban agriculture,” says Robin Petri from the City of Vancouver. Specific designs and programming have not yet been determined. Because of the site’s historic industrial use, the City has begun investigating how to handle nearby contaminated soils. The garden will be separated by a membrane from the contaminated industrial soil that underlies Hinge Park.

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Growing Home is committed to bring fresh food to Chicago’s South Side.

“Englewood, where our Wood Street Urban Farm is located, was once a flourishing Chicago neighborhood. It has suffered from decades of neglect and the flight of about 50% of its population since the early 1960’s. This dismal cycle of decline in Englewood can be seen in the vacant buildings and sparse population that have allowed drug trafficking and other criminal activity to grow. As gangs protected their territories, violence increased and youth became at risk of either gang assaults or gang recruitment.

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Reuters Video. Organic farms transform Nairobi slum. (Short advertisement at the start.)

Kibera (Nubian: Forest or Jungle) is a neighbourhood and province division of Nairobi, Kenya. It is the largest of Nairobi’s slums, and the second largest urban slum in Africa, with an estimated population of between 600,000 and 1.2 million inhabitants.

Kiberas Youth Reform Organic Farm – Nairobi, Kenya

By Public Radio Exchange
“The Kibera Youth Reform Organic Farm began on a 3 meter deep garbage dump in Africa’s largest slum. The transformation started in April 2008 and took three and a half months, prooving anything is possible. Claire Niala asked Su Kahumbu, Director of Green Dreams (the first locally certified organic farm in Kenya) to assist the Kibera Youth Reform Group comprising 70 young men and women who had decided to change their ways of crime. They wished to transform a garbage site into a farm, growing crops for their own consumption as well as for sale if possible.

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Jac Smit Passed Away Sunday, November 15

From Joe Nasr, co-author with Jac of Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities.

Jac Smit, often referred to as “the father of urban agriculture”, passed away on Sunday November 15th at his Washington, DC home, a few days after his 80th birthday. After working initially in the US (notably Chicago), Jac had a long career as a planner around the world, with assignments in Egypt, Iraq, Tanzania, and across South Asia, among others. Jac was a pioneer in advocating for the cause of urban agriculture, first publishing on it in the 1960s. He was the lead author on the seminal book on the subject: Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities (1996). Jac founded The Urban Agriculture Network (TUAN) in 1992; the unique library that he collected for TUAN will form the foundation of a new Urban Food and Agriculture Learning Centre in Toronto, to be managed by MetroAg – Alliance for Urban Agriculture. For more information on Jac’s contribution to the field of urban agriculture, see www.jacsmit.com. Jac is survived by his wife Elise Fiber Smith. He will be greatly missed.

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Galdino Gonzalez, 56, shows an urban vegetable garden to Reuters journalists in the Iztapalapa district, Mexico City, July 31, 2008. Over 20 urban vegetable patches have been planted since last year, some in areas formerly used to dump trash, and the city government wants to build at least 20 more. REUTERS/Henry Romero

Mexico City poor plant vegetables to lower food costs

By Mica Rosenberg
REUTERS
Jul 31, 2008

MEXICO CITY – Under the rule of the ancient Aztecs, Mexico City was a maze of canals and floating gardens that grew corn and beans to feed the masses.

Hundreds of years later, the government of this concrete metropolis of 20 million people is promoting urban vegetable gardens as a way to ease the burden of soaring food prices faced by poor families.

Leftist Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who is behind a string of crowd-pleasers like cycle lanes, artificial beaches and an outdoor ice rink, has sent groups of gardening experts out to build community gardens.

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Films by Tamar Kozlov
Tamar Kozlov is an actress turned journalist turned filmmaker from Montreal. Her contributiions to the artistic community include hosting the Centre St. Ambroise Scene et Salon and the Blue Zula concert series.

In 1988 Philippe Robillard bought earth and started La Ferme Pousse Menu, the only building in Montreal with farm status. Through innovative and visionary practices, he still uses the same soil, now 21 years old. By manipulating indoor space, Robillard is able to produce one ton of highly nutritious, organic food every week right downtown.

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Soldiers of the Soil: A Historical Review of the United States School Garden Army

By Rose Hayden-Smith
4-H Youth Development and Master Gardener Advisor,
UCCE-Ventura County
WINTER 2006, 20 pages

“Every boy and every girl should be a producer. Production is the first principle in education. The growing of plants and animals should therefore become an integral part of the school program. Such is the aim of the U.S. School Garden Army.”

With these words, the federal Bureau of Education (BOE) launched the United States School Garden Army (USSGA) during World War I. The USSGA represented an unprecedented governmental effort to make agricultural education a formal part of the public school curriculum throughout the United States.

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PHOTO BY KAREN LANDMAN. In Milwaukee, the Growing Power organization offers tours of its urban farm to give people, especially children, a chance to see where their food comes from.

Yes in My Backyard

Landscape architecture professor Karen Landman hits the road to see how people in Canada and the United States are bringing farming to the city

BY TERESA PITMAN
University of Guelph

Prof. Karen Landman, Environmental Design and Rural Development, grew up on a dairy farm, but she says her father wouldn’t recognize as farmers the people she met this summer when she travelled more than 18,000 kilometres across the western United States and Canada to study urban agriculture. They were growing food commercially in the city.

“I met with academics, social advocates, people who train others in the techniques of urban farming and, of course, urban farmers themselves,” she says.

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University of Guelph – Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium

November 13, 2009

Academics, municipal planners, community activists, gardeners and farmers will gather at the University of Guelph next week to cultivate connections between city-dwellers and the food on their tables by encouraging farming in urban areas.

Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium is a first for Guelph and takes place Nov. 20 at the Arboretum. The all-day event is hosted by the University and several local partners, including the Backyard Bounty project.

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The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

by R. J. Ruppenthal

With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow up to 20 percent of their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container “terracing.” Those with access to yards can produce even more.

Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vegetable farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental disruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods.

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Sunshine Community Garden, Austin, Texas.

The Dallas Morning News
November 13, 2009

Did you know that more Texas kids are believed to be studying agriculture and agricultural science in urban and suburban high schools than in the state’s rural academies?

As education officials told Dallas Morning News reporter Matt Peterson earlier this week, most of the ag-related jobs now and in the future are based in urban areas, not on the farm. “For that reason,” said the Texas Education Agency’s Ron Whitson, “I think these courses are very relevant to our young people.”

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Radical Green Building Takes a Giant Leap Forward as The International Living Building Institute’s New Standard Addresses Social Justice, Urban Agriculture and Community Scale Impacts

“The program introduces a new focus on urban agriculture, requiring a minimum amount of site square footage be dedicated to food production except in the densest urban environments – the more suburban a site is, the more food production is required.

“All projects must integrate opportunities for agriculture appropriate to the scale and density of the project using its Floor Area Ratio (F.A.R.) as the basis for calculation.”

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From the Food Project’s blog:

“The Food Project has started up a new plot of land in Lynn. It’s on Munroe Street, right by our North Shore office and directly across from the Lynn commuter rail station.

“If I’m looking at the farm data correctly, we’ve harvested almost 3,000 pounds of herbs and vegetables from the Munroe land this season. That’s in addition to the bounty of the 15 raised beds being used by community gardeners. This food stays in Lynn; some is sold at our Central Square farmers’ market just a few blocks away, and the rest is distributed to local hunger relief organizations.

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PopTech 2009: Will Allen from PopTech on Vimeo.

Watch Will Allen’s 24 minute talk.

In 1995, former Proctor & Gamble marketing executive Will Allen was helping neighborhood kids with a gardening project when he decided that introducing farming to America’s inner cities could reap real public health benefits. The farming methods and educational programs he subsequently developed are now the hallmark of Growing Power, the nonprofit organization Allen co-founded and directs.

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Philippines News Agency
September 1, 2009
LEGAZPI CITY

The Aquinas University of Legazpi (AUL) has implemented a project dubbed “Urban Agriculture through the High-Value Commercial Crops Techno-Demo Farm” within its expansive campus here.

The project features 60-square-meter greenhouse where vegetables highly sensitive to rain and changes in temperature like broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower and honeydew melon are being propagated.

Gardens for more hardy vegetables such as squash, eggplant and watermelon were also established in an open area of 1,000 square meters whose perimeters were planted to rootcrops like ubi and sweet potato.

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The Road House: The home-grown food gurus

Urban agriculture activists

BY JORDAN NOVET
The Missourian
NOVEMBER 12, 2009

On a Monday evening, the scent of warm tomatoes permeates the kitchen of the Road House, a green-and-red building on St. Joseph Street. Bobby Johnson, Daniel Soetaert and Billy Polansky, half of the six housemates, are making and canning tomato paste with tomatoes they bought from Amish farmers. Johnson pushes one sliced tomato after another through a juicer. Polansky oversees two vats cooking the juice on a stove.

“This is not special,” Johnson says. “This is what people did for thousands of years.”

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Brixton urban agriculture. More photos here.

Growing Round the Houses – Food production on housing estates

By Ben Reynolds and Christine Haigh
2008

Rising food prices and increased interest in healthy food, means more people are looking to grow their own. Growing Round the Houses, a briefing paper by Ben Reynolds of Sustain and Christine Haigh of Women’s Environmental Network, explains how social housing providers and their tenants can work together on their estates to grow food. As well giving advice on how to set up a food growing project on their estate, it describes examples such as the Spitalfields Estate Community Garden, where residents worked together to build themselves a food growing space for vegetables and herbs popular with the local ethnic minority community.

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My Ordinary Extraordinary Yard

By Greg Peterson

You can create your own urban farm. Creating your own urban farm is as simple as planting you flowerbeds with edibles. The payoffs can include home grown food and a deeper connection to the earth. In this unique mini-book, Greg Peterson shares how his yard went from grass and hedges to his very own Urban Farm, full of vegetables and fruit trees with plenty to share. His motto ‘food grows abundantly – lets grow it and give it away.’ This insightful book about how Greg’s Urban Farm came to be will inspire you to create your own urban farm.

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Fungi and Rhubarb Garden – The north facing end of the site will be in shade most of the day and most of the year. Large logs would be impregnated with fungi spores, the rhubarb and mint would be grown beneath them providing interesting food and creating am exotic and educational lunch time destination.

Leadenhall City Farm
By Mitchell Taylor Workshop

“Parks, allotments and markets are set to spring up across Britain on the sites of building projects that have been mothballed in the recession.

“Piers Taylor, of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, one of the practices shortlisted for the Leadenhall site has proposed a city farm, populated with colour-coded chickens. He wants to create grassy banks to picnic on and plant blackberry bushes amid the surrounding steel, granite and glass.”
- from The Times Oct 30, 2009

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Bangalore urban agriculture.

In this bulletin you will find information on:

1. RUAF From Seed to Table Programme

2. Other Urban Agriculture activities by the RUAF Partners

Food, Agriculture and Cities: challenges and way forward

Workshop on influencing and assisting national policy processes

Increasing recognition for urban agriculture in China

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