Posts from — December 2009

Urban Agriculture Ideas Competition – Mowing to Growing

Non-Profit Design Group Terreform ONE Announces First Annual “One Prize” Award to Promote Green Design in Cities

Seeking architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds:

How can we break the American love affair with the suburban lawn?

Can green houses be incorporated in skyscrapers?

What are the urban design strategies for food production in cities?

Can food grow on rooftops, parking lots, building facades?

What is required to remove foreclosure signs on lawns and convert them to gardens?

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By Henk de Zeeuw and Marielle Dubbeling
Leusden, October 2009
18,000 words

Discussion paper for the Technical Consultation “Agriculture, Food and Cities”, September 24-25, 2009, Rome, jointly organised by Food and Agriculture of the United Nations – Food for the Cities Multi-disciplinary Action (FAO-FCIT) and RUAF Foundation (International Network of Resource centres on Urban Agriculture and Food security)

This policy briefing resulted from the international expert consultation organised by FAO-Food for the Cities (FAO-FCIT ) and RUAF Foundation (24-25 September, 2009, in Rome), attended by some 25 experts on urban food security and urban agriculture from international organisations, including senior staff of FAO, RUAF Foundation, IDRC, CGIAR-Urban Harvest, UN-HABITAT, World Bank, IFAD, Rockefeller Foundation, IWMI, CIRAD, IFPRI, ICLEI, GTZ, Heifer Int., Biodiversity Int., WFP and Milano 2015.

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City Farmer garden photos by Monalyn Gracia of Corbis Corporation

Earlier this year Corbis Corporation, the famous stock photography company, came to shoot at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden for a series of shots on ‘sustainability’. Forty-one of those images are now on-line for sale. They feature shots of City Farmer’s roof garden, mason bee box, organic food garden, worm and backyard compost bins, and shiitake mushrooms.

From Wikipedia:

Corbis Corporation is an American company, based in Seattle, Washington, that sells and otherwise distributes photography and film footage and related rights. It has a collection of more than 100 million images and a footage library. Corbis is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems (a name currently held by an unrelated, slightly older company based in Concord, Massachusetts).

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Un hectare à Beyrouth – “Planete reporter” Le Monde.fr et Youtube

Une évocation de l’exploitation de Rahmé, agricultrice à Beyrouth. Les atouts de l’agriculture urbaine sont-ils une réponse aux enjeux environnementaux contemporains?

Un reportage destiné au concours “Planete reporter” organisé par Le Monde.fr et Youtube

Public Farm 1 (PF1) was the winning entry for the 2008 MoMA/PS1 Young Architect Program. Built in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s courtyards, the temporary installation introduced a 1000m2 fully functioning urban farm in the form of a folded plane made of structural cardboard tubes. PF1 combines infrastructure with public space, engaging the visitor to re-imagine the city’s infinite possibilities.

Built entirely of biodegradable and recyclable materials, PF1 was powered by solar energy and irrigated by a rooftop rainwater collection system that kept the project off the city’s grid. Throughout the summer, the farm produced over 50 varieties of organic fruit, vegetables and herbs that were used by the museum’s café, at special events, and harvested by visitors.

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High in iron and a mainstay in Southeast Asian cuisine in stir fries, Kokong or Vietnamese water spinach is traditionally grown along the edges of rice paddies. Gardeners in New Orleans East grow it along the canals near Michoud.

Battling the Chef Menteur Landfill

By Kari Lydersen
Colorlines
December 9, 2009

Tung Duc Tran’s backyard is a lush tangle of life. On a steamy New Orleans summer day, Tran, 80, leaves the cool of his small home to stroll under the trellises hung with bitter melons and fuzzy squash shading an assortment of carefully tended crops. The garden consumes the modest yard sloping down to the Maxent Lagoon, a canal whose waters are nearly obscured by an explosion of aquatic vegetation laced with a few old tires and other trash.

Like many elderly Vietnamese American people in the close-knit Versailles neighborhood on New Orleans’ east side, Tran grows his own vegetables to eat and share with friends and neighbors. But in recent years he has felt less confident consuming his produce, because he fears contamination from the lagoon that often spills over onto his land, and in the soil itself, which was swamped by the toxic floodwaters of Katrina four years ago.

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Larger image here.

The artist, Diz Jeppe, comments on what inspired her to create this work.

This is – obviously – a Soviet influenced poster. Stylistically, it was inspired by a Soviet Art and Architecture history course, but the artwork is from an original drawing of mine. As far as I can tell, rooftop gardens didn’t exist in early Soviet years, but had they been there they might have helped supplement the needs of the urban population during crippling food shortages.

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Danielle visits an urban farming project in Kibera and talks about the importance of agriculture in improving nutrition and incomes in urban settings.

Urban Agriculture in Africa

Danielle Nierenberg is a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and co-Project Director of State of World 2011: Nourishing the Planet. Her knowledge of sustainable agriculture issues, in particular factory farming and its global spread, has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and other media.

The following stories, videos and links are from Nourishing the Planet’s Weekly E-Newsletter, and include highlights from Danielle’s time in Kenya, where she met with farmers and visited projects on the ground to learn about and analyze environmentally sustainable ways of alleviating poverty and hunger.

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Noah Sheetz, Executive Chef of New York State picks some fresh produce from his plot at the Lincoln Park Community Garden in Albany. Photo by Michael P. Farrell

Gardens ripe with tales of Albany – Urban community plots are a fertile ground for diverse crops and a variety of people

By PAUL GRONDAHL
Times Union
August 23, 2009

ALBANY — Dressed in his formal chef’s whites, Noah Sheetz, Gov. David Paterson’s executive chef, ambled across Eagle Street from the Executive Mansion and picked his way through the bounty of the community garden that borders Lincoln Park.

From neatly ordered, weed-free rows in a corner plot he tends, Sheetz yanked up a fistful of ruby beets the size of baseballs and sliced off a head of broccoli as wide as his palm.
“This has worked out really well and it’s great to learn from the other gardeners,” said Sheetz, a Culinary Institute of America graduate with solid restaurant credentials.

As Sheetz commiserated about tomato blight and an influx of pesky beetles, gardener Euthia Benson, who grew up in the Deep South, told a story about how her mother taught her to grow tasty okra when she was a young girl.

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Trailer ‘Grown in Detroit’ from Mascha Poppenk on Vimeo.

Grown in Detroit

by Dutch filmmakers Mascha and Manfred Poppenk
(Highly recommended film! Mike)

Imagine urban teens, pregnant, and farming a decaying city. They’re working, learning and planning for a better life for themselves and their babies. It’s not a movie script. It’s the subject of a new documentary, Grown in Detroit, by Dutch filmmakers Mascha and Manfred Poppenk.

While Detroit may have a reputation as one of the most impoverished and dangerous cities in the U.S., this award winning documentary exposes a different side; the side about residents who are emerging by using their resource and creating unique solutions.

“This isn’t the typical, negative Detroit story. It’s a powerful, uplifting story about rebirth of the city,” Said Mascha Poppenk, documentary filmmaker. “It focuses on the future by featuring the efforts of teens and their educators. The message they are teaching us applies to all in the world, not just the residents of Detroit”

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Photo by Luxist. The marzipan Kitchen Garden is complete with veggies that were actually grown during the late summer/Fall season, with eggplant, radishes, carrots, cabbages, peas, cauliflower–and tiny handwritten signs that have the names of the vegetables on them. See larger image here.

Marzipan Kitchen Garden vegetables

By Eddie Gehman Kohan
Obama Foodorama
Dec 2, 2009

White House Executive Pastry Chef Bill Yosses has been as busy as an elf in Santa’s workshop–for months. In addition to a loaded schedule that includes making the thousands of sweets for all the White House holiday events (17 parties, 11 Open Houses)–and for private Obama family consumption–Yosses has also had a whole architecture project going on for the past six weeks, during the creation of the annual White House Gingerbread House, a holiday tradition that in the past was brought to stunning heights of creativity by former White House Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier, the only chef to last for 26 years in the Executive Mansion.

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Photo by Carl Warner. Edible city: London’s skyline has been recreated using fruit and veg as part of a promotional campaign. Larger image here.

The city that’s good enough to eat: London’s iconic skyline recreated using fruit and veg by photographer Carl Warner

By Daily Mail Reporter

16th November 2009

A photographer has recreated London’s iconic skyline using 26 different types of fruit and vegetables, with stunning results.

Carl Warner and a team of five model makers spent three weeks crafting the edible panorama and series of landmarks to promote healthy eating.

In the image some of the world’s most famous buildings are given a fruity twist and constructed from hundreds of pieced of fruit and veg – all painstakingly glued together.

The Houses of Parliament are built from a mix of asparagus, green beans and runner beans which are subtly mixed with baby sweetcorn to depict the intricate stonework.

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Millennials, who are generally considered to be a group of participatory, positive, technologically-savvy 18- to 30-year-olds

By Alissa Walker
Fast Company
Dec 8, 2009

Excerpt:

Waxman sought to have a group of students physically reclaim a strip of public land bordering the school’s street, which California College of the Arts (CCA) shares with homeless residents as well as day laborers. Waxman believed they could intervene agriculturally on the block–which was littered with hypodermic needles–by growing enough food for the neighbors. “We were three transient populations brought together by a piece of toxic land that held the potential for building community and for addressing a food issue,” she remembers. Dubbing the project FARM (Future Action Reclamation Mob) she encouraged students through posters and other campaign methods to rally behind the cause, using language she believed would appeal to the Millennials.

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Behold Africa’s new urban farmers

By Juliet Torome
Project Syndicate
Oct 26, 2009

NAIROBI: When I met Eunice Wangari at a Nairobi coffee shop recently, I was surprised to hear her on her mobile phone, insistently asking her mother about the progress of a corn field in her home village, hours away from the big city. A nurse, Wangari counts on income from farming to raise money to buy more land – for more farming.

Even though Wangari lives in Kenya’s capital, she is able to reap hundreds of dollars a year in profit from cash crops grown with the help of relatives. Her initial stake – drawn from her nursing wages of about $350 a month – has long since been recovered.

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From their website:

With Urban Farm, you’ll learn you don’t have to own acreage to fulfill your dream of raising your own food. The new Urban Farm magazine, from the editors of Hobby Farms, will walk you down the path to homegrown food and greater self-sustainability. It doesn’t take a farm to have the heart of a farmer. Urban Farm reaches out to those in the city and suburbs, those who are inspired by the local food movement and who want to start raising chickens and growing food for themselves, supporting local agriculture and living more sustainably.

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Photo by Southernpixel. Spring-time at The Jones Valley Urban Farm – a community-based non-profit organization in Birmingham, Alabama. Utilizing over 3 acres of vacant downtown property, JVUF grows organic produce and flowers, educates the community about healthy food, and helps make Birmingham a vibrant community. Alabama is growing greener. See larger image here.

Birmingham’s Jones Valley Urban Farm – Making a Difference

By Mary Christiansen
Tannehill Trader
Publication of Eagle Media
August 12th, 2009

Urban farming is on the rise along with an interest in making food choices that enrich individuals and communities. Birmingham’s Jones Valley Urban Farm is a shining example of this movement that is reconnecting people with food. VUF, a non-profit community-based organization, not only grows organic produce and flowers, but offers a wide variety of programs that teach youth and communities about sustainable agriculture and nutrition.

Over 5 acres of vacant downtown property, along with a 25 acre farm at Mt Laurel, have been transformed into community gardens that grow organic produce that is sold at local farmers markets, restaurants, grocery stores and food stands.

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Volunteers at the Richmond Fruit Tree Sharing Project

Richmond Farm School – 2010

The Institute for Sustainable Horticulture, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in cooperation with the Richmond Fruit Tree Sharing Project, the Richmond Food Security Society, and the City of Richmond is pleased to announce that the inaugural session of the Richmond Farm School is scheduled to commence this spring.

Objectives and Program Features:

The purpose of the Farm School is to prepare people from all walks of life to engage in human scale, urban focused agriculture enterprises including production, processing, adding value, distribution, marketing and sales and build regional agri-food systems in, around and for municipalities. The program will focus on balancing theoretical (classroom) and applied (field/ practical) skill development studies with the express objective of teaching agriculture as the applied science and art that it is.

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The author’s pet rooster, 15-year-old Mr. X, checks out the cool veggie garden. Photo by Rosalind Creasy

The total value of the fresh vegetables author Rosalind Creasy grew in her 100-square-foot garden in 2008 was $683.43!

By Rosalind Creasy with Cathy Wilkinson Barash
December 2009/January 2010
Mother Earth News

In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. Then, while working on my new book, Edible Landscaping, I had an aha! moment. As I was assembling statistics to show the wastefulness of the American obsession with turf, I wondered what the productivity of just a small part of American lawns would be if they were planted with edibles instead of grass.

I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn’t turn up any data for home harvest amounts — only figures for commercial agriculture. From experience, I knew those commercial numbers were much too low compared with what home gardeners can get. For example, home gardeners don’t toss out misshapen cucumbers and sunburned tomatoes. They pick greens by the leaf rather than the head, and harvests aren’t limited to two or three times a season.

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Guinea pig keepers in the North Kivu Province of Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by Neil Palmer. Larger image here.

By Nyumbaiza Tambwe
Conference paperKMAfrica
2009 Dakar

Excerpts:

Introduction

The paper attempts to establish a relationship between urban agriculture and food security. In other words, it seeks to examine the impact of agricultural activities taking place within and around the city of Lubumbashi on household level. The paper uses the sustainable livelihood approach based on the theories of alternative development. Instead of identifying all strategies used in urban areas, the study focuses on urban agriculture because of its potential as source of food and income. On methodological level, using the non-probability sampling, the city was divided into its seven administrative wards. As each ward is administratively divided into areas, each area was taken as reference for the selection of informants.

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Ma Chaba and Ma Phillipina is two of six elders who started this garden next to the Phillipi Municipal building, Cape Town. They receive training and ongoing support from Abalimi, and regularly supply the Harvest of Hope box scheme with fresh organic veggies. Photo by konsciousimages. Larger image here.

Determining the features of urban agriculture, the current poverty response policies that are in place in the Southern African countries of South Africa and Zambia

By Nel, E.; Hampwaye, G.; Thornton, A.; Rogerson, C.M and Marais, L.
Global Development Network (GDN) Working Paper Series
2009, Africa

Urban agriculture (UA) has not always received adequate recognition in respect of institutional acceptance. In addition, institutional acceptance has often not been followed by proactive policy approaches. At the same time, decentralization in both South Africa and Zambia has resulted in a larger degree of local decision-making powers. This report evaluates said responses from eight case studies (four from Zambia and South Africa each) against the existing literature and policy frameworks.

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