Your Garden. How about picking up a batch of fresh tomatoes for dinner tonight from your living room.

21 urban agriculture entries!
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The competition – Problem Space:

Within San Francisco and many urban areas, the potential for using community gardens, backyard gardens, vacant or under-utilized lots, parks, greenhouses, and rooftops for food cultivation is significant. Urban agriculture is known to encourage community wide benefits in urban neighborhoods as well as wellness and business opportunities on an individual scale.

Practicing urban agriculture promotes health, creates gathering spaces for cultural exchange and recreation, revitalizes and beautifies abandoned areas, and provides opportunities for entrepreneurship and active work. What seems to be an obvious opportunity with a multitude of benefits has not brought in the level of interest, support and complimentary application that it could be.

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Photo by Tony Dornacher

More city dwellers are growing their own food. It’s good business

By Peter Ladner
Vancouver Sun
March 24, 2010

Peter Ladner is a former city councillor who is a Fellow at the SFU Centre for Dialogue. He is writing a book entitled Planning Cities as if Food Matters.

Excerpt:

Will Allen, 60, is a 6-foot 7-inch former professional basketball player and sales executive for Procter and Gamble and KFC, who can’t keep his hands out of the dirt.

“I’m a farmer first,” he tells his weekend class of 80 people who are crammed into one of his 14 greenhouses in a working class neighbourhood of Milwaukee. They’re paying $150 a day for a weekend course at the at the epicentre of the North American urban agriculture explosion. Biceps the size of tree trunks hanging out of his cut-off hoody, he strokes and pokes the moist black soil swarming with red wriggler worms as he repeats his lessons.

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