Grist’s new comic series, My Intentional Life, features food-growing hipsters. See episodes here.

Building sustainable cities of the future

By Tom Philpott
Grist
August 3, 2010
Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

This is the first instalment in Grist’s Feeding the City series, which we’ll be running over the course of the next several weeks.

Excerpt:

“Few things scream ‘Hipster’ like an apartment garden.” Thus spake the New York City music magazine Death + Taxes, and it’s easy to see why. In trendy neighborhoods from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to San Francisco’s Mission district, urban youth are nurturing vegetables in window sills, fire escapes, and roofs. Down on the street, they tend flourishing garden plots, often including chickens and bees. Even Grist has launched a comic strip (left) devoted to the exploits of urban-hipster homesteaders.

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Photo by Jared Braiterman, Tokyo Green Space.

Pasona’s commitment to Japanese agriculture

Jared Braiterman
Tokyo Green Space Founder
Hiffington Post
July 30, 2010

Excerpt:

What roles can corporations play in transforming urban landscapes? This year Pasona, one of Japan’s top temporary staffing agencies, constructed a bold new headquarters building in Tokyo’s central business district that brings nature into the work environment and out to the street.

Pasona’s flashy interior farm and its elaborate yet less visible vertical garden activate normally dead spaces. While the results are uneven, the efforts to remake urban space and to use urban landscape to tell a new story about its corporate owner are remarkable.

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They share skills and share their problems

Christine Ottery
The Ecologist
30th July, 2010

Excerpt:

Estate community gardens are springing up in our cities – here’s how to transform a derelict urban space into a food growing hub

Urban agriculture is starting to take seed on social housing estates. Residents and volunteers are sprouting their fruit and veg on raised beds and in polytunnels on roof terraces, disused basketball courts and other derelict spots.
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