Hanging Gardens from The D Show on Vimeo.

200 Woolly Pocket gardens filled with organic compost

A vacant structure in Detroit’s Midtown is now breathing new life thanks to the hard work of some volunteers from one local agency. Ryan Schirmang, a creative project manager at Team Detroit, helped organize the Hanging Gardens, the first vertical garden project on an abandoned building in Detroit.

Schirmang recruited 75 eager volunteers from the Dearborn office and dispatched them to the Forest Arms apartment building at the corner of Second and Forest, near Wayne State University. The apartment building, chosen as the site for this year’s project, was ravaged by a fire in 2008 and is currently in the process of being rehabbed to its former glory. Read more about the building here.

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Engaging urbanites in shaping our cities

By Mike Duff for The Global Urbanist
25 August 2010
The Global Urbanist is a news portal reviewing urban affairs and urban management issues in cities throughout the developed and developing world.

Mike Duff is a consultant on strategy, planning and sustainability for cities at Happold Consulting, currently working in Detroit, Riyadh and Maputo. An alumnus of the London School of Economics (LSE) Cities Programme, he is part of the Harvard Working Group for Sustainable Cities, and a guest lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Excerpt:

Many city governments around the world are encouraging agriculture in urban areas–so long as it stays small scale and doesn’t challenge the status quo. Mike Duff argues that cities must learn to embrace ‘urban ag’ social movements as a way to engage citizens in shaping their own cities, and encourage these movements to scale up to reduce the power of ‘big food’ businesses to subvert planning processes. The key challenge will be regulation–cities should create a new land use designation entitled ‘urban agricultural use’ to accommodate a healthy balance between urban lifestyles and urban farming.

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Urban gardening: We spend a day on the farm in deepest Berlin to find out how urban agriculture is taking root in the German capital

In Monocle
12.08.10

Reporter: Markus Albers
Narrator: Saul Taylor
Director/Cameraman: Christian Fussenegger
Producer: Gillian Dobias
Editor: Aleksander Solum

See the video here.

From Agropolis Munich.

It’s all about longing for green, about healthy, competitively-priced food, and about using urban brownfield sites for precisely these purposes. Urban agriculture is an important building block towards a better life for many cities, and signifies a little bit of autarchy in a globalised world. Examples from Berlin and Munich.

By Elisabeth Schwiontek
A freelance journalist based in Berlin.
Translation: Jo Beckett
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
August 2010
The Goethe-Institut is the Federal Republic of Germany’s cultural institution operational worldwide.

Excerpt:

“Today and every day: harvesting fresh vegetables and herbs, no kidding!” The sign is a few metres away from the roaring roundabout traffic on Berlin’s Moritzplatz and marks the entrance to the Prinzessinnengarten. Robert Shaw and Marco Clausen, bosses of the non-profit company Nomadisch Grün, are cultivating vegetables to organic standards on 6000 square metres of leased land. A year ago the land was still a brownfield site filled with rubbish, today pumpkins, radishes, potatoes and the community feel are flourishing there. The two garden founders could rely on the active support of their neighbours right from the start.

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