Posts from — March 2011

Bogotá, Columbia

Familias de sectores populares de Bogotá intentan garantizar su seguridad alimentaria mientras proyectos milagro al interior de sus comunidades, los cuales consisten en el desarrollo de nuevos modelos urbanos de agricultura.

City giving $425,000; 150 jobs expected

By Larry Sandler
Journal Sentinel
Mar 4, 2011

Except:

Milwaukee will contribute $425,000 to an ambitious urban agriculture program that could create 150 jobs for low-income central-city residents, the Common Council has decided.

Aldermen voted unanimously this week to support the plan by Growing Power, the nonprofit farm on the city’s northwest side.

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Thirty basil plants are growing inside the restaurant in the ZENGROW wall garden. Customers can pick fresh basil directly from the wall to spice up their food.

30 places for small pots and different salad and herb varieties

Press release
Viherasema Ltd.
March 5th 2011

Viherasema Ltd. is a company based in Finland dedicated in pushing forward the concept of urban farming.

The company launched its latest innovation called the ZENGROW wall garden which supports the urban gardening movement in the center of Helsinki, Finland. The ZENGROW wall garden is inside a new trendy city center restaurant called Bravuria. The wall garden uses clean hydroponic greenhouse techniques.

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Harry Rhodes, executive director of Growing Home Inc., tends to more than just plants at the farms. Growing Home provides transitional jobs for people who have multiple barriers to employment, such as a criminal record and housing instability. Photo by Harry Rhodes.

We farm 12 months of the year, but we harvest 10 months out of the year.

By Jennifer Wholey
Medill Reports
Feb 04, 2011

Excerpt:

Harry Rhodes, 51, came home to Wilmette in 2001 after living in Israel for 16 years, where he worked on Jewish-Arab co-existence projects. When he returned, he became the one and only staff member at Growing Home, a non-profit organization started in the early ‘90s to provide job training for the homeless using urban agriculture as a teaching tool.

Now as executive director, Rhodes is at the forefront of the urban agriculture and food justice movement in Chicago, where Growing Home operates three farms on the South Side with a fourth springing up later this year. The farms next season will employ 35 people who have been imprisoned or homeless, and if Growing Home’s record holds, more than 75 percent will find jobs afterward.

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Here partners Alan Rose, Myles Harston and Paul Suder with greens raised in their closed-loop systems. Photo by Courtesy Alan Rose.

The plants grow in approximately 18-28 days. Arugula, basil, different salad mixes – they grow very quickly.

By Emily Gadekand Michelle M. Schaefer
Medill Reports
Mar 04, 2011

Excerpt:

Let’s talk about indoor farming inside urban warehouses or sleek glass highrises in the canyons of crowded neighborhoods.

It may sound strange but that’s the idea behind vertical farming, a new way to grow food in the middle of and during any season of the year.

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We found out that we could legally keep our Jersey named Holly at Sunset Magazine

By Sara Deseran
7x7SF
March 03, 2011

Excerpt:

Until recently, Margo True, food editor for Sunset magazine, hadn’t done more gardening than tend to a pot of basil in New York when she worked at Saveur. Today, she’s got a year-and-a-half of vegetable and fruit gardening, chicken rearing, bee-hive caring and even cow milking under her belt and is the author of the new book The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table (Ten Speed, $25). Sunset is currently holding the One Block Party contest, inviting people to live as local as they can get. Check out their blog to follow their trials and tribulations of urban farming.

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John Mogk is a professor of law at Wayne State University.

By John Mogk
Detroit Free Press
Mar 2, 2011

Excerpt:

Michigan’s Right to Farm Act stands in the way of Detroit and other cities promoting urban agriculture. The act prohibits cities from enforcing local zoning ordinances to protect neighborhood residents from problems created by commercial farms.

In Detroit — where poverty, hunger, unemployment, low family income, malnutrition, neighborhood blight and vacant land are major challenges — urban farming can make a difference. But farms, even small ones, can pose neighborhood risks if they are not controlled properly for noise, odors, vermin, insects, pesticides, wastes and increased traffic.

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Numerous private and public gardens in the sky

Golden Dream Bay, a residential and retail complex in Qinhuangdao, China, a city of 2.8 million located 300 km east of Beijing. Building upon Moshe Safdie’s groundbreaking Habitat, the project offers a radical solution for quality, affordable housing in a heavily populated urban area.

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Agricultura Urbana y sus aplicaciones para recuperar suelos degradados en la Unidad Vecinal Portales.

By Ben Bookout
Master of Architecture Thesis
Universidad Catolica de Chile
Feb. 3, 2011
In Spanish 225 pages

My name is Ben Bookout and I recently defended my thesis about urban agriculture in Santiago, Chile. I believe the city and country present interesting challenges and opportunities when it comes to the implementation and practice of urban agriculture. I also believe that the implementation of urban agriculture could help Santiago to become a more resilient city as well as give a new use to abandoned urban space and public space. The subject of study of my thesis is a late 1960′s housing development named Unidad Vecinal Portales.

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April 7, 8, 2011, Seixal County, 20km from Lisbon

The congress will take place at Municipal Auditorium of Seixal County, on 7 and 8 April. Seixal is a county on the south bank of the Tagus River, about 20km from Lisbon

April 7 (Thursday)

8:30 – Reception
9:00 – Opening Session
Presidente da Câmara Municipal do Seixal, Alfredo Monteiro / Vereador do Pelouro do Ambiente e Serviços Urbanos, Joaquim Tavares/ Ministério da Agricultura, do Desenvolvimento Rural e das Pescas / Quercus – Associação Nacional de Conservação da Natureza

Panel 1 – Public Policies and Planning
Moderador: Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles (Arquitecto Paisagista)
Relator: Giovanni Allegretti (Arquitecto, Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra)

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Robert Lewis Reid (American painter, 1862-1929) The Old Gardener 1920

non·a·ge·nar·i·an – A person who is from 90 to 99 years old

By Deanna Duke
Crunchy Chicken
March 3, 2011

Excerpt:

A few weekends ago I went to a book release party and ended up hanging out with the parents-in-law of the author. The dad had a birthday coming up that week and was turning 91. His wife was also turning 91 this year, in August.

I don’t know how we got on the topic, but our conversation turned to gardening, raising chickens and canning. They had been doing it all for decades and still grew a huge amount of food in their yard and canned like fiends every year.

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John Galuska. Photo by Aaron Bernstein.

“I want them to really see the connection between the people in the city who are buying and eating the food and the people who are growing the food.”

By Jennifer Piurek
Indiana University faculty and staff news

Excerpt:

This spring, Galuska will bring the concept of urban farming into the classroom at IU. “Farming the City: Global Perspectives on Urban Agriculture and Food Security,” a new course offered through School of Public and Environmental Affairs, will explore how forms of urban agriculture can help provide cities with consistent access to a variety of nutritious food sources. In addition to the international case studies, students will explore urban farming initiatives from Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Bloomington.

“I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but my mom’s father had chickens and had a hobby farm in Arkansas,” Galuska said. “My mom and her mother were more flower gardeners.” Somehow, it was enough to plant the agriculture seed in Galuska, a longtime vegetable grower who earned his doctoral degree at IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology with a focus on Caribbean verbal and music traditions.

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By Alice J. Hovorka
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,
1360-0524, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2006
Pages 207 – 225

Abstract

The research draws on a feminist political ecology perspective to demonstrate that agrarian restructuring and rural-urban transformation in Botswana offers women opportunities to renegotiate their marginalised positionality within the commercial urban agricultural sector in Greater Gaborone. Men and women participate in equal numbers, and both perceive of this sector as offering them new and accessible avenues for economic and social advancement. Although there is continuity of women’s social and economic disadvantage relative to men from rural to urban contexts, women are actively making claims on land and capitalising on their traditional roles and responsibilities associated with poultry production.

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