Back to the Future – A road map for tomorrow’s cities
August 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly.
“There’s a big difference between gardening and farming. Some activities are essentially rural and some urban, and we need to reestablish this distinction.”
By James Howard Kunstler
Published in the July/August 2011 issue of Orion magazine
James Howard Kunstler is probably best known as the author of “The Long Emergency” (The Atlantic Monthly Press 2005), and “The Geography of Nowhere” (Simon and Schuster, 1993).
Excerpt:
Speaking of technofantasies, another popular proposal is for skyscraper farms. The fiasco of suburbia sowed a lot of confusion in how we think about our human habitat. It hopelessly muddled the distinction between urban and rural. A manifestation of this confusion is the notion that we should focus our resources on growing food in “vertical farms” in the midst of our cities.
The problems we face with skyscrapers in terms of capital resources argue against this idea in the first place. Add to that the need to provide either artificial lighting for plants stacked under many layers of ceilings, or the energy to mechanically rotate them around the outer walls to expose them to sunlight. It is a particularly dumb idea when you consider that there is a practical relationship between cities and their agricultural hinterlands, where crops can be grown horizontally on the earth itself, without elaborate structures, artificial lighting, or high-tech gadgetry. The vertical farming idea is a demonstration of how extreme our technograndiosity has become, and how far we’ve strayed from centuries of accumulated wisdom.
Growing food on city rooftop gardens is fine but limited. Urban kitchen and dooryard gardens are historically quite customary. Community gardens on empty lots are a swell idea. But we better get our heads straight about where most of the food will have to come from, especially when a lot more of it will have to be grown locally. The appropriate place for that is outside of town. There’s a big difference between gardening and farming. Some activities are essentially rural and some urban, and we need to reestablish this distinction.
Our confusion about this distinction is visible in proposals to turn Detroit into farmland. Detroit is so far gone, the argument goes, that the only conceivable use for all that abandoned real estate is to re-ruralize it. This speaks to our lack of confidence in architecture and urbanism per se, and leads to the current default remedy whenever our cities fail: tear things down in favor of green space.
1 comment
Kunstler, in his delightful propensity for hyperbole, pushes past some nuances that weaken his argument: in the US in the 1940s, 40% of produce eaten was grown in backyard Victory Gardens.
In BC, the marijuana industry is demonstrating how to combine indoor growing, new technologies, efficiencies and productivity. They’re bringing those skills above ground and showing they can be applied to growing food.
Urban farmers divide the world of produce into grains (best suited for horizontal rural growing) and other fruits and vegetables where significant– though not sufficient– amounts can be efficiently grown in confined urban spaces.
I have a chapter on this in my book, The Urban Food Revolution, bit.ly/urbanfoodrevolution
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