Category — europe

28-30 September 2010, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Excerpt from Summit Report:

MetroAg and UrbanAg

A key concern and question for MetroAg is how well it is differentiated from Urban Agriculture. Many of the stakeholders participating in city workshops and attending the Summit are UrbanAg practitioners, so this distinction is important if MetroAg is not to become confused with the former.

The concern is valid, as three interviewees noted:

“The Summit made it clear for me that Metropolitan Agriculture is an economic activity, carried out by professionals, that also delivers on people and planet values. Urban Agriculture is often not about agriculture as an economic activity, but primarily about producing food, in combination with social values like community building.

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Nomadic green: The Princess Garden in Berlin-Kreuzberg

All four films are in German

Four new short films (in German) by George Eich show the different dimensions of urban gardening, its liveliness as well as its social and cultural aspects: A mobile, urban agriculture at the Prinzessinnengarten in the middle of Berlin-Kreuzberg; a neighborhood garden that becomes the departure point for city development from bottom up; cooking with boys with Turkish background in the intercultural garden in Görlitzer Park; and the moving of the Guerilla Garden “Rosa Rose”.

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By Urban Architecture Project

About 50 community-run green areas have been mapped: little urban gardens, play yards, edible gardens and areas for walking, resting, or simply talking. Citizens and associations acting together to reclaim the abandoned areas in Rome.

More than 100 sites together with the 65 spontaneous gardens are registered in the municipality of Rome.

There are urban farms too and other interesting destinations such as Participation Houses, “Punti Verdi Qualità” and green areas maintained by established associations.

See the map here.

Nærum Allotment Gardens

By Annemarie Lund

Nærum Allotment Gardens in Denmark, are considered one of C. Th. Sørensen’s most important creations. In 1948 40 oval allotment gardens, each measuring c.25 × 15 m/80 × 50 ft, were laid out on a rolling lawn, a common green, in a fluid progression. The gardens are mostly placed so that the oval lies across the curves of the slope. This use of the rolling terrain, combined with the sweeps and curves of the hedges, accentuates the dynamic impression. The individual garden plots are enclosed compartments surrounded by hedges; their cottages may be situated in different ways, but comply with the overall plan.

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Zellen. Life Science – Urban Farming lectures

Nov. 2010
In German

Excerpt:

Between workshops on harvesting, collecting seeds, the garden can be explored. The youth clubs of HAU present material they have worked on for several months, and die Helmis will show “Hans-Guck-in-die-Luft”. The mother of 19-year-old Hans is an outstanding tightrope walker, and his father a famous ornithologist. Hans is clumsy and living in his own world, but he is also a very talented draughtsman and bird voice imitator who has to cope with the conflict between an artist’s life and reality.

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Image by Stephanie Carter.

Eleven articles on urban agriculture in Vertigo – The electronic journal of Environmental Science

Vertigo, Vol 10, No. 2
Sept. 2010. In French
Articles about UA in Europe, America and Africa by authors from various backgrounds. This issue was coordinated by Eric Duchemin Institute of Environmental Sciences at UQAM (Canada), Luc Mougeot IDRC (Canada) and Joe Nasr Ryerson College (Canada).

Louiza Boukharaeva et Marcel Marloie
L’apport du jardinage urbain de Russie à la théorisation de l’agriculture urbaine

Manon Boulianne, Geneviève Olivier-d’Avignon et Vincent Galarneau
Les retombées sociales du jardinage communautaire et collectif dans la conurbation de Québec

Emmanuel Pezrès
La permaculture au sein de l’agriculture urbaine : Du jardin au projet de société

Christian Peltier
Agriculture et projet urbain durables en périurbain : la nécessité d’un réel changement de paradigme

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Edible Park opened October 22, 2010.

English artist Nils Norman

A project by the artist Nils Norman
as part of the Foodprint Program
Locations: City farm Herweijerhoeve and the compound of the Amateur Market Gardener’s Association ‘Nut en Genoegen’, Meppelweg 882, The Hague

Excerpt:

An artwork that grows and prospers and produces delicious vegetables and fruit is what the English artist Nils Norman conceived for the Hague city farm Herweijerhoeve in the Zuiderpark and for the compound of the Amateur Market Gardener’s Association ‘Nut en Genoegen’ which is situated close to the city farm on the Meppelweg. For both sites he designed a special vegetable garden based on permaculture and entitled Edible Park.

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Stollenwörthweiher community gardens, second largest garden colony in all of Germany. See map here.

My great grandfather said Hitler could just kiss his ass

By Patty Cantrell
Regional Food Solutions
Oct. 5, 2010
Patty Cantrell founded the Michigan Land Use Institute’s entrepreneurial agriculture program in 1998.

Excerpt:

My family here in Germany, where I’m visiting this week and next, has a favorite story about my great grandfather, Karl Bader. After already fighting in World War I, he stayed on the home front during the next war, taking care of his wife and two daughters. He did the best he could with a cellar for bomb shelter and a garden for what food they could raise there in the industrial city of Mannheim on the Rhine, one of the most bombed parts of the country during WWII.

In the chaotic last weeks of the war, the Nazi government called on all the older men not yet fighting to take up arms and defend the country. The story goes that my great grandfather said Hitler could just kiss his ass, and he started planting another garden that spring instead.

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Uppsala in 1858. The majority of the town land in Uppsala consisted of arable fields in 1858.

The food produced on the town lands was important in relation to urban food provision

By Annika Björklund
PhD Thesis
Annika Björklund has a Licentiate of Philosophy in Human Geography and a Bachelor of Science in Urban and Regional Planning from Stockholm University. This book is her Doctoral Thesis in Human Geography.
September 2010
303 pages

Abstract

This doctoral thesis analyses the role of historical urban agriculture in a long-time perspective, through a combination of overarching surveys of Swedish towns and detailed studies of one town – Uppsala in east-central Sweden. The study shows how agricultural land – town land – of various sizes was donated to towns repeatedly during medieval times and in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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The main focus is the trees. Apple, pear, quince, apricot, cherry, blueberry, blackberry, strawberry

By Emma Townshend
The Independent
August 22, 2010

Excerpt:

Trundling along to buy a lunchtime sandwich the other day, admiring the floral bedding in my local park in Ealing, I spotted a little sign: “Pop-up Kitchen garden”. Now, we’ve heard of pop-up shops, restaurants and art galleries, but a pop-up vegetable garden? Exploring a little further, I found that a set of kitchen garden beds, neatly edged in wood, had materialised out of nowhere. It was a gorgeous surprise.

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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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The two city gardeners: Robert Shaw (left) and Mark Clausen.

Wenn Städter Wurzeln schlagen

Junge Leute wollen sich erden. Am liebsten in Nachbarschaftsgärten mitten in der Großstadt. Der Kreuzberger Prinzessinnengarten ist einer davon.

By Anne Haeming
Zeit
6.8.2010
In German – translate here.

Excerpt:

Man könnte hier die Bienen summen hören, horchen, wie die Grillen zirpen. Prinzessinnengarten, märchenhaft klingt das. Doch der Presslufthammer schrillt, hinterm Zaun dröhnt der zweispurige Kreisverkehr. Berlin, Kreuzberg. Ein 1000 Quadratmeter-Areal am Moritzplatz, Ecke Prinzenstraße. Hier liegt der Prinzessinnengarten. Beet fügt sich an Beet, ein paar Bäume, in der Ecke ein Bienenstock. Knoblauch wächst hier, Kornblumen, und Kartoffeln über Kartoffeln. Landwirtschaft mitten in der Stadt.

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80 recycled industrial sacks growing food in the Kalasatama (Fish Harbor) area. See more photos of the project here.

Grown in Helsinki

By Päivi Raivio
Dodo

There is a quickly growing number of residents, who want to grow their own food within a short distance of their locality. A tradition of council-managed allotments is still going strong, but new areas for allotments are not being dedicated in the needed pace. A queue of thousands waiting for an allotment is a proof that there is a real need for a greater number of farming plots in the city.

Dodo, an environmental NGO, started a wider movement of “guerilla gardening” by obtaining unused land for growing vegetables near the rail tracks and since then, the phenomena has grown at mounting pace – just as the carrots in our growing boxes.

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Boatanic – all green hands on deck!

By Damian O’Sullivan
Rotterdam (NL) 2010

The Boatanic (boat + botanic) is a novel concept that combines existing know-how to create an unprecedented solution for growing food within the inner city. Its aim is to reduce the environmental impact of our food which, today, still has to travel large distances before it hits our plates.

The concept is to simply convert discarded tourist boats into floating greenhouses as these are ideally suited due to their large glass windows. The idea dawned on Damian O’Sullivan as he was walking around Amsterdam and realised that the typical tourist boat actually resembled a greenhouse. ‘What if you replaced tourists with thyme or tomatoes?’ he asked himself – the Boatanic was born!

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Guerilla Gärtnerin in Aktion. Photo by Ella von der Haide.

Urbane partizipative Gartenaktivitäten in Munchen 2009 – Participatory Urban Garden Activities in Munich 2009

Places for social interaction, subsistence, participation and the experience of nature

A research paper by Dipl.-Ing. Ella von der Haide
2009. In German
See Ella’s documentary films about community gardens here.

Summary

The study is the first inventory of its kind documenting the variety of ‘Urban Participatory Agriculture’ in the City of Munich. The report describes a variety of traditional forms of gardening such as in school and allotment gardens, as well as new innovative forms such as intercultural community gardens and guerilla gardens.

The potential and challenges of the gardens and support for the gardens from an urban planning perspective are outlined.

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Chelsea Barracks masterplan includes food gardens. 3. Promenade garden producing fruit and vegetables tended by gardeners. 10. Community-tended productive gardens.

Prince Charles guru gives Chelsea Barracks a green makeover

By Nick McDermott
Daily Mail
14th June 2010

Excerpts:

It was the ultra-modernist makeover that put Prince Charles at loggerheads with one of Britain’s foremost architects.
But the latest vision of Chelsea Barracks will see the site undergo a green transformation, with Prince-friendly features including beehives and a market garden.

‘It should be as productive as possible, rather than just be ornamental,’ said Mr Wilkie, who many suspect has been brought in to appease the prince. Key features include a nuttery – walnut and hazelnut trees planted around a central square – as well as fruit orchards and space for beehives.

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King’s Cross beekeeper Orlando Clarke Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

From quail in the East End to honey bees in King’s Cross, Carole Cadwalladr goes in search of all the ingredients for a meal sourced as close as possible to her London home

By Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer
20 June 2010

Excerpt:

It’s an exhausting and not very environmentally friendly business tracking down London’s urban farmers. I criss-cross the city spending what seems like the entire bank holiday stuck in traffic, wondering why this had ever seemed like a good idea.

Which is also pretty much what Oliver Rowe, the chef at London restaurant Konstam, says when I tell him I’m writing about urban agriculture, and am planning to source a meal from within the M25. “Somebody told me you’d rung,” he says. “And I thought, that’s what we do every day.” It’s true, localism is one of food’s most fashionable buzzwords these days, alongside seasonality and provenance, and Konstam prides itself on sourcing 80%of its ingredients from the Greater London area.

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Photo from Stiftung Interkultur.

Integrating cultures and provide healing spaces.

A garden in Kassel, Germany, provides a place for immigrant women to put down roots and cultivate the taste of home. Across the country, such intercultural gardens are helping to integrate cultures and provide healing spaces.

By Angela Boskovitch
WeNews correspondent
October 9, 2007

Excerpt:

KASSEL, Germany (WOMENSENEWS)–Fall is yielding its usual pumpkins, squash and wine grapes and the women stand side by side inspecting their harvest under a typically German sky of fluffy clouds.

Each one has her own small piece of the nearly 11,000-square-foot plot. The apple and pear trees and black currant bushes are considered communal property.

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Ein Berliner Stadtgarten will Gemüseanbau mit Sozialgefühl verbinden. Landwirtschaft zieht in die Metropole – und bleibt mobil: “Nomadisch Grün” heißt das Konzept. Photo by Marco Clausen.

New York and Cuba do it first, Urban Farming has now arrived in Germany

By Von Daniela Schröder, Berlin
Der Spiegel
07.06.2010

Article in German – Excerpt:
Translate it using Google here.

Hinter den Bürotürmen wandert die Frühlingssonne über den wolkenlosen Himmel, die Luft ist erfüllt vom Lärm des Feierabendverkehrs, es riecht nach Abgasen. Unter den Füßen spürt man das Vibrieren einer vorbeifahrenden U-Bahn.

Nur wenige Schritte entfernt rauschen Pappelbäume leise im Wind, der Duft frischer Kräuter hängt in der Luft, Kinder spielen zwischen Sträuchern und Pflanzenbeeten. Ein entspannter Nachmittag auf dem Land – und das mitten in der Metropole.

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