Category — Events

Image from the Carrot City Slide Presentation w/Mark Gorgolewski.(Fairmont Hotel) See here.

Farming in the City XIII

by Jon Steinman – Deconstructing Dinner
Radio show broadcast
February 4, 2010

In November 2009, a panel discussion on urban agriculture was hosted by Backyard Bounty and the University of Guelph. The event was called Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium and Deconstructing Dinner partner station CFRU recorded the panel. This episode hears from two of the panelists who both share innovative urban agriculture projects: the Carrot City exhibition – a collection of conceptual and realized ideas for sustainable urban food production, and the Diggable Communities Collaborative – a community garden initiative that demonstrates the importance of partnerships and the ways in which regional health authorities and local governments can support and implement local food system and urban agriculture planning.

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Urban Growth Bounty 2010

“Portland residents know that growing and preserving their own food is great for our personal, environmental and community health,” says Portland Mayor Sam Adams. “The Urban Growth Bounty classes are a great value. There’s always more to learn about how to grow, preserve and eat sustainably on a budget.”

From urban chickens and beekeeping to year-round food gardening, fermentation and preservation, City of Portland’s Urban Growth Bounty triples 2010 class offerings.

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Video above: An in depth problem statement and call to action delivered by Astrid Haryati, the Greening Director for the Office of the Mayor of San Francisco. She explores the obstacles to, and overarching importance of Sustainable Urban Agriculture for education, health and community development in the context of personal, community and city wide scales.

Urban Agriculture Design Competition

All entries due by midnight Jan. 31st 2010

The SF Chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA) and the Interaction Designers Association (IxDA) would like to introduce you to this year’s Digging Deeper, Building Blocks for Sustainable Design – A multi-disciplinary design competition addressing real urban needs.

Problem Space:

Within San Francisco and many urban areas, the potential for using community gardens, backyard gardens, vacant or under-utilized lots, parks, greenhouses, and rooftops for food cultivation is significant. Urban agriculture is known to encourage community wide benefits in urban neighborhoods as well as wellness and business opportunities on an individual scale.

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University of Guelph – Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium

November 13, 2009

Academics, municipal planners, community activists, gardeners and farmers will gather at the University of Guelph next week to cultivate connections between city-dwellers and the food on their tables by encouraging farming in urban areas.

Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium is a first for Guelph and takes place Nov. 20 at the Arboretum. The all-day event is hosted by the University and several local partners, including the Backyard Bounty project.

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PopTech 2009: Will Allen from PopTech on Vimeo.

Watch Will Allen’s 24 minute talk.

In 1995, former Proctor & Gamble marketing executive Will Allen was helping neighborhood kids with a gardening project when he decided that introducing farming to America’s inner cities could reap real public health benefits. The farming methods and educational programs he subsequently developed are now the hallmark of Growing Power, the nonprofit organization Allen co-founded and directs.

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Urban agriculture in Cuba.

By Neeraja Havaligi
Doctoral Candidate (in natural resource management focusing on agrobiodiveristy conservation and climate change.)
AkamaiUniversity
diversityoflife@gmail.com
Paper for the KLIMA 2009 conference in Berlin

Abstract

Urban Agriculture has a definite role in food security in the cities. This paper will explore the extent to which urban agriculture contributes to food security in the cities with examples from different parts of the world. The paper will explore the potential of urban agriculture in biodiversity conservation in urban and periurban areas, its role in reducing the C foot print of agriculture, urban food needs and generation of organic waste. The potential for urban agriculture in securing C credits for the cities will also be explored here.

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Re-Imagining New York: Designing Urban Farms to Feed New York City

Forum by The Municipal Art Society of New York
2009 MAS Jane Jacobs Forum, November 3, 2009

Is farming amidst New York City’s concrete jungle–through small urban garden plots or multi-story buildings–a realistic possibility? Or will we rely on large farms on the periphery of the city? Our panelists delve into the economic development and urban design implications of the fundamental question: Can New York, a city whose population is growing while its acreage is shrinking, eventually grow enough food within its boundaries to become self-sufficient?

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Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture

Curators: June Komisar, Mark Gorgolewski and Joe Nasr

The exhibition Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, was shown at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto earlier this year. The exhibition explores the relationship of design and urban food systems as well as the impact that agricultural issues have on the design of urban spaces and buildings as society addresses the issues of a more sustainable pattern of living.

The exhibit generated a huge amount of interest, including press articles, blog entries, YouTube submissions, and thousands of visitors.

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Multiple Geographies of Urban Agriculture in the Global North: Integrating Perspectives from Planning and Design, Ecology, Public Health, and Political Economy

Call for Papers
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting Washington, DC,
14 – 18 April 2010

Urban Agriculture (UA) is undergoing a renaissance in North American cities. Over the past few years, communities and individuals have launched innumerable initiatives to farm and garden in empty lots, at schools, in back yards, and on roofs and stoops. This renaissance has led seed companies to report record sales, prompted Michelle Obama to plant a model garden at the White House, and motivated municipal governments to open public parks to UA. Far from being a new phenomenon, however, this renewed interest is building on a historical legacy of UA as a critical part of North American urban culture and landscape.

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See these tomatoes grow each day in five different environments. Tomato Habitus is a project by the artist couple Driessens & Verstappen

Five variously suitable production environments for tomatoes were selected in and around The Hague: an industrial greenhouse in the Westland, a hobby greenhouse, an urban garden and a roof terrace in the inner city, and a shop window in a shopping street. In preparation, twenty five little tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum ‘Dirk’) were grown from seed in equivalent circumstances. Five of these little tomato plants were bedded out at the same time in each of the environments chosen. From that moment on, each plant became a reflection of its habitat. Differences in temperature, light, atmospheric humidity, precipitation, soil structure and care are expressed in the growth process of each separate tomato plant.

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2nd International Conference on Landscape and Urban Horticulture Bologna, Italy, June 9-13, 2009

Session 1 – Food and flower production in/for the cities: urban horticulture in developing and developed countries, for food and flower production.

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For the Greener Good: Vertical Farming from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Presenter(s): Dickson Despommier, Robin Elmslie Osler, Carolyn Steel, and J. William Thompson
Date Recorded: April 29, 2009
Duration: 01:29:59
Sponsored by: The Home Depot Foundation

Learn about the future of urban food production with Robin Osler, Elmslie Osler Architects; Dickson Despommier, Professor of Public Health, Columbia University; Carolyn Steel, Author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives; and J. William Thompson, FASLA , editor, Landscape Architecture magazine.

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Remarks about Jac Smit by Jerry Kaufman at the Minneapolis APA conference session, April 27, 2009, on Urban Agriculture’s Future.

Jac Smit was one of the founders of the urban agriculture movement; some even consider him to be the father of the urban agriculture movement. In his absence from this panel today, I would like to honor him by telling you a bit about him and sharing with you some of his thoughts about the future of urban agriculture. When I learned he was terminally ill a few weeks ago, I spoke to him by phone. I said I wanted to bring some of his views about the future of urban agriculture to the APA conference audience at this session. He was pleased to have me do so.

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Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture
Exhibit: February 25th – April 30th 2009 – Free Admission
Opening reception: March 3rd 2009
Design Exchange, Toronto
www.dx.org

Exhibition Overview

This exhibition will show how the design of cities and buildings is enabling the production of food in the city. It will explore the role that creative design professionals have in relation to the food system of cities, and the impact that agricultural issues will have on the design of urban spaces and buildings as society addresses the issues of a more sustainable pattern of living. The focus will be on how the increasing interest in growing food within the city, supplying food locally, and food security in general is changing urban design and built form.

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Dimensions of Urban Agriculture – Ryerson University course from Michael Levenston on Vimeo. Click on the Vimeo link to watch a High Definition (HD) version of this video.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Instructor Wendy Mendes, Ph.D. describes the urban agriculture course she taught this Fall.
Available through Distance Education.

This course describes the dimensions (functions, roles, benefits, potential risks) of urban agriculture and how these complement, supplement, compete with, substitute for, or undermine those provided by other land uses, sectoral activities and actors. The main dimensions covered are: health and food security, socio-cultural dimensions, economic dimensions, and environmental dimensions.

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See clips from the documentary film in this 24 minute video interview with the directors Robert Lughai and Tashai Lovington. Wisconsin Public Television, Director’s Cut.
Link to interview here. (Click on Watch Flash Video)

Witness if you will Gallus Domesticus … the backyard chicken. A mere few pounds of feather, bone, and muscle; a creature regarded by many as a rather humorous, though not so intelligent agent of food production. And yet, make note of a most singular phenomenon now taking shape across suburb and city.

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Information below from the MacArthur Foundation Web Site.

Will Allen is an urban farmer who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. In 1995, while assisting neighborhood children with a gardening project, Allen began developing the farming methods and educational programs that are now the hallmark of the non-profit organization Growing Power, which he directs and co-founded.

Guiding all is his efforts is the recognition that the unhealthy diets of low-income, urban populations, and such related health problems as obesity and diabetes, largely are attributable to limited access to safe and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. Rather than embracing the “back to the land” approach promoted by many within the sustainable agriculture movement, Allen’s holistic farming model incorporates both cultivating foodstuffs and designing food distribution networks in an urban setting.

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Photo by Cynthia Price. Larger image here.
MetroAg co-coordinators Joe Nasr, James Kuhns and Martin Bailkey, with Marielle Dubbeling of RUAF and Joe’s mother in Philadelphia for the event.

MetroAg promises to bring support and recognition to growing urban agriculture movement

Article by Kristin Reynolds in ‘Urban Grown’ the Newsletter of the Kansas City Centre for Urban Agriculture. Link to all ‘Urban Grown’ issues here.

Excerpt:
In conjunction with the annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference, a newly-formed organization held its first official forum on urban agriculture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on Saturday, October 4th, 2008.

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First Forum for the North American Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Alliance

Saturday, October 4th 2008 Noon – 5:30pm
University of Pennsylvania, Houston Hall,
3418 Spruce St., Philadelphia PA

Please join us for the first public forum for the new North American Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Alliance (NAUPAA), founded to support the growing community of sustainable farmers and policy makers working in and around the metropolitan areas of the U.S., Canada, and beyond.

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Planting a Victory Garden on the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall, July 2008. Photo by Scott Chernis

Article in NYT by Allison Arieff
July 28, 2008

“Earlier this month, my family spent a Saturday at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, helping to plant a 10,000-square-foot Victory Garden sponsored by Slow Food Nation, a nonprofit organization that will be celebrating American food through art, music, lectures, tastings, school programs and the like over Labor Day Weekend. More than 250 volunteers and nearly a dozen Bay Area gardening organizations dedicated their time to plant the first edible garden in front of San Francisco’s City Hall since 1943.

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