Category — Planning

The Ritchay family’s garden.

15Thousand Farmers – Planting A Seed To Feed Ourselves – Louisville, Ky

by Greg & Michelle Vittitow,
Impact Dash
March 11th, 2010

The Vision:

15Thousand Farmers helps create, empower, and inspire 15,000 new, organic, neighborhood backyard/front yard farmers in Louisville, KY to feed their families and themselves and to give away! How? By using simple and easy instructions, checklists and materials and ongoing support provided through local organic growers and resources that will provide everything needed to start Easy Farms in our yards, on decks or in community gardens.

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Urban Farming Summit: Panel Discussion

Panel: February 19, 2010, The University of Michigan – Dearborn

Ashley Atkinson, The Greening of Detroit

Oran Hesterman, Fair Food Network

Susan Schmidt, The Henry Ford

Kami Pothukuchi, SEED Wayne

Malik Yakini, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

Moderated by Bruce Pietrykowski, Professor of Economics, UM-Dearborn

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E. Duchemin, F. Wegmuller, and A.-M. Legault
Institut des sciences de l’environnement, Université du Québec à Montréal, Succ. Centre-Ville, C.P. 8888, Montréal, Québec, Canada
2009

Abstract.

For over 30 years, different urban agriculture (UA) experiments have been undertaken in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). The Community Gardening Program, managed by the City, and 6 collective gardens, managed by community organizations, are discussed in this article. These experiments have different objectives, including food security, socialization and education. Although these have changed over time, they have also differed depending on geographic location (neighbourhood).

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A burned out house is demolished in Detroit on Feb. 12. After decades of decline that has gutted many once-vibrant neighborhoods, Detroit is preparing a radical renewal effort on a scale never attempted in this country: returning a large swath of the city to fields or farmland, much like it was in the middle of the 19th century. Photo by Carlos Osorio/AP

Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking

Associated Press
March. 8, 2010

DETROIT – Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.

Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.

Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green.

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Urban Agriculture issue of Zoning Practice

by Nina Mukherji and Alfonso Morales
Zoning Practice – American Planning Association
March 2010
Nina Mukherji received her master’s degree in conservation biology and sustainable development from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Alfonso Morales is assistant professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

As sustainability moves up the municipal agenda, cities have begun to take an interest in urban agriculture as a way to promote health, to support economic and community development, and to improve the urban environment. This article places urban agriculture in a historical context, examines regulatory approaches, and makes recommendations for planning and zoning practice.

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Rendering by Amy Seek of Flatbush Farmshare

Petition to the Mayor of New York

By People’s Garden NYC

To Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

We, the undersigned people of New York City, respectfully request that a vegetable garden be planted in front of City Hall.

This garden will represent New Yorkers’ commitment to education, public service, healthy eating, and environmental stewardship. This garden will be tended by NYC public school students, in collaboration with the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation and our region’s talented gardeners and farmers. The harvest will be donated to a nearby food pantry to feed the hungry.

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Photos by Jami Scholl

Urban farming on the rise

By Carrol Krause
Herald-Times Homes
February 13, 2010

Excerpt:

Jami Scholl is a local garden designer who uses permaculture principles to create beautiful, edible landscapes that taste as good as they look. Jami is now taking her passion for “foodscaping” one step further; she has begun working with city government council members and planners in order to clarify the elements of urban agriculture that will be acceptable throughout Bloomington.

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Incredible Edible Todmorden: Introducing Britain’s greenest town

By Joanna Moorhead
The Independent
29 November 2009

It’s an ordinary small town in England, but its residents claim they’ve discovered the secret that could save the planet. And with world leaders preparing to gather in Copenhagen in just over a week’s time to debate how to do just that, the people of Todmorden in the Pennines this week issued an invitation: come to our town and see what we’ve done.

In under two years, Todmorden has transformed the way it produces its food and the way residents think about the environment. Compared with 18 months ago, a third more townspeople now grow their own veg; almost seven in 10 now buy local produce regularly, and 15 times as many people are keeping chickens.

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Sample Indicators from the map:

Local Foods

# Farms with direct sales
% Farms with direct sales
% Farm sales $ direct to consumer
$ Direct farm sales
$ Direct farm sales per capita
# Farmers’ markets
Farmers’ markets/1,000 pop
# Vegetable acres harvested
Vegetable acres harvested/1,000 pop
Farm to school program

Excerpt from the USDA Food Blog
Feb 12, 2010

USDA’s Your Food Environment Atlas is an online mapping tool that compares the food environment of U.S. counties—the mix of factors that together influence food choices, diet quality, and general fitness among residents.  The Atlas contains 90 food environment indicators—most at the county level—allowing Atlas users to visualize and compare on a map how counties fare on each of the indicators. This new online tool is designed to stimulate research and inform policymakers as they address the nexus between diet and public health.

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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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Farm on wheels

From Re:Farm’s Wiki:

Refarm the city are tools of open software and hardware for urban farmers. is a mix of a good meal (the crop, the friends, the seeds, …) , hardware (the urban farm, the composter, the electronics, the sensors, recycled materials, …), software (built a farm according to: your personal needs, local vegetables, local gastronomy, farm location, …) that will give you the tools to design, control and manage your farm during her life. We have divided this wiki on the steps you need to take to start a refarm.

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Urban Orchard

By Andrew Maynard Architects, a young Melbourne, Australian firm

Premise

A cities gardens can be more than a decorated landscape. Like the built environment, green spaces can work with us to make an integrated urban environment rather than isolated pockets of manicured greenery.
We propose a garden that contributes a SOCIAL space, creates a low impact and sustainable ECONOMIC model, beautifies the URBAN landscape and improves our urban areas impact on the ENVIRONMENT.

We propose that rather than only producing a beautiful, green rooftop space, we also create a greater, and achievable urban gesture. We propose a working garden that is wonderful to visit, great to have events at, while also producing food much like Cuba’s Market Gardens.

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For the Greener Good: “Urban Agriculture” from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Presenter(s): Josh Viertel, Liz Falk, Steve Cohen, Allison Arieff (moderator)
Date Recorded: January 26, 2010
Duration: 01:26:11

Listen to a panel of experts discuss the ecological impact of how we grow our food and how urban agriculture has the potential to reclaim unused land in cities. The panel included Josh Viertel, president, Slow Food USA; Liz Falk, director and co-Founder, Washington D.C. based Common Good City Farm; Steve Cohen, food policy and programs, Portland Oregon’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability; and moderator Allison Arieff, Food and Shelter Ambassador, GOOD and “By Design” columnist, The New York Times.

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By Russ White
February 02, 2010
Written by Lauren Talley
Michigan Live

Hamm is the CS Mott Chair for Sustainable Agriculture and leads the CS Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University. He’s been working on a way to use that land to develop an urban agriculture system in Detroit.

Excerpts:

Hamm works with Kathryn Colasanti, a graduate student who analyzed Detroit’s publically-owned space. Colasanti’s study focused on open land where buildings had already been torn down. She didn’t include parks or right of ways.

Colasanti discovered about nine square miles of empty available land within the city limits. If her study included land with abandoned buildings, that space would be doubled or tripled, Hamm said. Hamm and Colasanti determined with just 2,000 acres Detroit could produce up to 75 percent of the vegetables needs and about 50 percent of the fruit needs for 900,000 people.

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Agriculture and Food Availability
Cultivating the City: Mapping and Characterizing Urban Agriculture with Satellite Imagery – Lisbon, Portugal

By Sérgio Freire, T. Santos, and J. A. Tenedório,
posted on November 26th, 2009
in Agriculture, Articles, Biodiversity, Earth Observation, Sustainability

Excerpts:

The city of Lisbon, Portugal, has historically expanded towards areas occupied by farms, orchards, and olive groves, thus integrating some rural character. This process was complemented by the influx of immigrants from the rural countryside or from abroad who had farming habits. While until recently this land use activity was perceived as marginal and simply tolerated by public officials, there are now municipal plans to expand it, organize it, and integrate it in the city planning process.

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Illustration by Robin Tatlow-Lord

By Elise Harris
Email: eliseharris2@gmail.com
An Honours thesis submitted as part of a Bachelor in Urban and Regional Planning School of Natural and Built Environments University of South Australia
October 2008

Excerpts:

Abstract

Community gardens have been shown to have positive social, nutritional and educational benefits for their users, and improve the amenity, safety and patronage of the surrounding area. They also tie into wider themes of sustainability and food security. Despite these benefits, urban planners, as the keepers of land and determiners of land use, have had little to do with community gardens. This thesis will explain the benefits of community gardens and detail planning policies throughout the world that support community gardens. Lastly, recommendations will be made on how the South Australian planning system can better support community gardens.

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Excerpts from the Metropolitan Agriculture website:

What is metropolitan agriculture?

Many farmers perceive the city as a threat to agriculture. The encroachment of urbanisation places pressure on farmland, while the great concentration of people in activities leads to stiff competition for water, nutrients and energy. In addition large groups of urban consumers are becoming ever more demanding about their food and the way in which it is produced. Equally, many urban dwellers have a romanticised idea of agriculture that no longer squares with present-day reality. The concern over animal diseases and environmentally-polluting activities means that many urban dwellers would prefer to see the exclusion of agricultural activities from their metropolitan environment.

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Design Trust Seeks Two Fellows for Urban Agriculture Project

The Design Trust is currently seeking two fellows for Five Borough Farm, a project to create New York’s first citywide plan for urban agriculture. For the project’s first phase, the Design Trust will select two fellows in the fields of metrics/evaluation and policy/sustainable development. Deadline to apply is February 3, 2010.

Five Borough Farm will partner New York City’s most successful urban farm – Brooklyn-based Added Value – with New York’s largest landowner – the City itself – to create the nation’s first citywide plan for urban agriculture.

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Photo by Dezeen.

Landgrab City

By Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson, José Esparza
December 2009 – January 2010
2009 Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism

From the China-lab site:

Landgrab City is an installation commissioned by the Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism and located on Shenzhenwan Avenue (Nanshan), a busy shopping district in the city of Shenzhen. Conceived as an experimental investigation into the full extent of Shenzhen’s spatial footprint, the installation is comprised of two parts: an aerial photograph of one of the city’s densest areas, home to approximately 4.5m people, and a plot of cultivated land divided into small lots. This land is a representation, at the same scale as the city itself, of the amount of territory necessary to provide the food consumed by the inhabitants of the portion of city sampled in the map, projected to 2027 (the year China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s leading economy). Each lot represents the extent of a single food group’s footprint: vegetables, cereals, fruit, pasture (for livestock), and so on.

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Investors see farms as way to grow Detroit

Acres of vacant land are eyed for urban agriculture under an ambitious plan that aims to turn the struggling Rust Belt city into a green mecca.

By P.J. Huffstutter
December 27, 2009
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Detroit – On the city’s east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.

Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.

This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland.

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