Category — Planning

“A few developing countries are way ahead of the US in terms promoting urban agriculture.”

By Rana Amirtahmasebi
World Bank Blog
2012-02-06

Excerpt:

In a country where, in some places, a burger barely costs a dollar while a bag of baby carrots is priced nearly thrice as much, there’s plenty of work to be done to make healthy foods affordable – and accessible. There is no denying that food insecurity (of which cheap and nutritionally inadequate junk food is a major manifestation) is a concern in the US. In fact, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) nearly 14.5 per cent Americans experienced food insecurity at some point in 2010.

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Urban Agriculture Integrated Strategy Infrastructure Concept.

New Monaco – a new 125-acre sustainably planned neighbourhood in the District of Peachland, British Columbia.

Community Gardens

New Monaco’s home and community program will be one of a kind and will include:

Patio farm/ greenhouse for individual homes who wish a personal experience

Community farm/ greenhouse for those who enjoy group work

Programs to advise home gardeners and offer public seminars

Community composting to minimize organic wastes and to enrich local soils

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Will garden plots adjacent to homes make up for the loss of Oahu’s prime agricultural lands?

It’s a worldwide phenomenon, and one that doesn’t bode well for Mother Earth. Has the “Market” become our lord and master?

By Jack Kelly
The Kona Story
Jan 25, 2012

Excerpt:

The Ho‘opili project on Oahu has come back before the Land Use Commission again. Developer D.H. Horton is seeking rezoning of 1,500 acres of prime agricultural land from Ag to Urban, to allow construction of an 11,750-home subdivision. D.R. Horton first brought the project to the LUC in 2009, but the request was denied because it lacked an adequate timeline for the development.

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Chickens are part of the neighborhood in a portion of Tarzana zoned for residential-agricultural use. A developer wants to build an elder-care facility in the area. Photo by Genaro Molina.

In one of the city’s few residential-agricultural zones, developers want to raze five homes to build a 37,500-square-foot elder-care facility. Neighbors are divided.

By Ann M. Simmons,
Los Angeles Times
January 23, 2012

Excerpt:

A chicken, a raven and a peacock greeted Lisa and Ron Cerda when they moved into their southeastern Tarzana neighborhood almost two decades ago. It was just the sort of bucolic reception the couple hoped for when they fled crowded West Los Angeles for one of the city’s rare residential-agricultural zones, a district that permits farming and the keeping of livestock.

Today, the Cerdas say their rustic neighborhood is threatened with extinction. Schools, synagogues and commercial businesses have crept into the district, despite dogged opposition from dozens of residents.

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Helps to Feed 200,000 People Every Month

By John Cueler
growingyourgreens
Jan 6, 2012

From Irvine Wiki:

The Incredible Edible Park a 7.5 acre community garden in Irvine and is located at 15058 Harvard Ave Irvine, CA, next to the meeting of Harvard Avenue and the Walnut Trail and Metrolink. Southern California Edison has an easement on the land and after years of being empty and overgrown with weeds it was decided to transform the area into a park.

The Incredible Edible Park is one of the last vestiges of agriculture in Irvine and features beans, broccoli, carrots, lettuce, oranges, potatoes and squash just to name a few. The crops grown and maintained by the community six days a week and up to 1,2000 volunteers a year. It is subsequently donated to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County to help feed thousands of hungry families.

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In September 2011, Brighton & Hove City Council became the first local authority in the UK to publish guidance notes encouraging developers to include food-growing space in new building schemes.

Horticulture Week
13 January 2012

Excerpt:

Included as a case study in the guidance notes is BioRegional Quintain and Crest Nicholson’s sustainable living development One Brighton. Completed in 2010, the pioneering One Planet Communities project was the first development in the city to incorporate on-site allotments in its plans.

Among a host of other sustainable-living features, the apartment roofs house 28 box gardens for residents to grow produce. With 172 apartments in the development, a waiting list has inevitably formed. But on-site green facilities manager Peter Commane says planning permission for further growing space has been secured on a neighbouring former brownfield site to help meet demand.

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Unlike urban leaders of yore, city and state officials today aren’t just using urban gardens as a kind of emergency welfare or a distraction from troubled political and economic times.

By Sarah Parsons
Good
January 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Cleveland has bulldozed 6,400 homes since 2005, and another 20,000 throughout Cuyahoga County are slated for demolition. But amid the bleak landscape, something more hopeful has been growing: urban gardens.

Cleveland has deployed Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds to replace these bulldozed homes with parks, expanded yards, and, most notably, community and market gardens. These urban farms produce food for local residents and establish a sense of stability during troubled times. While Cleveland always had a land bank to use for community improvement projects, “the accelerated demolition caused us to be more aggressive in looking at innovative ways to use the vacant land,” says Daryl Rush, director of Cleveland’s Department of Community Development.

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The Mayor’s Office and BRA are launching ‘kicking off the planning process’ with a Kickoff and Visioning Meeting, scheduled for January 30, at 6:00 p.m. at Suffolk University

Mayor Thomas M. Menino and the City of Boston want to establish an environment in which all of our citizens–particularly the most underserved–have direct access to locally produced fresh food, the ability to produce food for themselves, and access to education and knowledge about healthy eating.

Objectives for the Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Initiative include:

1. Increase access to affordable and healthy food, particularly for underserved communities.

2. Promote economic opportunity and greater self-sufficiency for people in need, including increasing the capacity of Boston residents and business and grow and distribute local and healthy food;

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Productive Neighborhoods

By Magdalena Celinska, Intern
In collaboration with Jason Henry & Rachael Meyer
The Berger Partnership
Summer Internship 2011
Seattle, WA
(Must see report. Mike)

Introduction:

Currently there are 103 urban food production sites in Seattle. These include urban farms, P-Patches, community gardens, and school gardens. From the 103 sites, however, only 10 are functioning as Urban Farms. While P-Patches, community gardens, and school gardens are an important component of Seattle’s food system, urban farms have the potential to make a large impact on the local food supply system. Within this report we focus on existing urban farming case studies to better understand how these farms function.

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In this Nov. 15, 2011 photo, Zach Pickens, of Brooklyn, N.Y., manager of Riverpark Farm, tends to his crops, in New York. Instead of allowing stalled projects to become eyesores, some developers are coming up with creative ways to use them temporarily until construction can begin. In New York City, where open space is a precious commodity, just about anything goes. Photo by Richard Drew.

“The bottom line is that even as the economy improves, we’re still going to be stuck with some stalled development that doesn’t actually work with the community.”

By Meghan Barr
Associated Press
December 04, 2011

Excerpt:

NEW YORK — A remnant of the Great Recession is hiding behind a paint-splattered wall in Chinatown, in an empty lot where a building was supposed to rise into the sky.

The plywood barely conceals the mess behind it: a pile of cement blocks and tangled metal and empty bottles of beer. It is, in short, exactly the sort of place that draws the ire of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

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See the book here.

By Barbara Damrosch
The Washington Post
November 9, 2011

Writers Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman own and operate Four Season Farm, an experimental market garden in Harborside, Maine. The farm produces vegetables year-round and has become a nationally recognized model of small-scale sustainable agriculture.

Excerpt:

Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, proposed “using the federal tax code to promote gardening through a $1,000/household garden stimulus package.” My own two cents’ worth came in an address at Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair titled “It’s a Cute Little Movement, but Can It Feed the World?” I’d been provoked by a flood of articles declaring that only large-scale, industrial, biotech farms can save our increasingly overpopulated planet. That small farms and gardens cannot do that has become a mantra, self-replicating its merry way to pseudo-truth.

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Protest at City Hall.

Actress Daryl Hannah – “The people from the South Central Farm community have already suffered the great loss of their farm, which was their source of food, their safe haven and their green space.”

Los Angeles Wave
Nov 15, 2011

Excerpts:

Horowitz forced the farmers off the land in 2006. The city provided an alternative community garden space at 111th Street and Avalon Boulevard on Department of Water and Power property.

The vote Tuesday allows Horowitz to sell the Lancer site to a collective of four clothing manufacturers, which Councilwoman Jan Perry said would create jobs — 300 construction jobs and 600 permanent jobs in the factories and office headquarters.

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San Diegans are getting excited as the urban agriculture ordinance works its way through the city’s long and winding government system

By Jill Richardson
Grist
Oct 29, 2011

Excerpt:

An advocacy group formed calling itself the 1 in 10 Coalition, in reference to their hope that — once the rules changed — one in 10 people in San Diego would be able to get at least some of their food locally. One of the group’s leaders was Parke Troutman, who had written a PhD dissertation on land-use politics in the city and county of San Diego. “[It] was a land-use issue, and only a few of us had experience with that,” he recalls.

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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.

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Forward by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

By Olivia Varley-Winter
City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development
Capital Growth
Oct 2011 – 59 pages

Excerpt from Executive Summary:

This report aims to:

show that many community food-growing groups and other urban agriculture projects provide community-based learning and training opportunities, and are an effective way to develop employability for people in general,

outline how such projects can help people who face difficulties in finding and keeping work in particular, and

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One of the proposed sites. 1.63 acres at 2518 Ridge Court, adjacent to the Douglas County United Way building.

14 sites totaling about 70 acres that could be used for the program

By Chad Lawhornon
Well Commons
October 31, 2011

Under her proposal, the city and county would “license” the property to the growers for a three-year period, although the city and the county would have broad authority to end the license. Horn said more discussion would be needed to determine what growers should pay the city and the county for use of the property.

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Developers want to replace one of the last small orchards in the county with single-family houses.

By Nicole Santa Cruz
Los Angeles Times
July 23, 2011

Excerpt:

The Sexlinger Orchard, which borders a park and sits across Santa Clara Avenue from a cemetery, has managed to remain untouched. But the orchard’s 250 trees, one of the last sizable groves in the city, could be gone by next year.

A real estate company wants to build 24 single-family homes on the land, but opponents with the Save Our Orchard Coalition say the project, currently in the review stage with the city, would destroy valuable property that could be preserved and used as an educational center and community garden.

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“There’s a lot of interest out there,” he said. “We’re very open to selling all the lots we have for useful purposes.” Otis Williams, deputy executive director with the St. Louis Development Corp.

By Georgina Gustin
St Louis Today
Nov 4, 2011

Excerpts:

The couple, both 35, have secured city approval to buy a derelict one-third-acre lot at 4539 Delmar Boulevard and start farming it next year. They plan to take on trainees who will eventually do the same thing on other properties throughout the city, transforming vacant eyesores while providing jobs and healthful produce in the process.

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Written by Heather Wooten, MCP (PHLP) and Amy Ackerman, JD (Consulting Attorney)
The National Policy and Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity (NPLAN)
October 2011 – 40 pages

Introduction – Excerpt

Communities can support, promote, and preserve urban agriculture through land use laws. Land use policies can assist in securing access to and ensuring the preservation of land for agricultural uses. Zoning regulations can ensure that agriculture occurs in suitable locations and under the proper conditions. But there is no one-size-fits-all urban agricultural land use policy. Urban areas vary in availability of land for agriculture, population density, soil suitability, and resident interest. This toolkit sets forth a framework and model language for urban agriculture land use policies that communities can tailor to their particular context and needs.

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Nevin Cohen on Hacking the Food System

By Nevin Cohen
FoodandTechconnect
Sept 25, 2011

Excerpt:

The future of urban agriculture is not vertical, nor even simply horizontal. It is distributed and networked throughout the city. In a growing number of cities, suburbs,and small towns, community groups and entrepreneurs have discovered innovative ways to harvest and grow food, using interconnected networks of relatively small plots of public and private land and shared resources. In the process, they are forging novel relationships among producers and consumers.

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