Category — Policy

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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On a visit to King’s Cross, in London, John Denham and Hilary Benn saw the way in which local charity Global Generation is using a temporary lease to create portable allotments in a series of construction skips, located on one of the capital’s largest regeneration schemes

Grow your own revolution gets major land boost

Communities and Local Government
Great Britain
3 March, 2010

Plans to bring under-used and uncared for land back into use so that local communities and keen would-be fruit and vegetable growers have somewhere to get digging, were announced today by Communities Secretary John Denham and Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.

There is a huge interest in ‘growing your own’ with people wanting to get more in touch with where their food comes from, as well as staying active and spending more time outdoors.

About 300,000 gardeners in England already have allotments but demand still outstrips supply and the Government is therefore announcing new ways of meeting people’s desire to dig in.

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Reclaiming our agrarian heritage

By K. Rashid Nuri
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
March 5, 2010

In his State of the Union address, President Obama enumerated ongoing problems requiring his attention: health care, the economy, job creation, environmental issues and lack of renewable fuels. In doing so, he suggested that increasing agricultural exports would help solve some of these problems.

While export agriculture might indeed help some corporations, it is unlikely to resolve issues directly affecting the public. One thing that would, however, is urban agriculture. While not a panacea, urban agriculture can allay many of the concerns mentioned by the president, and it can do so in several critical ways.

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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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Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

TED Talk
February 2010

Transcript:

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat.

My name’s Jamie Oliver. I’m 34 years old. I’m from Essex in England and for the last seven years I’ve worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef; I don’t have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education.

I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you’re at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.

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GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that connects you to the causes and countries you care about. You select the projects you want to support, make a tax-deductible contribution, and get regular progress updates – so you can see your impact.

Organic Urban Agriculture in Quito, Ecuador

If we can plant orchards, build greenhouses and wormeries, buy seedlings, and train people though workshops, we can enable people to provide for and feed themselves and their children.

26% of Ecuador’s children under 5 suffer from malnourishment. Since 2000, the cost of food in Ecuador increased dramatically. It’s cheaper to buy a Peruvian potato than to produce it.

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FoodNYC – A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer
February 2010

GOAL: Establish urban food production as a priority in New York City for personal, community, or commercial use by the year 2030

Recommendations:

1. Assess Land Availability and Suitability for Urban Agriculture:

The New York City Council should pass legislation mandating that City agencies conduct an annual assessment of City-owned property and nominate suitable sites for urban agriculture. This effort is similar to the “Diggable City” project in Portland, Oregon that integrated urban agriculture into planning and policymaking. Based on a preliminary analysis of data provided by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in 2008, there are 454 total vacant lots above 110th Street in Manhattan. Of those, over 100 are owned by the City and many have no development plans. In 2008, the Manhattan Borough President’s office also identified significant amounts of open land on New York City Housing Authority properties which should be evaluated as possible garden sites. Where appropriate and following a public review process,
City and State parkland should also be considered for urban agriculture.

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Grow Your Own

By Heather Gray and K. Rashid Nuri
Counterpunch – “America’s Best Political Newsletter”
Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
February 17, 2010

Excerpt:

It seems everyone is questioning the implications of the most recent economic downturn. Then, of course, we’ve seen corporate America reap the benefits of its own disgrace with our tax dollars and, therefore, at the expense of all of us. Corporate America along with government support just keeps hitting us over the head. It’s too much! While, there’s been criticism of Wall Street and huge bonuses to the likes of AIG, one sector that’s not been the focus of attention lately is corporate agribusiness and it also should be intensely scrutinized. It seems, however, we’ve gone through a transition economically but we’re beginning to see some changes locally that are encouraging, perhaps partly in response to all this. The interest in urban agriculture and more attention to food issues in America is a case in point and a counterpoint to corporate agribusiness.

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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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Tara Kolla examines a seedling container, amid other vegetable seedlings that will be planted this spring in the garden at her home in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010. Like many eco-minded gardeners, Kolla planted seeds, only to find that her garden violated local zoning laws and alienated her neighbors. – AP Photo

Urban farmers fight nationwide to sow green biz

By Raquel Maria Dillon
Feb 5, 2010
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES – Tara Kolla fancied herself a green thumb-turned-green businesswoman when she planted an organic flower plot in her yard and sold poppies, sweet peas and zinnias at the local farmers market. For her neighbors, it was an eyesore.

Where Kolla saw her efforts as creating a lush sanctuary, her neighbors witnessed dusty pots, steaming compost, flies and a funky aroma on their tiny cul-de-sac in Los Angeles. They complained to zoning officials — and prevailed.

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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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Promoting community agriculture efforts and increased access to locally grown food

“2010: The Year of Urban Agriculture” was organized by Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Department of Planning and Development, and the Seattle City Council.

The site includes:

City Initiatives & Programs:

Street Use Permits: Gardening in Planting Strips
Seattle’s P-Patch Program
What’s new at P-Patch
P-Patch Program Evaluation (2009)
Seattle’s Market Gardening program

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Kampala City Council LCV Production and Marketing Sectoral Committee on an Agricultural field visit (2008)

By Ssembalirwa Edward (Senior Fisheries officer)
Email: ssembalirwa@yahoo.com
December 2008

Excerpts:

Profile of the urban agriculture sector in Kampala City

Urban Agriculture in Kampala city is a constituent sector of Kampala City Council under the Department of Production, Marketing and Environment.
The sector is comprised of 5 sub sectors namely.

1. Crop Production and Extension services
2. Animal Production and Extension services
3. Fisheries and Aquaculture Production and extension services
4. Commercial Services, Trade and Cooperatives
5. Environment and Natural Resources

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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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The Urban Agriculture Revolution

By Jason F. McLennan
Trim Tab – Cascadia’s magazine for transformative people and design
Winter 2009/2010

Excerpt:

As urban and suburban agriculture gains momentum, it will need oversite. One possible solution would be to establish “Municipal Farmers’ or Urban Farm Czars in every community just like there are city planners or police commissioners. These officials would rank high in local government, reporting straight to the mayor or city manager, and have direct access to all key municipal departments.

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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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Started in 1979, Nottingham urban farm needs help

The Petition

Stonebridge City Farm being pressured by the city council to give up of 10% of the farms land as a condition of renewing the lease for the farm. The council wants the land to be used by the farms neighbours to park cars in front of their houses.

After a “consultation” with 31 neighbours next to the farm it is said that 15 neighbours wanted this parking scheme. Were the 10,000 visitors to the farm last year consulted? It appears not.

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Rancho Cordova eyes ordinance on pot growing

By Loretta Kalb
The Sacramento Bee
Jan. 10, 2010

When the persistent “skunk” smell of marijuana became too much for Linda Kurtz, she did what she said she had to do.

She went to Rancho Cordova City Hall and asked the City Council to protect her from the smell coming from her neighbor’s backyard marijuana plants.

In so doing, she brought the city to the forefront of the next big issue facing marijuana producers and municipal regulators in California.

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The government plans a landbank to pinpoint unused plots where communities can grow their own food. Photograph: David Levene

Ministers consider temporary allotments scheme?Fruit and veg plots part of strategy to cut reliance on imports

By James Meikle
guardian.co.uk,
4 January 2010

The government plans to launch a “grow your own” revolution by encouraging people to set up temporary allotments or community gardens on land awaiting development or other permanent use.

It aims to develop a “meanwhile” lease to formalise such arrangements between landowners and voluntary groups and is considering establishing a “land bank” to broker better links and ensure plots are not left idle.

Ministers believe the move could foster community spirit and skills as well as improve physical and mental health.

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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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