New Stories From ‘Urban Agriculture Notes’

“Grow Bag installations promote the use of vacant, neglected and undefined spaces in the inner city of London for the growing of vegetables.

“To see a working inner city allotment initiated by the What-if team in 2007, visit VACANT LOT on Chart Street N1. A formerly inaccessible and run-down plot of housing estate land has been transformed into a beautiful oasis of green. Seventy 1/2 tonne bags of soil have been arranged to form this allotment space. Within their individual plots, local residents are carefully tending a spectacular array of vegetables, salads, fruit and flowers. The VACANT LOT has become a space for growing food, socialising, picnics and BBQs.’

Link to the London Festival of Architecture event.

Link to the What If Vacant Lot site.

Photo by Kym Pokorny from her blog “Dig in with Kym”.

Article by Kym Pokorny
The Oregonian October 2007

From atop the Rocket building, there’s no doubt you’re smack in the middle of a city. Swing around in a circle and you’ll see the sun going down on Big Pink, the arching Fremont Bridge thronged with traffic, the new aerial tram creeping up the hill to OHSU and the green-and-white 7-UP building plunked down squarely to the east.

When you scrape your eyes off Portland’s skyline and focus on what’s going on just below eye level, you may begin to doubt your urban sureness. The usual flat-topped, tar-papered city rooftop has been overtaken by edible productiveness, food that ends up in front of customers at the new Rocket restaurant.

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New report shows edible cities are the future - Edible Cities, looks at examples of urban agriculture projects in cities and identifies a series of opportunities that other cities could be adopting.

The British group visited an inspiring range of projects in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York and noted a number of similarities to and differences from urban agriculture initiatives in London, including:

• A commercial element to many of the US projects, which is much less common in the UK;

• A more liberal situation in the US than in the UK to encourage composting, but less willingness than in the UK to include animals in some urban agriculture projects;

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Photo by Ismael Hautecoeur.

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Canadian Institute of Planners, and Canadian Society of Landscape Architects are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2008 National Urban Design Awards. Making the Edible Campus.

“With simple, direct layouts it aims to employ underused corners and spaces within the public realm to grow produce linked to a food collection and meal delivery system, creating a sustainable prototype that could potentially be expanded to other university campuses and across the city.

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“The tests were performed as part of the health department’s analysis of soil samples from all of Montreal’s nearly 100 community gardens. Beausoleil said about 30 gardens city-wide are contaminated. However, only 11 gardens have been closed - nine of them last year. The other affected gardens will be made public this year by the boroughs in which they are located, Beausoleil said.

“We can tell you right now, there is no worry for your health as a result of eating vegetables from this soil,” Monique Beausoleil, a toxicologist with the department — She explained that most of the contaminants were found in soil lower than the roots that most typical vegetables grow, so their absorption rate was very low.”

Montréal Gazette article, April 1, 2008.

Links to official tests and reports.

Montréal’s community gardening program - description, 14 page PDF.

“I currently have in my backyard, a facility that I designed and built myself, that is capable of producing about 2000 pounds of tilapia per year. That is over 38 pounds of fish per week!

“These are the 500 gallon pools; the big 5000 gallon tank and the 400 gallon ‘catch of the day’ tank are on the other side of the storage sheds. Check out the tomato plants on the left, the fruit bearing banana in the center, and the papaya right in front of it. What you don’t see are the red onions, the pineapple, the chilli peppers, the red and green bell peppers, the thyme, parsley, greek oregano, sugar cane, and cilantro plants. Outside I have Mandarin oranges, Valencia oranges, grapefruit, Japanese plum, cassava (yuca), and blackberry plants.”

Go to the web site of Edgar F. Sanchez, Orlando, Florida; owner of Tilapia Vita Farms.

IDRC Photo: Monica Rucki
Urban Farming in Accra

“While we in the urban West congratulate ourselves on innovations like the 100-Mile Diet and eating food raised close to home, much of Africa has been quietly surviving on the 100-metre version.

“Their produce isn’t trucked halfway across the continent. Some of it grows in greenspace hacked right out of city landscapes.

“That’s why you’ll see lettuce under power lines, and cassavas in the culverts.

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Paper produced for the Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria (4731 words)
Email: mansurdawaki@hotmail.com

“— a system of land use that is being practiced in metropolitan Kano will be considered. This system of land use that has been going on for centuries involves the use of stream water to irrigate land at the banks. Principal of these streams are Challawa, Getsi, Jakara and Salanta. The main objective is to produce fruits and vegetables for the consumption of the city dwellers. This system of land use has been called by Binns et al (2003), by the name urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA).”

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Article in the Globe and Mail
by Anne Roberts
November 29, 1979

“In an attempt to recreate that heyday of urban gardening (Victory Garden Era), a small group of practitioners decided to publish a monthly tabloid called City Farmer to propagate information on intensive cultivation methods that can triple the size of the harvest, winter gardening to extend the growing season, and keeping bees, chickens and rabbits to supply a wider variety of nutrients.”

See complete Globe and Mail article here.

“City Harvest is a business which uses urban space in Victoria, BC — yards or vacant land — to produce hand-tended, sustainably produced vegetables to market.”

“City Harvest is also responsible for a pending bylaw amendment in its home municipality of Oak Bay where agriculture – defined as the production and subsequent sale of produce – has been illegal. The municipality’s council has ratified the amendment which now welcomes urban agriculture, and the bylaw will be changed upon a public hearing on the issue in the near future.”

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