Honey from the Hood
Now that I’ve seen JS’s backyard garden in Brooklyn and hear of plans for another JS’s Bronx garden plans, I’ve been turned on to the potential of urban agriculture. The NYTimes has an article on a profit-making one acre garden in North Philly to further whet that appetite. Of course, their profits are a pretty miserable $10K on $450K in revenue and a good deal of their produce is trucked in from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but they are bringing healthy food to low income areas, a vital contribution.
Curiously, the backyards all around JS’s place are all overgrown or strewn with trash. Presumably this is because tenants don’t feel they have the right to grow things (or lack the desire) and landlords feel no drive to keep up the gardens. It seems that planners should consider additional legislation granting a “right to garden”. If the landlord is not going to keep up the backyard, the tenants should have the right to form a collective that does.
In New Orleans, part of our rebuilding efforts include urban gardens and fresh food markets. Also, sun flowers to fight lead, etc.
I will share this site with our Environmental Division headed by Dr. Earthea Nance.
I just wrote a paper on UA in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. While I was doing my research I spoke to Vinit Mukhija at UCLA…he acknowledged the potential that UA had on cities (especially in LDCs) but said it was “unrealistic” to expect the practice to take off the right way since land will go to developments instead of tenure rights for urban farmers. Shame really, if that’s the case. UA could and should be an advantage for planners to exploit.
I’m sure overcrowding in LDCs will certainly prohibit most opportunities for urban agriculture. And such is the case in developed countries as well. Except for stretches of land in “undesirable” neighborhoods (like the neighborhood in Philadelphia), we should expect all land to go to development. And that inclination to use fertile land for real estate instead of farming is a major contributing factor in the current world food crisis (MRZine).
The opportunity I see is in taking advantage of zoning legislated open spaces. Too often these are paved over or ignored. But if an additional “right to garden” was included, it might be possible to foster more sustainable practices.
This is clearly much harder in LDC cities, where almost all available space is dedicated to shelter or transportation. But still, I understand that there is a great deal of small-scale UA in LDCs. One area of research that might be interesting is to look at who is doing the gardening in the less developed countries. I would be that it is the middle class, farming their slightly larger plots of land to offset other costs.
This summer I plan to keep a few records on my tiny garden patch (or back yard if I move!). I can use the records (with some adequately documented assumptions) to estimate the number of trucks we take off the road this summer, the amount of time and money we invested into the garden, and the amount of money we saved on our grocery bills.
In terms of finding the space to garden – I would contend even small patches can be promising. It is only the most densly built portions of American cities that have any problem; the typical suburbs and small towns across the country have ample yards (i.e. non-productive, pesticide-laden, labor-intensive, monocultures) that could be partially re-purposed for sizable food yields. In fact, I dream of a Suburban Revolution that involves more self-sufficient food production and a dramatic increase in bicycle transportation, to really draw on the hidden assets of a built environment that we would not be able to easily or quickly restructure at any rate.
Green roofing could provide good opportunities for new construction in denser areas, and even window boxes could provide some incremental benefit.
That sounds like a huge garden! check this one out:
http://www.ebeautywallpaper.com/files/Garden45.jpg