![]()
![]()
An introduction
Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen
Food is a sustaining and enduring necessity. Yet among the basic essentials for life – air, water, shelter, and food – only food has been absent over the years as a focus of serious professional planning interest. This is a puzzling omission because, as a discipline, planning marks its distinctiveness by being comprehensive in scope and attentive to the temporal dimensions and spatial interconnections among important facets of community life.
(APA 2007)
In 2007, a US-American team of urban planners led by Jerry Kaufman formulated this now familiar pivotal thought as part of their substantial work on relationships between the food system of an urban entity, its spatial design and development planning. Published and adopted by the American Planning Association (APA), the resulting Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning is widely accepted as marking the beginning of a new era which had been carefully and tirelessly prepared for by its protagonists over many years: food has finally entered the public and professional consciousness to the extent that the systematic designing and planning of food-related urban spaces can begin.
This does not mean that issues around urban food production, distribution, retailing, consumption and waste recycling had not been discussed before. Neither does it mean that the design professions were unaware of the influence food-related issues can have on product, space, event or process design or had not worked with these issues. Both subjects – let’s bundle them under the headings ‘urban food system’ and ‘designing for Urban Agriculture’ – had been investigated for between 20 and 30 years by a variety of players worldwide. But, the APA report took this early activist-like work to a new level: it urged its legislative recognition, thereby paving the way for legally grounded, longer term, better financed, environmentally conscious and designed spatial responses at urban, rural and regional levels addressing one overriding issue: feeding people that live in cities. Which is half of the world’s population (WHO 2012).
One might ask what the significance of these points – and hence this entire book – is for the other half of the world’s population; those that live in rural areas. Additionally, the frame of reference of this book and of this subject area as contextualised by the APA report concentrates on the Global North, whilst the main urban population growth is happening in the developing countries of the Global South (WHO 2012). Who and what are we aiming for with this work?
Durable change will occur through small steps, but steps that thoroughly engage the imagination of all (or most) people for a fair, healthy and desirable future. Such durable change is needed everywhere, and the imagination of a fair future is no further developed in the Global North than it is in the Global South, and no more in cities than in villages. The challenge is to start. Addressing the problems which one is a part of is one way of starting. It may indeed only produce a small step, a small change, but – for us – these are the problems that surround us, concern us and hence require our attention.
Nowadays there is tangible evidence emerging of insights that urban food-growing protagonists intuitively always spoke about, for example: urban agriculture will augment the appreciation of rural agriculture (we speak of urban–rural linkages); it will encourage people to reward the effort that goes into producing good fresh or exotic food (think farmers’ markets or fair trade); it will change the way we live in our cities (we speak of space production, participation and lifestyle choices). With our type of work, we may not immediately solve the problems of rural populations in the Global North or South, but we can create practical and conceptual conditions that – in small steps – contribute to changing the unsustainable way cities in the Global North feed themselves today. Achieving this, would really change a great deal…
In this first part of the book, we would like to highlight some of the theoretical discourses which provide the current academic context for work on productive urban landscapes and urban agriculture and therefore also of our work on the CPUL City concept. It may be worth noting that most of these ‘theoretical discourses’ are actually very practical, reflecting the fact that the generation of knowledge in this subject area often happens via the experiment, the empirical and its subsequent observation and evaluation.
Urban Agriculture on the map
It is undeniable that urban agriculture practice and discourse have increased dramatically over the last ten or so years. On a practical level, the frequent first scepticism has usually converted into passive acceptance with the next step being to turn this into active support, which, in many cases, has already started. At the same time, on an academic level, the relationship between urban agriculture and local urban food systems has become much clearer, and their interdependencies with peri-urban and regional supply and demand have been articulated in much greater detail. The question now is how, in the future, urban agriculture should sit on the map, literally spatially, but equally in terms of environmental, social and economic durability.
In the chapter Growth and challenges since 2005, we are taking stock, trying to summarise how and why urban agriculture has moved from a marginal subject to the centre of attention in a comparatively short time and on a global scale. The chapter loosely concentrates on the book’s three case study countries – Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA – and it starts its observations around 2005, the publication year of our book CPULs Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes. The following chapter The CPUL City concept then looks specifically at the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape work as an example for how the subject area has been embedded into the international urban design discourse.
Whilst, at the end, the CPUL work focuses on the urban and architectural design implications of urban agriculture, Kevin Morgan, who researches innovations in governance and development, places a goal post by highlighting in his chapter The new urban foodscape: Planning, politics and power the necessity for supportive food policy and its incorporation specifically into municipal planning in order to facilitate any substantial urban food-growing activities. He describes examples of first moves in this direction and concludes that a successful alliance between the local state and its civil society could ‘begin to foster rather than frustrate ecological integrity, public health and social justice’.
Joe Nasr, June Komisar and Mark Gorgolewski reinforce in their chapter Urban Agriculture as ordinary urban practice: Trends and lessons the need for broader strategic action when arguing that there is nowadays so much evidence of interest in and practice of urban agriculture that it has become a ‘commonly recognized activity within the urban context’. The architect authors suggest a spatial typology based on a variety of case studies underpinning their contention that urban agriculture has started to transform ‘from a theoretical concept with occasional, exceptional, experimental manifestations to a common phenomenon’.
Utilitarian Dreams
The year 2005 marked for us the beginning of a further working direction after about seven years of data collection and of architectural and urban design studies as contributed to the urban design discourse around this time. We began to broaden our design research into the qualitative aspects of urban agriculture space by discussing its visual and social perception with various artists, curators and filmmakers. British artist Tom Phillips devised the name ‘Utilitarian Dreams’ for a collaborative exhibition between Cuban and British architects and artists held in Brighton at the end of 2005 (UoB 2006). The interplay between the poetics of a working landscape and the hands-on necessities for its success are still – and always have been – the drivers for our work.
The chapter Food growing in urban landscapes therefore describes the spatial qualities that we, as architects, envisage for productive urban landscapes and that we see many others envisaging too, as these spaces are starting to emerge in cities around us. In the following chapter, Productive life in the citiy, we discuss emerging economic and socio-cultural characteristics of CPUL-City-like space during the early stages of its integration into European and North American cities. The chapter also addresses the rising desire of those involved with urban development and governance to find ways of measuring urban agriculture’s social and environmental benefits so as to aid and underpin policy development supporting sustainable and healthy food plans.
Yrjö Haila’s chapter The city in the fabric of eco-social interdependence reinforces yet another way of thinking about the utilitarian and the dream. Haila, a philosopher and environmental policy researcher, sees contemporary cities as part of a historic environmental continuum and understands them as ‘ecological formations in a metabolic or physiological sense’ and believes that as such ‘they create novel types of ecological communities’ with human action being ‘an integral element in the dynamics of such communities’. Much in the ‘Utilitarian Dreams’ sense, he concludes that ‘not every urbanite needs to become a gardener, but every urbanite needs food’.
In her chapter, Sueños Utilitarios: La Habana, Yuneikys Villalonga questions how ‘the landscape and the city update, in response to the new realities and necessities of society’. Villalonga, curator of the second part of the ‘Utilitarian Dreams’ project, a multidisciplinary exhibition in the Cuban capital in 2006, describes the different interpretations of productive urban landscapes by the participating artists and architects. These highlight the closeness of the utilitarian to the dreamlike, of the poetic to the prosaic, of the landscapes in our imagination to those that can be created in our cities in the future. But, as Villalonga says, ‘beyond the cities referred to, “Utilitarian Dreams” reflects upon a global urban awareness, which concerns every place and everyone’.
Environmental impact and Urban Agriculture
In our 2005 CPUL book, we discussed the environmental impact of industrialised food production in an overarching way and, from a sustainability, suggested urban agriculture as part of an alternative solution. Now with the increased practical and academic experience of about ten years, we can re-discuss urban agriculture in a similarly overarching way. The advantage of the fast and sometimes overwhelming increase in urban agriculture activity in the Global North now allows us to take stock for the first time, both of its quantifiable and qualitative aspects. Is it possible to practically assess urban agriculture’s environmental impact on the city, or the other way round; the city’s impact on urban agriculture?
The two chapters Diversity and Water, soil and air aim to take account of this duality: whilst the former attempts to scope out the mostly positive environmental impact urban agriculture can have on urban diversity in a wide sense, the latter addresses the challenges urban agriculture faces when its practices could have negative results. The chapter Diversity argues that urban agriculture responds to more than concerns about food miles and relates it to issues such as biodiversity, local diversity or diverse food cultures and open space uses. Water, soil and air presents a review of concerns about the impact of pollution on urban agriculture, especially on soil, followed by a section on alternatives to soil as a growing medium.
In her chapter Economies of scale: Urban Agriculture and densification, Gillean Denny argues that different scales of food production need to be taken into account when discussing the potential environmental impact of urban agriculture. Through a life-cycle analysis of specific fruit and vegetables, Denny, an architect, can show how, ‘through increasing local opportunity for production and procurement, emissions for specific produce can be reduced across the entire life of the produce’. She concludes that ‘in the end, fresh produce emissions reveal that it is not only what we eat, but also how it is procured that will make the greatest difference in this interconnected food world’.
Mikey Tomkins, an urban beekeeper and urban agriculture researcher, discusses in his chapter Bricks and nectar: Urban beekeeping with specific reference to London the environmental importance of the honeybee for all human life and the ability of urban agriculture to help retain bees in cities. According to Tomkins, ‘urban beekeeping is largely a cultural practice’ – hence of second nature – and his chapter lays out its ‘interconnecting components’ relating them to spatial concerns. Bees, so Tomkins argues, ‘already think about landscape as continuous, extending our concept of the CPUL as essential infrastructure beyond superstructure and into the atmosphere that ultimately connects us all’.
Green theory in practice and urban design
As mentioned earlier, urban agriculture is a primarily practical movement. Theoretical ideas about ‘green’ lifestyles, sustainable urban or architectural design, and participatory uses of urban space or local food production are immediately mirrored in actual projects and prototypes. Protagonists of these types of contemporary urban space production draw from socio-cultural, ecological or design history and theory and, at the same time, theorists learn from the practical experience of commercial or communal food-growing projects.
The first two chapters developing this direction of thought look more closely at Germany and the United Kingdom to explain their current state of urban agriculture and the food-related interdependencies f...
