urban agriculture

Food & agriculture – Aug 14

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•Surge of investment in farming threatens £5trn catastrophe

•Tokyo’s "unmanned stores" – honor-system sheds where farmers sell their surplus produce

•Community kitchens and connectors developing to foster new food businesses 

•4-acre urban farm is made up of multiple residents’ gardens

•Too many urban beehives may do more harm than good, experts say

Food & agriculture – July 16

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• Congressional posturing: House Republicans (No Democrats) pass farm bill without food stamps •Can an urban food growing project cure a ‘sick city’? •Hipster hen dump: The issue of urban chicken abandonment •Small-scale producers key to attaining food security and ending hunger

Practicing Commons in Community Gardens: Urban Gardening as a Corrective for Homo Economicus

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“In these times of ever more blatant marketing of public space, the aspiration to plant potatoes precisely there – and without restricting entry – is nothing less than revolutionary,” writes Sabine Rohlf in her book review of Urban Gardening.1 Indeed, we can observe the return of gardens to the city everywhere and see it as an expression of a changing relationship between the public and the private. And it is not only this dominant differentiation in modern society that is increasingly becoming blurred; the differences between nature and society as well as that between city and countryside are fading as well, at least from the perspective of urban community gardeners.

Urban Ag: Taking steps toward political ecology

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Practitioners of urban agriculture have a lot to be proud of, including forming part of a “food movement,” which is increasing in size and influence. People are questioning food systems conventions and the dominant forms of food production (industrial farming) and distribution (globalized trade) are being opposed more and more by communities around the globe. Urban agriculturists—with their claim for a viable alternative to the broken food system—seem to have at this moment a certain cultural cachet.

Harvesting the city

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Urban agriculture has captured the imagination of many San Franciscans in recent years. Two dozen gardens and farms have sprouted across the city since 2008, and in 2011 the city changed its zoning code to permit urban agriculture in all neighborhoods. Interest in urban agriculture stems from its numerous benefits. City farming and gardening provides San Franciscans with vibrant greenspaces and recreation, education about fresh food and the effort it takes to produce it, cost savings and ecological benefits for the city, sites that help build community, and a potential source of modest economic development. But the city will not fully capture these benefits unless it takes advantage of the growing interest and energy behind the issue.

Power grows from Motor City soil

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On Dec. 10, 2012, hundreds of Detroiters lined up outside of The East Lake Baptist Church, braving the cold for the last of a series of public hearings on “the Hantz Woodlands deal.” At stake was the “largest speculative land sale in the city’s history”: 140 acres comprised of 1,500 lots of city land. Local multi-millionaire John Hantz wanted to turn this plot into a large timber farm that would be, as he promised, “Detroit’s saving grace.” But the hundreds of residents waiting outside had another idea of what saving the land could mean: They wanted the city to sell individual vacant plots at affordable prices for people to plant community gardens.

Food & agriculture – Nov 19

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•Peak Oil? What About Peak Food? A Conversation With Lester Brown 
•Revolution in Mexico City, one lettuce at a time 
•Chicago’s urban farm district could be the biggest in the nation 
•Massive deforestation risks turning Somalia into desert
•These guerrilla cartographers are mapping the edible world