Three cherry-picked projects exhibit the new frontier for food system planning and design.

Economic

Urban Farmers is a roof-top farm developer for cities. It was created in Zurich by a Swiss businessman and an aquaponics scientist at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. They don’t grow tomatoes but provide the system to do it. This system includes advanced hydroponics and aquaponics (fish production). Scientists and Swiss bankers collaborated to develop a franchise system that teaches a diverse customer base of stores, hotels, individual operators, and neighborhood communities how to create, manage, maintain, and make money off of a rooftop farm. It looks at rooftops as vacant real estate assets and a business opportunity, as well as locations to reduce the environmental impact of urban life and grow food. www.urbanfarmers.com

Social

21^st century Detroit has been victim to “poverty porn.” People view photos exhibiting its recent decline with the same intrigue as pictures of the Titanic. But in urban food system circles, Detroit is a celebrity. Much of this is due to efforts by urban “heel diggers” who still have hope. Earthworks Farm in Detroit is an extension of the Catholic Church’s Capuchin Soup Kitchen. Seven farms make up the complex over two city blocks. As Detroit de-populates, entire neighborhoods have become vacant. Open land for agriculture has become a viable and valuable land use. Although some product is sold at local markets, most of the food grown at the farm is used to feed people at the soup kitchen. In this fashion, Earthworks Farm has become a “working study is social justice.” They are working with the Department of Health to promote fresh food consumption. They have grown their activities by creating “value-add” products (canning, jams, pickling). Earthworks is making good use of vacant land, “recycling” blight into a resource that benefits those that live there. www.cskdetroit.org/index.php/EWG

Image courtesy of http://www.cskdetroit.org/EWG/.

Environmental

Haiti has the sad legacy of being intensely deforested. It also has the added complexity of a recent disaster that spurred a chaotic urban reorganization. However, it is not surprising that some of the most integral and effective innovation is happening in “developing-world countries” like Haiti. Places where people already think about overlapping vital processes like growing, processing, and eating food show that necessity is easily the mother of invention. The silver lining to the horrible 2010 earthquake is an intense focus on rebuilding and improving urbanized and urbanizing areas of Haiti. Food systems play a large role.

The Catholic Church bought a deforested, wind-swept, steep parcel in the peri-urban community of Titanyen, Haiti outside of Port-au-Prince. It was established as an orphanage for children, many of whom were orphaned by the earthquake. Father Charles Moise, the priest leading this effort, had a holistic vision of the orphanage and its function on the landscape and in the community. Small business ventures were started. An integrated water system was developed that utilized well water, captured rain water, and waste water. Although the property was steep with little vegetation to maintain rainfall on site, deeply grooved by erosion, and scoured by sea winds, Father Charles enlisted the help of a young Haitian agronomist who helped create and implement an agro-forestry plan that surrounded the orphanage and church buildings. The entire site was terraced simply to create water catchment zones. Edible, low-water plants, many of which are native or adapted to the region, are planted in layers that form protection for the plants and over time will help augment and maintain precious top-soil. Repairing the ecological function of the site with food crops shows how multiple goals can be achieved in projects that address complex issues.

Rachel Hill (rachel.hill@archtam.com) is a landscape designer in ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice. She worked for Verzone Woods Architects in Switzerland on the Food Urbanism Initiative (FUI). She helped develop a website that continues to grow as an “atlas” of urban food system projects, broken down into their functional components: www.foodurbanism.org.

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Food systems as part of our urban environments are nothing new. It is only in the last 100 or so years of city habitation that we’ve moved many parts of the process out of our cities and sterilized it such that children grow up not understanding that milk comes from cows, or the nitty gritty that goes into meat consumption. Cities built on the networks that gave us sustenance were named for them. Riverside streets in London are named after grains that arrived on boats from the agricultural fields. Butcher shops sat on the edges of cities where animals arrived from farms and fields, forming meat districts. (Hungry City – Carolyn Steel)

Courtesy of http://gastronomyspace.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/a-manifesto-how-food-shapes-our-cities-carolyn-steel/

Industrial farming and distribution changed much of that.

Fortunately there is an emergence of urban food “awareness” and an effort to reintegrate the food system into urban environments. New interest in the urban food process adds to the typical production chain that involves farms, distribution, processing, packaging, sales, and consumption. It reveals and recognizes a part of the chain that has always been vital but rarely talked about – waste and decomposition. And it adds social functions to this seemingly linear chain with loops that link and weave food into other urban functions like education and recreation.

Whereas the (re)genesis of urban agriculture in the 20^th century came from utopian and altruistic efforts to feed people (for example, Victory gardens during World War II, farming coops in intentional communities, and efforts by Catholic churches in blighted urban areas like Detroit), it quickly moved into a realm of fad and popularity. Don’t get me wrong – this is critical for warming the masses to what is ultimately a messy process. A friend in a ritzy high-rise in Portland, Oregon, was allowed just recently to put tomato plants on her publicly-viewed veranda. Realizing that rooftop gardens can add considerable real estate value, landscape architects are developing a new specialty when working with urban developers. Real estate agents now put the proximity to community gardens on their listings, and farm-to-fork grocery stores have become neighborhood catalysts.

Courtesy of http://www.clemson.edu/extension/hgic/hot_topics/2009/02victory_gardens.html

It is now time to look past the individual objects that make up food systems. One of the most compelling and motivating aspects of urban food systems to designers and planners is how these are being woven back into all the other interconnected systems within cities. We are examining how the different objects (gardens, fields, factories, stores, restaurants, compost bins) function together with elements of the city (stormwater, HVAC condensate, nutrient flows, open space, left-over space).

These systems are being understood and designed as organisms, nourished by the “big three” factors that underpin our understanding of sustainable development – economy, environment, society. They are relevant and responsive to modern needs instead of recreating a nostalgic agricultural past. They capitalize on modern modes of production, marketing, technology, sales, and consumption. They re-purpose old ways of doing things and aging infrastructure. A successful example is Eli’s Vinegar Factory in New York City, which put a small rooftop farm and grocery store in an old vinegar factory, creating opportunities to participate in and expose multiple parts of the urban food process.

Food system planning and design is happening at a spatial level, in how we organize and design spaces. It is also happening at an organizational and policy level, making possible or even incentivizing these processes. The landscape composition of house yards in Portland, Denver, Boston, Madison, and San Francisco (among others) now mix chicken coops together with plastic children’s slides and garden gnomes. Legally.

Although the good, old community garden may have been the catalyst for the expansion of the entire network in cities (community comes together to grow a garden that feeds its members, often in situ, while participating in communal goals and shared resources), the next phase of the design and planning of urban food systems will take on a more comprehensive span. It will consider and affect the larger physical urban context. It will more fully blend modern modes and innovations into its functioning. Financial fitness and creativity will drive it.

Look out for my next post to come shortly.

Rachel Hill (rachel.hill@archtam.com) is a landscape designer in ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice. She worked for Verzone Woods Architects in Switzerland on the Food Urbanism Initiative (FUI). She helped develop a website that continues to grow as an “atlas” of urban food system projects, broken down into their functional components: www.foodurbanism.org.

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