With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition.
Andrew Maynard Architects, a young Melbourne firm in their Urban Orchard 2 concept have veered away slightly from the purely conceptual and have proposed a more actionable concept inspired by the community markets of Cuba. Cuban Market Gardens first arose as a community response to a lack of food security after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Collectively they are able to produce 90% of its citizens fruits and vegetables without the use of transport, simultaneously creating urban green areas and neighborhood integration.
Nature has been working forever, what challenges us now is finding how it will keep working forever. Intelligence as brought us to a point at which we have at hand an array of technical solutions that can either deprive or provide us with comfortable, culturally rich living conditions. The way we arrange such devices will ultimately make all the difference. In this project we aim at recognising how natural cycles work and replicate them; as a vast strategy, as a way to organise space, and as a model to technical solutions that are incorporated.
America should increase its regional food consumption. Each metropolitan area, the researchers say, should obtain most of its nutrition from its own “foodshed,” a term akin to “watershed” meaning the area that naturally supplies its kitchens. Moreover, in a novel suggestion, the MIT and Columbia team says these local efforts should form a larger “Integrated Regional Foodshed” system, intended to lower the price and caloric content of food by lowering distances food must travel, from the farm to the dinner table.
One common lament about local food is that there simply isn’t enough of it. The best part about it — that it’s different in every foodshed, location to location — also means that the supply can have a hard time keeping up with demand. That’s especially true when it comes to larger, more dense urban centers, where locavores greatly outnumber farms and farmers.
The troubles of Detroit are well-publicized. Its economy is in free fall, people are streaming for the exits, it has the worst racial polarization and city-suburb divide in America, its government is feckless and corrupt (though I should hasten to add that new Mayor Bing seems like a basically good guy and we ought to give him a chance), and its civic boosters, even ones that are extremely knowledgeable, refuse to acknowledge the depth of the problems, instead ginning up stats and anecdotes to prove all is not so bad.
Gensler’s winning design, co-created with 4240 Architecture, transforms Chicago’s abandoned Bloomingdale rail line into a three mile long greenhouse and hydrogen generator that provides 10 acres of farm land year round, powers city schools, and creates a beacon for the city.
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat.
The competition resulted in more than 50 inquiries and 22 formal entries received from around the globe, including proposals centered on cities in India, Mexico, Israel, Tibet, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. “Many of the entries presented very credible and implementable solutions that could be utilized today to move our cities towards greater resiliency,” said Craig Applegath, founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.
Sometime in the last two years, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
For Carolyn Steel, it begs one of the great questions: How do you feed a city? We take food for granted, she says. We assume that it will magically always be there in our restaurants and supermarkets, but “it’s remarkable that cities get fed at all.”
We are as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were.
