Urban Farming

Monika Hermann and I met with Stacey Murphy from bk Farmyards last week – really great to make contact with somebody who’s been testing some of the same ideas we’ve been talking about.  A few takeaways:

Community Gardens vs Urban Agriculture: I was aware of the long history of the community garden movement in NYC, and suspected that it would make landlords leery of allowing any sort of gardening activity on their property, for fear of losing control of it.  Murphy mentioned that she had been trying to make a clearer distinction between what she was doing (agriculture) as apart from the history of the gardening movement.  Urban farmers might try to work with landowners, a sort of Rem Koolhaas approach to land use, fitting in where possible and focussing on food crops  – their goals and intentions are different from gardeners, who seek community control in perpetuity for the land to justify their sweat equity and to provide a lasting resource for the surrounding community.

Distributed urban farming vs “Vertical” farms: What a lot of us are talking about is how to re-integrate the life-cycles inherent in food production in urban life.  Rather than everything being done “away” – food production, preparation and waste disposal, we bring these activities back into focus.  This requires an entire ecosystem – urban agriculture,  slow food, local composting.  I think if you remove any of these pieces from the local equation and the energy spent on logistics grows exponentially.  What Gap Gardens could do is to provide the seed for a local ecology – a little closed loop of food production, consumption and waste management.

I think its hard for urban dwellers isolated from farm culture to realize that a lot of farming has become industrialized, with all the problems associated with industrialization: waste management, labor exploitation, monocultures, chemical use, distribution problems.  I have not seen a convincing argument as to how concentration in the vertical dimension would be able to overcome the challenges already present in industrialized farming.

I see the vertical farming idea as a bit of pre-millenial Bucky Fuller utopianism:  if we could only make our systems ultimately efficient,  all of our societal problems would be solved.

I’m on a landscape architecture jury at Rutgers today (Brian Osborn’s studio) addressing urban agriculture – should be fun!

How can I help?

Gap Gardens is currently looking for pilot sites in Brooklyn.  If you know of an empty lot near you with a little soil and good sunlight, especially if you know how to contact the owner, please let us know – we’d be glad to contact them, or work with you to make contact.

This Fall we’ll be looking for volunteers to help with soil testing and preparing the ground for Spring.

If you would like to help out with Gap Gardens, please email us: gapgardens[at]lesbetes.com

A Little Background…

My wife and I moved to 22nd Street in Brooklyn a little over a year ago, attracted by cheaper rents but pleasantly surprised by the little corner of the world that we found.  The neighbourhood is now are home, and we’ve added our young son to the family.  Perhaps because of him, I’ve become more acutely aware of the world that he’s spending his first years in.

Last Winter, as the throes of economic crisis began to solidify into an acute ache in the world, the bursting of the housing bubble was what brought the rest of the countries problems crashing into our little world.  Our landlord lost his shirt in other real estate deals, and sold our house to his lawyer.  Our neighbours across the street came to live downstairs for a short while, driven out of their home by shoddy renovations on the house next door which destabilized their foundations.  They moved on  a few months later, though their house still remains empty.  I lost my job at an architecture firm in the City, and began to spend more time in our new neighbourhood.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon, which I came to realize was an indicator for a whole tangled mess of problems.  On snowy days, as I walked to the subway I could tell which houses were unoccupied by the ice and snow that collected unshoveled on the walk in front of them.  Walking down the hill towards 4th avenue, this became apparent as a pattern of gaps in the fabric of the neighbourhood.  Here a stalled renovation, the waterproofing flapping in the wind around a front door without any stairs leading to it.  There a luxury condominium, largely finished but completely dark at night, the furniture of the model apartment still visible through the curtain-less floor-to-ceiling windows.  The only indication of activity was that the tickets from the DEP appeared and disappeared from the front doors.  Worse were the vacant lots, precious open space waiting in stasis for the economy to get back onto its feet.

This was a problem bigger than gentrification – more like walking across a floor with missing or dodgy floorboards.  We worried as the financial crisis deepened that empty projects would get torched by their owners, desperate to recoup something from their investment.

As the weather warmed, we planted a garden in our backyard and took solace in the effortless inevitability of sprouting seeds and new growth.  Our little 4′x8′ plot, uncovered from the woodchips and gravel in the backyard and fueled by an unusually wet Spring, exceeded our wildest expectations this summer. The tomatoes and peas spreading greedily over the back wall of our yard, so that individual plants merged into a single tangled wall of greenery.  With relatively little effort and attention, our tame little yard had become a productive jungle.  It was in that garden that I found the beginnings of Gap Gardens.

What if a little bit of care and attention could be injected into those weedy lots?  Could a little nurturing and attention heal the holes in our neighbourhood, at least until something more permanent could take root?