Urban Agriculture Research Document

UR BAN

AGRI CULTURE An analysis of systems, urban, and industrial design Jacqueline Bush

TABLE OF CONTENTS

04 Intro 08 Existing Systems 09 Hydroponics 10 Vertical Farms 11 Raised Bed 12 Rooftop 13 Guerrilla

14 Case Studies

15 Victory Gardens 16 Detroit 18 Montreal 19 Paris 20 Vancouver

22 Conclusion 24 Appendices 40 Bibliography

INTRO DUCTTION

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The current model for agricultural practices are unsustainable. Millions of people rely on huge tracts of clear-cut forest land devoted to monoculture crops that require synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides—the runoff of which then contaminates our water— grown mostly to feed factory farmed meat that is then transported hundred to miles to reach our tables1. As the population continues to grow—a predicted 9.6 billion people will inhabit Earth by the year 20502—it is obvious that our current methods are in dire need of reevaluation. With most of the global population living in cities, the conversion of urban landscapes into productive agricultural areas has the potential to ensure food security and sustainability for literally billions of people. The fact is, urban agriculture is increasingly becoming synonymous with survival3. Our current food system is fundamentally flawed in that it is based on a centralized industrial complex that is then intended to distribute to every far-flung community the world-over. Approached from the same mindset of central production and distribution, urban agriculture will encounter the same pitfalls of food insecurity and social disparity as our current conventional methods4. The key to a new agricultural model’s success is the democratization of food production, through many small-scale initiatives. By enabling communities to create their own networks through thoughtful urban and industrial design, we are designing-in the flexibility and customization that a sustainable food system requires to address the diverse needs of various populations.

My interest in environmentalism has been a lifelong pursuit in sorting out my place to make a difference. I’ve always been a Do-It-Yourselfer, and my passion for design is rooted in the same impulse as my activism: an itch to dissect and rebuild the world around me. For as long as there have been environment clubs to join, I’ve been an eager member, going all the way back to our fifth grade Green Committee. Moving through the education system, my involvement got more elaborate, eventually leading me to the Dawson Rooftop Gardens Project.

1 2 3 4

Fox pg 21-28, 2011 UN DESA, 2013 Fox, pg 29 Cox, 2016

There, I interned for a summer with responsibilities ranging from garden maintenance and planning, to planter building, to creating seed saving and pest control documents. This was before I formally entered design training, but looking back on the experience, design could have made the work more thoughtful and effective. Coming at this project from a designer’s perspective could have influenced the approach of the entire garden’s layout and management into a more cohesive and streamlined process. As it stood, the garden was a formative experience and introduced me first hand to the capabilities of urban agriculture as a builder of community and a viable producer of local food. The vegetables we grew were sold at a weekly harvest market to members of the Dawson community at prices competitive with the local supermarket.

I am a firm believer in design’s ability to effect positive change, particularly when viewed from a systems approach. As designers in a world of increasingly strained resources, we must examine our roles as creators of the systems and cultures in which we live. We are positioned with the power to create and communicate on a scale that is unattainable in other domains, and with that power comes the responsibility to design for a better and more sustainable world. In terms of urban agriculture, design has a multitude of opportunity to transform our cities into living and livable ecosystems. By growing in biodiverse, accessible locations, we allow for communities to reconnect with nature and domestic skills, to democratize food production.

In this document, I intend to explore the potential of urban agriculture as a design solution to the litany of crises that the world currently faces.

For the purposes of this project, I am limiting the scope of urban agriculture to plant farming, as animal agriculture presents a host of other factors that make it less feasible in an urban context, and an overall less efficient and sustainable use of resources. First, I will explore the realm of urban planning and the land-use restrictions that limit how agriculture could be introduced into urban environments. Next, a brief summary of existing urban farming systems and designs. Finally, this document will examine a variety of case studies from cities around the world, responding to current projects being implemented in each.

ZONING & URBAN DESIGN

Zoning in urban planning began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a way to mitigate the public health issues associated with mass urbanization and a burgeoning industrial sector. By segregating industrial and residential areas, city planners hoped to limit the spread of illness in the newly crowded city centers. Over time, however, zoning has become more focused on protecting property values than ensuring public safety1. The practical impacts of zoning ordinances are more nuanced, as the laws often reflect and reinforce social power structures, thereby further marginalizing already vulnerable people. Food security becomes a major issue for poor and minority neighbourhoods when their access to grocery stores is limited, yet liquor stores and fast food are abundant2.

Another regrettable impact of early zoning laws was the establishment of a firm distinction between urban and rural, city and farm.

Whereas ancient city-states relied heavily on urban agriculture to nourish their populations, the modern city’s attitude was one of having transcended the need to cultivate the land3.

Residential zones, with yards and lawns ripe for cultivation, are often the most restricted in use, meaning that urban farming operations are held back by outdated zoning codes from a century ago. The underlying attitude of these codes is that residential neighbourhoods are for leisure and ornament, while business and production are for their own spaces.

1 2 3 4 5

Planning and Zoning, 2013 Planning and Zoning, 2013 Fox, 2011 pg 18 Miner, 2010 “Urban Design Creates Green, Sustainable Places,� n.d.

6 Planning and Zoning, 2013 7 Jacobs & Appleyard, 1987

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Early urban planners didn’t anticipate food production being an urban activity at all, making urban agriculture schemes a legal grey area. Edible gardens themselves, while largely permitted, often become illegal when the vegetables change hands in exchange for money. This technically makes them out-door home businesses, which fall outside the use regulations for most residential zones4. This is a problem for urban farms, however, because a well-designed backyard farm will produce far more than a single family could ever consume, and startup and maintenance costs are substantial. If a single edible garden could feed five or six families, why shouldn’t these neighbouring families pitch in to cover some of the costs in exchange for fresh produce? Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes are a popular existing subscription service for receiving fresh vegetables from local (rural) farmers, but a neighbourhood-scale CSA would, in most cases, be deemed illegal.

Mixed-use zoning and thoughtful urban design present a potential solution to the complications of outdated and rigid urban planning policies. The move toward more sustainable, happier cities is gaining momentum world-wide; these cities are high-density, walk- and bike-able, with access to a variety of services and uses integrated together with clean and renewable energy5. While changing the legal parameters of a zone to allow other activities is a legislative nightmare, re-zoning an area into a more flexible mixed-use code is much more feasible5. In Toward an Urban Design Manifesto, Allan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard liken a successful city to a mixed fabric of many colours mingled together, just as a city should have many different activities integrated and in close proximity to one another7. The emphasis on high-density, integrated use, and accessibility of this model creates the opportunity for urban agricultural practices to develop. Approaching the design of a public park or green space with mixeduse in mind, for example, one might consider the inclusion of a community garden. Allowing residential and commercial spaces to coexist would unsnarl the neighbourhood-scale CSA from the legal ramifications of restrictive zoning laws, and the density of inhabitants would necessarily encourage public interaction and the development of strong community.

EXISTING SYSTEMS Many different approaches to urban agriculture have been designed, largely with maximum footprint to yield ratios in mind. In this section, I will examine some of the more innovative methods designed to-date.

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HYDROPONICS Hydroponics is the practice of growing plants without soil. The benefit of hydroponic systems is that the nutrients are delivered directly to the plant, reducing the energy expended by the roots that would normally go to seeking nutrients within soil1. This energy can instead be put toward the growth of the plant’s fruit or flowers. There are many variations of hydroponic system designs, the most basic of which consists of pants grown with their roots directly in fertilized water. In more complex systems, the nutrients can be released to the plants on a timer, ensuring the plant receives the exact amount it needs. Hydroponic systems can be designed for both home and industrial scales. The precision of hydroponics removes the guess work involved in traditional gardening methods, making it an efficient method of production. Soil depletion of nutrients is not an issue in hydroponics, meaning that the nutrient content of the vegetables is higher, and therefore the produce is actually healthier.

Different types of hydroponic systems deliver the nutrients to plants in different ways, but they all function on the same principle of delivering moisture, nutrients, and oxygen to plant roots.

The complexity of the system depends on time and budget, but essentially every aspect of the system can be automated. The basic hardware components to a hydroponic system are the growing tray and medium (something inert to hold the plants like sand or gravel), a nutrient solution reservoir, and a pump and plumbing to deliver the nutrient solution from the reservoir to the growing tray. Optional but recommended elements are a timer to automate nutrient delivery, and an air pump to oxygenate the water in the reservoir.

1 “Types of Hydroponic systems,” n.d.

2 “Hydroponics,” 2006

Aquaponics, a variation of hydroponics involving fish, can be incorporated as well to create a symbiotic system. In aquaponics, the nutrients for the plants come from decomposed fish waste, and the water that’s been filtered by the plants gets cycled back to the fish tank; the nutrient reservoir would be substituted with a fish tank. The science behind aquaponics systems is more complex, however, as the breakdown of the fish waste must be monitored to ensure that it can be properly absorbed by the plants2.

Pros:

Cons

• Efficiency • Space and growing time reduced • Customizable • No crop rotation necessary • Pest and weed control • Reduced labour • No dirt

• Not suitable for all plants • High set up costs • Skills and expertise required • Disease may spread quicker from plant to plant • Plants react quickly to conditions, good or bad • Energy requirement to maintain gardens

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VERTICAL FARMING Vertical farming involves the stacking of planting beds to minimize the garden’s footprint while maximizing yield. There has been lots of hype around high-rise vertical farming as a way of revolutionizing the industrial agriculture system, taking planting out of the fickle hands of nature and into the controllable realm of science. The problem with many visions of vertical farming schemes is that they focus on industrial-scale, indoor farming operations for which the energy requirements and infrastructure costs would be astronomical3. A large scale vertical farming operation would require grow lights for each level of crop, and the type of crops grown would be very limited. The overall inefficiency of vertical farming as an industrial scale agricultural model makes it an inviable long term solution. On a much smaller scale, however, vertical or wall gardening may provide an opportunity to generate a use for spaces otherwise too small or inconvenient for food production. Fences and walls become rife with gardening possibility when you consider hanging planters and climbing vegetables. In terms of urban agriculture creating neighbourhood-scale food systems, thinking vertically opens an array of design options for saving space and still yielding a fruitful crop.

Pros: • Maximize yieldto-space ratio • Repurposing existing spaces to be productive Cons: • Limited scale • Limited type of crop

3 Cox, 2016 4 Fox, pg 62, 2011 5 Semenak, 2016

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RAISED BEDS Raised bed gardening or container planting is the most typical method of gardening. The simplicity and versatility of this method makes it one of the most manageable approaches for urban agricultural projects, the only limitation being the amount of space required. The benefits of raised beds over growing directly in the ground are many; the soil structure can be closely monitored and adjusted and remains uncontaminated from potential pollutants, the beds can be built to different depths to accommodate root space needs and the needs of the gardener, the beds can be self-watering or involve more complex irrigation systems4. The benefit over other types of urban agriculture systems like hydroponics and vertical gardening is the simplicity in building and maintaining this type of garden, it’s so easy in fact that children can do it (see Vancouver Case Study). The true potential for raised beds, however, lies in their ability to mimic the symbiotic relationship between different plants through companion planting. By planting garlic near cabbage, for example, one can stave off cabbage maggot. The ability to mimic the way ecosystems develop in nature in a controlled way is how some Native traditions have approached agriculture for centuries. “Three sisters” planting is the practice of planting beans, corn, and squash together so that each plant benefits from the others. The corn grows tall, providing structure for the beans to climb, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil to nourish the other crops, and squash’s leaves create a living mulch, protecting the others from weeds and pests5. They are naturally able to provide optimal growing conditions for each other, and therefore reduce the need for outside influences like pesticides and fertilizers.

Raised beds are the most similar to traditional growing methods, just on a much more local scale. By planning and designing the layouts and timings of various plantings, the natural cycles of crops can be preserved and issues like pests and soil depletion can be greatly reduced. Front lawns and backyards are prime locations for raised bed planting, and even most balconies can produce a decent crop of container-grown vegetables.

Pros:

Cons:

• Customizability • Accessability • Range of growing techniques incl. companion planting

• Space considerations • Set-up costs

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ROOFTOP Rooftop gardens are another approach to repurposing existing urban spaces into more productive landscapes. While retrofitting existing rooftops to accommodate agricultural production is largely not ideal, new buildings can be designed with the added weight of these types of projects in mind. That said, retrofitted green roofs should not be dismissed entirely. Even nonedible moss or grass roofs, which are relatively light, have a positive net contribution to city life by absorbing rain runoff and reducing the heat-island effect common in urban areas. The heat-island effect is when an urban area’s temperatures are significantly higher than in the surrounding rural areas owing to human activities like landscape modification. The blackness of the tar of roofs and the asphalt of city streets absorbs the sun’s heat, which affects energy consumption and water quality. Green roofs help to reduce this effect by reducing the amount of heat-absorbing surface in the city. Plants also help to cool through evapotranspiration, the process through which plants absorb and rerelease moisture into the air.

Existing roofs that can accommodate the weight of full-scale vegetable gardens are an excellent opportunity for setting up raised bed or container gardens. See the Lufa Farms section for an example of a brilliant use of rooftop gardening.

Cons:

Pros:

• Added weight to roofs limits feasibility • High set-up costs • Potential liabilities in allowing roof access

• Reduce Heat Island Effect • Repurpose space

6 Howard, 2014 7 Howard, 2014

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GUERRILLA GARDENING Guerrilla gardening takes the democratization of the urban food system to another level by re-appropriating whatever spaces can be found.

Poorly maintained municipal plots, roadside medians, abandoned lots, guerrilla gardening encourages taking ownership over any space with growing potential6. Borrowing the language of war, “guerrilla” and “seed-bombs”, for example, this gardening practice is intentionally antiestablishment, but its true aim is to better urban life through people power. Guerrilla gardening recognizes how slow systems are to change, and how simple change can be if taken on by keen grassroots communities. Often operating in a legal grey area–can growing tomatoes really be considered vandalism? – guerrilla gardening’s magic is its ability to recognize growing potential almost anywhere, and its motivated community that rallies behind cultivating these spaces.

The design innovations that are spurred by the illicitness of guerrilla gardening are inspiring: a seed-bombing camera, a handbag augur7.

The process of claiming and tending a public space for a garden without permission is one of simultaneous taking and letting go. Because guerrilla gardeners have no legal claim to the land they cultivate, the must be prepared for their gardens to be fined or removed, for vegetables to be stolen or plots truly vandalized. The selflessness of investing time and labour into that which is not truly your own is the backbone of the community and the spirit in which all communities and gifteconomies should be built. If a guerrilla garden is destroyed, a new one will arise elsewhere.

Pros • Solid community • Reinvigoration of interstitial spaces • Adding beauty and life into forgotten corners • Opportunity for people without lawns or yards to participate in agricultural community Cons • Legal ambiguity in most cases • Time and labour to find and refine spaces into being workable land • Inherent impermanence

CASE STUDIES

15 VICTORY GARDENS communication design Article response—See Appendix 1 For centuries, urbanites have turned to urban agriculture in times of war. By growing their own gardens, civilians have contributed to wartime conservation efforts and allowed for more industrial agriculture to be deployed to the troops.

During the Second World War, Canadian Victory Gardens grew approximately 57 000 tonnes of produce. The government at the beginning of the war was concerned about resource waste due to inexperienced gardeners, but as the war progressed, leaders began to recognize the efforts as not only a substantial contribution to vegetable production, but an important improver of public morale. In times of war and crisis, giving people control over their fundamental subsistence restores the sense of independence and security vital to the fight.

As Bill McKibben argues in a 2016 piece for New Republic, the rhetorical War on Climate Change needs to be addressed like an actual war, because “by most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments”1. The mobilization efforts of the first two World Wars were incredibly effective, and with similar measures, real climate action could be made. Why shouldn’t Victory Gardens make a comeback, just as they have time and time again to keep up morale and contribute to the war effort? Right now World War III is underway, whether we acknowledge it or not.

The Second World War approach to victory gardens was largely grassroots because of government hesitation. As a result, the most successful victory gardens were those on private property, in back yards and on front lawns, run by the upper-middle class folks with land and time to spare. Within a more thoroughly designed urban agricultural system, however, victory gardens have the potential to empower marginalized communities (see Detroit Case Study, pg 16).

1 McKibben, 2016

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DETROIT systems, communication, landscape design Article response—See Appendix 2 Post-bankruptcy Detroit is a fascinating glimpse into a post-capitalistic society. After the economic crash that sent property values plummeting and left thousands of homes abandoned, those that remained in the city have been picking up the pieces through a new system of labour exchanges and urban farming. Without cash on hand, traditional capitalism can’t function, so instead residents have been banking hours of community service, things like child care and snow shovelling, in order to exchange them for the services they need themselves, like auto repairs.

Food insecurity in a city where unemployment is as high as 50% is a real problem, and traditional avenues of food distribution have failed the city miserably. As a means of survival, many of the city’s neighbourhoods have turned to urban farming to feed the masses, taking over acres of unused urban territory and converting it to highly productive land. The farms operate on a volunteer basis, and the produce grown is exchanged for this labour.

Unlike most urban farmer’s markets, which tend to cater to the upper middle classes that can afford whatever superfood is trendy that week, these urban farms are intended to fulfill a basic need in the community. Unlike the war-time Victory Gardens of previous generations, Detroit’s urban agriculture is a solution to crises of accessibility and survival for those with nothing left.

2 Sundeen, 2017

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In Mark Sundeen’s 2017 Vice article Can Farming Solve Detroit’s Post-Industrial Blues?, he discusses the journey of a pair of urban farmers as they established their farm, Brother Nature, in innercity Detroit2. Towards the end of the article, they touch on the arrival of a Whole Foods in the neighbourhood, a notoriously over-priced grocery chain with a reputation of catering to yuppies and hipsters. The Whole Foods’ goal was to support local enterprises like Brother Nature, but ultimately a remotely based grocery chain would symbolize a return to business as usual for the very capitalism that left Detroit in the lurch to begin with. The beauty of Detroit’s many urban agriculture initiatives is their inclusivity of traditionally marginalized groups. They are communities based on trust and resident action to improve the city, not outside money.

Where Detroit could benefit from design is in facilitating the grassroots system creation that is already happening. As designers, it is important that we don’t use design as an imperialistic tool to impose what we think communities need on them. User needs assessments and design by the people is where the opportunity lies in Detroit, supplying people with the skills and design thinking approaches to address their own needs as they arise. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing food security, even just within Detroit, so creating accessible education programs that allow people to communicate and share skills more efficiently will encourage thoughtful solutions to complex issues. I think Detroit should resist the temptation to rejoin the traditional systems that failed them in the past, and instead embrace this chance to create something new and unique, a system from which the rest of the world can learn and benefit as we necessarily transition away from fossil fuels and the corporate abuse that has ravaged the world’s resources and decimated cultures.

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MONTREAL systems, web, architecture, urban design Article response—See Appendix 3 Montreal has many various urban agricultural initiatives, but most innovative is Lufa Farms.

Based on a CSA-style subscription service, Lufa’s innovation lies in the combination of rooftop, greenhouse, and hydroponic technologies, making local, rooftop tomatoes available in Montreal year-round. Lufa also incorporates easy-to-use yet comprehensive web design in the ordering process, creating a holistic system for ordering locally produced vegetables all year. The greenhouses are located on industrial rooftops in Montreal, repurposing otherwise neglected space.

The Lufa Farms system is a thoroughly well designed vision of what urban agriculture has the potential to be. By integrating web design into the process, Lufa recognizes the importance of a complete user-experience and reimagines what grocery shopping could be. For many, physical access to good produce is limited, by proximity to a grocery store or market, or ability to transport heavy or cumbersome bags. The online ordering process and option of home delivery creates an accessibility that is missing from traditional food distribution networks. One criticism is that it is fairly expensive, with a minimum order of $15 worth of products, which may be prohibitive for those struggling to make ends meet. Borrowing from the Detroit model, Lufa could incorporate time banking to allow for people to contribute to the greater health of the community, using whatever skills they already have, in exchange for fresh, local produce.

Another issue is the energy consumption required for year-round climate control within the greenhouses. Lufa, based in Montreal, benefits from renewable hydro-electricity, however if this model were to be adopted by other cities that continue to rely on fossil fuels, an alternative energy source would need to be considered in the name of sustainability. Because the greenhouses are situated atop industrial buildings, other rooftop greenhouses could partner with industries that create excess heat. Waste heat from breweries, for example, can be recovered into power and heat and supplied to other buildings, creating a zerowaste system. By closing that loop, similar urban farms could be truly sustainable.

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PARIS urban, communication design Article response—See Appendix 4 As part of a broader urban initiative to combat climate impact, Paris has implemented a greening policy that will license the public to create urban gardens wherever their hearts desire. The permits are for 3 years and are renewable, and encourage people to be creative in where and how they plant their gardens. There will also be garden starter kits available including seeds and topsoil. The gardens must be tended using sustainable methods and use only species native to the region.

By introducing this campaign, the city of Paris is designing-in the type of mixed usage that makes a city great. Opening up the opportunity for community investment, and facilitating it with garden kits makes it possible for people to create their own projects. This is an example of top-down urban agricultural innovation that understands the opportunity present in the imaginations of citizens, innovation coming down from government but asking communities to develop the real legwork to suit its own needs. Municipalities all over the world can incorporate similar campaigns with relative ease, designing communication materials and garden kits for distribution, providing educational materials on how to maximize growing potential and to foster an understanding of why these projects are important. Eliminating the legal ambiguity of guerrilla gardening but retaining its spirit of creativity and community, this policy is exactly the system-wide, thoughtfully designed approach we need to launch real urban agriculturedriven change on a global scale. Citizens are now equipped and encouraged to invest in selfsufficiency before it becomes a survival tactic, as was the case in Detroit.

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VANCOUVER urban, systems design Article response—See Appendix 5 The best way to create a lasting change in behaviour is to normalize it in the lives of the next generation, especially through school programs. Vancouver-based organizations Victory Gardens and Room to Play have created one of many school-based gardening programs that are gaining popularity world-wide. The Victory Gardens’ program is particularly well-designed in its comprehensiveness: setting up the gardens themselves, equipping teachers with the knowledge and skills to manage them, providing support, and helping to develop the curriculum that incorporates gardening.

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For most people, taking up gardening, let alone vegetable gardening, requires a lifestyle shift that might seem insurmountable. Most people don’t even cook their own food anymore, never mind growing it first, and even those who might like to often lack the skills and knowledge to get started. What was once passed down through the generations is now a specialized ability, and the only way to reintegrate these skills into our collective lifestyles is by handing it down to our children. Similar to the Paris “License to Vegetate” policy, these types of school programs are initiated on an administrative level, but are predicated on the empowerment of the populace. Disrupting the standard, utilitarian approach to public education by reintegrating domestic self-sufficiency skills should be a priority in redesigning how the school system works. Being able to efficiently design a garden plot and understand the relationships between crops and seasonal timing in order to get the best yield while managing pests and disease requires complex problem solving and critical thinking skills. The school system itself needs to be redesigned to incorporate this type of teaching, in order to equip the next generation with the design skills needed to tackle urban agricultural tasks within their daily lifestyles. The success of urban agriculture shouldn’t have to rely on a small number of individuals with skills and knowledge, it should be woven into the very fabric of our culture, starting with our children.

CONCLUSION HALIFAX urban, systems design Halifax’s food movement is amazingly active, with a variety of projects encompassing the various needs of the community. Each of these projects interacts with the social fabric of the city, many existing because of or within the social issues of class and race in the urban geographic context.

Common Roots Urban Farm is a local example of a well-blended system of community engagement and public education. Offering vegetables for the general public for free in the “Nibble Beds” brings in the spirit of sharing that should be the basis of all community organizations, particularly urban agriculture projects. Located in the space of the old Queen Elizabeth High School, Common Roots is a community health-oriented use of a temporarily vacant space. The lot will change with the planned hospital expansion, but the farm is acknowledged as an important element of a healthy community.

Launched in 2012, the farm has brought together church groups, new-Canadians, school and university groups, marginalized-youth groups, camps, and corporate volunteer groups, orienting itself in the intersections of, and therefore transcending the limitations of, race, class, and ability. The site of workshops, parties, art and design projects, and social work projects, Common Roots manifests the power of a strong local food network, beyond a utilitarian means of survival, as a hub of true community.

Hope Blooms, a North End project with a mission “to empower at-risk youth to be actively engaged in building environments that directly impact the social determinants of health in their communities”, is another inspiring illustration of the potential of bringing urban agriculture to communities. The program uses a “youthled, community-based model”, encouraging entrepreneurship and leadership in changing their neighbourhoods. Teaching self-sufficiency and community engagement, Hope Blooms helps the youth break out of the cycles of poverty and isolation that permeate the North End. The area in which it is located, adjacent to Uniacke Square, is a neighbourhood of public housing originally

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their needs, being empowering, not imposing, and designing for the creative capacity within these existing groups. Using design this way, it is a tool with which underserved communities can help themselves in ways that only members of said communities are truly able to. intended for the displaced residents of Africville.

The influx of lower-income, African-Nova Scotian residents coincided with an exodus of community resources like banks and grocery stores, leaving the residents to a self-fulfilling prophecy of impoverishment and isolation from basic services and opportunities. Access to quality food is scarce, the nearest full grocery store being the Windsor/ North Sobey’s, making healthy food choices both geographically and financially inaccessible. At this intersection of racism and classism, a welldesigned system of urban agriculture has the power to radically change a neighbourhood, both as means of food production and as a tool for empowering youth and strengthening community.

Similar to urban agriculture in war times, Hope Blooms works as a builder of morale and a symbol of optimism for a marginalized community.

It is also important to remember, however, that design has the power to function as a tool of imperialism, imposing upon these communities without regard for their needs or preferences.

The neglect of and subsequent demolition of Africville in the name of “urban renewal” is a dark spot in the local history of urban system design, one that brought the current residents of the North End into the situation that so desperately needs projects like Hope Blooms to try and rectify design history’s mistakes. Now facing increasing gentrification, the North End is falling victim to a disconnect between the locals and the owners and patrons of new bars, cafes, and retailers. This gap in communities is a signal of design failing those who need it, preferring instead to uphold the status quo that privileges whiteness and wealth at the expense of everyone else. This is where maintaining the democratization of a food network comes in to an urban agriculture design.

In proposing design projects that affect the public, such that urban agricultural projects would, it is important to consult communities and listen to

According to Anita Nipen’s Environmental Honours Thesis for Dalhousie University (2009), wherein she used Geographic Information Systems to calculate the usable growing land of yards on the peninsula, Halifax has 3.4 km2 of untapped usable land within its 20 km2 peninsula. Because of the HRM’s 2003 pesticide restriction policy, the produce yielded from these locations would be grown using sustainable practices and would not cause environmental damage through groundwater runoff. She concludes that the key to reaping the most from this idle resource is “centralized, accessible resources” to mobilize interested Haligonians and equip them with the tools they need to begin and maintain their own urban agricultural projects. This is where design has the potential for greatness: creating an overarching system to guide grassroots movements in innovation and creativity, or drawing from traditional knowledge and culture.

APPENDICES APPENDIX 1 Victory Gardens—The Canadian Encyclopedia Victory gardens were vegetable plots planted across Canada during the Second World War that were inspired, at least in part, by a similar patriotic mobilization during the First World War. Victory gardens were vegetable plots planted across Canada during the Second World War that were inspired, at least in part, by a similar patriotic mobilization during the First World War. Largely an urban phenomenon, victory gardens were an important part of both the symbolic and material mobilization of civilians on Canada’s home front. Although their contribution to overall food production has sometimes been exaggerated — both during and after the war — victory gardens nonetheless provide a useful window into the ways in which Canadians understood and enacted different visions of patriotic citizenship on the home front.

Background While victory gardening occurred during both world wars, there is far less research on the practice during the First World War. Nonetheless, it’s clear that “war gardening,” as it was more commonly known, was widely promoted throughout the First World War by both the Canadian government and the media as a patriotic form of wholesome leisure.

Indeed, the basic idea behind victory and First World War-era war gardening was much the same: the more produce that could be grown by Canadians in their front yards, vacant lots and former flower gardens, the more food, soldiers and munitions that could be shipped to Canada’s allies overseas. This was because not only did victory gardening help to meet existing export commitments, but it also freed railcars and transport trucks to move other strategic goods instead of food. That victory garden produce was also part of a healthy diet according to the newly created Canada’s Official Food Rules (1942) — the precursor to Canada’s Food Guide — was simply an added bonus.

Victory gardens therefore offered Canadians what seemed like a direct role in meeting the nation’s ambitious agricultural production goals while at the same time promising very tangible material, moral and health benefits. By as early as spring 1940, planting a victory garden emerged as a popular form of wholesome, patriotic leisure that many argued strengthened families and enlisted their untapped productive potential. At its 1944 peak, it was estimated that upwards of 209,200 victory gardens were in operation nationwide producing a total of 57,000 tonnes of vegetables.

Opposition Despite Canadians’ early enthusiasm for victory gardening, the federal government was not always a strong proponent of the practice. In fact, up to the middle of the war, officials in the Department of Agriculture felt that inexperienced gardeners were likely to waste valuable commodities in short supply.

One 1942 pamphlet produced by the Department went so far as to actively discourage unskilled “cityfolk” from planting food gardens because “they would create the demand for equipment such as garden tools, fertilizers and sprays, which are made from materials needed by Canada’s war industries and because Canada’s vegetable seed supply can best be employed by experienced gardeners with equipment on hand.” By 1943, however, agriculture officials reversed their position in the face of considerable protest by the country’s avid gardeners and an end to the threat of a vegetable seed shortage.

Demographics In many ways, the typical victory gardener was precisely the kind of “city folk” the Department of Agriculture had tried to discourage in the early years of the war. Home food production, after all, was already a common practice throughout rural Canada and the transformation of pre-war kitchen gardens to victory gardens was, in most rural areas, largely in name only. Because the goal was to increase the acreage of land devoted to food production, the ideal

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victory garden was one that transformed urban land into agricultural space. Municipalities, private owners of vacant land and even grassroots organizations around the country like Victoria’s Victory Garden Brigade or the Community Garden League of Greater Montréal offered up land to gardeners, usually for a small annual fee.

Despite these efforts to create public spaces for gardening open to everyone, victory gardening appears to have been most common among betteroff, urban homeowners. According to the most extensive wartime survey of wartime victory gardens, 82 per cent were being cultivated at the home of the householder, 15 per cent were in a nearby vacant lot and only 3 per cent were in a community garden area. In fact, some believed that victory gardening on vacant public lands never even reached the levels of the relief gardens planted during the Great Depression. In Québec City and Toronto, for instance, it was estimated that the acreage tilled by victory gardeners on public lands in 1943 was only 25 and 50 per cent, respectively, of the land that had been under cultivation by Depression era relief gardeners.

According to one investigator, the message was clear: “the appeal to patriotism together with individual fears of possible food shortages were not as potent as absolute necessity in promoting home gardening.”

Not only was the typical victory garden usually planted on private property, but they were also often being tended by inexperienced gardeners. This was partly reflected in the prescriptive literature about victory gardens as well as by the prominence of new entrants into the garden, particularly young children and men. For many proponents of victory gardening, the movement of amateurs into the field of gardening was one of the campaign’s benefits: it was teaching Canadians a new set of domestic skills which, in the process, increased their selfsufficiency and encouraged them to gain new respect for farmers and other food producers. For the government, though, it pointed to the potential waste inherent in the practice.

Significance In the end, though, the real value of victory gardens lay in their importance as a symbolic, rather than as a purely productive, activity — something that the government began to recognize by 1943. From a morale standpoint, victory gardens linked a wholesome and familiar form of domestic labour to a larger war effort in a way that could both include the entire family, and was also highly visible to friends and neighbours. The victory garden, in other words, provided a powerful domestic venue for home-front participation in the larger war effort and, for many, an enjoyable diversion from the less pleasant realities of total war.

26 APPENDIX 2 Life Without Money in Detroit’s Survival Economy—Bloomberg How the city’s neglected poor rely on time banking, skill-sharing, and giveaways to get by.

When her car broke down, Halima Cassells didn’t have $400 to fix it. But she had logged hours in her Detroit neighborhood time bank by babysitting, and that time yielded a repair.

When she was pregnant in 2012, she couldn’t afford baby clothes, a stroller, or a car seat. But she could throw a potluck barbecue, and her friends could afford to bring their old baby supplies.

“When people come together to share, it’s not transactional,” says Cassells. “Everyone assumes an amount of responsibility with everybody. It’s a different way of knowing your needs are being met.”

Detroiters like Cassells, after years of privation, have turned to what experts call a gift economy to survive.

Theirs is an alternative economy based on time banking, skill-sharing, and giveaways—home-grown vegetables, a roof repair, spare keys to a shared car— in which neighbors give as they can and take as they need.

It’s a currency of community that has helped Detroit’s poor survive without ready cash. And those who rely on it say it has helped strengthen communities throughout America’s poorest big city, where nearly 40 percent of people live in poverty and about 11 percent officially are out of work.

“There is significant progress being made, but we recognize we have a long way to go,” says city spokesman John Roach.

Musid’s son, Ali Ali, plays with his two dogs, Max and Penny, at his house on Detroit’s southwest side.

Penny is herself the product of an exchange; Ali swapped a portable speaker and three dollars for her.

The city’s much-touted renaissance is reviving just seven of its 139 square miles. In the rest, all that many people feel they have are community-based networks of their own making.

“These systems and networks take root because historically Detroit has been abandoned,” says Peter Hammer, who heads the Damon J. Keith Center for

Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School.

“The neglect and abandonment are turned into a source of power and opportunity.”

Erik Howard, co-founder of the Southwest Detroit youth-development organization Young Nation, agrees. “When the city didn’t have the capacity to provide, alternative systems were created,” he says.

What Cassells began with her barbecue four years ago has since ballooned into a regular, roving exchange called the Free Market of Detroit.

Hundreds attend its swaps. She likens them to the communal feasts where precolonial Native Americans in what is now Detroit gave neighbors such things as food and blankets.

“It’s an economy based on trust. If someone gets hurt, shot, slips and falls, whatever, you jump in.”

“There are ancient ways of always having needs met,” she says. “We’re reclaiming a traditional practice of this land.”

It’s hard to judge just how many Detroiters are living this way—after all, they’re conducting trade in their homes, often informally. It’s invisible, and it’s born of “necessity and the motivation for survival,” says Jenny Lendrum, a Ph.D. candidate studying Detroit’s informal economies at Wayne State.

“You look to the people around you—who do you know, what do your social networks looks like?—and you look for opportunities,” she says. “So they’re cooking, selling food, rolling cigarettes, whatever they can do. The revitalization efforts are not going into the neighborhoods. What are the alternatives?”

“Everybody has needs and has something to offer,” says Alice Bagley, who is a part-time staffer at Unity in Our Community Time Bank in southwest Detroit.

A member can bank, for instance, one hour of child care, then spend the hour she’s earned on whatever she needs from another member—in Cassells’s case, an auto mechanic.

Jane Slaughter, who’s on the time bank’s volunteerrun steering committee, offers writing and fruitdrying services; in exchange, she’s gotten rides to the airport, shiatsu bodywork, and a garbage disposal installed.

“If you’ve got no money, it’s not an answer,” she says.

“But there is food and meals for work.”

27

Time banks like theirs partner with other organizations, too. Seniors in an elder-care program that participates can offer their skills in exchange for rides, helping them to live independently. (“It shifts the power structure,” Bagley says. “Maybe you can’t drive because you’re elderly. But you can read to children, or teach me how to knit.”) And after patients are discharged from a Pontiac hospital, the Michigan Alliance of Time Banks offers them athome support—“a more pay-it-forward model,” says Kim Hodge, its executive director.

“The money economy doesn’t value checking in on someone like that and making them a sandwich,” Bagley says. “But in that moment, it’s important.”

Jerry Hebron harvests Swiss chard at the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm in Detroit’s North End, where locals can volunteer in exchange for fresh produce.

Many of these sharing practices aren’t new, but when the broader economy collapsed, they became a vital safety net, says Jerry Hebron, executive director of the Northend Christian Community Development Corp.

“More people had to come together and ask, ‘How do we survive?’” she says. “We can all band together and grow our own food.”

Hebron’s organization runs the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm in Detroit’s North End. That four-acre farm, which targets 8,000 families, grows more than 30 kinds of fruits and vegetables—including “culturally appropriate” ones such as peas and collard greens—in its community garden and greenhouse, hosts cooking and canning workshops, and provides neighbors with gardening supplies.

“We reward people for volunteer hours that they give to us. They can help us plant seeds, water, weed, participate in canning classes, cooking demonstrations,” Hebron says. “In exchange for that participation, we offer food. We don’t place a value on it. It’s just, ‘What do you need?’”

“We put a lot of faith in big business and had the idea that industry would take care of you,” says Howard, the Young Nation co-founder.

For a time, it did. But the auto industry, which for the first half of the 20th century made Detroit a middle-class mecca, gradually helped spur suburban migration and deepen the divides that would hollow out the city and its prosperity.

At its peak in 1950, more than 1.8 million people lived in Detroit. Today, fewer than 680,000 do. Tens of thousands of homes are vacant, and a program to demolish them is under federal investigation. Public transit is scarce; in its absence, whole neighborhoods rely on community-based ridesharing.

City officials point to job growth—15,000 more Detroiters are working today than in 2014, says Alexis Wiley, the mayor’s chief of staff—and to infrastructure improvements, including the installation of 65,000 new streetlights citywide.

“When people come together to share, it’s not transactional ... It’s a different way of knowing your needs are being met.”

“We’re improving neighborhood services and improving public transit,” says Charlie Beckham, the city’s group executive for its neighborhoods.

Still, two years after the city left bankruptcy, much of it remains dilapidated.

Basic services, including the police and fire departments, are scaled back. The city for years was widely regarded as the nation’s arson capital and still sees thousands of suspicious fires each year.

Last year, one ravaged the three-bedroom home where Musid Ali’s family of 12 lives. Ali had no insurance and just $2,000 from the Red Cross to rebuild, but his older sons had spent the previous summer doing yard work for neighbors with the southwest Detroit time bank. He says he was surprised when strangers—“white, black, young, old”—came through the time bank to help repair their house and replace what they’d lost.

“They bring me wood, they bring me insulation, tools, clothes for the kids, shoes, gift cards,” Ali says.

“People made me proud. I love them.”

Jessica Ramirez (right) runs Detroiters Helping Each Other—a thrift store similar to a Goodwill, only free—in the Springwells Village neighborhood in southwest Detroit.

Across the neighborhood, Jessica Ramirez sorts donated clothes, appliances, and furniture in a small storefront akin to a thrift store, except that everything inside is free. She and seven others cofounded this store, Detroiters Helping Each Other, in 2013, and it’s been a crucial local support since.

28 Stoves, refrigerators, microwaves, and beds are in the highest demand, largely because of fire.

“We have a waiting list on those,” Ramirez says. If anybody needs something the store doesn’t have, she asks around and posts requests to the store’s Facebook page.

One morning this fall, families trickled in and out seeking help, including an old woman who said, voice trembling, that she was trying to round up a car seat, clothes, and food so she could get custody of her grandchildren. Ramirez asked her for a list of what she needed, of clothing and shoe sizes. She promised she’d gather everything that weekend.

This sort of neighborly safety net, says Detroit native Kevin Reynolds, is now all many Detroiters have to replace services they can’t count on from the city.

“If one of my neighbors needs a ride to work or to dialysis, it’s gonna happen. It’s an economy based on trust. If someone gets hurt, shot, slips and falls, whatever, you jump in. You fulfill those services that were promised to you, that you pay for through taxes, that you don’t receive,” he says. “I will drive that person to the hospital, because I’m not waiting 45 minutes to an hour or never for the ambulance to come.”

Officials defend Detroit’s police and emergency services and say they’ve improved, pointing to city data that show EMS and police response times cut roughly in half in the past two years. “The fact is that our response times have changed across the city, down to the national average,” says Wiley.

By now, though, some Detroiters are used to fending for themselves. When Reynolds suffered third-degree burns recently, his wife drove him to the hospital.

“Why call an ambulance?” he wondered.

Yet as development ramps up downtown, what it might mean for locals’ sharing economy is unclear.

Neither Cassells nor Lendrum is worried about their economy’s future. It has become their way of life.

But Howard, in the community room of Grace in Action Church in Southwest Detroit, says he’s frustrated by the city’s focus on economic development, at communities’ expense. He says people fear the development touted as key to the city’s future could threaten what they’ve built in their communities.

“People have restaurants and businesses out of their homes. You’re gonna put Buffalo Wild Wings on top of that?”

It’s happened before, as Hammer, the law professor, notes. Like historically black neighborhoods in other cities, Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were razed in the 1950s to make way for expressways. Today, Interstate 75 runs through where they once were, and Beckham says the city has acquired some of what’s left so as to “recreate the the entertainment” once offered there.

“When these new systems come in and the old ones are in the way,” Howard says, “you tear the fabric that held up these communities in the first place.”

A local woman carrying a baby into the room overhears as Howard explains, and she chimes in: “People have restaurants and businesses out of their homes. You’re gonna put Buffalo Wild Wings on top of that?”

“What I’ve learned,” he says, “is to be self-reliant.”

There is a lesson to be learned from communitybased sharing economies like Detroit’s, Howard says.

And cities and their schools would do well to study and work to bolster them, especially by integrating them into city services.

Detroiters like these are trying to “think past the limits of capitalism,” says Malik Yakini, who runs the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which promotes food security and urban farming for black Detroiters.

“What if you could pay your city taxes with community benefits? What if neighbors helping neighbors could offset taxes? ‘Well, that doesn’t work,’ they’ll say,” he says. “Well, traditional economics isn’t working here, either.”

The sharing economy has its limits, which Yakini hopes can be overcome. “You can’t barter for gas, water, or lights, so we still find ourselves stuck having to get cash for the most essential needs,” he says.

29 Can Farming Solve Detroit’s Postindustrial Blues?—Vice In an excerpt from Mark Sundeen’s ‘The Unsettlers,’ the journalist connects with a young Detroit couple who have gone back to the land.

The autumn of 2008 may have been the worst time in history to find a job in Michigan. In mid September, Lehman Brothers failed, triggering a global recession. The Big Three carpooled to Washington begging for loans, then laid off more than 10,000 workers. Detroit’s mayor pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, resigned, and was sent to jail.

In a decade, the city had shed 240,000 people, leaving its population at just more than 700,000, roughly a third of its 1950 peak. Residential property values had declined by 97 percent. It had the nation’s highest poverty rate (34 percent) and highest unemployment rate (23 percent). The only businesses that seemed to be thriving were party stores, a Detroit institution in which cash is passed under bulletproof panes from a black to an Arab in exchange for liquor, cigarettes, and potato chips.

Olivia Hubert had just returned home from a postgraduate internship at the Royal Horticultural Society in London. Home was a former nut-processing plant close to downtown where she and her mother and stepfather had moved to have room for her mother’s resale shop. But now the shop was shuttered, and many of the abandoned homes and businesses in the neighborhood had burned down. As balloon payments on mortgages came due, hundreds of still-occupied houses went into foreclosure. Owners were evicted, windows and doors boarded up. Broken water mains bubbled up for months, flooding entire streets. And then, inevitably, the houses caught fire.

Sometimes the fire trucks arrived, sometimes not.

Some of the charred hulks were razed, while others just collected snow in the winter and sprouted weeds in the summer. Homes that had sold for $40,000 a few years earlier were now listed at less than $10,000. And still nobody bought.

Gazing out at the ruins of Mack Avenue from her family’s home, Olivia saw that the marketability of her proudly acquired skills was dubious. She had borrowed $10,000 from the government to complete her degree and was paying it back at $150 per month. Her student health plan had expired, and her mother was hounding her to get coverage. She searched all winter for conservatory jobs across the nation, but she wasn’t landing so much as an interview.

Meanwhile, the jobs advertised in Detroit were the same minimum-wage grinds she remembered from high school: Long John Silver’s, security guard, Family Dollar. Her former classmates were still working them, or having babies and collecting food stamps. Or going to prison. One girl from school had been choked to death by her boyfriend. The other available jobs were dealing blackjack and making beds and cleaning floors at one of the three gigantic Vegas-style casinos that now shimmered in neon above the freeways, yet another of the city fathers’ plots to save Detroit.

I first encountered Olivia bent over a tray of basil starts. In a white cotton dress, floppy straw hat, and sandals, she looked vintage cool, as if she’d been outfitted for a production of Porgy and Bess. I was researching contemporary homesteaders—as part of a book on folks who’ve rejected the global economy and modern technology—and I’d heard about Brother Nature Produce at an anarchist collective elsewhere in Detroit, when someone cited it as a good place to exchange labor for vegetables.

The farm, run by Olivia and her husband, Greg Willerer, spread over a block of vacant lots in North Corktown, adjacent to downtown. The farm is part of a growing movement of what I call “unsettlers”—a radical resistance to the fossil-fuel economy and its tentacles of technology, which in postindustrial cities like Detroit looks a lot like going back to the land. At 28, Olivia spoke with a lilt that was more Mississippi than Michigan, and presented as more blunt than sweet. As we spoke, our conversation turned to preppers getting ready for the collapse of civilization by filling their basement with packaged foods and generators.

“Their preparing for the collapse is what’s leading to the collapse,” Olivia said, “because they’re not doing anything to stop it.” She spoke with an authority unique among the homesteaders I had met, because the world in which she’d been raised was one that had already collapsed.

Paradoxically, Olivia had grown up sheltered in Detroit. When she reached school age, her mother, Vicky Powe Ransom, enrolled her in a Catholic school just a few blocks from their house, on the far east side of Detroit, a relatively safe neighborhood shoehorned between the stately homes of Grosse Pointe and the bleak party stores along Warren Avenue. She forbade Olivia to walk or bicycle to school, and instead drove her each morning. She allowed Olivia to venture three houses to the north and three houses to the south.

30 What good was upward mobility if you were afraid to walk out the door of your house?

Olivia did well in the classroom but showed little interest in other activities. She was encouraged to try out for the track team. “They always think black people have potential to be athletes,” she told me. “I didn’t give a damn about no damn track.” At recess and lunch, she wandered to the front of the campus, where unsightly weeds sprouted from flowerbeds.

She kneeled to pull them.

A teacher asked Olivia if she would like to meet someone who could teach her about plants.

Catherine Mack had retired after a career teaching biology at Wayne State University. She taught Olivia not only about plants and insects but about other things too: knitting, weaving, cooking, and canning.

How to spin wool with just a hook fashioned from a hanger, and how to dye it.

One day, at 13, Olivia came home from Miss Mack’s and said, “Ma, I know what I want to do.”

“What?” her mother asked.

“Horticulture.”

“Horti-what?”

Vicky had little idea how to prepare her daughter for such a career. Her own mother had been raised on a farm near De Kalb, Mississippi, but country life had never suited her, and in 1967, after her marriage had ended in divorce, she headed north with her five children, catching the tail of the Great Migration.

Maybe this passion of Olivia’s was just a phase.

One day, as the two of them worked in the garden of their new home on Mack Avenue, a neighbor stopped by to compliment them on how they’d transformed the place. Vicky thanked him and bragged about her daughter’s green thumb.

The man’s face lit up. He worked for the Detroit public schools, at the vo-tech center. Did they know, he asked, that there was an ag-science program with a specialty in horticulture, right here in Detroit?

To qualify for the program, Olivia transferred to the local public high school. She awoke well before dawn to take first one bus and then another, which ferried her across the Detroit River and deposited her at the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory on Belle Isle.

Belle Isle appeared to Olivia as another world. It was considered Detroit’s jewel, a relic from a gilded era long past. The old gray globe of the arboretum and its resplendent fountains were vaguely European.

Chiming bells filled the air. Couples said their vows

on infinite green lawns spread between towering elms. Women in swimsuits lay on sandy beaches along the banks of the river. The unfamiliar skyline on the far side was an actual foreign country, Canada.

Inside, in the great glass atrium, blossomed flora from the world over: Manila palm and cabbage palm and majesty palm and slender-lady palm. Byzantine tangles of water pipes and gas lines and electrical cords that would have mystified a contractor somehow managed to pump the atrium with warm air and fresh water, insulating it from the Detroit winter. The great dome opened onto the hot, dry Cactus House, with its South African ox tongue and Kenyan cow’s horn and Mexican jelly beans. The oldman cactus peered down on the silver-dollar cactus, while the queen of the night floated overhead as if riding a thermal along the steel ribs of the sky.

Best of all was the Tropical House. Olivia ducked under the oldest canary palm in America, danced past calamondin orange and blood-leaf banana, Surinam cherry and fiddle-leaf fig. She sampled the sweetest grapefruit she had ever tasted. Wet leaves drew her deeper into the jungle of hibiscus spider plant and white bird‑of‑paradise. There was peace lily and rainbow tree, heavenly bamboo and angel-wing begonia. In the deepest recess of the Tropical House hid the orchids. Their perfume made Olivia dizzy.

Supple pink petals peeled open to the sunlight to expose magenta capillaries. Climbing vines exploded gold and crimson like strings of firecrackers.

Olivia threw herself into the place and quickly distinguished herself from the parade of listless fellow students who didn’t want mud on their Reeboks. The staff of seven taught her how to propagate plants and told her about the conservatory’s glory days, when it had been kept immaculate by a staff of 20.

At the end of two years, Olivia took a practicum exam and scored the first-ever A in the program’s history.

She didn’t want to return to her school for her senior year, and the staff didn’t want to lose her, so they created a position for her: student greenhouse manager.

Olivia won a scholarship to Michigan State, in East Lansing, to study horticulture. She marveled at the joggers on the trails snaking through the wooded campus. “They were just running for fun!

And nobody got jumped. And there wasn’t glass broken everywhere. And you could walk places by yourself. And your bike wasn’t automatically going to disappear. I was like, Wow!” She loved the safety of her dormitory, the locked bedroom, the cafeteria

31 that prepared three meals a day, and the janitors who scrubbed the toilets and showers. Students of agriculture, science, and engineering were housed together, and Olivia was the only black woman in the dorm. She got a work-study job cleaning the dorms, to supplement her scholarship and her loans. White people she took as one more exotic, if preponderant species, with the habit of leaving their expensive laptops on sofas and dining-hall tables.

Olivia spent the summer after her freshman year studying horticulture in England through a program at Michigan State. She learned to harvest hay by hand. She visited Wisley, the flagship garden of the Royal Horticultural Society in Surrey. With its majestic glasshouse and vast rose collections and stone terraces, it was grander even than Belle Isle.

The society offered a paid internship, and after graduation, Olivia returned to London. She discovered the joys of living in a safe and thriving city with functional public transportation. With an income of about $15 per hour, she had plenty of cash to make the payments on her student loans and still eat out and buy new clothes. Nonetheless, after a year in London, she felt homesick. That’s when she’d decided to return to Detroit, still believing she could make a career there. But now, stuck at home, Olivia wondered if going to college had been worth the trouble and money. What good was upward mobility if you were afraid to walk out the door of your house?

She considered going back to her Paw-Paw’s place in Mississippi and trying to make it as a farmer. It was as if she had never left Detroit—and might never escape. *** In 2010, Olivia’s dream job finally appeared: She was hired to work at the conservatory again. Her mentors apologized for the piddling $8 per hour the position paid, half of what conservatory workers had made a decade earlier, but emphasized the health insurance and pension. Many of her colleagues were approaching their fourth decade on the job. With the city’s finances failing, their workloads had increased, and raises had halted.

On her first day on the job, Olivia realized that Belle Isle was in bad decline. Four of the old-timers— the experts who knew every leaf and branch and leaky pipe on the premises—had been nudged into retirement. Fallen leaves went unswept. Spiderwebs clung to overgrown shrubs. The palms had outgrown the atrium, and now and then, their fronds, pressed against the glass ceiling, busted a pane trying to escape. In the Cactus House, in the soft flank of

the silver-dollar cactus, someone had carved “i love mimi.” The queen of the night clung to the overhead bars, gasping for air.

In an effort to reduce the work hours required to grow saplings from seed, mature trees had been transplanted, bringing with them an epidemic of cockroaches and mealy bugs.

“They wanted instant stuff,” said Olivia, “and the instant stuff comes with instant problems.”

One advantage of the staff reductions was that the new supervisor had been transferred from city hall and knew nothing about horticulture, leaving Olivia relatively free to pursue her own projects. Some days, she was the only worker on duty, color-coding orchids in some drafty greenhouse with a broken boiler. Occasionally her superiors shuttled her to the mayor’s mansion to give landscaping advice.

Her wage was raised to $10 an hour. But, at the same time, the city furloughed its workers, forcing them to take an unpaid day off every other week. Then everyone took a 10 percent pay cut. Now Olivia was barely earning minimum wage. And she was still paying off student loans.

“If you get an education and still can’t get a job with a living wage,” Olivia said, “then the education is not worth the cost.” After work, she parked her car on the far side of Belle Isle and sat there for hours, watching an old man fish in the Detroit River. “The age of the aesthetic was over, and people didn’t care about me being able to make topiaries or any of these things that I had bothered to learn,” she told me. “Now people show their wealth by gadgets instead of having a really nice garden, so they’re unwilling to pay a highly skilled person to make a topiary garden or maintain a kitchen garden. I was about 50 years too late.”

“I knew the suburbs were a lie,” Greg Willerer told me, shoving a pile of greens into his mouth. “La la land.”

We were sitting at a picnic table nestled between his house and farm. Greg was in his early 40s, compact and wiry, with flecks of gray in his close-cropped black hair, his arms and face leathery from the sun.

As he spoke, his leg jittered like a sewing-machine needle, and I got the impression that sitting still was torture for him. Most of our conversations occurred in moving vehicles, at his booth in the farmers’ market, or as we hacked at weeds or laid irrigation hose through fields.

Suburbia, Greg told me, was the greatest

32 misallocation of resources in the history of the world: big, thin-walled houses that take loads of gas and electricity to heat and cool, acres of farmland and animal habitat bulldozed for useless lawns that guzzle water and gobble poisons, barrels of food scraps hauled across the county and buried in a landfill, sprawling subdivisions requiring cars and gasoline for the simplest of errands—mailing a package or buying a gallon of milk. What’s more, he said, suburbs encouraged isolation, cultivated a fear of strangers, and created enclaves that segregated the white middle class from poor people and brown people.

Like Olivia, he spoke from experience. His parents had grown up in Detroit proper, in solid-brick bungalows a few blocks from one another in the northwestern part of the city. But like most white Detroiters, they’d fled to the suburbs in the 1960s, settling just north of Eight Mile Road, the city limit. Then, as the city’s decay crept closer, they’d relocated farther north, in the rolling hills of West Bloomfield.

Yet Greg had been hell-bent on escaping the privilege in which he’d been raised. He discovered punk rock, and as soon as he and his friends got their licenses, they made their way to the gritty clubs of the city that had spawned not only Motown but Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5. Through the music scene, he became involved with the “movement,” the anarchists and radicals who populated the Cass Corridor, Detroit’s skid row. He and his friends formed a collective on Willis Street, just off Cass Avenue, that booked bands, hosted readings, and distributed radical literature and ideas to a mixed crowd: black and white, young and old, college kids and homeless men. He took a room in the Trumbull Theatre, a dilapidated complex of houses converted into flats and a brick factory converted into a community stage. He had enrolled at Wayne State, and he reverse-commuted to “some stupid deli in the suburbs” to earn tuition. When he graduated, with a history degree, he convinced three friends to pool funds to buy the Trumbull, with a down payment of a couple thousand dollars. They moved the music venue there, but Greg became disillusioned with the growing rift between the neighborhood’s mostly black, working-class old-timers and the incursion of punks, who were mostly white.

He launched a career as an elementary school teacher and spent the next 15 years devoted to it. But when a new superintendent prioritized standardized testing and began to push out teachers who resisted, he grew as disillusioned with public

school reform as he had become with the activists and anarchists.

Then he met Paul Weertz, a craggy, sandy-haired high school science teacher who had created a remarkable settlement on Farnsworth Avenue, amid the blight of a once mostly Polish neighborhood that had been decimated by a doomed incinerator project Greg had protested back in high school. Weertz and his wife, a retired Wayne State professor, had started by buying a rambling two-story fixer-upper with high ceilings and wood floors for just $8,000 back in 1985.

As their neighbors fled, they understood that vacant houses would attract drug addicts and scrappers and arson, so they bought them up; even on their modest salaries, they could afford the four-figure price tags. Before long, they owned ten houses on the block. They rented out those they could, and when each of their sons turned 18, they gave him his own house. They pulled down the fences between backyards to create a huge commons. A corner lot was transformed into a garden.

It resembled the Detroit in which Greg’s parents had grown up, but for the sight of a tractor dragging a baler across a field of alfalfa on the adjacent block, where not a single house still stood. Weertz kept goats and horses, and as Poletown returned to prairie grass, he’d bought a tractor and begun mowing the hay, baling it, and feeding it to the livestock. He did not apply for permits at city hall, or anywhere else.

It was a world Greg had long envisioned: a mixedrace, working-class village built out of reach of the tentacles of banks or government, enacting the sort of decentralized change that he had heard activists and educators theorize about for decades. He rented a house from the Weertzes and started a garden, then expanded the garden. He began to sell his vegetables at Eastern Market, a Detroit institution since 1891. Greg remembered getting hauled around it in a wagon by his mother, but now he saw the place with new eyes. Even as the city tanked, Eastern Market was bustling, one of the few places where suburban whites and urban blacks mingled. Between 30,000 and 40,000 shoppers came each Saturday morning.

Suburbia, Greg Willerer believed, encouraged isolation, cultivated a fear of strangers, and created enclaves that segregated the white middle class from poor people and brown people.

He began to look to Corktown, west of downtown, one of Detroit’s oldest neighborhoods and one of its earliest wastelands, a landscape of toppled roofs and

33 weedy rubble since the 1960s. Greg saw beauty and potential: a neighborhood that’s sharpest decline was far behind it. There were even signs of renewal: On Michigan Avenue were an upscale barbecue joint and an espresso house.

In 2005, Greg borrowed money from friends to put down $11,000 for a two-story wooden cottage on Rosa Parks Boulevard, formerly 12th Street, the street where his grandfather used to cut hair. The block had just six other remaining houses. The fenced yard was small, so Greg claimed the vacant lot next door, and then expanded into additional lots.

Soon he was spending as much time in the garden as in the classroom.

By the end of 2008, Greg owned the house free and clear, and had paid off his car and his credit card.

His expenses were just $500 a month. That summer, he had sold $10,000 worth of produce. He wondered how much more he could make if he quit teaching and invested all his time in raising food.

“I used to think education was the way to change the society,” Greg told me. “Now I think it’s the local food movement.” That winter, he walked away from his teaching job, its health insurance and salary.

Three principles guided Greg’s venture. The first was to bring a new product to market. In 2008, it was impossible to find gourmet organic greens in Detroit except in fancy restaurants, and they were sourcing from out of state. So the second principle was import replacement: Selling a local product to those restaurants would keep the money in Detroit and eliminate the carbon costs of trucking produce in from the West Coast. Third was profitability: Unlike most row crops, salad greens could be harvested every week between March and November and sold for thousands of dollars per month. He christened his new venture Brother Nature Produce.

There were plenty of challenges. Much of the soil in Detroit’s vacant lots was devoid of nutrients, riddled with rubble, polluted with industrial chemicals and heavy metals. Greg planted sunflowers to draw lead from the soil. Breweries and coffee shops gave him their spent grains and grounds, which made excellent compost. He offered landscapers a place to drop off their leaves: more free compost and mulch.

To irrigate his growing acreage, he ran a hose from a fire hydrant, watering at dawn and dusk when he was less likely to be discovered by a meter reader.

Eventually he began collecting rainwater. He opted not to have his farm certified as organic by the USDA, a process that could cost $6,000. Instead he marketed his produce as “chemical-free.”

On a good Saturday, he earned $300 at Eastern Market, selling out by 11 AM. He sourced directly to high-end restaurants. He invited his friends and neighbors to bonfires and held you-pick afternoons.

Old-timers on the block called him Garden Greg. By the end of his first year as a full-time farmer, Brother Nature had grossed $30,000.

Olivia Hulbert had been to Eastern Market many times since childhood as well, but visiting now, she was surprised to find a table labeled “GROWN IN DETROIT” and stacked with kale and arugula and carrots. She tried a carrot: robust and bursting with flavor. The people working the table were pretty white for a pretty dark city, but they told her that the produce came from farmers all over town, who were getting 100 percent of each sale. Yeah, right, she thought. She offered to volunteer at the table so that she could see where the money actually went.

She arrived at 7 AM the next Saturday and laid out the produce. A clean-cut guy with flecks of gray at the temples handed her a tray of his nasturtiums.

Olivia arranged the tiny plastic pots across the front of the table. “Hold my coffee,” he said. He redid all her work, squeezing the nasturtiums close and sliding in a second tray.

“Maybe you need your own table,” Olivia said.

“Maybe I do,” he said and flashed her a smile.

After a few weekends at the market, Olivia had determined that Grown in Detroit was legitimate.

She watched the money go into the till, and she watched the farmers collect their portions at the end of the day. Each onion and carrot was accounted for. Nobody skimmed off the top. Next spring, Olivia determined, she would sell her own produce here.

Running the numbers, she decided that the most profitable crop would be garlic. It required little maintenance and resisted insects, and best of all, not many others were selling it. That fall, she planted 300 garlic bulbs in neat rows behind the gate on Mack Avenue. Come harvest time, she might make $500.

Not a bad hustle.

A friend invited Olivia to a brunch on a farm colonized from a row of vacant lots. Amid the towering weeds, Olivia could make out tomatoes and lettuce and kale and broccoli. It was a bit sloppy and in need of attention, she judged, but not bad for an amateur. The farmer turned out to be that white guy from Eastern Market, Mr. Hold My Coffee. They ended up seated together, and she told him her dilemma: Her mother and stepmother had sold the place on Mack Avenue, and 300 garlic plants were in need of a new home.

34 “Transplant them over here,” Greg suggested. The next weekend, he arrived with a pickup and shovel, and helped her dig up the shoots, and back at his place, they tilled a fresh row and pushed the shoots into the soil. Afterward, he invited her to join him at a symposium on Detroit farming where he was one of the speakers. Not a black face among them, Olivia noted. The white people talked and talked: local food, food desert, food justice, greening the city. When the farmer’s turn arrived, he said, “I’m flattered to be asked to speak here, but we really have to get a more representative group of people to discuss agriculture in Detroit.” Olivia wasn’t exactly impressed, but at least someone had said it.

For Olivia Hulbert, natural farming and food justice were not political slogans, but values she embodied through her work.

Over dinner, she told Greg how tired she was of living with her mother and stepfather. And yet she wasn’t earning enough to get her own place.

“I’ve got an extra bedroom,” he said.

Olivia continued to rise at six each morning for her job at Belle Isle, and then helped on the farm afternoons and weekends.

“She is all about living a certain way,” Greg said. “And she worked her ass off.” For Olivia, natural farming and food justice were not political slogans, but values she embodied through her work. “People on the left always talk a good game about how they feel politically. She was one to just show it without saying anything. I felt really at ease with her, in a plain way.”

A month after Olivia moved in, Greg took Vicky to lunch to formally ask for her daughter’s hand. As an engagement gift, the couple bought themselves a 12-gauge shotgun: a symbol, as they saw it, that their farm and their future were worth protecting. They carried it down to the old train station and shot off a box of shells for target practice.

At the end of 2010, Brother Nature had grossed $40,000. That winter, they married in the church at the corner of Martin Luther King and Trumbull, and for the reception a horse pulled the couple on a sleigh to the old ice rink on Belle Isle.

Olivia set about whipping Brother Nature into shape.

For all her husband’s enthusiasm and success, his methods were not up to the standards of the Royal Horticultural Society. With Olivia’s guidance, crops were planted in straight rows, with neat handmade trellises, and weeds were pulled on schedule. The salad mix was standardized—equal parts arugula,

mizuna, pea tips, sorrel, lettuce, bekana, and spinach. Olivia honed old-time skills: canning, pickling, pressing cider, saving seeds, drying herbs, rendering stock from beef bones. She built a coop for chickens and ducks. She killed varmints with bow and arrow. When her grandmother stopped

by Brother Nature for the first time, she saw crops in long rows like she hadn’t seen since she’d left Mississippi. “That’s some hard work,” she murmured, and retreated to her truck.

Growing food in marginal soil with limited resources in a city often referred to as “post-apocalyptic” and a “war zone,” Olivia took her lessons from an actual war zone: Britain between the world wars. “That was the last time people put modern scientific method into low-tech ways of doing things,” she said. “They were on rations for 14 years. They had to make do, and they had to ask Grandpa what he used to do. That was the last time that people really took that stuff seriously. After the wars, it was chemical this, and spray that, and why don’t you just monoculture?” She and Greg were figuring out how to farm without reliance on the industrial technology that, in their opinion, had brought about the collapse of their city in the first place.

As far as Greg was concerned, local food needed no more defense, just more defenders. “How many people does it take to make an urban farm?” he asked in a Facebook post. The answer: “25 film makers and journalists to do pieces on urban farming, 63 grad students to study the farm, a few people from the not for profit complex to hold meetings about farming, a few elected officials to have their pictures taken at the farm, and about 5 people to do the actual farming.”

When Farmer Jack closed back in 2007, Detroit became America’s largest city without a national grocery chain. Now a national grocery chain announced plans to set up shop in the Cass Corridor, rebranded as “Midtown.” And it wasn’t just any old chain. It was Whole Foods.

Until now, the irresistible narrative of urban farming went like this: Abandoned by the corporate food cabal, Detroit citizens had no choice but to grow their own. The arrival of a gourmet, all-natural grocery store upended this story. Greg’s allies at the Detroit Food Justice Task Force welcomed the arrival of the chain and got onboard, consulting with the company on how best to serve Detroiters.

The executive, a young, ponytailed, eloquent Native American named Red Elk, son of the founder of the American Indian Movement, told Greg they wanted to stock his lettuce. It was part of the strategy built

35 with the task force. Whole Foods had held meetings with church congregations. They were hiring local people—black people—at a good salary. They weren’t merely stocking local vegetables and bread and beauty products on their shelves; they were offering micro-loans to help independents like his operation ramp up production.

Whole Foods could sell more salad in a day than Greg and Olivia could sell in a week. Greg could put the farm on autopilot: Grow the salad, harvest it three times a week, deliver it to Whole Foods, just a mile from home. No more early mornings at Eastern Market. No more CSA members dribbling in after dark to collect bok choy. No more clipping two ounces of chives and parsley to deliver to a chef.

Greg had never totally accepted Detroit’s label as a “food desert,” although he knew the phrase attracted foundation money. He saw Detroit as more of a “food labyrinth.” Good food was there; you just had to know where to find it (and have the means of getting there). Just a mile from his farm, for example, was an excellent independent grocer in Mexicantown with fresh produce and homemade tamales and guacamole. More to the point, the movement was not just about vegetables but about economy and restructuring society. He didn’t want to be just the guy who brought arugula to the ghetto. He posted ten reasons why Detroit didn’t need Whole Foods.

The last two were: 9. Detroit is on the verge of developing a unique local food economy that uses local farms and artisan food businesses. WF will use incentives from Detroit tax payers and that money will go back to Austin TX where WF is based, while our local businesses cycle money throughout our community.

10. WF is part of this propped up image of a new downtown where Detroit is for the hipster, wealthier, and whiter and at the same time diverting resources from neighborhoods where people have lived and struggled to improve their city for decades.

He refused the offer. “Food justice isn’t helping a corporation increase its bottom line,” he told me, that old anarchist streak rising to the surface. He and Olivia vowed to keep growing on a small scale, selling directly to their neighbors. “Food justice is producing your own food,” he said, “getting people to be foodindependent.”

36 APPENDIX 3 Urban agriculture pioneer Lufa Farms opens third rooftop greenhouse farm—Montreal Gazette There were two important beginnings in Mo Hage’s world last summer: In July he and his wife, Lauren Rathmell, welcomed their daughter into the world.

And in June, work started on construction of the third commercial rooftop greenhouse in the burgeoning urban farming company the couple cofounded, Lufa Farms.

Their daughter, Dani, is six months old. And last week Lufa Farms began to harvest produce from that greenhouse, set atop an industrial building in Anjou. The first week brought mega-sized radishes, watercress, Persian cress, arugula and spinach from among more than 40 varieties of greens started out there as seedlings in December; this week, tatsoi, red and green bok choy, Chinese cabbage, romaine and Boston lettuce were added to the mix. Next week there will be more.

cultivars are often chosen for toughness, and that industrial farms can be “massive consumers of land and water.” A rooftop greenhouse, on the other hand, uses no land. And because it absorbs heat from the building below, it uses 50 per cent less energy than one on the ground – and reduces energy costs for building owners.

Rathmell, who has a biochemistry degree from McGill University, serves as greenhouse director at Lufa Farms and oversees the farming, plant-science activities and marketing. During a tour on Tuesday of the airy new greenhouse, she pointed out how seedlings are started in small containers of groundup coconut husks and then planted. Growing times vary, with arugula taking six weeks from seedling to harvest, for instance, and cauliflower twice that.

She pointed out four varieties of bok choy, a range of herbs, kohlrabi and mustard greens. Her favourite vegetable, by far, is rainbow chard, with its coloured stems and delicate flavour.

The produce is sold to directly to consumers, to subscribers – Lufavores, they are called – who find it in the baskets they order online, along with produce from small family farms, almost all local, and other products including meat, cheese, baked goods, fish and prepared foods, all sourced by Lufa Farms. The year 2016 was a good one: The Lufa Farms subscriber base grew by fully 50 per cent to more than 9,000 families.

The building on which the Ahuntsic greenhouse sits also contains the Lufa Farms warehouse, where subscribers’ baskets are assembled. Lufavores start out with baskets made up of $30 worth of food, mostly produce, and have until midnight to customize or finalize orders for the following day: The minimum order is $15. At midnight, the “marketplace” is closed and credit cards billed.

Partners log in on an online portal to check what was sold that day, then work all night to prepare it.

Hage and Rathmell, partners in life before they were business partners, had a vision: to create an ecologically — and economically — sustainable model for urban farming and to help to change the way people eat. It took the expertise of many and the investment of $2 million from family friends and others, but in 2011 they opened what was reputed to be the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse, atop an industrial building in Ahuntsic.

“I like the fact that I can customize my baskets and that products are environmentally friendly,” said Verdun resident Sherri Wallace, who has been a Lufavore for about two years. “I get mostly vegetables and, with time, I find the variety has increased. Produce is mostly local but they offer some citrus and collaborate with a farm in Florida so we get a few exotic things like avocados, oranges and grapefruit. And I find the cost reasonable.”

A second, in Laval, followed in 2013; the newest, at 63,000 square feet more than double the size of the first, is the largest. Produce is grown hydroponically through a system of plastic tubing that feeds them, recycles the water and reuses it; the circulation system and microclimate are managed by computer software.

Because only what is sold is harvested, produce is always fresh and both waste and need for storage are eliminated. There are more than 300 pick-up points in cafés, pharmacies and yoga studies around Montreal and, for an extra charge of $5, orders can be delivered to subscribers’ home by a fleet of four electric cars now working at capacity. Recently drop-off points have been added in Quebec City and Trois-Rivières, where the company has growers and producers.

Speaking during a Ted-X talk at the Universiteé de Montréal in 2012, Hage observed that our food often travels great distances before it gets to us, losing flavour and nutritional value along the way, that

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West Island resident Joel Assouline, whose Lufa Farms shopping list includes produce, dairy, some meat, and pasta, said he admires the company’s transparency. “What is cool is that even though they have their own tomatoes, they still carry tomatoes from other farmers. They have products that compete.”

He said he finds the online shopping cart “so userfriendly, with nice pictures. And your basket stays open all week.” Assouline, who has orders delivered to his home, likes also having access “to local and ethical farmers … When you go on their website, you have access to the information of every producer you buy from. For me, if a farmer is disclosing his name and his address, already it’s a good sign.”

38 APPENDIX 4 Paris Becomes One of the Most Garden-Friendly Cities in the World—EcoWatch Earlier this summer, Paris quietly passed a new law encouraging residents to help green the City of Light by planting their own urban gardens.

The new urban garden program is designed to help beautify and increase green space and biodiversity in the French city.

Although the measure was adopted on July 1, the news has only recently made headlines in France and on U.S. sites such as Inhabitat and Condé Nast Traveler.

The initiative, “permis de végétaliser” (or “license to vegetate”), is part of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s 2020 target of adding 100 hectares (247 acres) of vegetation on the city’s walls and roofs, with a third dedicated to urban agriculture.

To encourage citizens to become “gardeners of the Parisian public space,” any resident can now apply for a renewable three-year permit to start their own urban garden project. Participants can green the capital in various ways, from planting fruit trees to creating living walls to a rooftop garden. Upon request, the city will also provide a planting kit that includes topsoil and seeds.

Gardeners can get as creative as they want with their greenery, but they are instructed to maintain their installations sustainably and to keep the city’s aesthetics in mind. They are not allowed to use pesticides and can plant only local species.

Also, as Condé Nast Traveler noted, “the city has also expressed the need for ‘local honey plants,’ presumably to help grow the world’s diminishing bee population.”

By the year 2020, the City of Paris wants to add 100 hectares of vertical gardens and roofs, with a third dedicated to urban agriculture.

The city of Paris says that its new urban gardening program is designed to encourage biodiversity, meet the need for green spaces, mitigate “heat island” effect and climate change, improve air quality and improve the thermal and acoustic comfort of buildings.

Penelope Komitès, who is in charge of green spaces, nature and biodiversity for the city of Paris, said the initiative allows Parisians to help beautify the city while improving their own quality of life at the same time.

The urban garden initiative is only one part of Hidalgo’s ambitious plans of greening the French capital. The greening program also involves the creation of 30 hectares (74 acres) of public gardens, the planting of 20,000 new trees, 200 revegetation projects and the development of educational farms, orchards and vegetable gardens in schools.

In its continued efforts to fight pollution, the first Sunday of every month is a car-free day in Paris.

In March, French Parliament passed a new law mandating that all new buildings constructed in commercial zones must be partially covered by plants or solar panels. France also recently banned plastic plates and cutlery, making it the first country in the world to take this step.

39 APPENDIX 5 The Classroom Gardener: A School-Yard Garden Project—Victory Gardens Vancouver The Classroom Gardener supports teachers and students with a meaningful cross-curricular, placebased, on-site school garden learning experience.

There is a high correlation between outdoor learning and reduced anxiety and depression in children.

Learning outdoors improves overall health.

The Classroom Gardener includes 2 professional development sessions, comprehensive, crosscurricular teaching guides, and an awesome bundle of all related teaching resources! We also include all the gardening supplies necessary to run a successful school garden!

We provide on-site, in-garden, programming for students of all ages in public, private and home learning spaces within Vancouver’s lower mainland.

Schools outside of this area can still contact us for professional development bookings.

Preschools and daycare centres are eligible for our professional development series and on site coaching within the Lower Mainland.

K-7 schools within the Lower Mainland a re eligible for our comprehensive year-long Classroom Gardener programming.

K-7 schools outside of the Lower Mainland are eligible for the professional development series and can purchase the teacher’s guides.

Grades 8-12 are eligible for the professional development series and on-site coaching, within the Lower Mainland.

WHY GARDEN WITH KIDS AT SCHOOL? The research is overwhelmingly clear that learning out-of-doors provides a valuable context for academic, social and emotional skill development.

Learning in natural environments encourages imaginative and flexible thinking, which has been correlated with efficient problem solving later in life.

Learning out of doors has been associated with improved outcomes in all academic areas, specifically expressive language, math reasoning and scientific understanding.

Children who learn out of doors are more able to focus on non-preferred tasks and see improvements in their ability to problem solve.

Learning outdoors increases opportunities for positive social interaction, communication skills, group cohesion and teamwork.

Learning out of doors develops positive relationships between teachers and children, that can then vastly improve a child’s school experience.

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