The
growth of urban areas, has caused us to become increasingly separate from where
our food is grown. Like, we have covered in class, there has been a huge push
to promote urban agriculture. However, while urban agriculture has the
potential to promote social and ecological sustainability, there has not been an
effective way to promote it. In the Mendes article, the aim was to identify
weather or not city land inventories can be used to support urban agriculture,
by looking at the capacity to support policy integration and the advancement of
ecological and social sustainability. There findings in both Vancouver and
Portland supported there purpose, however there was little public involvement
in Vancouver. In my opinion, I believe that public involvement hinders implementation
of different initiatives, I only say this because of the time involved on
informing stakeholders and supporting their interest. However, it is important
to receive public opinion, as it gives policy makers an indication of what the
citizens needs are.
In
the Kennedy article, the Growing Power Vertical farm gives major indication of
how urban gardening, can be implemented in certain cities like New York and San
Francisco. Cities like this do that have a ton of horizontal land mass that
other cities have. This system also incorporates ecological and social sustainability,
similar to what the case studies for Portland and Vancouver where attempting to
identify.
In class today Professor Butler showed a Ted talk of a urban farmer from South Los Angeles and from the looks of it, it does not take acres of land to make this sort of thing happen. Regarding that Ted talk, the speaker actually said that the implementation process was being hindered by the local planner in LA. Apparently, they even threatened to put him in jail for "planting food" or in his terms, "planting some shit." Nonetheless, this stirred public involvement and 900 signatures later these sidewalk food gardens were being built throughout LA. The benefits, according to the speaker, include changing the lives of youth, which I thought was admirable given the circumstances of our society in the context of obesity and education rates. I think food really brings society to an intersection where nobody can truly ignore the conversation, which may in turn, actually be a great opportunity to really make advancements in other sectors within planning.
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