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Grown in Detroit

Posted in Active Design, Agriculture, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 03/28/2013 | 3 Comments »

On a modest site downtown, Lafayette Greens yields a good deal more than just food.

By Linda McIntyre

Detroit is having quite a moment in the media at a time of renewed interest in the trials and tribulations of cities, but it’s still kind of surprising to find a small, trapezoid-shaped edible garden thriving among the towers of its downtown. This is Lafayette Greens, designed by Kenneth Weikal Landscape Architecture, on a block that, until now, was best known for its homegrown fast food rivals American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island (“Coney Island” is Detroitspeak for chili dog). Now the Coneys are improbably sharing the neighborhood with vegetables, herbs, fruit, and flowers, all grown on a scant half-acre at a busy intersection across from the historic Book Cadillac Hotel (now part of the Westin chain) and the city’s federal office building and courthouse.

A little more than a decade ago, the notion of a neat, well-designed garden here at the paved epicenter of car culture—the General Motors headquarters is a few blocks away—would have seemed like a hallucination. The site’s previous occupant, the Lafayette Building, was a 14-story V-shaped Italian Renaissance tower built in 1923. It was demolished in late 2009, having been vacant since 1997. It had become one of the beautiful ruins for which Detroit has become ghoulishly famous, with broken windows, graffiti tags, squatting hipster artists, and weedy trees growing out of the roof.

But although abandoned buildings and vacant lots are still vexing issues in many parts of the city, this section of the downtown core has been transformed. The waterfront along the Detroit River is slowly developing into a series of linked green spaces and public plazas. Sports venues, even the home of the hard-luck Lions pro football team, draw hordes of loyal fans downtown. New cafés and pop-up retail spaces lure shoppers from suburban malls. Companies such as Compuware and Quicken Loans have opened big offices here and brought in employees from outside the city.

Compuware was one of the first companies to come back downtown, and one of its founders, Peter Karmanos Jr., has been a steady force in efforts to revitalize downtown Detroit. Karmanos, who stepped down as CEO in 2011 (he’s currently the company’s executive chairman), was one of the leaders of a group of businesspeople and philanthropists who raised $20 million to design, build, and maintain Campus Martius Park across the street from the company’s headquarters and just up Michigan Avenue from Lafayette Greens (see “Miracle on Woodward Avenue,” LAM, November 2006).

Lafayette Greens is a Compuware project too. Meg Heeres, the company’s art and community programs manager and the project director for the garden, says that Karmanos (who’s a Master Gardener) originally wanted to start an urban farm somewhere in the business district.

That’s not as weird as it might sound: Detroit is huge—almost 140 square miles—and by some estimates there are as many as 40 square miles of vacant land. There’s a long history of farming here, starting with French settlers’ early-18th-century “ribbon farms” along the Detroit River. Grassroots gardeners have started community gardens all over the low-density city, which has an abundance of single-family houses with yards. Detroit’s historic Eastern Market wholesale and retail food complex has a lot of local fruit and vegetable vendors. And in December, the city planning commission approved a new urban agriculture ordinance that updates the zoning code to allow land uses such as farms, tree farms, and orchards.

Compuware wanted the project done fast, but it also needed a design firm with the right kind of sensibility. “We knew this was not a straight-ahead landscape architecture project,” Heeres told me. “The designers had to understand the community here, how to engage a lot of different stakeholders and create a welcoming space for all, while meeting our demands for a strong aesthetic and innovation. My involvement as the client would be very, very hands on, and they had to be okay with that.”

Ken Weikal, ASLA, who started his firm in the Detroit suburbs in 1989, and Beth Hagenbuch, Associate ASLA, a partner in the firm and the project’s lead designer, were already involved in GrowTown, a nonprofit group formed to help improve derelict urban sites with easy and inexpensive design interventions and technology. They had recently worked on a community project in the north central part of the city.

The design quickly evolved from the simple kitchen garden concept that Heeres pitched to Weikal and Hagenbuch—raised planting beds divided by mulch paths—into a modern riff on the French potager. Corrugated steel clads the raised beds and plays off the concrete and high-rise buildings that surround the space, as well as the dramatic weathered brick wall of an adjacent building that serves as a backdrop to the greenery. The shiny metal and the reclaimed wood used to build a trio of wacky storage sheds were inexpensive and manufactured locally. They also give the space an industrial vibe that suits Motown quite well.

Compuware loved the design and wanted it built as soon as possible. But the city owns the site, and Mayor Dave Bing’s administration has been looking at creative ways to use vacant land, including larger-scale urban agriculture. A lot of consultation and negotiation by Heeres was required to hammer out the year-to-year lease agreement in a short time. The design was made final by January 2011, the city’s blessing was secured in time to start work in June, and most of the work was done by the end of July.

The prep work for the garden was not as hard as you might expect. Weikal says that after the Lafayette Building was demolished, the site was excavated about 15 feet down, and soil was hauled in to bring it up to grade. The team replaced the top few feet of that soil but didn’t have to deal with a huge contamination legacy.

The designers manipulated the site in subtle ways to give the garden a spatial charge. Two gravel paths radiate out from a paved terrace and gradually diverge from each other, widening for a forced perspective. This arrangement makes Shelby Street, to the west, look farther away than it is from the terrace. They integrated the site’s four-foot grade change into the design. It helps the hardscape drain into a swale edged with gabions and planted with redtwig dogwoods and other water-tolerant plants. It also varies the height of the raised beds for comfortable and accessible gardening. The tops of the planters all rise to the same flat level, but the bases follow the slope, resulting in a range of bed heights, from eight to 40 inches, and an intriguing sense of depth across the whole garden.

A small, circular children’s garden, 38 feet in diameter, sits at the southeast corner. It is edged with fruiting shrubs and sunflowers, and its planters are filled with colorful flowers, sweet-smelling herbs, fuzzy lamb’s ears, and spiky succulents. Made from recycled 55-gallon steel juice barrels, they repeat, in a smaller size, the children’s garden’s circular shape. These geometric shapes, and the strong lines of the rest of the garden, bring order to all of the lushly planted raised beds and help the small space hold its own in the tall and dense urban streetscape.

All of the planting in the 2,000 square feet of raised beds was done on one sweltering and labor-intensive day in July 2011, during which the landscape contractor, the WH Canon Landscape Company, executed what Weikal describes as a “military-style operation.” Plants were grown from seed off-site in the nearby town of Howell by Motave Meadows, a small organic grower, in 12-inch pots that could be slotted in to the raised beds without much root disturbance. “The challenge that day was to plant several thousand tender transplants into more than 30 beds according to a very detailed planting scheme,” says Hagenbuch. “Getting the plants into the right beds, the specified patterns, watered in, and drip irrigation in place and properly adjusted on a very hot day required dedicated teamwork.”

Apple and pear trees, and swaths of lawn, were installed separately. Weikal says the lawns, planted with fescue that doesn’t require a lot of irrigation, help the garden look good all winter and open up more space for programming. Along with gravel paths, they also contribute to the site’s mostly (70 percent) porous surface. As in most cities, stormwater management is a problem in Detroit: According to a 2012 report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes, in 2011 the city sent 7 billion gallons of stormwater and untreated sewage into the Detroit and Rouge Rivers. The city government is trying to use more green infrastructure, but its dire financial situation has slowed progress.

Since its official opening in late August 2011, Lafayette Greens has been a big success. In 2012, its first full growing season, the garden produced almost 1,800 pounds of fresh produce according to Gwen Meyer, who manages the garden for Compuware full-time. The food, which is grown organically, is donated to Gleaners, a local food bank, and other community groups (volunteers can take small amounts with them). Kids from Compuware’s in-house day-care center and other nearby programs come to learn and play. Volunteers from Compuware, the federal building, and other nearby offices show up regularly to pull weeds (the raised beds and overall tidiness make it easy for people in work clothes to do a bit of gardening at lunchtime) or hear talks on beekeeping, vermicomposting, and other garden topics.

And some people come just to hang out, which is fine with Meyer. “Our whole purpose is to be available for people to sit and relax, take a break,” she told me. “They can get involved if they want to.” The garden is open year-round, and so are volunteer hours, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday. In the winter, fewer volunteers show up, but the ones who do shovel snow, keep an eye on the covered hoop houses Meyer is trying as an experiment, and plan for the next growing season.

Some concessions to the reality of urban parks had to be made. Heeres says that Compuware would have preferred to leave the site open, but the city insisted on a fence. The garden is locked up at night and on most weekends, and a camera allows Compuware security staff to monitor the site, which is well lit at night.

Vegetable theft hasn’t been a big problem, Meyer says, but it happens. “We’d rather engage people than reprimand them,” she told me. “I might ask them to pick more so I can take it to Gleaners. Honestly, I’d rather train thieves to harvest properly so the plants continue to grow. It doesn’t occupy much of my time.”

Lafayette Greens doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Urban farming has become something of a class-based flash point here. The concept was mocked by some residents in the recent documentary Detropia, and the city council’s December approval of the sale of about 1,500 city-owned lots to a local businessman, John Hantz, who wants to start a tree farm, was controversial.

Compuware has been careful not to fan any flames. Heeres and Meyer stress that Lafayette Greens is by no means the first or only edible effort in the city. “The media attention is positive, but it doesn’t always fully represent how deeply spread out growing is here,” Meyer says. At the dedication in 2011, Heeres focused on the park aspect of the project. “It’s like Campus Martius with vegetables,” she told the Detroit Free Press.

Heeres says that the ecofriendly aspect of Lafayette Greens is nice, but it wasn’t what drove the project—it was about building relationships in the community. The project offers some timely lessons. Green spaces are part of Detroit Future City, a long-awaited strategic plan released by the Bing administration in January. The product of a two-year process led by local government, business, academic, and nonprofit leaders, the plan is a broad blueprint for improving the city’s economy and making better, more efficient use of its vast amount of land over the next 50 years. Among other things, it envisions more walkable, high-density neighborhoods with inviting parks and gardens. Kind of like what Compuware has done on a smaller scale.

Other companies, whose willingness to deeply engage has the potential to make or break the strategic plan, might be paying attention to the company’s success. Heeres says she’s had “probably a half-dozen calls” about the process. “None of those have come to fruition yet, but we would love for that to happen.”

The city, and the people who live and work there, will benefit if it does. “Lafayette Greens has created a real amenity in downtown Detroit,” John Gallagher, a business and development reporter for the Free Press, told me. “The design of the park is very much advanced over the usual community garden in a neighborhood setting. The organization of the garden, with Compuware volunteers tending the plants, maintains the quality level.” Few places need that kind of amenity as urgently as this one.

Linda McIntyre, a Detroit-area native, is a former staff writer and frequent contributor to LAM.

In honor of National Landscape Architecture Month (NLAM), the entire April issue of LAM is available for free.

Image credits: (1-2) Lafayette Greens / Beth Hagenbuch, Associate ASLA

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Detroit Is Not a Ruin

Posted in Agriculture, Education, Environment, Public Spaces, Urban Design on 01/09/2013 | 1 Comment »

At the National Building Museum, a controversial set of two new photography exhibits asks us to consider whether a city can die, whether districts of ruined, abandoned buildings reverting back to nature can define a city that still has a population of 700,000 people. The answer is no: Detroit is still alive, but perhaps shamed by its decline. At a presentation by two photographers — Camilo Jose Vergara and Andrew Moore — Detroit was viewed as a warning of things to come, a modern-day Necropolis or city of the dead, but fortunately this storyline doesn’t tell the whole tale about that city.

Vergara, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, sociologist by training, and also an evocative photographer, covers the process of decay in many cities in the U.S. Each year, he travels to cities like Camden, Chicago, and Detroit, to document how “time, elements, scavengers, and people” do “whatever they do to fine buildings.” In Detroit, he has taken series of photographs showing the decay of the same few buildings over time. Year and year, Vergara comes back because he’s fascinated by “what is going to happen” to these buildings. “Some are engulfed in vegetation or become ruins.”

The Chilean photographer has spent a lot of time at the old Ford Packard Plant, which once churned out the cars and trucks that populated Detroit’s streets and all of America’s arteries. Once the factory closed, the mile-long building became home to over 200 businesses, beginning in the early 90s. However, those businesses seemed more focused on disassembling or scavenging. “This was now the place you took your car to be taken apart and turned into scraps.” Other businesses collected old shoes or cardboard boxes to be reused or recycled.

In a view of the old plant Vergara returns to year after year, he documents a time when there were “wild parties” organized within the walls, organized via pagers, to a period of partial demolition, to nature eventually taking over again.

Now, it’s a dangerous place filled with scavengers and homeless people. “Fires have further weakened the structures.” But a theme both Moore and Vergara returned to again is that this place and others in Detroit are also sites of creative rebirth. Within all the decay, it has become a “museum of graffiti,” where any graffiti artist of note wants to have a piece.

For Moore, a leading contemporary large-format photographer, the process of documenting Detroit’s glorious ruins are like “mental blueprinting.” His father is an architect and he grew up with the idea that “you can tell a story through a space.” He says that “buildings are an incorruptible witness of history.” Buildings inflect history; buildings can’t lie, whereas the faces of people can tell lots of different stories.

Like Vergara, Moore takes photographs of cities undergoing change, even if that change is destructive. His work has spanned New York City’s Time Square and Fulton Fish Market areas over the years. In early 2008, he began to really take photos of Detroit and was at once “amazed by the quality of the architecture.” He sees the ruins as particularly “emotionally charged” because that city’s fall is so recent.

In the Ford company’s Dry dock building, where Henry Ford first worked as an apprentice, “one guy is now living there, with a wind screen up to block the cold air.” (The historic building is now slated for condos).

A grand old theater that opened in 1928 with an appearance by Gloria Swanson is now “damaged by water, neglect.” The muted palette of the buildings create a sense of “loneliness, desolation, and abandonment.”

Both Vergara and Moore also see a “surreal” quality of the city. A theater with an amazingly beautiful ceiling was turned into a parking lot, because it was more cost-effective than tearing it down. Nature is also seen as playing a key role in creating the surreal effect. “Wherever there is a void, nature returns in full force.” For example, what Moore thinks is Henry Ford’s old corner office is now covered in moss. An old post office building’s roof has caved in. The space was once a depot for storing old books. Those books have decomposed and turned into mulch and now provide a foundation for birch trees that grow out of the hole in the roof.

Within this landscape, Moore said, there’s also good and bad. “There are black hats and white hats. The black hats are interested in destruction, blowing things up. The white hats looking at documenting, taking photos.”

Both photographers, who almost seem to view buildings as living things – with their own cycle of life and death, said the ruins are “always changing over time. Ruins aren’t static.” Vergara, though, also thinks that the ruins are indicative of what “we’ve done to the earth. The ruins are the future. I’ve internalized what I’ve seen. It has energized my life, but it isn’t positive. The experience of these desolate places has marked me.”

And while both do include photos of living people (occasionally), both said people in these places are few and far between. In their tours, there just weren’t people walking around. And perhaps because of this, both feel a greater responsibility towards the buildings — and to document the buildings, instead of the people who created them and let them decay. Vergara said: “I feel a responsibility to all those buildings. I have to know what’s going to happen to them.” By shining a “strong light on their ruin, we can bring attention to what’s happening here. That’s positive.”

For Carolyn Mitchell, a Detroit native and now Washington, D.C. resident who attended the lecture and was interviewed after, the photographers “only showed the death, but not the life of the city.” The exhibits were “misleading.” She said some great buildings were always well-maintained and others have been newly restored. “We have some of the greatest Art Deco buildings in the U.S.” Still, the exhibits brought back “memories of how the city once was.”

Many neighborhoods are still maintained like those in any other city and are real, thriving places. In neighborhoods like Woodbridge and Corktown, “homes have porch swings. There are lots of community gardens. Neighbors know each other.” This narrative isn’t really out there. The story of nature taking over, both positively in the form of urban farming and new forests, and, negatively, in the form of decay, may not be accurate. As Mitchell argued, “nature has always been in the city.”

In their presentations, Moore and Vergara admitted that they have received criticism from the local community, and there’s no way the exhibits will ever be shown there. As the moderator John Beardsley, head of the landscape studies program at Dumbarton Oaks and a professor at Harvard University, said, “well, these photos don’t paint the best portrait of the city.”

Mitchell also thinks that the photographers failed to place the ruins in a historical context. She said the exhibits could have been more powerful had they shown “the before and after, what the city once looked like, how fabulous it once all was.”

In the end, the photographs then don’t answer the real question: What happened? Why did Detroit fail while other large cities like Chicago and Los Angeles renewed themselves? Mitchell, who used to work for the Detroit city government, said it was a real “lack of vision, leadership” at the top. A series of corrupt mayors and their cronies stymied positive change and drove out business owners. City services declined with mismanagement and a falling tax base. And while there are a number of non-profits coming in to create bottom-up, community-led visions, “these can’t really replace the lack of vision from the mayor.” Detroit sounds like any other big city — with its mistakes, but not dead yet.

Learn more about the two exhibits and see a book of Moore’s work on Detroit.

Image credits: (1-3) Copyright Camilo Jose Vergara, (4-7) Copyright Andrew Stone, (8) Copyright Camilo Jose Vergara

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Permaculture = Permanent Agriculture

Posted in Agriculture, Ecosystem Services, Forests, Waste on 11/19/2012 | Leave a Comment »

That’s at least one definition of this innovative practice, explained Jillian Hovey, the Toronto-based head of Sustainable Living Network at the 2012 Greenbuild in San Francisco. Another possible definition: “a holistic design methodology to access the intelligence of natural ecosystems.” Really, the goal of the ever-growing tribe of permaculturists is to “co-create with nature.” Permacultural projects include organic food, edible landscaping, forest farming, and other small forms of urban agriculture.

Hovey said one of the central tenets of permaculture is regenerative design. While sustainable design involves simply mitigating the negative impacts of humans on the planet, regenerative design goes beyond and seeks to create a “positive role for people on earth.” Practitioners of permaculture seek to merge landscape, people, and technology to create “food, shelter, and energy.” Hovey said it’s a “philosphical approach to land use” in which ”intricately conducted ecosystems, consciously designed” are put to work. (Still, she said some critics argue that, in these permacultural systems, humans are at the center of the regenerative effort, so the approach is still too human-centric, and doesn’t truly benefit “life in all forms,” as permaculturalists say they do).

Bill Mollison, the Australian founder of the movement, wrote Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, back in the 1980s. Early permaculturalists in Australia wondered whether it could actually be replicated in other places, but they decided that other temperate climates could make the systems work. So a slew of Australian books came out, followed by American and European guides. Recent how-to literature includes Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscapes Naturally and Edible Forest Gardens.

Standing on Greenbuild’s oddest “dog-bone”-shaped center stage, Hovey walked in circles showing off photographs of permaculture projects being designed and built. One practitioner she showed, Austrian outlier Sepp Holzer, is well-known for his “crater gardens,” stepped, terraced landscapes, which involve moving earth to dig out gardens, creating more surface area for agriculture and microclimates for different plants.

Holzer was recently brought in by Hovey’s group to help build a stepped crater garden at a school in Detroit. With the use of a translator, Holzer communicated to the bulldozer operator to create a set of steep walls out of the earth, adding in wood joints made of out sticks to “increase the productive edges.” Wood was also put in so that it decomposed and made richer soils. Once the area was seeded, straw was put on top. As Hovey described, “nature hates bare soil. Weeds happen when soil is left bare.”

The project, and others like it, demonstrate how “nature can be used as a model.” Hovey said permaculturalists use a design process wherein ”everything is connected, every function should be supported by multiple elements, and every element should serve multiple functions.” This type of design process “builds in redundancy and resiliency.”

Permacultural design also enables feedback to be incorporated throughout the process. “This is a cyclical, iterative, spiral approach.” This kind of approach allows permaculturalists to “eliminate pollution.” While waste is abundant in nature — because it produces so much — pollution is not. Pollution is the “concentration of waste to such a degree that nature can’t handle it.” Interestingly, Hovey said lawns are a form of pollution because they “suppress existing ecosystems.”

Hovey went into great detail on the benefits of compost (if done right, it shouldn’t smell), along with the application of permaculture in parks, small urban plots, and even windowsills.

Closing with a thoughtful take on regenerative design, Hovey argued that if these systems are designed to be self-sustaining, “the agricultural output is theoretically unlimited.” And if designers understand “ecological succession,” these landscapes can be “self-maintaining and even replicating.” Hence, permaculture as a state of permanent agriculture.

Check out Sepp Holzer’s book on permaculture at the small-scale.

Image credit: Powell Street Promenade, San Francisco / Hood Design / image copyright Marion Brenner and Beth Amann

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Landscape Architecture vs. Consumerism

Posted in Agriculture, Land Art, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Residential Design on 11/12/2012 | 2 Comments »

The design professions are at a crossroads, struggling to reconcile design’s role as an engine for consumer-driven economic growth with its role in imagining and implementing sustainable lifestyles and businesses. There’s a “meaning” gap between designers’ potential for social good and the ruthless commercialism and consumerism that serves as the context for the professions.

In my new book, Architecture & Design versus Consumerism: How design activism confront growth, I explore this gap and present examples of how designers are confronting key problems of consumerism. Here I look at a few examples from landscape architecture.

Consumerism acts as an engine for economic growth. This engine shapes design as market values increasingly outweigh civic or environmental values. One example is private suburban communities. Peter Cannavò reports that the growing trend for making new suburbs private—privatization is a requirement in a number of cities—means that more and more whole neighborhoods are managed as property rather than as communities or civic places. This type of management usually limits the variety of structures and allowable types of landscapes, often aiming for an outdated suburban ideal of big houses, big cars, and resourced-intensive landscapes, all of which drive increased consumption.

New suburbs are privatized, becoming consumption-driven commodities rather than communities. Photo Patrick Huber.

Consumerism also shapes landscape design when market actors control the location of public places. Emily Talen describes how cities such as Phoenix and Chicago implement new parks and other public spaces not according to where they are needed, but rather, according to where developers have paid impact fees. In the case of Phoenix this means that parks are planned for low-density, peripheral locations rather than strategic locations that might synergistically enrich the public landscape. This is similar to other “privately owned public spaces.” Whoever has money to pay impact fees determines location, whether or not the location adds wider value. The locations and contexts then dictate the benefit that any landscape design can bring to the urban fabric as a whole.

How Landscape Architecture is Reshaping Consumption

Despite these problems we’re also seeing cases where landscape design is shaping, or reshaping, consumerism. Here we look at the examples of sharing, appropriation and interactivity. The discussion above suggests that the location of landscape amenities can limit the way they enrich the public realm. Although we think of a landscape as stationary, recent examples of mobile urban farms and floating parks begin to question what it means to share a landscape. Two examples are the Neptune Foundation’s floating swimming pool, essentially a floating park, and “The Farm Proper,” a mobile urban farm.

Set & Drift developed this experimental, mobile urban farm using abandoned shopping carts, among other things.

Landscape architects are also looking at ways to appropriate and reassign existing landscapes that are underperforming socially, often because spaces are shaped by market efficiencies, to the exclusion of social or environmental values. In these cases designers highlight and uncover added value in tactical ways. An example is the Park(ing) Day project by ReBar, where money in the meter converts on-street parking spaces into temporary pocket parks.

Western countries are driven increasingly by “positional” consumption—for status rather than to meet basic needs. But research indicates that providing a better quality commons, including public space, could offer new means for gaining social distinction and weaken the link between status and private consumption. To this end, designers are enriching public spaces in new ways.

Play encouraged by flexible, fiber-optic “stalks” that emit sound and light as people passed near them in “White Noise, White Light” by J. Meejin Yoon. Courtesy of Howler + Yoon Architects.

Examples are experiments in interactive landscapes such as Enteractive (by Electroland Studio) and White Noise White Light. In both cases public spaces were “wired” to react to public and social activity. This interaction introduced play, but also temporarily personalized the place without privatizing it. Interesting developments occur as these interactive components are deployed in urban greenscapes as well as hardscapes.

This guest post by author Ann Thorpe is part of a virtual book tour for the book, Architecture & Design versus Consumerism (Earthscan/Routledge 2012). Thorpe currently serves as strategist with a Seattle-based startup, a social enterprise called Luum. She is also author of The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability.

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Metropolitan Agriculture at All Scales

Posted in Agriculture, Gardens, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/11/2012 | 2 Comments »

S, M, L, or XL-sized metropolitan agriculture? Mia Lehrer, FASLA, Mia Lehrer + Associates, said it’s not just about one size, which definitely doesn’t fit all when it comes to cities, in a session at the ASLA 2012 Annual Meeting. In an era where it seems like any school or community can start a garden, perhaps it’s time to step back and think about the bigger picture. What’s the goal? Lehrer thinks it’s comprehensive urban agricultural systems that are relevant to the unique cultural, social, and environmental conditions of a city. Metro-region agriculture, if planned, designed, and supported financially at all scales, can address issues related to social equity and health issues like diabetes and obesity, while building regional agricultural communities and economies.

In California, where Lehrer lives, she said the agriculture system is completely out of whack. While the state grows some 50 percent of America’s fruit and vegetables, just 2 percent is kept and eaten locally. About 98 percent is imported from Chile or elsewhere. Unfortunately, California isn’t alone: “These issues also go way beyond the North American continent.”

In an effort to build and sustain urban metropolitan systems at the XL and L-scales, Sibella Kraus, Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE), made the case for “New Ruralism,” a place and systems-based approach to farming and smart growth that seeks to “preserve and enhance the rural and urban edge.” She said these places at the edge are counter-intuitively “indispensable to the vitality of cities.” This is because the footprint of any city really reaches far beyond the core — to the edges, to the suburban and rural communities and economies that make the whole metropolis work.

In the San Francisco Bay area, Kraus explained that she’s been working on metropolitan agriculture planning, including a San Francisco foodshed assessment. She said that project came out of the question, “could San Francisco survive on food grown within a 100-mile range?” Not likely for now, but perhaps more so in the future. In justifying the program, Kraus said like any other planning effort, urban agriculture also needs its own “nuanced, detailed planning” effort.

At the sub-regional scale, another project on the Coyote Valley agricultural region, a 7,000 acre valley near San Jose, focuses on creating a vision plan, with layers outlining how farmland, nature habitat, and development can better coincide. Over the next 25 years, $50 million will be spent to make the plan a reality, purchasing easements and land to make sure development happens in a way that protects the vital cultural landscape of the agricultural region.

Kraus said one of the ultimate goals of SAGE’s work was to “promote rural and urban placemaking” while linking sustainability at those two different scales. In the European Union, the places where the rural and urban meet, “urban edge agricultural parks,” are completely valued — people understand the need to protect and even cherish these historical agricultural landscapes. She pointed to a 1,000-acre agricultural park outside Milan, Italy, where there are recreational, farming, and cultural opportunities combined.

At the M and S-scales, Glen Dake, ASLA, GDML, former green deputy for the city of Los Angeles and a landscape architect, described his innovative “community development-based approach” to metropolitan agriculture in Los Angeles. Dake said he’s averaging about 3-6 gardens per year, and has worked on more than 50 in total. As an example, he pointed to his work with Crenshaw Gardens, where he’s been helping them access local community development block grants.

Dake called for a “public health approach” that leverages local city programs. In Los Angeles, that has meant working with and tapping resources available through a range of federal, state, and non-profit programs like L.A. Sprout, L.A. County Renew, and Little Green Fingers programs.

In a rapid-fire survey of research, Dake argued that at least indirect evidence demonstrates that urban agriculture does help boost positive health outcomes. With 2/3 of adults in the U.S. expected to be obese by 2050 if nothing is done, just getting people outdoors exercising, eating healthy produce matters. What particularly works: doubling gardening with nutrition education. When kids and adults alike learn that you can eat “lots of processed foods and not feel full,” they also learn that fresh, unprocessed food helps reduce weight if coupled with exercise.

The little green fingers program is also important because there “obstacles to having kids in gardens.” Parents worry that they will get dirty; they also worry about supervision. In a new design Dake worked on, the gardens had areas that made supervision easier. Interestingly, Dake said in his work setting up these projects, he has actually found that a lack of bathrooms wasn’t an impediment to making these gardens work.

Another speaker delved into Detroit, where there’s a real grassroots effort underway to turn the city around. A big part of that effort, which runs from XL through S scales, said Charles Cross, Detroit Collaborative Design Center, is producing food. He said all the locally-grown produce at Detroit’s Eastern Market is “amazing.”

At it’s height, Detroit, which comes in at a gargantuan 13,859-square miles, had a population of 2 million. Now, it’s about 715,000. The population started to drop in the 1950s, with the collapse of manufacturing. Now, there are around 105,000 vacant lots. About 125 schools have closed. One neighborhood that used to have nearly 90,000 people now just has 5,000.

Working with landscape architecture firm Stoss and Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Cross’ group developed a plan that connects all the scales, from the “personal to the neighborhood to the non-profit to the commercial scales.” Talking to the mayor, Cross made the case for making the plan a reality, saying all the city’s local farmers needed better “distribution, infrastructure, and facilities.” One proposal they’ve pitched even calls for large-scale urban forestry within the city limits. Christmas trees or wood products from Detroit could be coming to a city near you.

Cross said companies are also getting involved in this bottom-up agriculture-driven revitalization effort. In fact, Compuware, which is headquartered in Detroit, just won an ASLA professional design award for their remarkable urban garden called Lafayette Greens. A lush garden and public space, Lafayette Greens provides access to all local residents who can come help harvest the produce, which is then donated to food banks. Other local bottom-up programs include Detroit School gardens and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Recovery Park, an amazing program, provides former felons and addicts with self-help and rehabilitation services, while creating “productive landscapes” within the city. This ambitious project is working on unearthing a creek, developing a horticultural center, and converting 2,000 inner-city acres into farmland.

In a nice finale, Kraus said that all these examples show that “agriculture is the new golf.” Lehrer went one step further, calling for cities to convert their existing water-hogging golf courses into farmland. L.A. golfers beware: She may be aiming for your courses soon.

Image credit: (1) ASLA 2012 Professional Award Winner. Lafayette Greens. Kenneth Weikal Landscape Architecture / Beth Hagenbuch BLA, (2) San Francisco Bay Are Foodshed /San Francisco Chronicle. Stephen Joseph, (3) Crenshaw Garden, (4-5) Recovery Park

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Fritz Haeg’s Agricultural Art

Posted in Agriculture, Land Art on 09/05/2012 | Leave a Comment »

Artist and landscape designer Fritz Haeg, who is also author of Urban Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, has been busy since we last spoke to him at the 2010 ASLA annual meeting, with two new installations worth checking out. Haeg will soon be hosting an opening reception at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for his Domestic Realities installation, a part of the museum’s MoMA Studio: Common Senses project. He’s also been working with renowned landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations on a new project in the Everton park in Liverpool, UK.

Haeg tells us that Domestic Integrities is a survey of “local and seasonal patterns and rituals of interior domestic landscapes,” which explores ”the way we use what we resourcefully find around us to artfully make ourselves at home.”

The funky, organic feel of the circular garden installation has a nice contrast with MoMA’s sleek high-modern sculpture garden. The work was created in partnership with the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

The tiny garden, which was planted this summer by a team of gardeners, offers “medicinals, herbals, edibles, and plants for pollinators” and has been cultivated throughout the season in preparation for this month’s launch.

Another linked component — a circular rug, which is called the Domestic Integrity Field – is set up indoors in partnership with Mildred’s Lane in Pennsylvania. There, Haeg will use elements harvested from the outdoor garden, such as ”tea infusions, fresh bread, dried herbs, and flower arrangements,” presenting them on the “crocheted spiral rug of discarded textiles.”

The pieces are supposed to work in tandem. Vistors are expected to “explore the garden outside and make themselves at home on the rug inside, taking off shoes to sit down, inspect, touch, taste, and smell that day’s various Domestic Integrities.” Haeg talks more about his rug installation on MoMA’s blog: “Proprietress J. Morgan Puett donated antique linens, which we cut into strips and crocheted into a 6-foot-diameter circle that will gather more rings as it travels. By the time it arrives at MoMA in the fall, it will hopefully be around 20 feet in diameter, and large enough to serve as a welcoming domestic landscape.”

Another one of Haeg’s recent projects in the UK is also worth checking out. For the Liverpool Biennial, Haeg partnered with James Corner Field Operations to create Foraging Spiral at the Everton Park. James Corner, ASLA, and his team are now working on a new master plan for the park.

The project takes the “elevated central site of the bowl-shaped hollow,” which was previously occupied by a small wheel manufacturer, and creates a set of interesting outdoor happenings. “The project includes an a one-day archeological dig, the planting of a wild edible spiraling garden, a temporary basecamp headquarters for a series conversations about the park’s past and future, a printed journal that reports on the gathering, and a video that tells the story of the park from multiple points of view.” The idea was to “treating the hollow as a microcosm of the entire park, a series experiments is presented to publicly present the range of activities and features the local community would like to see in their park.”

First, there was a day-long archeological dig, which uncovered the facade of an old church buried there. Then remnants of the church were used to build out the next piece, the Foraging Spiral. Haeg describes this project: “Existing grass within the entire area bounded by the circular overlook drive in the center of the park to grow and gradually turn into a tall wild meadow, into which paths are mown which follow the crest of the bowl and down into the center. A 6 foot wide by 450 foot long bed of wild, native, and edible plantings (with local partners Squash Nutrition, The National Wildflower Centre, and the Everton Park horticulturist) lined with excavated brick from the archeology dig, was [then] established.” The new spiral garden includes an amazing variety of different fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

See more images of Domestic Realities and Foraging Spiral.

Image credit: Fritz Haeg

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A Roadmap for Urban Agriculture

Posted in Agriculture, Policy and Regulation, Urban Revitalization on 09/05/2012 | 1 Comment »

While New York City already has some 700 urban farms and gardens spread throughout its five boroughs, urban farming still feels ad-hoc, somewhat tacked-on in many places. The gains have been slow and future progress isn’t guaranteed. To boost the long-term prospects of urban farming in the U.S.’s biggest city, the Design Trust for Public Space and its partner Added Value just launched a new report some three-years in the making called Five Borough Farm: Seeding the Future of Urban Agriculture, along with a companion Web site. The project seeks to create a comprehensive “roadmap” with the goal of helping stakeholders — policymakers, community groups, farmers, and designers — “understand and weigh the benefits” of urban agriculture, while making a compelling case for significantly ramping up local government support for this growing field. Basically, if you’ve been looking for a thorough examination of all the policy aspects of urban farming, this report is it.

The Design Trust for Public Space has had a long history of strategically intervening in the public realm in NYC. They were very early supporters of the vision of the High Line founders, and provided vital aid to them, which helped underpin their later success. The group has also recently been involved in redesigning NYC’s taxis and creating sustainable guidelines for NYC’s parks, buildings, and infrastructure.

The report authors argues that a more comprehensive policy approach is needed for urban agriculture because so many of NYC’s urban farms are on city land. A “decentralized system of diverse, small-scale, community-based public spaces” exists in schoolyards, the grounds of public housing developments, community gardens, and public parks. As we know, the benefits of these spaces go beyond fresh produce. ASLA’s recent Google Sketch-up animation — The Edible City – explains how communities improve the health and wellbeing of communities and help people better engage with their urban environments. But, unfortunately, in NYC and so many other cities, there’s still a disconnect between official policy and the bottom-up grass-roots movement being led by gardeners, farmers, and landscape architects.

To remedy this, the Design Trust brought together nearly 100 experts in food policy, sustainable design, and public health. It looks like just about every major urban farm, community gardening group, and non-profit working on food issues participated, which gives their recommendations some real weight.

First, the group identified some of the obstacles to future growth. For example, farmers and gardeners face a whole host of “challenges obtaining critical resources” such as soil, compost, and growing space, as well as construction materials, financing, and skilled labour. More involvement by city farmers in policymaking could help alleviate some of those problems. Additionally, there are “race- and class-based disparities that hinder access to information, services, and funding” amoung urban farmers. It seems depending on where you are, neighborhood farmers in NYC get very different treatment. Furthermore, the city is doing very little to actually track urban agriculture so there’s no good data on the scope of the field or its growing contribution to the NYC economy. Without a better understanding of how urban agriculture creates social, ecological, and economic benefits, it’s hard to build more support for these farms. Lastly, the group said that the city government has little authority over coordinating urban agriculture, incorporating these programs into other complementary initiatives.

The Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value smartly focus on the need for better metrics. They write that while there are now tons of studies showing the benefits of urban farming, there is no way to track real progress on improving healthy eating, spurring physical activity, growing jobs, and building “community cohesiveness.” As a result, they propose a whole set of indicators that the city should be methodically collecting data against annually. And to track this data well, the city will need to ramp up its own resources, with an enhanced position for the ”food policy coordinator,” who’s success should then be tied to the growth of the burgeoning field.

Their recommendations, which are detailed over many pages, fall into a few categories. The first involves boosting the resources for urban agriculture in the NYC government. The group proposes strengthening the GreenThumb program, while making the food policy coordinator a true urban farming czar for the city. The second looks at how urban agriculture can be better integrated into city policies and plans. For example, shouldn’t urban agriculture be better connected with NYC’s innovative green infrastructure program, which just got almost $200 million in financing? Maybe all those green streets could also be used to grow tomatoes. The third explores how the city’s vast roof-scape could be better used for farming. Stalled development sites, new developments, and existing buildings that can handle the structural load should all be real opportunities for rooftop farms like the innovative Brooklyn Grange. The last set of recommendations examines how disparities based on class or race could be better addressed, with more capacity building and information resources for poorer areas of the city.

Even if you don’t live in NYC, this well-designed, well-written 170-page report is certainly worth exploring, perhaps as a model for an urban agriculture plan in your own city. See some of it online or purchase via Amazon. Also, read an interesting interview with Susan Chin, executive director of the Trust, by Metropolis Magazine editor Susan Szenasy, or one with Nevin Cohen, lead writer of the report, by Urban Omnibus.

Image credit: (1) Design Trust for Public Land and Added Value (2) Rob Stephenson Photography

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City Bountiful: The Rise of Urban Agriculture

Posted in Agriculture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 08/02/2012 | 2 Comments »

At the Greater & Greener: Reimagining Parks for 21st Century Cities conference in New York City, Laura Lawson, ASLA, Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University, described how urban agriculture has experienced explosive growth in recent years. According to a survey produced by the American Community Gardening Association and Rutgers University, community gardens are now found in all 50 states. Some 445 organizations responded to the survey, listing a total of 9,030 gardens. Of these organizations, 90 percent have seen increased demand over the past five years. Also, some 39 percent of the gardens listed were built just in the past five years. These organizations have a variety of goals, including food production and access, social engagement, nutrition, education, and neighborhood revitalization.

Sarita Daftary then discussed her work as Project Director of East New York Farms. East New York is the easternmost neighborhood of Brooklyn. A community of 180,000 residents, East New York is underserved by fresh food markets. The East New York Farms program (see image above) seeks to engage the community through its 30 backyard gardens and 24 community gardens, employing 33 youth interns, 80 gardeners, and 100+ volunteers.

The program addresses neighborhood food access through its farmers markets, growing and selling a diversity of unusual foods that reflect the diversity of the neighborhood.

Ben Helphand, Executive Director of NeighborSpace, said his organization is the only non-profit urban land trust in Chicago, working to protect gardens on behalf of community groups. NeighborSpace collaborates with a variety of city and state organizations to secure land titles and provide basic liability insurance for community gardens.

Unlike East New York Farms, NeighborSpace is not oriented around food security: Out of NeighborSpace’s 81 gardens, roughly 1/3 are ornamental, 1/3 are food gardens, and 1/3 are an ornamental/vegetable hybrid. Some of these gardens have become spaces for public art.

Maitreyi Roy, Senior Vice President for Programs and Planning at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, described her organization’s City Harvest program. Due to severe budget cutbacks, the Philadelphia prison system has an abundance of unused greenhouses, land, and water. City Harvest utilizes these facilities to grow seedlings for community gardeners. The program also works with local community gardeners, expanding access to gardening supplies, nutritional education, and fresh food.

The tension between for-profit urban farming and community-driven initiatives was a recurring theme throughout the discussion. After all, simply growing food in a neighborhood doesn’t necessarily expand the neighborhood’s access to healthy food. For example, for-profit operations often sell their produce to high-end restaurants located outside of their communities. Organizations will need to continue to address these complicated social and economic issues as urban agriculture spreads.

This guest post is by Benjamin Wellington, Student ASLA, master’s of landscape architecture candidate, Louisiana State University, and ASLA 2012 summer intern.

Image credits: (1-2) East New York Farms, (3-4) Britni Day, (5) Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Online

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A City Among the Villages

Posted in Agriculture, Policy and Regulation, Urban Design on 05/11/2012 | Leave a Comment »

Rapid and somewhat disturbing changes are overcoming China as it pursues economic development, said professor Margaret Crawford, University of California, Berkeley, at the Food & The City symposium at Dumbarton Oaks. In Guangzhou, where the land and water have “inter-penetrated” for centuries, the Pearl River Delta region, which was once a maze of rivers, streams, and canals, is increasingly being taken over by land and development. Much of the estuary landscape is being reclaimed and filled-in. The old village-centric agricultural landscape is becoming either industrial farms or a sea of high-rise towers punctuated by spotty patches of urban farms. Of the 1,100 agricultural villages in Guangzhou, many have simply been swallowed whole by an expanding metropolis. “It’s now a city among the villages.”

Historically, the Pearl River Delta has been a “very rich agricultural landscape,” enabling up to three crop harvests per year. There has also been a diversity of crops, with the area being a major zone for producing rice, fruit (some tropical), sweet potatoes, peanuts, and safflower oils. Until 1985, the Delta was made up of small agricultural villages defined by a unique social structure. Often entire villages shared the same surname, demonstrating their same lineage. Villagers left these compact settlements by boat for market towns. Given Cantonese food is all about the freshest ingredients, markets were busy trading produce constantly. Now, the cities of the urbanizing Guangzhou have engulfed the villages of the Delta, and there are reasons for this based in the political economy of China.

When the Communists took over in China in the late 1940s, the “social order was inverted.” Landlords became “bad elements,” while the poor, landless underclasses rose to the top. Land was redistributed via People’s Communes. Later, the Communes, which proved to be too unwieldly due to their size, were then broken apart, becoming smaller “production bridages” about the size of the old villages. By 1985, the central government has de-collectivized the land, and 90 percent of all agricultural land became marketized.

With the marketization of land (which is still all owned by the state and only leased out), the municipal governments in Guangzhou (and really everywhere else in China) saw buying cheap farm land and selling it as development land as a key way to raise funds. Given localities receive so little from the provincial and central governments in China, this system quickly became a way to raise city revenue. The effect: explosive development everywhere. Crawford said municipal leaders also all need a “mega-project in order to get promoted,” which only further contributed to the push to grow bigger and faster.

At the same time, the old “Hukou” residency permit system, which had been established in the 1950s and gave each citizen a pass card that provided them with rights to education, healthcare, and other services in the community where they have received a permit alone, was having an impact on development patterns. The Hukou system, which created a two-class system with people having either rural or urban Hukous, created opportunities for some in Guangzhou and not others. ”The system is still in existence,” said Crawford.

Basically, the marketization of land opened up lots of opportunities for those lucky few who had urban Hukous. They had “negotiated positions” that enabled them to re-categorize their agricultural land as development land. At the same time, since the economic opening in the late 70s, Guangzhou has been growing 60 percent annually, with much of the influx coming from more poorer provinces. In this new Guangzhou, there were now many different categories of people mixing — those native residents with urban hukous, people with residency permits from other poorer cities, and migrants with rural residency permits. Migrants have very limited access to schools or healthcare in their new homes. They often open stores that cater to other migrants. Interestingly, in many of the old Guangzhou villages, the residents have all made land deals and have left, leaving only migrants.

Examining Panyu, one part of Guangzhou, Crawford and her students found an incredible mix of new types of development reflecting all these development deals and changing demographics: high-rises, restaurants with live seafood, California-style villa subdivisions, and gaming industry buildings. Leftover parcels of agricultural land dot the new urban landscape. In a “messy” process of redevelopment, these parcels are often simply left vacant or rented by incoming migrants to “farm so they can augment their own diets.” They found that if Panyu’s communities actually put these leftover urban farms to productive use, some 220 families could be fed annually. Given the incredible water pollution, there may still be food safety issues in using what could be contaminated semi-urban plots to grow food.

The Chinese government is increasingly focused on “complete food security” for all its citizens. The general public is now more interested in organic, safe food products. But Crawford thinks that industrial farming will entirely take over agriculture in the area, leading to even more water pollution.

While “urban agriculture has to be rebranded in a cultural context” given it’s viewed as “something you stop doing as soon as you can,” some agriculture and design universities are starting to see the opportunities. New values brought in from Chinese who have studied overseas means the cultural understanding of urban farming may be slowly changing.

Crawford also thought these dense environments with their incredibly high land values would be the perfect locations for vertical farms.

This is the third in a series of posts about Food & The City, a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks.

Image credit: Urban development at the edge of Guangzhou / Pop colcha

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How Tokyo Invented Sushi

Posted in Agriculture on 05/09/2012 | Leave a Comment »

“Sushi is fleshy, decadent, an erotic experience,” said professor Jordan Sand, Georgetown University, at the Food & The City symposium at Dumbarton Oaks. Asking us to close our eyes and imagine our first experience with this delicacy, Sand described his own (he was on a date in New York City in the early 1980s). He then told the crowd how sushi, an ancient food, became modern in Tokyo, eventually changed the landscape of that city, and then conquered the world, becoming about as exotic as pizza.

The sushi best known in the U.S. is actually Nigirizushi or “grasped sushi,” given it’s often cupped by the sushi chef and crafted into bite-sized pieces. Invented in Tokyo in the beginning of the 19th century, Nigirizushi came out of the “broad, ancient category of sushi foods,” which describe any with salted, vinegared, slightly fermented rice. Sushi, in fact, just means “pickled rice” and really describes a cooking process.

Before Tokyo was called Tokyo, it was Edo, the capital of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a feudal militaristic regime ruled by Shoguns with their armies of Samurai warriors. Edo was a military encampment that grew rapidly into a city of about a million by 1700. At the time, said Sand, it was probably the biggest city in the world (and today it’s still very near the top). Samurai, who could be rich or poor, made up about half of the city’s population and consumed a lot, driving the growth of agriculture and demand for fresh fish. Given the city was basically a military base, women and children were left at home in the countryside so there were lots of single men. Prostitutes appeared for the soldiers, and sushi as the West knows it came into being.

Fresh fish used to be cut for the ruling classes in special rituals where nothing but the blades touched fish flesh (always white flesh). Carefully arranged, the dishes were incredibly fresh, elegant constructions. With the need for “fast food,” usually eaten on the run by Samurai and their short-term mates out on the town, new variations of sushi came into being. To fit the need, “restauranteurs first made street food fancy and then they made it fast,” said Sand. By the 1820s, these early innovators stopped the pickling process and Nigirizushi (or sushi as we know it in the West) became a “hit” among the Samurai and commoners alike. What made sushi interesting, and perhaps transgressive, was that it combined elite foods of the Samurai and street foods of the common classes, creating a new form. On the same plate, the white-fleshed fish that the ruling class preferred was mixed with “vulgar” common fishes like tuna, anything red in color. Another thing that made the food common: it could be eaten with your fingers.

Tokyo Bay itself had always been central to sushi. Fishermen, in contrast to farmers, were seen as “buckaneers,” adventurers. Watching the fire-lit boats trawling at night became a major tourist attraction. ”The waterscape of the bay also captured the imagination of artists” like Hiroshige (see image above). But beyond being beautiful, this waterscape was highly productive. Agricultural runoff into the bay actually attracted more fish, making it easier for the fishermen. In addition, human waste was almost always recycled into urban farms so little of it polluted these key waterways. “The bay was a cultivated landscape,” said Sand. Then, with the application of paper manufacturing processes to making Nori, the seaweed wrap we all know was invented. Tokyo Bay itself became home to a flotilla of Nori farms, with the farms at their highpoint taking up more of the bay than reclaimed land would years later.

To facilitate the trade in fresh fish, Tokyo’s main fish market was established, interestingly at the exact center point of Japan. Fish merchants became increasingly wealthy, with their wives dressed in the latest fashions. Until 1939, street stalls served sushi, then the regime shut them down due to health concerns.

By the 1840s, tuna had become so popular that Japanese fishermen had to leave Tokyo Bay and head to the South Sea to find more. Then, in the 20th century, Japanese fisherman entered the Pacific Ocean, freezing fish in hulls to bring back to the mainland. By the early 1980s, prize tuna caught around the world were being FedEx-ed back to Japan at a cost of up to $100,000 a fish. Today, because of the ever-increasing demand for sushi, many of the world’s natural fisheries, even in the Atlantic, are under incredible stress. Sadly, the Western Atlantic Bluefin tuna, one of the grandest fishes, is down to about 25,000 in the wild, estimates one international group. Perhaps sushi needs to become less common again.

This is the second in a series of posts about Food & The City, a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks. Read the third A City Among the Villages.

Image credit: Fishing Boats at Tsukuda Island by Ichiyusai Hiroshige II (1826-1869) / Richard Ukiyo-e

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