San Joaquin Valley farmer profiles / Community Alliance for Agroecology
The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF)‘s most recent class of innovation and leadership fellows spent the past year “unearthing assumptions and trying to find a path forward” through the “disorienting dilemmas” facing the world, explained Cindy Sanders, FASLA, CEO of OLIN, in the kick-off off LAF’s now annual symposium. Each fellow seeks to generate “ethically-motivated societal change,” which in the process required “personal transformation.” Over two days, this year’s six fellows delved into the results of their independent research and leadership building efforts, which were each supported by a $25,000 grant from LAF.
Alison Hirsch: Equitable and Sustainable Water Management for California’s Central Valley
California’s Central Valley accounts for one-fourth of the country’s food supply, but it’s a deeply troubled agricultural landscape. Alison Hirsch, associate professor of landscape architecture and urbanism and program director, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, characterized the landscape as challenged by climate change, poverty, animal waste, pollution, collapsing aquifers, and racist labor and immigration practices that are the result of the “violence of an extractive system.” But it’s also a “landscape of extreme resilience and that provide optimism.”
Hirsh brought a “longitudinal action research” framework, which was conceived by Ann Whiston Spirn, FASLA, a professor of landscape architecture at MIT, in order to conduct “investigative mapping” and find opportunities for structural policy changes.
San Joaquin Valley mapping / Alison Hirsch with Lauren Cubacub, MLA, USC
For example, Hirsch and her team of USC landscape architecture students found that “big farms get the best and most groundwater.” These industrial farms can dig up to 250 feet deep to get at remnant pockets of groundwater. This process is increasingly leaving black and brown communities, many of which are immigrants, without access to water. Furthermore, old dry wells are contaminated with animal waste and arsenic, which then poisons other water sources used by immigrant workers. Hirsch studied local organizations and interviewed farmers advocating for more equitable and sustainable water management as part of eco-agricultural cooperatives.
Key informants of research / Alison Hirsch
Alexa Vaughn-Brainard: Going Beyond ADA to Achieve Universal Design
Medical model vs. social model / Alexa Vaughn-Brainard
“I am a deaf woman, a disabled person, and a landscape designer,” explained Alexa Vaughn-Brainard, Assoc. ASLA, with MIG. “I am constantly adapting myself to the built environment but it’s not adapting to me. Enough is enough: We have been fighting the same battles since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed thirty years ago.” Vaughn-Brainard said communities need to move away from “the medical model in which the person is the problem,” to a “social model in which the built environment is the problem.” According to the World Health Organization, 1 billion people around the world are disabled, which is one-seventh the global population. In the U.S., 20-25 percent have a disability. “Disability is a spectrum; and some disabilities are invisible.” Furthermore, disabled people are a group “anyone can join at any time.”
Spectrum of disabilities / Alexa Vaughn-Brainard
Recounting the long fight to achieve ADA requirements for buildings and landscapes, Vaughn-Brainard argued that they are really the bare minimum. Explaining her Deafscape design guidelines, she outlined how deaf people need 10-to-12-foot-wide sidewalks so they can walk and sign; a “degree of enclosure” to feel safe so recommended tall-back seating; and broader lines of sight. She called for the use of universal design principles as a “creative tool,” because there are no “one size fits all” solutions. Vaughn-Brainard outlined approaches for designing with disabled communities and especially disabled designers — from accessible meetings and focus groups, to accessible plans and models for teams of abled and disabled to review together, to accessibility audits landscape architects can undertake with communities.
Disabled stakeholder meeting in Eugene, Oregon / OLIN, Cameron McCarthy
Roxi Thoren: An Introspective Journey into a World Shaped by Multiple Species
Before the pandemic struck, Roxi Thoren, ASLA, head of the department of landscape architecture at Penn State University, had planned a series of programs and a book to explore how climate change posed a threat to complex ecological relationships among species. Thoren argues that the world is full of species, and that designers must increasingly approach animals with respect and co-design with them. “How can we include animals? How can we with collaborate with them?,” she urged us to consider.
Turning towards her residential landscape and neighborhood in Oregon, and the plants and animals that call it home, Thoren instead found inspiration in nature, offering a poem accompanied by a slideshow of images.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, Landprocess
At first, the images of Thammasat University Rooftop Farm seem like renderings, but they are in fact real. Designed by Landprocess, which is led by landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom, International ASLA, the 1.7-acre rooftop farm in Bangkok, Thailand, is not only mesmerizing but also a model of sustainable multi-use infrastructure.
This kind of infrastructure is exactly what we need in an urbanizing world dealing with climate change, flooding, pollution, and a lack of access to high-quality fresh produce.
The most successful forms of this infrastructure use an integrated design approach in which architects, landscape architects, and engineers cross disciplinary boundaries and unite to create better projects for people and the environment.
According to Voraakhom, the initial design for the new campus building was just a building. But she convinced the architecture and engineering teams to collaborate with her on a new concept. Given a large park was being developed in front of the building, why not just continue up over the building and link the rooftop green space with the park on the ground? “In the end, the design team and the clients all agreed this option will have a bigger impact,” she said.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, Landprocess
For Voraakhom, the $31 million project shows what is possible through an integrated design approach — and also what landscape architects can bring to the table. In an email, she explained her thinking:
“My profession, landscape architecture, should not be left as the last amenity to be added while finishing up a project. Landscape architecture should not take up the last of the budget for some minor greening. Instead, landscape architecture should be the source of the initial concept and be the voice for, and restorer of, a healthy urban environment. If architects and engineers work more collaboratively with landscape architects, I’m certain we can strengthen our climate-focused architecture in significant ways. At the beginning of any project, we need to bring everyone on board, at par, to openly discuss and brainstorm, especially across disciplines, without fear of judgment or domination. With that, I’d like to express my gratitude and officially thank the architects and engineers with whom we worked with on this project for allowing us to be a major part of the overall concept.”
Integrated design enabled the entire design and engineering team to layer in solutions to multiple problems.
The first big challenge was managing the vast amount of rainwater that lands on Bangkok, creating frequent and destructive floods. Inspired by traditional terraced farming found in mountainous regions across Southeast Asia, the rooftop farm uses an intricate structure and gravity to cascade rainwater down each level.
Landprocess explains: “As rainwater zigzags down the slopes, each level harvests runoff from the previous cell, forming unique clusters of micro-watersheds along the terrace to help absorb, filter, and purify rainwater while growing food for the campus.”
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / LandprocessThammasat University Rooftop Farm / Landprocess
The structure slows down water 20 times more efficiently than a conventional roof, and any run-off is captured in four retention ponds at the feet of the building, which can hold up to 3,095,570 gallons of water.
To address the problem of the lack of local access to healthy organic foods, the design team created a productive rooftop landscape. To soak up all that free water, Voraakhom’s firm introduced nearly 50 kinds of edible species, including rice, indigenous vegetables and herbs, and fruit trees.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, LandprocessThammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, Landprocess
There are Jamaican Cherry, White Cheesewood, Camphor, Red Sandalwood, and Ceylon Oak trees, intermixed with azaleas, lemongrass, holy basil, amaranth, rice, and okra. Rows of dill, Thai eggplant, red and green oak-leaf lettuce, green roselle grow amid the source of Thai food’s heat: bird’s eye chili peppers.
After one season’s harvest, the team discovered the roof can grow 20 tons of organic food annually, enough for 80,000 meals in the campus canteen. Food scraps are composted and returned to the roof farm, creating a sustainable food cycle.
Another issue the project addresses: urban Thai are increasingly divorced from their agricultural heritage. The rooftop farm helps reconnect students and community members to their history and educates them about sustainable, organic growing practices.
A century ago, King Rama V created the Rangsit rice plantations and a vast network of canals on the site of the rooftop farm. King Rama’s goal was to make Thailand a major jasmine rice producer. Paved over as Bangkok expanded, the rice fields were lost, but through this project, rice production has returned in a contemporary form.
Through volunteering, 40,000 students and nearby residents learn about this cultural landscape and their heritage. They can volunteer on the roof and learn how to plant and harvest. They have access to workshops on agriculture, nutrition, and permaculture, which are embedded into the university’s sustainability curricula.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, LandprocessThammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, Landprocess
The rooftop landscape also helps solve the problem of fossil fuel use to generate power. Photovoltaic panels installed at the top of the roof generates 500,000 watts of electricity per hour.
This energy powers water pumps that pull water up from the retaining ponds to irrigate the crops during the dry season. The renewable energy is complemented by passive strategies that reduce energy use overall. The green roof further insulates the building, reducing its cooling energy needs. And air that passes over the retaining ponds is cooled before it reaches the building, creating natural air conditioning.
All of these layers of solutions are united in the building’s H-shaped form, which represents the university’s long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and democracy.
Landprocess explains: “Divided into four equally-accessible sections, each chamber represents a core element of democracy—people, liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
To realize that spirit of egalitarianism, there are 12 social spaces set within the farming terraces that function as outdoor classrooms.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, Landprocess
At the very top, there is a large amphitheater space that offers 360-degree panoramic views.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Panoramic Studio, Landprocess
And back on the ground, at the entrance, there is another accessible, terraced amphitheater for events, with life-sized sculptures of the two founders of the university.
Thammasat University Rooftop Farm / Dsignsomething, Jinnawat Borihankijanan
To learn more about Voraakhom, watch a recent short film produced by Mercedes-Benz:
Many have called Kongjian Yu, FASLA, president of Turenscape, the Frederick Law Olmsted of China. And with his new book Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City, one understands why. This collection of letters to Chinese president Xi Jinping and provincial governors, essays, interviews, and other advocacy pieces reveal how much Yu has invested in promoting his ecological, water-centric “sponge city” approach. His book demonstrates that every landscape architect can become a leader and a powerful force for improving environmental and human health in their community.
Yu connects the professed communal and environmental aspirations of the Communist Party leadership with his own goals — healthy places for people and well-functioning ecosystems. But he also believes there has been some deviation from the original goals of the Communist revolution, with the pursuit of Western-style, car-based development; isolated, residential skyscrapers; and widespread environmental degradation.
He submits typical contemporary urban design in China to a kind of criticism study session, asking mayors and governors to re-examine their own motivations and re-align themselves with the true needs of the Chinese people and the environment.
He takes aim at the Chinese version of the western City Beautiful movement that has been carried out “aimlessly and autocratically,” damaging both the civil realm through the development of highways that split communities, giant soulless plazas, and parks filled with non-native plants; and the natural environment, through the country-wide pollution of air and water. His core argument: to mindlessly ape Western development models — and profit from these destructive approaches — is fundamentally un-Chinese and certainly not Communist.
In one compelling essay directed to mayors, he writes: “contemporary movements to build the ‘City Beautiful’ and the ‘eco-city’ are short-sighted. It is wrong to raze old homes downtown to erect a paved concrete square; wrong to demolish natural features to build ‘parks’ stuffed with exotic plants; wrong to cut down forests that meander along riverbanks, only to line those rivers with concrete; wrong to take productive rice fields that are over a thousand years old and cover them up with lawns of imported grass — all to inflate and publicize a mayor’s false achievements.”
He seeks to grow a new stock of governors and mayors who can change the status-quo urban planning paradigm in China. He wants them to adopt a “negative planning” approach in which important ecologies are purposefully protected from development. Instead of running population growth estimates and then creating a development plan based in standardized land requirements per person, Yu wants urban planners to preserve and enhance undeveloped land — hence the “negative” or zero planning or development approach — that provide vital ecosystem services. With negative planning, China can then build “landscape security patterns,” which form out of “strategic locations and linkages” that are “extremely important to the maintenance and control of ecological processes.”
ASLA 2013 Professional General Design Honor Award. A Mother River Recovered: Qian’an Sanlihe Greenway. Turenscape / Kongjian YuASLA 2013 Professional General Design Honor Award. A Mother River Recovered: Qian’an Sanlihe Greenway. Turenscape / Kongjian Yu
In a country that has become a toxic brownfield, landscape security could provide the stable foundation for the renewed sustainability and resilience of the country.
He calls for using a number of ambitious strategies for achieving landscape security, and bringing nature back to the cities in a real, not fake “eco-city” manner. Historic and cultural preservation, as well as agriculture, are woven through the ideas, too:
“Maintain and strengthen the overall continuity of the landscape pattern.
Establish and protect the city’s diversity of habitat.
Maintain and restore the natural configuration of rivers and shorelines.
Restore and protect wetland systems.
Integrate rural windbreaks into urban greenways.
Build greenways for pedestrians and cyclists.
Establish green cultural heritage corridors.
Improve urban green spaces by making them more permeable and accessible to the public.
Dissolve parks into the city’s matrix.
Dissolve the city, protect and integrate productive farmland as an organic element of the city.
Establish native plant nurseries.”
ASLA 2014 Professional General Design Honor Award. Slow Down: Liupanshui Minghu Wetland Park. Turenscape / Kongjian YuASLA 2014 Professional General Design Honor Award. Slow Down: Liupanshui Minghu Wetland Park. Turenscape / Kongjian Yu
Amid the essays and lectures, Letters to the Leaders of China intermingles actual letters written by Yu to provincial governors, mayors, and Chinese president Xi Jinping himself. They give an insight into the opportunities and limits of Yu’s role as a leading intellectual and critic and the preeminent landscape architect in China. Unfortunately, though, Yu doesn’t provide any of their responses back to him, so these sections feel like a one-sided conversation. One doesn’t know the results of his lobbying.
Still, one letter to Wen Jiabao, premier of the state council, calling for a “vernacular heritage landscape network” — essentially, a national system of cultural landscapes that could also provide ecosystem services — is a particularly creative, efficient policy proposal that even includes specific governmental and regulatory changes to make his proposal happen. The letter shows an understanding of how the government is structured and what needs to change.
Through the letters, essays, and lectures, one gets a sense of how much Yu cares — and how driven he is to undo the unsustainable development patterns that repeat the same destructive errors made in the West over the past 50 years. He is trying to respectfully guide the leadership of China towards a more ecological, humane approach, and he works every angle he can find.
At the end of the book, there is a transcription of an interview with Chinese contemporary artist Ai Wei Wei. Ai presses Yu on his ideas, forcing him to justify his arguments. Yu states that China’s rustic, vernacular, “low culture” is what’s key to achieving sustainability — not the imported Western ideas of development, architecture, and landscape or bourgeois Chinese traditions. To achieve social and environmental reform, China must raise up what is considered low today — the wetland that functions, the productive aesthetics of the humble farm, the clean river.
ASLA 2016 Professional General Design Honor Award. Framing Terrain and Water: Quzhou Luming Park. Turenscape / Kongjian YuASLA 2016 Professional General Design Honor Award. Framing Terrain and Water: Quzhou Luming Park. Turenscape / Kongjian Yu
And so he seeks to educate China’s many mayors on the beauty of what is plain, which is why his works of landscape architecture are “consciously educational.”
Deep in the woods southwest of Atlanta, Serenbe is a unique designed community — a mixed-use development, with clusters of villages comprised of townhouses and apartments fueled by solar panels and heated and cooled by geothermal systems, and vast open spaces with organic farms, natural waste water treatment systems, and preserved forests. A leader in the “agrihood” movement, which calls for agriculture-centric community development, Serenbe is now moving into wellness with its new development called Mado.
On a tour of the new town, which will add 480 homes, including some assisted living cottages, to the 1,400 that already house some 3,500 people, Serenbe founder Steven Nygren explained how his vision of wellness was inspired by the sustainable Swedish city of Malmö. He and his wife Marie traveled there, and they brought back lots of photographs, which they then gave to their planners, architects, and landscape architects.
The community now under construction is organized around common spaces set in gardens. Nygren fears a scenario in which you have two older residents out on their porches, but both are waiting for the other to invite them over. In Mado, the ground-level shared patios may create more opportunities for interaction.
Also, Nygren reached an interesting conclusion from his trip to Malmö: “They always connect streets into nature.” He decided to recreate that relationship in Mado, organizing the housing and common spaces along a central axis with ends that extend into nature trails.
Mado development plan / Rhinehart Pulliam & Company, LLC
Once this central organizational structure was decided upon, they brought in landscape architect and University of Georgia professor Alfred Vick, ASLA, who then created an innovative “food forest” to realize the concept of wellness in landscape form (see the bottom portion of the image above). It will function as an accessible outdoor living room, given throughout the space the gradient is less than 5 percent. It’s also a place where people can gather and also learn how to forage in the wider Serenbe landscape (see a close-up of its design below).
Mado food forest / Solidago Design Solution, Inc.
Vick said his vision was of a “edible ecosystem, an intentional system for human food production.” Using the natural Piedmont ecosystem as the base, Vick is creating a designer ecosystem of edible or medicinal plants, with a ground layer, understory, and canopy that also incorporates plants with cultural meaning and a legacy of use by indigenous American Indian tribes.
He imagines visitors to the forest foraging for berries, fruits, and nuts, including serviceberries, blueberries, mulberries, and chickasaw plums, as well as acorn and hickory nuts, which can be processed and turned into foods. Mado residents and chefs can harvest the young, tender leaves of cutleaf coneflowers, which are related to black-eyed susans. Or reach up to an arbor, which will be covered in Muscadine grape vines and passion flowers. Or take some Jerusalem artichokes, which were used by Cherokee Indians and today cooked as a potato substitute. Or pluck rosemary or mint from an herb circle. Vick left out peach and apple trees because they require fungicides.
“The primary goal is to engage residents,” Vick explained. There will be interpretive guides to explain how plants can be consumed, which will also “help encourage wider foraging when they are out in the Serenbe landscape.” Nygren wants everyone in the community connected to the productive cycle of nature and to know when the serviceberries, blueberries, figs are ready to be picked.
And the landscape is also designed to both provide a safe boundary — so grandparents can let kids roam — but also provide a natural extension into the rest of the landscape. While the Mado designs are still being developed, we hope that universal design principles, which call for fully-accessible seating and nearby restrooms, will be incorporated to ensure an 80-year old as well as an 8-year old can comfortably access and enjoy the landscape.
Vista Hermosa Park (met AB 1881 and LID requirements) / Mia Lehrer + Associates
For the past century, much of California has relied on an inherently fragile and unreliable imported water infrastructure. While the current crisis attracts the attention of the media and public, the environmental community and government have been actively pursuing solutions for decades. These efforts have resulted in long-term water conservation. For example, Los Angeles has seen a dramatic increase in population since the 1970’s, but water use has actually declined, with the largest drops in use during periods of drought and recession. Efforts are now focused on decreasing demand for imported water by increasing local supplies. A few weeks ago, we wrote about ways each of us as individuals can conserve water in our landscapes by copying nature and making choices appropriate to our local micro-climates and water availability. In addition to the smaller-scale decisions we make in our own landscapes, progressive state and local policies are helping California to better conserve its limited water resources.
Here are a few across the state:
Water Conservation in Landscaping Act of 2006 (AB 1881)
This Assembly Bill spurred the creation of the Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance, which established maximum allowed landscape water budgets and mandated low water-use plants and efficient irrigation strategies. AB 1881 encourages us to capture and retain on site stormwater and use recycled water. The ordinance also requires soil assessments, soil management plans, and landscape maintenance plans to accompany landscape plans submitted through municipal permit processes.
Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones (AB 551, in progress)
If passed, Assembly Bill 551 will incentivize the use of currently-vacant private land for urban agriculture. Private landowners could have their property assessed at a lower property tax rate — based on agricultural use rather than its market value — in exchange for ensuring its use for urban agriculture for 10 years. Increasing local agricultural production where recycled water is readily available can reduce water and energy use in food production and increase our cities’ self-sufficiency and resilience in the face of potential natural disasters.
In Southern California:
Recycled Water
The Los Angeles County Bureau of Sanitation and Orange County Water District (OCWD) began recycling water in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, for groundwater recharge and non-potable uses — or uses other than for drinking, such as irrigation or industry. In 2008, the OCWD district began recharging its groundwater supplies with water treated to levels above drinking water standards for reuse as potable water. A big push to educate the public about the process and its benefits smoothed the transition. The district is now expanding production from 70 to 100 million gallons per day, or enough to supply nearly one-third of Orange County’s 3.1 million people. Los Angeles, which delayed their water recycling efforts for drinking water after negative PR alarmed the public, is now planning to expand their recycled water program, including groundwater recharge, by 2035.
In Los Angeles:
Proposition O (2004)
Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly passed Prop O to use $500 million to fund projects to:
• Protect rivers, lakes, beaches, and the ocean;
• Conserve and protect drinking water and other water sources;
• Reduce flooding and use neighborhood parks to decrease polluted runoff;
• Capture, clean up, and reuse stormwater.
Peck Canyon Park, San Pedro, funded with Prop 0 funds / Mia Lehrer + AssociatesLos Angeles Zoo Parking Lot bio-infiltration, funded by Prop 0 / Mia Lehrer + Associates
Low Impact Development Ordinance (2012)
Los Angeles’ LID Ordinance ensures that new and redevelopment projects recharge groundwater aquifers to increase future water supply; protect water quality downstream; reduce flood risk by keeping rainwater on site; remove nutrients, bacteria, and metals from stormwater runoff; and reduce and slow water that runs off of properties during storms.
But there is still much more we can do. Caroline Mini, who wrote her PhD dissertation at the University of California last year, shows how urban residential water use in Los Angeles is largely determined by income. Wealthier neighborhoods on average use three times more water than poorer neighborhoods. This is despite the fact that most wealthier neighborhoods inhabit tree-covered hillsides with ample available soil moisture, while less fortunate residents occupy dryer, flatter, and less shaded areas. Better-off communities have the opportunity to use their wealth to establish well-designed, resource-efficient, and beautiful landscapes that will become models in water conservation. And cities and counties have the opportunity to create green infrastructure projects that add tree canopy and increase permeability to regain the sponge quality of soil in those low-land neighborhoods that will benefit most.
Agriculture accounts for 80 percent water of the used by people in our state. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Pacific Institute published an issue brief last year illustrating the massive water conservation potential that could come from more efficient agricultural practices. Just using the most up-to-date irrigation technologies and applying only the amount of water crops need could reduce agricultural water use by 17-22 percent. In 1975, Masanobu Fukuoka wrote The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, describing dry rice farming techniques that matched or out-produced his most productive neighbors. This poetic story about working with nature instead of against it to grow successive crops with little effort is more relevant than ever today.
More thoughtful planning for both rural agricultural and urban water use is needed. We can determine which crops and farming methods best serve our regional and exported food needs while further conserving water. We can advance urban water efficiency plans, which could generate savings that can negate the current deficit, while creating greener, more resilient and self-reliant cities.
This guest post is by Mia Lehrer, FASLA, founder of Mia Lehrer + Associates, and Claire Latané, ASLA, senior associate, Mia Lehrer + Associates.
Public Produce: Cultivating Our Parks, Plazas, and Streets for Healthier Cities / Island Press
We are increasingly concerned about the provenance of our food. Movements supporting local food production, urban agriculture, and more socially-equitable food systems have gained increasing traction over the last decade. Meanwhile, our industrial food systems are increasingly vulnerable due to over-centralized facilities and ownership, reliance on fossil fuels for production and transportation, and crop monocultures, which are made only more vulnerable by climate change.
Urban agriculture is frequently cited as a response to these challenges. Cities, though, still face question of where to grow food, how to maintain farms, create access, and educate citizens about agricultural production. In Public Produce: Cultivating Parks, Plazas, and Streets for Healthier Cities, urban designer and author Darrin Nordahl proposes local governments bolster local ecosystems of public food production.
Alice Waters praised the original 2009 edition as showing “how growing food on public land can transform our civic landscape.” Marion Nestle said the book gave “all the reasons why growing food in cities would be good for alleviating poverty, for building communities, and for public policy.”
A newly revised and expanded edition does these things and fills in key details by offering numerous examples of people, organizations, communities, and governments implementing all sorts of models of food production on public lands as well as partnerships between local governments and community organizations.
The first few chapters will be highly useful for those looking for a succinct and easily-readable introduction to the arguments behind local and urban food production: food (in)security, over-reliance on fossil fuels, social equity, and resilience to climate change, to name a few. But those already well versed in the works of Michael Pollan and other sustainable agriculture advocates can skim through.
Nordahl hits his stride in the third chapter as he goes beyond the general tenets of urban agriculture and makes his case for a triad between public space, public officials, and public policy. Growing vegetables in public spaces sends a powerful message. Nordahl defines public spaces as places freely accessible to the public, “whether they are truly public or merely perceived to be . . . In essence, any space where the public can enter throughout the day without being charged and admission fee . . . and is suitable for growing food, is worthy of inclusion in a network of public produce.”
Social justice advocates will appreciate the chapter on gleaning as a public produce model, and Nordahl gives many examples of places that have developed strong access networks. Fallen Fruit in Los Angeles, for example, develops freely accessible maps showing where fruit can be publicly gleaned. He also offers an interesting take on gleaning as economic opportunity – foraging for fruit rather than, say, recyclables, and trading in one’s daily harvest for money or other essentials.
Publically accessible fruit trees in Sherman Oaks neighborhood, Los Angeles / Fallen Fruit
Nordahl’s strongest arguments come in chapter five, in which he addresses the perennial maintenance question: “who is going to take care of it?” Indeed, this was one of my first questions – and many others may well wonder how well-received the idea will be of rotting fruit all over public spaces, which are expensive to clean up and unappealing to the aesthetic eye. But Nordahl reminds the reader that “the fantastic aesthetics of our most prized landscape plants makes it easy for us to forget that they produce an abundance of leaf litter, drip with sticky nectar, and drop unpalatable fruit by the bunches.” Planting edibles prioritizes the value of food production, while often offering an aesthetic value as well.
“There is no doubt that food-producing plants can be messy and need some upkeep,” Nordahl admits. “But the pervasive assumption that edibles require considerably more management than ornamental plants, or are not as pretty, is bogus. . . [that said], sound design principles are not thrown out the window simply because the plant palette uses fruit-bearing trees instead of sterile cultivars. As in any landscape design, the architect needs to take into account how many people will use or pass by the space; what types of activities will take place in the space; the microclimate, solar access, and water availability of the space; and a host of other variables.”
Again, Nordahl gives several examples where communities developed multi-beneficial models for maintenance, harvesting, and clean-up of edible plants. Communities who balance an appropriate “carrying capacity,” where the availability of edibles does not exceed the demand for them, help ensure that fruit is harvested and eaten, rather than left to drop and rot on the ground.
Landscape architects and designers will appreciate the examples where aesthetic and place-making qualities were woven into designs for food production. The Curtis “50-Cent” Jackson Community Garden in Queens, NY, designed by Walter Hood, ASLA, for example, integrates huge, eye-catching rainwater-collection sculptures amid the edibles planted in French-style parterres. And designers for Disneyland’s “Tomorrowland” area planted edible fruit trees, herbs, and leafy greens in lieu of solely ornamental plantings, perhaps to suggest what urban design of the future will look like.
Sculptural rainwater collection towers amidst planting beds at the Curtis “50-Cent” Jackson Community Gardens in Queens, NY / New York Restoration ProjectCitrus trees in “Tomorrowland,” Disneyland / FlashBulb
But this book is not a design manual or a how-to guide for would-be urban farmers. A good number of photos intersperse with the text, but readers will not find design schematics, planting calendars, or detailed plant lists for every climate. Examples are woven into the narrative, not broken out as researched case studies. Nordahl lays out an alluring vision, however, and his arguments are persuasive. Peas at City Hall, persimmons along public avenues, and pawpaws in city parks? Maybe not such a crazy idea after all.
Yoshi Silverstein, Associate ASLA, is founder and lead designer-educator at Mitsui Design, focusing on landscape experience and connection to place. He was the ASLA summer 2014 communications intern.
In fact, it’s been around since 3,500 BC when Mesopotamian farmers began setting aside plots in their growing cities. In a review of urban agriculture throughout modern history at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., a diverse set of academics and designers ranging from historians to landscape architects discussed how the practice has evolved over the ages, often been highly ideological, and continues to be loaded with meaning. Organized by professor Dorothee Imbert, ASLA, chair of the master’s of landscape architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis, the conference looked at why urban agriculture is such a hot topic among the public and designers now but also hoped to put the current interest in a broader context. As Imbert said, “the inter-relationship between food and the city has a long history.”
Here are snippets of presentations that covered aspects of urban agricultural history in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S.:
David Haney, Kent University School of Architecture, said London in the 1880s was the first “global, industrial city,” in part defined by its massive slums. Public parks were an early “instrument of social reform,” an effort to bring green space to the poor masses but urban agriculture soon became another tool for improving the conditions of the urban masses. As the Salvation Army got its start, one of its first programs were “farm colonies” designed to help urbanites “take care of themselves.” In fact, urban agriculture was viewed as a way for “everyone to become self-sufficient.” Haney explained the early role of anarchist thinkers like Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had been imprisoned for pushing for social reforms in Tsarist Russia and eventually became an influential social reformer in the UK, informing the ideas of Ebenezer Howard, who created the “Garden City” concept. Haney explained how early London urban agriculture communities rooted in anarchist beliefs went on to influence the growth of utopian urban farming communities in Germany. One called Eden, an early vegetarian community, is actually still a “well-known brand” in Germany.
Haney thought that the idea of self-sufficiency and urban agriculture has come full-circle again, gaining traction through today’s “eco-villages.” These “intentional, small” communities may have a lineage based in “anarchist” beliefs, but are now more widespread. However, Haney doubted whether these are actually “models for urban growth,” given they aren’t planned to be part of broader urban developments.
In Israel, the early Zionist settlers in the 1920s saw small urban farms as critical to the development of a new Israeli society. By 1942, there were more than 4,600 urban farms, most of which were between 1,000 and 1,999 square meters, said professor Tal Alon-Mozes, a professor at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. She described how many of these communities were comprised of women’s settlers associations that were key to “women’s empowerment.” Out farming in virgin territory, the women experienced “a sense of self-fulfillment, personal regeneration, and new hope.”
Early on, then, urban farms were ideological and connected with the goals of the Zionist movement. In the first master plan of Israel in 1951, urban farms had a “protected” place. However, Alon-Mozes said, eventually the Kibbutzim, rural farms separate from urban areas, dominated, becoming more prosperous and closely associated with Zionism. “They overshadowed small urban farms.” Kibuttzim were essentially the winners, and “history is written by the winners.”
Jumping time and space, professor David Rifkind, a professor at Florida International University, zoomed in on Italy’s fascist government in the 1930’s and the role of reclamation and urban agriculture projects in their African colonies, particularly Ethiopia. The government of Mussolini was interested in the “neat organization of landscape, its segregation into districts,” which also mirrored its efforts to create a system of “hierarchy and control” between Italians and the native Ethiopians and other nationalities. Urban plans in Italy’s colonies included “symbolically-rich spatial organizations” that reinforced the idea that Italians were at the top of the heap. Ordered landscapes moved parade routes from ancient Ethiopian sites to modern Italian ones. There were separate markets for Italians and Ethiopians, with linear parks serving as barriers. The Italians saw reclaiming Ethiopian swamps — unusable yet fertile soils — as central to their effort of taming and controlling alien lands. “Tilling soils” was also viewed as an activity of the empire.
Back in Italy, consuming a range of agriculture products from the colonies was viewed as a patriotic act. Rifkind showed funny images of children eating bananas from Ethiopia, being told that they were supporting the homeland through their daily breakfast. “By eating grains, fruits, oils, salts from the colonies, Italians were participating in the empire.” The Italians pushed food production in the colonies to boost self-sufficiency among the colonies as well though. With the onset of world war, Ethiopia needed to be able to stand on its own and not drain Italy of resources. Overall, urban agriculture was seen as a way to “cultivate the territories, control the local population, earn foreign capital through exports, and resettle and reform unemployed Italians sent over from the home country.” Still, Ethiopia never ended up serving the role Egypt did for ancient Rome, becoming the breadbasket for the empire. It just wasn’t a great place to grow many types of grains.
Back to Europe: In France, in a little known episode, great Modern architect Le Corbusier attempted to bring rational, scientific approaches to the typical French farm. Professor Mary Mcleod, Columbia University, said in contrast to the common understanding of Le Corbusier, he was for “increased density.” Upon visiting New York City, he was quoted as saying the “skyscrapers are much too small.” In the 1930s and 1940s, agricultural reform also became an interest of his. Some of his early urban concepts offered individual garden plots, with a professional gardener responsible for plowing and fertilizing 100 plots each. In contrast to the romantic visions of farming in Israel and the totalitarian ones among the fascists in Ethiopia, Le Corbusier wasn’t deluded, calling “the whole thing ridiculous and too much work.” He thought the last thing an urban worker would want to do coming home from work would be to engage in back-breaking gardening work to yield a few tomatoes. “Growing food is a job, not pleasure.”
In an effort to bring his rational, scientific approach to the countryside, he started corresponding with a local French farmer who also wanted to make farming Modern. Translating his Radiant City concept to the countryside, Corbu came up with the little-known and ultimately untested Radiant Farm model, which offered distinct zones with small pastures, woodlands, fields, and detailed community plans. No one would finance the project. McLeod seemed to say Le Corbusier’s “futile utopianism” was just another variant of ideological forms of agriculture that never really took off.
In the Netherlands, the rational, scientific approach actually worked though. Zef Hemel, University of Amsterdam, described how the 20th century “polders,” low-lying, man-made tracts of land formed with protective barriers or dykes, were created to create urban agriculture opportunities in expanded cities. Polders can be land reclaimed from water, land purposely-flooded and then reclaimed, or drained marshes. Hemel said the Dutch “love planning and don’t need to have any ideology to do it. We are just very practical.” In the Netherlands, the demand for polders came from an expanding Amsterdam, seeking out more agricultural lands around the city. Then, before World War I, the country started a campaign of “food self-sufficiency,” which led to the development a 30-km long dyke that yielded a 180,000 hectare plot for agriculture. A second polder created just before World War II was almost stymied by the Nazis but the Dutch managed to complete their work, creating a “livable, beautiful place with 40,000 acres of new nature.”
Today, Holland’s polders, which are productive farm landscapes, communities, and woods, are threatened by climate change given they are about 10 feet below sea level. Some Dutch policymakers are already worried about increased salinization as rising seal levels pour saltwater into protected freshwater bodies. Others are thinking about whether floating barge farms will be feasible. The Dutch are worried.
For professor Laura Lawson, ASLA, Rutgers University, people garden for “food and a whole lot of other reasons” in the U.S. Community is an important element, or as Lawson laughed, “drinking goes hand and hand with community gardening.” In the early 20th century, there were “vacant lot cultivation associations” designed to put unemployed workers to work. Hundreds of families were given plots as a loan, with the goal of making them self-supporting. By 1934, some 36 percent of relief food was grown in these gardens. With World War I and II, the U.S. saw the rise of war or victory gardens. In 1918, there were more than 5 million war gardens and by 1943, there were 20 million victory gardens. As an example, in Chicago, there were 2,200 acres of land donated to cultivate produce. For WW II, there were 33,000 gardens covering nearly 1,800 acres.
Today, Lawson said many cities are now revising local codes to allow for urban agriculture. Land trusts sometimes purchase land, enabling communities to commit to growing things. However, even in food deserts, not everyone wants to become an urban farmer: One Detroit focus group said “not everyone has the intent or capacity to participate.” At the local level, community organizations often take the lead, given most urban farms are non-profit. Lawson argued that in these local instances, there is often a divide between the landscape architects (experts) and community organizations (grassroots). Landscape architects have been ambivalent about urban farms in the past. During WW II, many were concerned about these pop-up gardens ruining their landscape designs.
In a later conversation, questions were raised about the role landscape architects should actually play in urban agriculture. One attendee implied that a systems-scale approach may be the most appropriate perspective for landscape architects. Lawson said that may end up being the right role, but “many landscape architects don’t teach gardening and perhaps need to or they will become unrealistic about what it entails.” Still, urban agriculture is expected to present “aesthetic” challenges for landscape architects. Can these designers make the spaces for the messy growing process and the equipment of a working farm seem more functional, beautiful, and integrated into communities? Lawson thinks that more landscape architects need to go to community groups to “learn their issues.”
This is the first in a series of posts about Food & The City, a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks. Read the second post, How Tokyo Invented Sushi.
Image credit:WWIIVictory Garden, San Francisco / San Francisco Chronicle