What is the role of the built environment and of urban agriculture?
Excerpts from my Master’s Thesis
“There are designers who work on interventions for a certain circumstance, who work for clients who may or may not have a direct connection to the project site.
There are people who use such designed places daily and enjoy well enough the experiences and functions dictated.
Then, there are people who want to get their hands dirty, who want to live deliberately, and who have needs not necessarily being met by their environs.
This thesis is for the latter group, which means it does not propose a design, but rather offers a process and interface for these independently engaged people to live in dense urban environment as part of a richly diverse society.”
Built Environment
People build to sustain and express themselves. Engaging in a design process for built environments is an opportunity to clarify desired outcomes. In natural processes one might call it ‘natural selection.’ There are two main routes in social processes: ‘vernacular’ is a repeated response based on stable perceptions and desires, and ‘professional design’ professes to be the result of more widely explored concepts of context and priorities. Regardless of what route one uses, built projects reflect people’s sense of themselves in relation to the world and highlights their priorities.
In areas of high human density there is a fuzzy area between planned and ‘grown’ environmental developments. Patterns develop through formal interventions and independent repetitions like paths across a field, one person’s action influencing the next’s and both influencing another’s and so on. Because of their intimate complexities, environments supporting greater diversities of lifestyles encourage the average individual to understand things from more points of view, and societies allowing the luxury of spare time promote a greater level of forethought and deliberation than societies driven by immediate need. Dense settlements, therefore, have the opportunity to develop a hybrid of ‘vernacular’ and ‘professional design’ based on the personal and social growth of their populace.
A city’s environment is created by beautifully complex relationships between materials, spatial arrangements, and people. Within this complexity, the basic details supported and supplied by municipalities set an environmental standard that has a large impact on the environmental qualities of the city, especially the quality of everyday public spaces. A city’s infrastructure, or basic framework is largely comprised of this set of built and social standards. The resultant environmental qualities describe the values physically supported by the city—which, because of a common disconnect between the values of people making decisions and the values that actually place out in their lives, may or may not be the qualities desired. How can a city’s infrastructure adapt to the diverse and changing needs, in parallel with the growth of its citizens?
Living systems inherently perpetuate conditions favorable for life and may be ideally suited to supporting an adaptive diversity and engagement with an urban environment. The idea of ‘growing’ infrastructure is not new. The City of Seattle has campaigned to increase the tree canopy within the city, mostly because of the trees’ inherent environmental controls. A report claims that “increasing canopy from the current 18% to 30-36% will be a net monetary gain for the city over just one year, considering stormwater mitigation, air cleaning, carbon sequestration, and benefits regarding and aesthetics” (Seattle’s Urban Forest Management Plan 2007).
By allowing our environments to grow about us, we are using systems already in place (processes of genetics) to directly meet our needs (food, shelter, nutrient loops). Constructing built form currently requires more strain on our part to plan and manufacture than is required in natural growth processes, where the system takes care of itself. It may benefit cities and their constituents to rely more on life to help create spaces fit for living--both directly and as a model of adaptive, self-perpetuating ease. A new system of adapting city infrastructure could be led by urban agriculture, an activity currently popular with portions of Seattle’s general populous, academic circles, and political spheres.
Roles of urban agriculture
There are many perspectives on the potential roles of urban agriculture—in totality it is a subject well beyond the scope of this paper. A United States Department of Agriculture literature review on the subject declares that “urban agriculture has almost as many definitions as locations.” It seems that its social relevance depends on the character of the society in question and the economic power of the people farming. Urban agriculture is a way for many of Seattle's low-income immigrant families to provide for themselves. For more established residents of Seattle and the Northwest, and for other families, urban agriculture may be a leisure activity, too. (Seattle Department of Neighborhoods 2010) For Milwaukee-based Growing Power, urban agriculture is a way to counter current food-inequalities, helping urban dwellers have better access to fresh food (Will Allen, growingpower.org). The Urban Agriculture Network suggests three main categories of benefit from urban agriculture: environment, well being, and economy. The United Nations Development Project's report on urban agriculture also sees potential for urban agriculture to help cities move from an economically open loop system to a more sustainable closed-loop resource cycle—a fundamental change in social organization in the developed world. These changes—systemic improvements in well-being, environment, and economy—should be available to all people regardless of income or social stature. Programs should not be limited to helping just the wealthy or just the needy, but rather address the society as a whole. A fundamental change such as this demands collaboration at multiple levels of social organization. In his book Public Produce, Darrin Nordahl looks at the systems of agriculture public space before attaching the term ‘urban agriculture.’ He argues for changing the goal of agriculture’s system from making money to making a healthy community. (32) Nordhal sees “the real solution” as “accessibility and affordability” (38), 7 stating that food needs to be available regardless of income level. He also notes that people, especially children, tend to want what they see and what is around them. (41)
“Successful public-space design in this country
must respond to the needs and desires of
a pluralistic society. The goal of the publicspace
designer is to ensure that the qualities
and components comprising the physical
space of the public realm provide the greatest
value to all members of the community.
When such requirements are met, public
space becomes equitable, convivial, and
communal. It is only natural that something
as universal as the desire to eat healthy be
fulfilled in our urban public space, and that
these places teach us a thing or two about
food, the environment, and each other. Nothing
is more communal than diverse individuals
coming together around food, and perhaps
the time has come to consider public space as
the community dinner table. Food is largely
absent from public space today, but I do believe
there exists a more equitable approach
to public-space design that provides the
greatest value to its users, while building and
strengthening community.”
E.O. Wilson in his book Biophilia from 1984 argues that beyond just having edibles present, our public places should actually be alive, and that an environment of living things is crucial to us as a species. Perhaps if the large task of ‘bringing to life’ our public places is accomplished, then the presence of healthy food will naturally follow. This thesis is most interested in how urban agriculture can inspire an integral city street infrastructure and: 1) provide for people more directly within a relatively sustainable system; 2) build on existing resources of the city, including social assets such as individual citizens, neighborhoods, businesses, and civic programs, and 3) suggest a ubiquitous ‘public space’ with benefits locally, regionally, and potentially globally. To help frame the issues, this thesis applies systems thinking and permaculture philosophies.