‘The success of all forms of food activities, including urban agricultures, rests on the economies of scope, not the economies of scale….When we understand that breakthrough method of measuring progress in urban food matters, we will come to see the potential of totally different methods of managing and rewarding food activities.’
—Wayne Roberts
When Socrates, Plato and the gang had their dialogues about the inner essence of beauty, truth and justice, while hanging out at the farmers market in downtown ancient Athens, they had no idea of the problems they would create for urban agriculture 2500 years later.
Unfortunately, urban agriculture is still all Greek to many city planners.
That’s because the ancient Greeks established the pattern of what I call singular thinking for all manner of food policies — including such commonly used expressions as food policy, food strategy, food culture, local food, sustainable food, alternative food, and urban agriculture. Not much pluralism or plurals here!!
We betray the Greek origin of western styles of thinking every time we use the singular to discuss potential options with regard to the abundance of foods and food choices that urban lives and modern technologies provide (please note my use of the plural).
The ancient Greek philosophers, despite many wonderful ideas they developed, were hung up with locating the one and only essence of things — an abstraction that was independent of the ups and downs of momentary appearance.
They didn’t like messy realities because they were too messy, and left that world to slaves and women.
To this day, many of us are still straitjacketed by this narrow mindset. One way the tradition lives on is the low standing of growing and preparing food, as distinct from the well-paid work and prestige that goes to people who speculate on the financial abstractions of food.
Almost as harmful, though much less direct, is the way food policy gets treated by city authorities.
To wit, the way cities agonize over a policy (note the singular) for urban agriculture (note the singular), rather than a suite of policies (note the plural) to help as many who are interested, for whatever reasons (note the plural), be they love or money, to eat foods (note the plural) they have grown or raised or foraged in varieties (note the plural) of spaces (note the plural) — from front yards, to back yards, to green roofs, to green walls, to balconies, to windowsills, to allotment gardens, to community gardens, to beehives, to butterfly gardens, to teaching and therapeutic gardens, to edible landscaping, to soil-based, hydroponic and aquaponic greenhouses, to vacant lots, to public orchards, to community composting centers, to grey water recycling for lawns and gardens, to formally-sited farms and meadows.
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
There are so many opportunities, so many points on the urban agricultures spectrum, that we can’t even say urban agriculture is what it is.
Urban agricultures are what they are, and governments should embrace them all.
Of course, public authorities need to practice their usual due diligence in terms of personal and public safety, but the emphasis of policy should not be on toleration or permission, but management and stewardship of the health, environmental, community and economic yields of urban ag.
This is in marked contrast to the present mode of civic management over urban agriculture, which Vancouver-based city food planning expert Janine de la Salle, writing in the book, Cities of Farmers, compares to the way authorities manage sleep: “it is necessary, but not meant to be regulated or managed in any meaningful way.”
That nice little dig (there are many ways to dig in support of urban agricultures) brings me to the business at hand in this newsletter, a review of three fairly new resources (two books, one assortment of essays) on urban agriculture — each of which sheds a distinctive light on the growing possibilities of urban food production.
VIEWS FROM MADISON
The best to begin with is the collection edited by Julie Dawson and Alfonso Morales, called Cities of Farmers: Urban Agricultural Practices and Processes. It sets the stage.
The two editors come from the state university in Madison, Wisconsin, where the late city planning authority, Jerry Kaufman, spread his protective wings around a new generation of urbanists who now teach and practice city food planning around the world. Before Kaufman, the conventional wisdom of city planners was that food was produced in rural areas and consumed in cities; cities should stick with making things that provided the “highest worth” of expensive city land. This anthology, which breaks totally from convention, is a worthy basket from the harvest Kaufman seeded. (To be transparent, I am as indebted to encouragement from Kaufman as any of his students.)
To be more transparent, I got to see this book before it was published, so I could write a back cover blurb drawing attention to its “down to earth quality” that can help city planners, health promoters, community developers and “all who love what a garden does for a day outdoors, a yard or parkette, a great meal, and quality time with others.”
The breakthrough of the book, in my view, is that it doesn’t ask the ancient and unanswerable philosophical question about “what is urban agriculture.” Instead, it asks the more pointed and fruitful question: what do urban agriculture projects do.
The book’s answers (note the plural) form the most comprehensive overview yet of how the “multi-functionality” of both agriculture and food can generate the many benefits that urban agricultures bestow on cities.
Producing food may well be the least accomplishment of urban agriculture, though that extra food can really make a difference for people on low income. But the crop itself is only one contribution on a long list that includes enhanced public safety, community vitality and cohesion, neighborhood place-making, skill development, food literacy, garbage reduction (through composting) and green infrastructure.
As Erin Silva and Anne Pfeiffer argue in their chapter on agroecology in cities, the sheer range of benefits bestowed by urban agricultures dwarfs the efficiency of any one particular contribution — be it food production or the development of community food literacy. This knocks the economic analysts for a loop because the premise of this book is that the whole is greater than the part, and the efficiency comes out of the whole, not any one part. “Though food production remains a central focus for many operations,” they write, “ it is often a means to achieve other social benefits rather than the singular goal.”
As I used to put it during my working days at the city of Toronto, the success of all forms of food activities, including urban agricultures, rests on the economies of scope, not the economies of scale.
Therein lies the key to measuring true productivity, and when we understand that breakthrough method of measuring progress in urban food matters, we will come to see the potential of totally different methods of managing and rewarding food activities.
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That’s the first and only book I deal with in this newsletter. If you’d like to see more of what I have to say about two other books on urban ag, please go to my blog rendition of this newsletter.
Stick around to see other newsletter features, such as the Hungry for More section, which this week features other useful articles on urban ag you will want to take a look at.
