Urban Agriculture and Land Use Planning

Look around your city as you're driving to work.  How many farms do you see?  How many vacant lots lying fallow do you pass?  How many fruit trees are thriving on your block?  The answer, in the order to the asking, is most likely "Little or none, tons, and little to none."

Why don't we see more urban agriculture happening?  People have gathered for millenia, and history has admitted that the "hunter gatherer" ideology should be described as more of a "foraging" community in pre-history as we know it's easier to daily gather nuts and grains, but especially in the case of larger kills, not necessary to hunt daily.  This is part of the reason why settling down and beginning to farm was successful: it was easier to travel for meat and grow food in a stable environment.

Yet as we've gotten better at living in cities, we seem to have forgotten that without air, water, and a food supply, our days are numbered.  Homes have plumbing and oxygen is readily available to us thanks to that good ol' photosynthesis thing that produces our oxygen molecules.

Cities that are growing are in a constant state of development, yet land use planning for urban agriculture is rarely addressed.  In 2000, Kameshwari Pothukucki, Ph.D., and Jerome L. Kaufman conducted a study wherein they addressed the lack of inclusion for urban agriculture sites in city planning.

What they found was not a lack of interest in including urban agriculture, but a lack of knowledge for how to implement it into successful city planning.  The report broke down their findings into seven main causes for leaving gardening out of the design:

1. Food production was considered a social issue, not a planning issue.  Many developers thought the idea was good, but not in their wheelhouse.
2. Many developers and planners left food to rural communities and did not consider them "urban issues."
3. City planning is outside the private sector, where many feel food production resides.   
4. Food system planning subsidies are not as well known as city planning subsidies.
5. Planners don't think food production is an issue; they see supermarkets and think there is not a problem to be solved.
6. Most planners have connections within their own system, but do not have readily available resources to reach out to those in food production.
7. Lack of knowledge about food production and food scarcity issues many urban dwellers face.

With the help of organizations like the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), people are being empowered in local areas to develop and grow their own communities.  How does it work?  

As you can see, by empowering locals through research, advancements are being made by people for their own areas, and these ideas spread out to others in similar situations and create partnerships for lifelong change.

Integrating food planning into urban development is a fairly new concept, but is growing in popularity.

In 2008, a group of researchers (citation at end) who embarked on researching urban agriculture planning in the city of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia.  As the first US city to adopt a policy to reduce carbon emissions, Portland created an Office of Sustainable Development in 2000, which later grew to include food sustainability in it's list of priorities (Mendes 438).  When the city passed a resolution to take inventory of city-managed lands for potential urban agriculture (but didn't provide any funding for the project), Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman recruited students from Portland State University to complete the project, and "The Diggable City" concept was born (Mendes 439).

The Special Office for the Environment was created in Vancouver in 1990, and by April 2002 the city had a vision for sustainability in the city that also included the creation of the Sustainability Sponsor Group made of city employees (Mendes 443).  Even without food sustainability mandates, Vancouver has held to the policy to provide funding for urban agriculture until a Food Action Plan was officially established in 2003.  

In developing Urban Agriculture land planning, the city also turned towards university students at the University of British Columbia, modeling its inventory after the Portland report (Mendes 443).  

Upon conclusion of both initial research projects, the cities were both primed to move into implementation.   The Diggable City is now in Phase III and still making recommendations to perfect it's pilot projects.  Vancouver has moved forward with its goals of urban agriculture by adding recommendations and how-tos to the city's website.  

With a little savvy, a little planning, and a little consideration to both the mental and ENVIRONmental aspects urban agriculture gives to a city, future planning projects across the nation that incorporate the ideals of a greener city will include the know-how and layout necessary to create future possibilities of reclaiming farming in even the most chic and sophisticated city layouts.

Unlinked Source:

Mendes, Wendy, Kevin Balmer, Terra Kaethler, and Amanda Rhoads. "Using Land Inventories
     to Plan for Urban Agriculture." Journal of the American Planning Association. 74.4
     (2008): 435-449. ProQuest.  Accessed March 13, 2014.