Feeding the Community: The Original & Potential Value of the Urban Farm

various images from, and courtesy of, DBCFSN.

"Detroiters recognize that the value of the vacant land in the city goes beyond the construction of a structure. Residents have turned "abandoned" lots into productive agricultural resources. Mini farmers markets are springing up citywide providing Detroiters with fresh, organic food grown right in the neighborhood. Urban agriculture should be recognized as an essential contributor to the local food system. It ensures a ready supply of nutritious, high quality vegetables and fruits. The entry costs associated with intensive food production on small urban farms in a cooperative environment is much lower and accessible than the current trend of mega farms. Urban growers stand to benefit from increased opportunities to market local products. The potential market for local value-added products makes urban agriculture even more attractive as a local economic development tool.." -- The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

As mentioned the other day, urban farming has come to some mention in the press lately. As discussion on Farm Bill-related matters keeps to the downlow, much of the conversation in advocacy circles (both at the Edible Institute in Santa Barbara and to a more limited degree at Cooking for Solutions 2012, for example) have moved into direct ways institutions, consumers, and localized policy solutions may be able to rectify shortcomings in food security and access issues. Urban Agriculture represents one such venue: as the foreclosure crisis hit across the country, large swathes of property in various urban, suburban, and peri-urban counties have been abandoned or lost population density. Cities bleed cash having to still cover utilities to these areas, geographies that no longer pay into city coffers in any significant way. And not all of these areas are peripheral; some areas are right in the urban core, thanks to a planning notion called "contagion effect", where a single property devaluation and improper handling by mediating institutions (such as banks) can lead to a cascading devaluation effect at nearby properties, even if there was no mishandling on the part of the tenant/owners. 

Nowhere has this been clearer than in Detroit, a city who has been defined by decreasing population, high poverty rates, low investment, and a high degree of food insecurity across all demographics. It is a city of 1000 liquor stores and not a single grocery. Within its large African American population, a large portion of the population was, in the 80's as today, largely locked out from federal and state assistance programs and food stamps due to ineligibility issues derived from housing, employment, and criminal record qualifications.  And it is from these conditions -- lacking institutional and financial access to food sources, little to no recourse through political means to rectify these conditions, and a high degree of unemployment -- led to the start of what can be considered the present understanding of urban agriculture (1).

Detroits urban farms were largely abandoned lots or yards within abandoned lots, taken over by neighbors and with either implicit or passing allowances from the city. They were largely intended for individual households, occasionally for resale to other families. They were representative of a cultural resilience and self-sufficiency; rooted in some thinking from the Black Power movement, the idea was to be able to feed yourself and curtail the dependency one had on the state for basic needs. As documented in the film "Urbanized", this was as much a movement of basic need as it was a way to build sense of community in a city with little of both. Over time, these farms came together to create the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, an organization that supports these farms, as well as fostering an urban farm incubator, a green jobs program, and lobbying the city of Detroit for permanent policy promotion and protections for urban agriculture in the city.

This still remains the core of the this more recent evolution of urban farming nation-wide; many of the projects in the books I mentioned in the previous post -- Breaking Through Concrete and Urban Farms (2) -- cover projects, both non- and for-profit, community organized and individually run, that see community building as a core value in their orientation, their brand, whatever you wish to call it. It measures out -- urban farming projects have been shown to increase communication and interactivity between neighbors, have a strong multiplier effect on economic transactions, and pay dividends to local tax bases. And in centering around these notions, the ability to create context-specific solutions is improved considerably. There are still many things in the way of expanding urban agriculture efforts -- zoning laws and blight definitions, as well as urban convenants all have restrictive tendencies on what individuals can and cannot do, and most business zoning exempts agricultural work from occurring on them. Cities are beginning to overcome those restrictions, and with the rise in entrepreneurial urban agriculture, they would be best in starting to work on them as extensively as allows. 

(1) Urban agriculture and urban gardening have been a part of the American cityscape since the inception of the nation. Truck farms and large-scale operations within city limits were common in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City; allotments and community gardens abounded, especially during the Garden Cities movement, let alone the proportion of participation in the Victory Gardens program in World War 2. There is a difference between the two

(2) Review of these two books to come up later this week. I have a lot of good to say about them, but there are also a few points to consider -- especially where the location and demographics of their subjects is involved.