Farm your City, Green your Future
report Heerlen 9 seminar, 5-7/11/2011 Amsterdam. 
Since Michelle Obama started growing organic tomatoes in the White House garden it is a hype: growing your own food on roofs, walls, in hidden gardens and on derelict industrial sites. And although there may be doubts about its potentials to save the planet, no one can deny Francesca Miazzo’s thesis that urban agriculture has promises for social innovation as well.
Depuis Michelle Obama cultive des tomates organiques dans le jardin de la Maison Blanche, c’est un hype médiatique: la culture de nourriture sur les toits, murs, dans les jardins cachés, et sur des sites industriels désaffectés. Et même s’il y a des doutes quant à son potentiel de sauver la planète, personne ne peut nier la promesse de son porte parole Francesca Miazzo, que l’agriculture urbaine offre des perspectives pour l’innovation sociale aussi.
Links on urban (farming) experiments: Cities the Magazine; http://www.thewhyfactory.com/
Follow-up: no concrete plans yet, but we’re open to all suggestions. Leave them in the comments box.
Urban Addict
She describes herself as ‘an urban addict’ and ‘a community activist’, urban planner Francesca Miazzo. And where others see concrete and asphalt, she sees rice field, lamb yards and carrot beds. In 2009 she co-founded the webzine Cities the Magazine, a panorama of social and cultural experiments in cityscapes. And recently she persuaded the Amsterdam authorities to sponsor a pilot project, which, she hopes, will bring city farming to every neighbourhood in town.
Stigmatised Youth
Miazzo believes that ‘being actively involved in the production of one’s own food, should be part of everybody’s education, to raise conscience about its environmental impact and influence consumption patterns. In addition, she sees excellent possibilities for social development. ‘It can be done everywhere’, she told the audience. ‘And I am convinced that it is possible to involve every social segment and make elderly people, migrants and stigmatised youth realise that they too can bring something valuable to the community.’ ‘But you need to include the people, which is what science often forgets.’
Giant Cone
To give the audience an idea of the possibilities, she showed slides from places as different as a university campus in China where students grow rice; The New York Museum of Modern Art, which has created a garden consisting of little beds of vertical tubes to show people how food grows; a very hot city in which people have built a giant cone around which fruit- and vegetable plants grow, whereas the space inside, nicely cool, is used for concerts or a harvesting festival
Amsterdam Pilot
Urban farming has been particularly successful in New York, where you can find community gardens, a floating mobile yard on the river Hudson or even lambs in rooftop gardens. But Amsterdam may catch up fast, if Miazzo has her way. The city council has agreed on an experiment that, if successful, might be applied in many neighbourhoods. It started with contacting ‘people who never got dirty hands or worked a garden’, and persuading food stores owners that the project ‘isn’t just about selling food, but about a whole new way of thinking about it’.
It was followed by a meeting of policy makers, civil servants from sub-councils, community activists, and food engineers. The spark jumped, she said: ‘people shared their knowledge, and new visions emerged.’ At the moment, she said, we are ‘mapping’ the city through a series of interviews, to find out which problems have to be dealt with, what needs there are, and what solutions are possible.
Carrots or computers
Because Miazzo couldn’t show any results yet, some in the audience responded quite sceptically. From an energy perspective, the balance might not be too positive. Global cities tend to get their food from all over the world, not just from local fields. You cannot use roofs for growing carrots when you need them for solar panels providing electricity for your computers. And making migrants grow food can be extremely patronising.
Quality Cannabis
But there were also positive responses, often from personal experience: a neighbour who built an oven outdoors and invited all neighbours to use it; someone’s son of nine who ‘loves his vegetable garden at school’; a considerable decrease in vegetable expenses ‘since we started growing our own’; a migrant neighbour growing quality cannabis, and women from northern Africa who know exactly what herbs to pick from the verges.
Rural Roots
And New York and Amsterdam certainly are not the only cities that have discovered the social possibilities of farming the city, said a participant from Spain. ‘In Catalonia, local authorities try to include Romanian minorities through food growing, so they can cut their food bills whilst going back to their rural roots.
