Food and Urbanism: The Convivial City and a Sustainable Future by Susan Parham

Author:Susan Parham [Parham, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

What are the design requirements for urban food growing?

Theorists from urban biodiversity, sustainable cities and urban design perspectives are increasingly tying together notions of food-centred productivity, with reshaping and retrofitting urban built form (Dunham-Jones and Williamson 2009; Tachieva 2010). Drawing on pre-urban patterns from European experience, Vall-Casas et al. (2011) argue that the rediscovery of rural grids and watercourses can form the physical design and landscape basis for remaking suburbia as more sustainable urbanism, including for urban agriculture. Notwithstanding the critiques of radical political ecology which problematizes biodiversity corridor and framework approaches within its Marxist analysis of urban landscapes, it appears that when successfully designed, urban food-growing spaces can contribute to making convivial outdoor rooms on which public green space is focused. The idea of design for ‘nourishable’ places (Mouzon 2008) has emerged, while constructs such as the urban bioregion seek to interconnect cities and their landscape contexts and opportunities in much more resilient ways, as explored in Chapter 9. Issues of urban food security are sharpening interest in the possibilities for the design of convivial green space. Among conceptual approaches is that of ‘continuous productive urban landscapes’, the ‘CPULs’ which seek to insert an unbroken chain of open spaces across cities, linking urban and rural space and providing opportunities for urban food growing from inner city to fringe locations (Viljoen et al. 2005: 11).

As noted in Chapter 2, Alexander et al. (1977: 792) offer notably holistic proposals for remaking city form in ways sympathetic to food growing. In A Pattern Language (Alexander et al. 1977: 302), it was argued that (to paraphrase) urban green space provides a kind of flip side to lively, engaged streets; forming the quiet backs, still water and cool greens that urban dwellers turn to when the pace and connection of civic life threatens to overwhelm their sense of self. Just as city dwellers need promenades to which the café is the proper adjunct, they also require quiet places where ‘the mood is slow and reflective’, where only natural sounds can be heard, where there are pools and streams nearby, but where walking is protected by a comforting wall at one side (Alexander et al. 1977: 302). Within this wider set of spaces, a series of patterns for urban gardening are laid out that echo in spatial terms the kitchen gardens of traditional cities and include terraces and bunds on which to plant vegetables and orchards, wild gardens, garden walls, trellised walks, greenhouses, garden seats and vegetable gardens (Alexander et al. 1977: 302). The designers are very conscious that these productive spaces can (and should) be very beautiful and robust over the long term, as in the example of the limonaie of Lake Garda described by D. H. Lawrence which form exquisite ‘terraced labyrinths’, some of which have borne fruit for 150 years (Rudofsky 1964: npr).

Farr (2008: 179), meanwhile, proposes that in terms of urban food production, ‘planners and architects have the opportunity to bring back what years of irresponsible practices have taken away’ and documents a number of built and unbuilt examples for well-designed space for growing.

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