I had no idea I would experience a mental turnaround at the opening night of the Design Exchange show Carrot City: Designing For Urban Agriculture, February 25.
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It wasn’t 180 degrees, mind you. I’ve never been one to scorn urban ag as a contradiction in terms akin to “hospital food,” “careful investor” or “responsible banker.” But I did have a prejudice about what food production in cities is really about.
Here’s a good time to confess: my priority in pushing urban ag was the opportunity to create community, a chance to give people a taste of what working with the earth and chewing fresh-cut veggies are about. Green roofs, garden patches on lawns, school grounds and parks are more about appreciating food than growing it, I figured.
But a trip to Carrot City, with all its city harvesting inspirations in the context of the economic collapse, has altered my priorities. The rethink starts here: the immediate vulnerability of the entire world to mortgage failures in the U.S. has exposed how much self-reliance we’ve really lost.
Although comparisons are often made between today’s and the 1930s’ depression, there’s almost no comparison when it comes to consumerism.
Back then, the population was rural. Most people were capable of feeding and housing themselves through their own labour. Half of adult urbanites were full-time housewives able to tend gardens, watch over small livestock and cook from scratch. Takeouts and ready-to-eat foods were rarer than hen’s teeth, as were opportunities to purchase exercise, recreation or entertainment. The consumer economy barely existed.
This is where urban ag gets so important in this meltdown – it provides an escape from mass dependence on purchasing. We need sound planning that boosts safety zones of resilience, places where people can control the factors affecting their basic survival and life. And it’s hard to get more basic than food.
Safeguarding food is part of safeguarding health – one of the first things people save money on when times are tough but the crucial factor in helping societies bounce back after hard knocks.
Direct access to food is much more important in today’s interdependent world than it was yesterday. In a globalized food system, most farmland close to cities now grows specialized products for mass export, not diverse products for nearby cities. If food isn’t grown inside the city, there’s no easy way to find it close by either.
From this standpoint, having an urban ag zone and urban ag ethic are part and parcel of civic due diligence in planning for any number of emergencies faced by city dwellers cut off from essential supplies – be it by recession, truckers’ strike, drought or peak oil.
My hunch is that the crisis we’re in now comes from pushing a consumer economy past the point of diminishing returns. Urban ag fights depression because it reclaims areas of a producer economy crucial to physical and mental health. Few urban gardeners describe their activity as a chore. It’s a hobby that meets personal needs for exercise, meditation, communion with nature and self-esteem related to personal skills.
This suggests we share a need to escape excessive consumerism.
Today’s anti-recessionary gardening can also double the return in the old rule about a penny saved being a penny earned. Most proles pay close to a cent to earn a cent by the time they’ve paid taxes, transportation, meals away from home. Just one more reason to use Friday for gardening and donate a day to keep another worker on the job on a four-day week.
That’s the kind of down-to-earth economics that urban ag makes possible.
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