fertile cities: from communal perspectives to vertical techno-gardens

 Mia Pfeifer

"We reveal our presence in the world by creating places-buildings, towns, villages, farms, and cities. They are set either directly or indirectly into the world of nature, and they serve us as a kind of artificial nature, or "second nature", to use Cicero's term for it, one that we are able to control just as the gods of our remote past were seen to control the natural world that lay outside our door. The fundamental sources of all our knowledge, however, still remain rooted in nature. That is to say that nature, as our first environment, was our primordial source of external knowledge and the subject of our speculation about ourselves in relation to all else. By the extension of our imaginations, we created our cosmologies from what we observed firsthand in nature: life and death, the passing of days and the seasons, the geometry of the compass rose, the dome of the sky, and the spatial richness of the earth and the endless variety of living things throughout land and sea. Having once departed Eden by creating a "second nature" all our own, it has been our task to nurture and perfect it ever since - even, it seems, to the detriment of the natural world out of which is formed."

-Norman Crowe, 1995.

With the necessity to liberate the soil from agricultural methods that rose through the principles of the Green Revolution, new alternatives in urban agriculture have emerged in the last ten years. Governments, farmers and the general community are looking at more sustainable, environmentally friendly and cost-effective ways of feeding worldwide populations. In response to this need, the food movement advocates for local and chemical-free food production methods. However, this model based on quality over quantity increases social polarisation (Biel, R 2016) and does not meet the demands for feeding an ever-growing urban population. To control who, where and how is produced the food consumed by city dwellers, farmers and individuals are reinvigorating, generating, and building agricultural infrastructures within the city. However, with thousands looking to cultivate and scarcity of land fit for purpose, urban agriculture moves from the communal outdoor spaces to technologically fueled rooftops and indoor artificially led warehouses and undergrounds. In this light, I ask: What are the implications of detaching urban agriculture from communal practices, and are we losing the opportunity to grasp a momentum for urban change?

In order to reveal an answer, I explore the history of the allotment movement in the UK and its working-class traditions of self-organisation within the city supported by governmental initiatives. I will focus my attention on the current rise of community gardens due to agricultural practices derived from the green revolution, estate campaigns, environmental concerns, human wellbeing and food dependence of long food channels. Finally, I will look at Vertical farming infrastructures developed as an alternative to the scarcity of farmland within the city, scientific research on environmental modification and a high-profit business model. Urban Agriculture originates as a mean of food security. Nevertheless, multiple benefits are proven connected to greenspace vital to people's mental health and wellbeing in cities; an active connection via gardening builds on this and adds physical health and social benefits through added community cohesion (Dunning, H; Collins, T 2020). As well as these benefits, today's urban agriculture places its focus on integrating the "natural world" to the built environment, the reconceptualisation of food consumption, commercial alternatives and productivity. In this essay, I argue that vertical farming is reinstalling the principles of the Green Revolution, where market needs and technological knowledge are imposed over social wellbeing, promoting the urbanisation of green spaces within the city, creating a disconnection with the land and ultimately feeding a wider divide between city dwellers and the natural world, despite the vindication of these practices as a sustainable alternative to meet elevated demand for food without the need for additional farmland (Southey, F. Jones, H 2020).

the allotment movement history

An Allotment Garden is an agricultural opportunity for those with limited or no access to land used by individuals for non-commercial gardening or growing food (Fletcher, E; Collins, M 2020). An allotment measures around 10 "rods", an Anglo-Saxon unit of length equivalent to around 253 square meters. The land itself is often owned by the local government or self-managed and owned by the allotment holders through an association (Harrison, J 2007). Except for intensive and green belt agriculture, allotments represent the largest land area devoted to Urban Agriculture in many medium-high density cities worldwide, including London (Breuste, 2010; Garnett, 2000; Fletcher, E; Collins, M 2020).

In the UK, governmental legislation enabled access to land through allotments as a mean of food security. In 1908 the Small Holdings and Allotments Act was declared, instating local authorities to provide sufficient land to be cultivated as a response to the rapid industrialisation of the country and increasing demand for land from the labouring poor. With the First World War eruption, the Land Settlement Facilities Act 1919 made allotments available to all in a quest to help to return service members and their families with the provision of food. However, during The Second World War, a sharp rise in allotment use took place after grave food shortages ignited a governmental initiative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries entitled "Dig for Victory". Through a heavily promoted educational campaign, Dig for Victory promoted the use of private and public spaces as allotments providing food for the starving population and contributing actively to the war, liberating military cargo for the transportation of ammunition, military machinery and medical supplies. The post-war recovery kept a high demand for allotments; however, this trend clashed with the urge for urbanisation and the gradual increase of land costs. In the following decades, local authorities subside to sell allotment land for high prices to housing developers. The peak of 1,400,000 allotments in 1943 had a critical decline to around 500,00 in the 1970s (Harrison, J 2007).

In the present time, allotments are rented through landlords and associations registered with the local government. The gardeners pay a small fee and sign a contract that states the conditions and regulations for using the land. Apart from principally providing independent food security, the Allotment activates a robust set of socio-cultural and economic outcomes. As a response to the Green Revolution and its legacy of environmental and health concerns, communities have pushed the interest in allotments to a phase coined as "the revival of urban gardens" (Speak et al., 2015; Fletcher, E; Collins, M 2020). In contrast to the pioneer allotment movement, the new allotment revival places its value on additional benefits and contribute to urban resilience, reinforcing its physical and mental outcomes and placing the notion of the community garden as a space for social capital exchange (Audate et al., 2019; Speak et al., 2015; Fletcher, E; Collins, M 2020).

the rise of the community garden

Between 1950 and the late 1960s, The Green Revolution "was a strategy for food crop productivity growth explicitly based on the premise that, given appropriate institutional mechanisms, technology spillovers across political and agroclimatic boundaries in food production could be captured" (Pingali, P 2012). The initiatives adopted new technologies, including high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereals, especially dwarf wheat and rice. The Green Revolution was associated with chemical fertilisers, agrochemicals, controlled water supply and newer cultivation methods, including mechanisation. These together were seen as a 'package of practices' to supersede 'traditional' technology and to be adopted as a whole (Farmer, B. H,1986). The rise of the Green Revolution had a problematic heritage of environmental, health and socio-economic impact, including a reduction of agricultural biodiversity (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, 2007), land degradation (Stevenson, J et al. 2013), an increase in carbon emissions and poisoning due to pesticide use (Loyn, D 2008). As a consequence of the agricultural practices and food production mechanisms developed as a direct and indirect link with the Green Revolution, a robust response from western countries informed by available data online such as The Poison Papers, Toxicdocs, and the Monsanto Papers inspire new trends in food consumption under the umbrella of the Food Movement.

The Food Movement highlighted issues of food sovereignty, organic and local produce, food dependence of long food channels and inspired an interest in agricultural practices at a multigenerational level. The Food Movement created a "seismic shift in how people eat" (Taparia, H; Pamela Koch 2016), forcing companies and western governments to address the subject. Nevertheless, the issue of food was connected hand to hand with environmental impact. "Food systems that promote the consumption of fresh, local produce benefit both the environment and nutrition" (Stephan, A et al. 2016).

"Cities are the epicentres of human activity. They cover less than 2% of the earth's land surface but generate about 70% of GDP and house more than half the human population. The importance of cities is only going to increase in coming decades as another 2.5 billion people move to urban centres." (Stephan, A et al. 2016) Urban patterns of food consumption that include processed foods, elevated levels of salt, sugar, and fat are seeing as a matter of public policy as nutrition is at the base of the obesity pandemic.

In 2010, The London Assembly submitted a report entitled "Cultivating the Capital Food growing and the planning system in London" to support food growing, for the individual but also for commercial purposes, in and around the city as a mean to bring many social, environmental, economic and food security benefits to its inhabitants. It states: "The report commends the Mayor's Capital Growth program, which promotes the creation of local community growing spaces, and calls for an assessment of sites owned by the Greater London Authority to see if any are suitable for food growing. Boroughs should do the same for their existing and brownfield sites". Coinciding with the London Olympics in 2012 (Lachmund, J 2020), Capital Growth, a subsidiary campaign by Sustain- a governmental alliance that promotes sustainable food systems- supported the creation of 2.012 new community food growing spaces in London. Through a free network and a membership program, Capital Growth provides training, equipment, and support. The agenda behind this initiative was built in the example led by Canada during the winter Olympics in 2010, where "sustainability meant striving to manage the social, environmental and economic impact and opportunities of the Games in ways that would create lasting benefits, locally and globally" (Furlong, J 2010 - VANOC report.

Initiatives such as Capital Growth supported by governmental funds reinvigorated the interest in Urban Agriculture, emphasising the promotion of green spaces and new creatives infrastructures. These networks provided the logistics for food growing, but knowledge about the practice of community gardens gave place to a fruitful ground for social exchange. Technical knowledge also allowed successful harvests, which create a surplus of food items that give place to community enterprise (Roberts, G 2012).

Communal gardens with cafes, sale of vegetable boxes, and paid agricultural and horticultural workshops have become commonplace in the last ten years around London. An example of this trend is Grow Tottenham, "a meanwhile use project on Ashley Road in Tottenham Hale". Ashley House was originally a large civil engineering depot left unused since 2014. GT is now a self-funded community garden open to local neighbours, hosting a café, garden kitchen, an event space with a 5 am license at weekends and a carpentry workshop. GT organises volunteering sessions to create micro-allotment plots, a wildflower meadow, a polytunnel and removable vegetable beds. They also run educational programs in conjunction with local schools teaching agricultural skills to young ones. All the revenues from the paid events go directly to finance the space. The urban landscape around GT has changed significantly since its creation. Urbanisation has grown exponentially in the last two years, and the surrounding area is busy with cranes and building noises. The open space nature of GT and the ground level positioning of the vegetable beds contrast dramatically with high rise neighbouring apartment blocks.

a space of collective learning

Urban Agriculture inspired by the Food Movement brings together several themes: the city as a garden; community gardens; wellbeing; meeting, conviviality and neighbourliness; diversity of experimentation, safeguarding free/open space from privatisation and enclosure; plurality against uniformity; common goods; experiencing nature (Biel, R 2016). All of these dynamics of socio- economical learning are fomented through the relationship with the land.

The engagement with nature in the city exposes the dualities upon which the garden works. "Urbanisation has long been discussed as a process whereby the one kind of environment, namely the "natural" is traded in for, or rather taken over by, a much more crude and unsavoury "built" environment" (Heynen et al. 2006; Deraas, M 2013). An extensive debate concerning dichotomies related to nature and culture, human and the environment, has played a central role in anthropology discourse (Barlett 2005; Ingold 2000, 2011; Latour 2005; Myhre: in press). Urban agriculture in the community garden opens up for a revision of assumptions of the city as a negation of the natural (Amin and Thrift 2002; Barlett 2005; Deraas, M 2013) and touch upon the notion of interconnectivity between certain elements at "the origin of the primaeval forms of all human building", "an unbroken continuity between a built place and its natural environs" (Casey, E 2009)

Growers at the communal gardens learn by doing (beck, 2016) in the space of collective learning and experimentation. The garden provides a structure that builds on a dialogue with nature, changes with the seasons and ignites physical engagement. In a quest to generate food, the gardener changes its environment, and in return, the environment changes the gardener. The sociality that takes place in the garden is linked to the surroundings and its materiality. Together, gardeners deal with the soil conditions, the complexities of the maintenance of the plants, the construction of the garden, irrigation processes, dirt. The garden provides a system of “structuring structures” (Grenfell,M 2014; Bourdieu,P; Passeron, J-C 1977) through the experience embedded in the physical act of gardening, building on collective and individual knowledge routinised through bodily action (Bourdieu, P.1980). The gardening process is at play and expands through the relationship with the harvested food brought home, cooked and shared with others.

In that sense, food acquires a different taste. The transformation of food from plant to palate through its cultivation promotes food knowledge and cooking skills. The garden mediates the relationships with the gardeners, the food and its surroundings. The relationship with the product as it is cooked and shared also impacts wasting methods and recycling. The appearance of the food is no longer restricted by market guidelines, laws and legislation, meaning surpluses are not created to fill those demands. The food is produced locally and in smaller quantities given gardeners greater control of the waste they generate. Local consumers draw upon this in opposition to the current model of a longer supply chain in which consumers and the food source are disconnected.

productivity

Fresh food travels on average 1500 miles to make it our plate. In order to maintain its freshness, food in a matured incipient state is packed, refrigerated, unpacked and repacked before arriving on supermarket shelves. Food is selected according to its durability and resilience through its transport. As a result, food loses many nutrients and other qualities such as texture, taste and smell (Lim.CJ, 2014). In order to comply with international standards, industrial farmers have to produce an additional surplus not only to commit to food protocols but also with tariffs and prices in international markets (WTO, 2000). The World Food Programme states that today the world produces 17% more food than 30 years ago, and contrary to popular belief, we have enough food to feed the global population( Kweifio-Okai, C 2014). However, food is not distributed equally among the population. Industrial Food is delivered to international markets, and a large percentage is used to make processed products created to optimise the prices( Henderson D et al, 1996). As an alternative to global industrial frameworks of food production, the food movement advocates for minimising distances from where the food is produced to where it is consumed. This model also aims to connect farmers and growers to local economies, creating self-reliant networks independent from globalised suppliers. Urban agriculture as a means to actively participate in the movement equips itself through allotments, communal gardens, and other alternatives at a personal level, initiating commercial initiatives and shifting to productivity through low input agriculture and no-dig methods. However, productivity cannot be met through these small- scale agricultural practices, neither can meet a democratic price point.

In the last ten years drawing from the principles of the food movement, entrepreneurs turned their eye to food production, labelling the practice as "the opportunity of this generation" passed the dot.com bubble of the 1990s (Musk, K 2015). The food crisis provides a fertile ground for business strategies, all in the name of local and organic produce. Entrepreneurial young farmers aim to feed the 4.4 billion worldwide urban population, maximising profits by cutting on distribution networks and using the current available infrastructures and energy resources already built in the cities. Using no new land and utilising high urban carbon dioxide levels, agriculture in the city provides an excellent ground for business. This new model of urban agriculture is labelled as Responsible Agriculture and is part of the Real Food revolution.

vertical farming and the new chapter

Vertical farming is the process of growing crops on shelves stacked vertically using cutting edge techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics and Climate Control Environment. Theoretically, vertical farming gave to agriculture what high rise tower blocks gave to architecture. Through Hydroponics and Aquaponics, the soil is no longer required. Instead, plants are immersed in water. Hydroponics use mineral nutrition in the water to foster rapid growth. Aquaponics requires other organisms and aquatic animals such as fish to generate plant nutrition. A symbiotic combination of animal waste- ammonia- as fertiliser feeds the plants, and in return, plants extract the fertiliser from the water. This water is then used to maintain the fish, and the recycled process continuous.

High tech glasshouses, warehouses and undergrounds use Climate Control Environments for indoor farming. The artificially controlled temperature protects food production from external natural climate and environmental risk factors. Climate control environments and biocontrol mechanism- the use of insects to control pests instead of chemical pesticides- are the method most broadly used for urban agriculture today. In CCE used for indoor farming, a high-tech infrastructure of sensors, automation and artificial light - LED commands the environment. This light replicates the sun, increases photosynthesis reducing plant cycles and adapts to different crops through tailored light recipes and a varied light spectrum. Through sensors, airflow and Co2 emissions are controlled, optimising plant growth and increasing the revenue considerably. Greens and small vegetable crops are mainly grown today, but growing potatoes, cereals, and even food trees can be possible. Young male white farmers command this trend of urban farming driven by the high revenues and the technical side integral to the grounds of this generation.

Although this type of Urban Agriculture could signify a powerful achievement for the recovery from the Green revolution's chemical legacy, it imposes the danger to reindeer Urban Agriculture into monopolies with access to online sales and supermarkets. The technology involved in vertical farming at a large scale comes with great investment, only affordable for those in the position of institutionalized power. It is not a surprise that companies like Amazon (Akula, L. 2007), Google (Peters, A. 2019), Ikea ( Williams, 2021) as well as investment from the founders of Tesla and Space X ( Musk, K 2015) are subsidizing Urban Agriculture around the globe.

Although Urban agriculture plays an essential role in the reconceptualisation of food consumption- eating fresh, avoiding processed food, home cooking- and plays a critical role in addressing environmental concerns -ecological footprint, unsustainable practices- the quest to provide food security cannot be separated from the pressing issue which is the urban disconnect from our rural food sources. The crucial element of the allotment movement and "the revival of urban gardens" deals with the "doing" of Urban Agriculture and issues of food reliance. Urban Agriculture is envisioned as a participatory activity, as an embodied disposition created by contact with nature, by growing one's food. "Information, in itself, is not knowledge, nor do we become any more knowledgeable through its accumulation. Our knowledgeability consists, rather, in the capacity to situate such information and understand its meaning within the context of a direct perceptual engagement with our environments. And we develop this capacity, I contend, by having things shown to us" (Ingold, T 2000). Through a pivotal reconfiguration of rural to urban agriculture and acquiring knowledge "by doing"(Ingold, T 2000), a new sensibility and a climate in which political and social questions ideally could occur. In this order, the quest for land rights liberated from irresponsible agricultural practices, issues with population mobility in and out of the cities, and restructuring of the city through green spaces and many other conversations could be addressed.

conclusion

Urban agriculture brings some new dilemmas. With the eyes set on productivity to feed the growing urban population, we return to the principles that inspired the industrial and green revolution: technological ambition and scientific knowledge. Urban agriculture is phased with the prospect of ignoring the call to look back at the natural world to address the challenges of climate change as governments delegate responsibilities to the hands of young entrepreneurial farmers with the vision to conquer new techno markets. "Urban Agriculture is a set of fundamentally political practices, both in terms of their role in neoliberal governance and 'sustainability' policy-making, and also as objects of contestation" (McClintock, N et al., 2017). Present concerns on healthy eating, organic produce, and exercise fuel demand in allotments and participation in communal gardens. In particular, the coronavirus pandemic put into context the fragility of long food channels and the lack of self-sufficient food production skills. However, although there is unprecedented demand for food growing spaces, there is insufficient availability within the city. Is up to local authorities to get their hands dirty and through the liberation of private space promote a radical re-imagining of food growing based on the premise of food sovereignty within the city and by their citizen. "Food sovereignty is, after all, merely a term currently attached to an emergent process, one which by definition is more than the sum of its parts. These parts include land reform, indigenous struggles, food networks, seed exchange, community-supported small farms, cooperatives, commons regimes in knowledge, localism, urban metabolism and many more. Such movements, generated by the reality of alienation and dispossession, are descendants of struggles going back to the origins of colonialism and class society, and the point now is to bring them together into an ensemble. The process is partly an objective one, common to self-organisation in all complex systems, and partly a subjective visioning of a better future. In any case, food sovereignty cannot fully be understood outside the context of the era within which it has arisen: that of imperialism." Biel, R (2016).

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