Local Urban Agriculture

I've been reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, as well as continuing my work with a great and inspiring group called Verde, and it has put ephemeral site use and urban agriculture on the brain in some interesting new forms. Verde is a non-profit dedicated to [improving] "...the economic health of disadvantaged communities by creating environmental job training, employment, and entrepreneurial opportunities, fostering the connection between economic vitality and environmental protection and restoration."

The third leg of sustainability, social equity, often is neglected, and pairing job training with sustainable stormwater just makes so much sense that you gotta support the idea. I got hooked up with Verde and the executive director Alan Hipolito after working on a number of affordable housing projects through Hacienda CDC, mostly in Northeast Portland. The following is an example of some of the sustainable stormwater projects that have been completed recently, creating demonstration rain gardens at local sites:


::image via Verde

The long and short of it is that Verde now has the rights to establish a short-term production nursery operation on a former landfill property located in NE Portland. One of many surplus properties owned by the City of Portland, the Cully Park site as it is known, is slated for use as a future neighborhood park and ballfields, and a master planning process has begun to shape this future use. The goal for the site now is to temporarily use the site for production of stormwater plant materials and as a site for job-skills training. Recently, the idea has expanded to include potential strategies for urban gardening to use these sites.

Surveys of vacant and blighted land, which contributes little the community, reveals many acres of potential land that can be co-opted for alternative uses. While the idea of using vacant and underutilized land for agriculture is not new... but perhaps requires some additional revisitation pf other examples. Last December in various sources, including BLDGBLOG, was a story regarding Farmadelphia, which envisions wide areas of vacant lands in Philadelphia transformed to areas of urban agriculture:

:: images via BLDGBLOG

There has long been a shortage of community gardening spaces in Portland, and i'm guessing, wherever we live in urban areas where yards are either too shady or too small to provide a good growing environment. We are slow to add community gardens, both due to land costs, infrastructure, and just plain will - and thus we are constantly underserved with access to garden space. Rather than add any significant amounts of new gardens, there was the controversial removal of the Reed Community Garden (in which I had a plot for a year, and was mesmerized by gardens and gardeners on a daily basis there).

Another somewhat related option, Orion magazine featured an article 'Food Less Traveled', which some innovative Portland gardeners who run Your Backyard Farmer, a service that 'create sustainable organic farms' in people's backyards, sharing a CSA portion with the homeowner. With a message of 'We do the Work, you enjoy the healthy harvest', YBF is aimed at those either too busy or with excess urban land that would like to enjoy fresh vegetables without getting their hands dirty.

The Carbon Question

The Carbon Question is on everyone's mind these days, due in no small part to Al Gore an the shockingly good An Inconvenient Truth and a steadily growing acknowledgement of the problems associated with global warming and it's causes. This has been addressed as well in the architectural press, and the role that building occupies in the overall. Architects and advocates have responded with more green building in general, as well as more robust guidelines such as Architecture 2030 which continue to address the root cause (primarily energy use and materials production) and don't significantly address landscape issues.


:: logo via Architecture 2030

Recently Slate featured a column titled The Greenest Tree (Jan 8. 2008), which asks the question, 'Which tree species will do the most sequestering carbon?' Or simply, which species aid us in doing our part to limit global warming in the landscape. While there are some simple recommendations, such as planting trees that are large, and deciduous, and focusing on those fast growing species (because they sequester more carbon more quickly due to size). The winner, due to a 2002 survey by NY Oasis, is the Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and the European Beech (Fagus sylvatica). The study delved into ecosystem valuation as well, by assessing a variety of factors such as size and type to provide a weighted compensatory value based on the tree.


::Liriodendron image via Floridata

Inevitably, the ability for plants to sequester carbon is fleeting, as they will release this carbon into the atmosphere when they die and begin to break down: From the same article in Slate:

"Yet even the hardiest native trees are doomed to die someday, and in doing so, spew their carbon back into the atmosphere. (That's particularly bad news when the trees are killed as part of a timber company's clear-cutting efforts, since no young trees are left behind to help mitigate the losses.) If you're around to witness your trees' twilight years, consider keeping the carbon in place by turning them into furniture or building lumber, rather than letting them go gently into that good night."


::sustainable furnishings via The Joinery

At the very least, planting MORE of any type of trees have multiple benefits to the public, of which carbon sequestration is just one. A more focussed study from a landscape perspective, would be to provide additional date on how much more carbon sequestration is actually provided via the soil biomass. While planting trees and building, this reinforces the need for making soil conservation and erosion control measures to maintain soils during construction and farming operations paramount.

LU Top 8: Recap 2007

While this blog has not been around long enough to warrant a year-end (or month-end) recap, I did spend some time sifting through the list of blogs and assorted sites that I look at regularly, and found some great stuff. While there are good sites that touch on landscape issues, like BLDGBLOG, Pruned and others... I want to position the content on this site to encompass the transitional space between building and landscape, while being able to occupy the margins of both areas of inquiry. See the constantly expanding sidebar to get a feel for the types of source material that I am drawing from.

This is a quick recap of the best of 2007 I encountered...

1. Pure Geography - from the October '07 blog Pruned, the residential development of Punta Pite, near Santiago, Chile, which was showcased in the August 2007 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine - and the cliffside trail system leading to the was skillfully designed by the Chilean firm Teresa Moller & Associados.


:: image via Pruned

2. Under construction photos of the California Academy of Sciences Building in San Francisco by Renzo Piano and the wonderfully organic and undulating green roof. I have yet to find out whom is responsibe for the green roof, but will do so asap.

:: image via Archidose

3. Tattoo House by Andrew Maynard Architects. As profiled in Architecture.MNP this architectural abstraction of vegetation teeters on the edge of kitsch without falling - making it a daring and quite simply stunning use of natural form to articulate a facade.


:: image via Architecture.MNP

4. The virtual mind-trick played by City-Shrinker using simple camera manipulation of the depth of field and color, creating a diorama-like effect that turns real spaces into virtual models.


:: image via Architecture.MNP

5. Agricultural rehabilitation via BLDGBLOG, featuring the work by Front Studio's creation of Farmadelphia. Using agricultural landscapes as ways to reclaim unused and blighted urban spaces.


:: image via BLDGBLOG

6. West 8's competition-winning entry for Governor's Island in New York City. See all of the entries (including Field Operations, Hargreaves, WRT, MDP - and some architects you may have heard of at the site: The Park at the Center of the World.


:: image via Treehugger

7. The consistently good work of Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture in the Bay Area. A overview of some of her work was posted on Atelier A+D, as well as showing up in many design mags throughout the year. Ahhh.


:: Pacific Heights Residence image via http://www.acochran.com/

8. Lastly, my newfound love of blogs and blogging (refer to sidebar for my current and growing list of readings) - I was a skeptic for years, passing blogging off as self-indulgent, mindless, crap. But no more... and it allows me to satisfy my sometimes insatiable craving for input, and gives me something productive (I guess) to do with it! Overall, I'm a little disappointed in the lack of good landscape blogs (Pruned has been slow of late) - and thus the desire to ramp up my content... Anyone knows of sites i'm missing, let me know.