Urban Agriculture: East New York: Asset Mapping

Urban Agriculture: East New York is a documentary video in five chapters that explains how East New York’s urban agriculture movement evolved. Each chapter is dedicated to one piece of a complicated process: a portrait of a veteran local farmer in her garden; a trip to the East New York farmer’s market; a look at asset mapping analysis by the Pratt Center; land transfers from HPD to Green Thumb; and the investment in the neighborhood’s youth made by agricultural organizers and experts.

In this piece, we hear from Perry Winston, an architect formerly with the Pratt Center, who has worked with the community since the early 1990s. He describes how he brought together a diverse coalition of organizations, including the Cornell Cooperative Extension and the East New York LDC, on a grant from the Yamaha Corporation to map assets and engage the community in visioning sessions to identify development priorities.

If you want to learn more about East New York as a community, one first step is to look at some land use and demographic information:

Profile: Brooklyn Community Board 5

OasisNYC.net: Community Maps

The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.