-C.S.

What is Seeing Green and how did it come about?
Erik Facteau: Seeing Green is a research project that studies specific urban agricultural sites in the New York City area in order to demonstrate how urban agriculture should be considered as a viable and important component of a city’s green infrastructure. One of the sites we’re currently looking at is Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City; another that we will be looking at is Added Value, a raised bed farm in Red Hook. We’re also looking at the rooftop farm atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Administrative Building on Randall’s Island.

By measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration rates, we are looking to create metrics to calculate how much water urban farms are managing, through both detention (meaning the temporary storage of excess stormwater) and retention (the indefinite storage of excess stormwater). This will tell us how much water urban farms keep from entering the sewer system, therefore reducing combined sewer overflows.

When you start to get these numbers, you can begin to extrapolate over larger areas of land – whether it’s exisiting farms or underutilized land with farming potential – to determine how much water can be managed and what the best practices are for doing so. Right now, we are looking at a couple different sites as a base line and moving forward from there.

Testing the water at the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso: This project began as a graduate research project and as it has evolved to include a series of interesting collaborations; and the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute has helped us pursue these partnerships. In one project, called “Farming Up,” Alec Baxt and Lise Serrell look at nutrient quality of crops growing in urban environment compared to rural environments. “Don’t Flush Me” is a project that puts sensors in sewage outflow points and notifies individuals about how much wastewater they produce during and immediately after those weather events that cause sewage to overflow into the harbor. Another one is called “Farming Concrete,” for which Mara Gittleman has been calculating the area, weight and monetary value of food grown in community gardens in New York City.

Facteau: Another project we’ve been involved in has been to set up a demonstration project on the roof of the Association for Energy Affordability‘s headquarters in the Bronx. We emulated the green roof condition on part of the roof and installed a container underneath so we could measure the amount of water running through the green roof and then compare that to the amount of water rushing off the impervious surface of the regular rooftop.

Caruso: If you take all of these metrics and you collapse them – you look at the nutrient level of both the soil and the crop, you look at the stormwater management potential, the energy rate reduction, the food production potential — the combined analysis is much more powerful. The guiding idea is this: if you can first define the benefits and know what they are and research them, then you can quantify them, and then you can monetize the benefits — and that’s when it really becomes valuable to private property owners and cities. At that point, the research can begin informing policy. And it can begin informing the development of best management practices around the design of farms. For example, if we observe nutrient run-off, we can help design small wetlands around the drain. If we know how much water an urban farm can manage at a particular soil depth, and how much productivity and costs would be affected by increasing its depth, then we can inform building owners about the best investment to reach the desired productivity and the desired environmental outcomes. It’s a necessary step if we want to see urban agriculture grow in New York City.

Soy Plant tested for Farming Up | Photo: Catherine Yrisarri

How did you both get involved in this topic?
Facteau: My background is in microbiology and mycology, working mostly on plant restoration projects and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. I studied environmental science and forestry in college. And I met Tyler while in the graduate program in environmental systems management at the Pratt Institute.

Caruso: Before this, I was working on landscape design and urban agriculture projects and designing and installing grey water systems in San Francisco. When Erik and I started the discussions that eventually led to Seeing Green, we were looking for a thesis project and decided to work together. At the time, there were lots of projects around that dealt with urban agriculture, and most of them were primarily concerned with the economic or social benefits. They might mention the environmental benefits of farming in the city, but not in great depth. The potential of urban agriculture as green infrastructure was a connection that hadn’t yet been made. In 2010, we started noticing how much City agencies were talking about green infrastructure, and realized that if we wanted our cities to support urban agriculture under the banner of green infrastructure, we would have to quantify the environmental benefits.

Brooklyn Grange | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Facteau: The green infrastructure documents from the City that we were looking at all seemed to focus on traditional green roofs. So we started researching how much water these systems could actually handle while simultaneously looking at how rooftop agricultural projects are performing.

Caruso: The grants that Erik is referring to include a green roof tax credit incentive, issued through the Department of Buildings, that specifically prohibits urban farms because of plant selection and because of speculation that irrigation – traditional green roofs don’t require irrigation; agricultural green roofs do – would make rooftop farms less able to retain stormwater than a traditional green roof. That’s a clear example of the city implementing progressive green infrastructure policies that exclude urban agriculture. And in this case, the policy is based on hypotheses that are scientifically untested.

We also find the language of these policies to be more prescriptive than performative. Our methodology for the Seeing Green project looks closely at performativity: how well urban farms and green infrastructure perform over time.

A common criticism of LEED certification system for green buildings is its focus on the design of a building as opposed to looking at how it performs in the long-run, through energy audits or other measurements. With LEED, there is currently no follow up once a building is certified. The next wave in green design – whether it’s buildings, landscapes or infrastructure – is ways to measure performance. That’s what inspired us to develop our thesis project into a larger initiative: to support urban agriculture by defining and quantifying its environmental benefits and seeing how performative it can be.

What kinds of tools or precedents were out there to help you analyze, monetize, to quantify or identify proper metrics?
Caruso: I know everyone says this, but I think social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has really helped empower people with a DIY attitude, has helped citizens’ groups to form, has helped individuals collaborate with a science lab.

Platforms like Kickstarter have created more of a sense of “we’re all in it together,” and that attitude has definitely benefited us.

Facteau: Kickstarter was a huge help in getting this off the ground. We had worked out our methodology as part of our thesis project at Pratt, and when we finished that we asked ourselves, “Where do we go from here?” We knew the equipment that we needed, and we knew that farmers and communities would really value the information we wanted to collect. So we used Kickstarter not only to raise money for equipment but also to raise awareness. Groups from England, from Australia, from the west coast contacted us because of their interest in the research.

Caruso: I just spoke to someone preparing a research report on the potential for urban agriculture in San Francisco. Another group in Minneapolis recently requested our collaboration on a large-scale urban agriculture initiative out there. Around the country, and the world, it’s a really supportive community. There are also some big research initiatives right here in New York….

Like “Five Borough Farm,” which Urban Omnibus featured last year. That effort is also trying to push the idea of metrics.
Caruso: Exactly. I think one of Five Borough Farm’s contributions to the field is its focus on the public health perspective. There’s also the work Kubi Ackerman is doing at Columbia’s Urban Design Lab to evaluate New York’s capacity for urban agriculture. We’ve used some of his preliminary numbers to help us make the case that if we have x amount of stormwater, and if we extrapolate from the knowledge of how many vacant lots or rooftops could be used to scale up urban agriculture, then we can start to talk about how to address the combined sewage overflow problem. If we know that we could manage this many gallons through urban farms, and how much money the city spends per gallon on treating stormwater and wastewater, then we can calculate how much money the city could save if urban agriculture were considered one of many pieces of the green infrastructure puzzle. When you compare that to the cost of retrofitting or constructing new sewage treatment plants, and factor in the amount of energy that goes into treating wastewater, the savings become astronomical. Plus, there are all the benefits that urban agriculture advocates have made well known: vacant land is being re-utilized by communities, increasing property values, supporting economic micro-enterprises, contributing to healthy living, decreasing public health costs. Once you start layering all those factors, the potential of these farms or community gardens is phenomenal. 

Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Speaking of that kind of layering, and the multiple ways to discuss the benefits of farms and community gardens in the city, how did you decide to focus specifically on the intersection between stormwater management and urban agriculture?
Caruso: Our primary goal was to support urban agriculture in whatever way we could. We started by talking to farmers and asking them what would help their efforts. What we heard from people was the need to preserve existing urban farms and expand the agricultural capacity of the city. To do that, we wanted to make a quantitative case for the benefits. Our initial plan was to look at more metrics beyond stormwater.

Facteau: We also wanted to look at carbon capture as a way to show farms as potential carbon sinks and look at temperature differences in order to see urban agriculture’s role in mitigating urban heat island effect. Existing equipment for measuring carbon capture are suited for huge plots of land much more than an acre-size roof. There is definitely potential to look into that more in the future.

Stormwater emerged for us as a focus because of the rooftop tax credit issue we mentioned earlier – that it’s unfounded to exclude urban agriculture from green roof incentives without considering the numbers. We thought this was a good opportunity to initiate a policy change.

But of course we are very interested in some of the other environmental factors. For example, comparing different soil mediums  — what is used on rooftops is not technically soil, because dirt would be too heavy for most building capacities, but an engineered alternative – in terms of drainage, nutrient leaching, nutrient run-off, the remediation quality of the engineered growing medium and of the plants themselves, temperature fluctuations, etc. Those are some of the things we want to look at down the road. I think the more metrics you can get together, the more powerful a statement you can make. The social benefits – from filling in gaps in the foodshed to bringing people together in a shared community project – are well known. The environmental issues, particularly related to roofs, require more research.

Weighing produce at Two Coves, Queens | photo courtesy of Stephanos Koullias via farmingconcrete.org

You have discussed the potential for this research to affect policy and to help building owners understand their options. What are some other lessons to be learned from this research? What else do you hope will be done with your findings?
Caruso: The green roof tax credit is being amended. And the hope is that other plans put out by city agencies or reports by national organizations will factor some of this into their thinking. The American Planning Association, for example, puts out a guide for agriculture; if city planning institutions start to consider urban agriculture as a viable step for cities to strengthen local economies, expand regional foodsheds and isolate and address environmental challenges, that would be great.

The US Green Building Council’s recent announcement that the retrofitting of existing buildings is eligible for an innovation credit is an interesting tactic and a change in the right direction. I think as LEED begins to move more towards performativity and long-term monitoring, we’d like to see services such as Seeing Green becoming inextricable parts of measuring performance.

Some city agencies have legitimate concerns about scaling up rooftop gardens. The Fire Department is worried about the height of plants allowed and how that affects fire safety. The Buildings Department is worried about buildings’ structural load capacity. But hopefully the Parks Department will be a leader in this effort; working with them has been a great partnership for us. Their experimental roof garden on Randall’s Island is intended specifically to inform what kind of green roof systems they should be implementing on their buildings. If other City agencies did the same thing and committed to doing pilot projects on City-owned property, it would have a huge impact.

Recently, some have voiced skepticism about the viability of urban agriculture, dismissing it as a phenomenon only relevant to small portions of the population. What’s your response to those voices?
Caruso: I think when people hear the term urban agriculture, they make the mistake of thinking that its advocates are postulating that a city the size of New York or San Francisco or Chicago could grow all its food within its borders. Most farmers would laugh at that, given the amount of effort it takes to productively and intensively grow on even an acre of land. But I think it’s incredibly important that urban agriculture is part of a regional foodshed, is part of supporting local, decentralized economies and healthy, active and safe communities.

Once again, I think layering the environmental benefits, the social benefits and the economic benefits is really important to counter skepticism about urban agriculture’s viability.

AEA roof demonstration project | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso works as an Environmental Planning consultant and researcher for such companies as Great Ecology and Environments, Roy Co. Architecture, thread collective, Gowanus CDC, and Advancement for Rural Kids, Inc. His area of focus is urban agriculture and ecological sanitation programs, designing closed loop systems using composting toilets, agriculture and greywater and rainwater harvesting systems. He has a Master’s of Science from the Environmental Systems Management Program (ESM) at Pratt. Tyler is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in ESM Masters program. This summer he is co-teaching a design/build urban agriculture course that he helped to develop. He also co-founded and runs New York City’s Youth Food Council.

Erik Facteau is a biologist, with a Master’s of Science in Environmental Systems Management from Pratt Institute. He has a strong interest in the creation of local food systems and has worked at the NYC Greenmarkets for the last 5 years. Previously, Erik worked in a microbiology laboratory as an environmental air quality analyst. As an undergraduate, at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, Erik Facteau studied Biology with a focus on Microbiology and Mycology. While at SUNY ESF, Erik conducted lab and field research on two ongoing plant restoration projects (The American Chestnut-Castanea dentata and The Pinedrop-Pterospora andromedea).

Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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Proposed Applied Science and Research Campus |

THE NEXT TECH CAPITAL: NYC
This past March, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) solicited a request for expressions of interest (RFEI) to global research institutions for ideas to establish a future “applied science and engineering research campus” somewhere in New York City. NYCEDC received 18 proposals from top schools that included designs on four recommended 40-acre sites, including the Navy Hospital Campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, areas on Governors Island, Farm Colony on Staten Island and some privately owned sites. Stanford University unveiled a particularly interesting plan for an institute on Roosevelt Island, which, if constructed, could open in 2015. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote on the topic for The New York Times, reflecting on whether or not an applied science center in New York City even makes sense. Read Glaeser’s piece here and see the full coverage of the Stanford proposal in The Architect’s Newspaper, here.

Proposed Fourth Avenue Zoning Area | Image via Department of City Planning

DCP PROPOSES ‘ENLIVENED’ FOURTH AVE
The New York Times’ City Room blog covered the Department of City Planning’s latest proposal to rezone the commercial strip of Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, between Atlantic Avenue and 24th Street (from Park Slope to Sunset Park), in a effort to ban new developments from constructing parking lots, apartments or any block-long stretches of unfriendly walls on the ground floor. The proposal eliminates streetside parking and residential use, requires “a minimum of 50 percent street wall transparency” on Fourth Avenue, from two feet above the sidewalk up to 12 feet, and calls for all owners to devote at least half the space for retail. After 1993, when it was partially rezoned for residential use, Fourth Avenue began a “visible and dramatic transformation from an auto-oriented, heavy commercial and industrial avenue, to one with a significant residential presence.” The proposal is currently in public review, and will be assessed by affected Community Boards for the next 60 days.

Gotham Greens Greenpoint Greenhouse | Image via Gotham Greens

GOTHAM GREENS: BK GREENHOUSE
Gotham Greens, Brooklyn’s first commercial greenhouse farm facility, will begin their first Greenpoint harvest this month! The hydroponic greenhouse will provide year-round production of vegetables and herbs soon to be sold at a select list of restaurants and retailers in NYC. This hyperlocal commercial facility is another in a string of urban farm businesses including Brooklyn Grange and Eagle Street Farm. Check out Gotham Greens’ site for updates on where you can buy their locally produced veggies in the near future.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “THE BIKES HAVE WON!”
The Wall Street Journal published an optimistic piece on the city’s ongoing “war” over the value of bike lanes, bike culture and the future of biking in New York City. Author Jason Gay adeptly claims that biking is far from the cultural fringe of our city, asking readers: “Email your friends. Ask how many of them own bikes. Then ask how many of them own cars. If more of them say they own cars, look out the window. You live in Connecticut.” Gay believes the so-called bike war is actually an enormous mischaracterization by the media, and draws salient points about the outcome of the momentum built by bike advocates like Transportation Alternatives and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik Khan. “The bikes have won and it’s not a terrible thing.”

Amtrak Acela Train | Image via Amtrak

THE END OF AMTRAK?
Last week, Chairman of the House of Transportation and Infrastructure Committee John Mica proposed legislation to privatize Amtrak, denouncing the system’s forty-year track record as a “costly and wasteful Soviet-style operation.” The proposed Competition for Intercity Passenger Rail in America Act hopes to “end the Amtrak monopoly,” involving a competitive high-speed rail network between New York City, Washington, DC and Boston. First the act would transfer ownership of the railroad to the US Department of Transportation, after which the Transportation Secretary would seek bids from private companies “to design, build, operate and maintain intercity passenger rail service, including high-speed rail” in the Northeast Corridor. Check out Infrastructurist’s ongoing coverage of the issue, and see the Chairman’s press release on the proposed legislation here.

CITIES vs. SUBURBS
This week’s issue of The New Yorker includes “Get Out of Town,” a piece by Nicholas Lemann discussing the age-old city vs. suburbs debate that draws on several books to assess the factors behind a successful city. “In the United States right now, after a long run of ‘urban crisis’ (punctuated by periodic hopeful reports of revitalization), cities are viewed positively again,” he writes. Through Richard Florida’s The Great Reset, Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, John D. Kasarda/Greg Lindsay’s Aerotropolis, Doug Saunders’ Arrival City, James S. Russell’s The Agile City and more, Lemann looks at the prevalence of celebrations of urban dynamics in current society and touches on questions still unanswered as we move into an increasingly urban world. Read an abstract of the article here, or pick up this week’s New Yorker on newsstands to read the complete piece.

Rendering of Interboro’s “Holding Pattern” | Image via PS1

TO DO: INTERBORO’S HOLDING PATTERN
This year’s PS1 summer courtyard installation is now open! “Holding Pattern” by the Brooklyn-based Interboro Partners will be on view through September 26 in Long Island City and will act as the environment for PS1′s Warm Up music/performance/sound/dance series every Saturday from July 2nd to September 3rd. As part of the installation, Interboro conducted a survey asking local businesses and organizations what objects they would like to have or most need that they don’t already have access to. Based on the results, the team constructed a set of simple but elegant objects, including foosball tables, lifeguard chairs and a rock climbing wall, all of which will be donated to the neighborhood organizations after the installation is taken down. The hope is that this process will strengthen the connection between PS1 and its surrounding community, a goal that inspired the physical form of Holding Pattern. The undulating plains of rope, taut from wall to wall, create a dialogue between the courtyard and the surrounding environment by integrating without obstructing. Find out more about “Holding Pattern” and the MoMA Ps1 Young Architects Program at ps1.org.

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Image by Ryan Heshka | via wsj.com

GETTING TRANSPORTATION POLICY RIGHT
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes calls for an overhaul to the way our country spends its transportation dollars. Moving away from the transportation infrastructure improvements that have built enough new highway lane miles since 2000 to circle the world four times, Puentes instead advocates for a necessary alignment between transportation and the new economy with private and public sectors joining forces to cut carbon emissions and increase connectivity. Puentes spells out a series of national goals, concerning export corridors, commuter connectivity, greener infrastructure and better technology, ”and how transportation policy can — no, must — be rethought to achieve them.” Read the full article here.
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PLANYC’S MISSING PIECE
Last month, the City unveiled its latest update of PlaNYC, addressing what various City agencies, community groups, businesses and others can do to further the administration’s sustainability goals, calling for a multi-stakeholder approach to implementation. In an article for Gotham Gazette, Pratt Center fellows Eve Baron and Alyssa Katz see things differently. For them, participatory planning is “The Sustainability Plan’s Missing Piece.” Calling the plan “top-down” and pointing to the remarkable fact that New York is the only major metropolis without a comprehensive plan, Baron and Katz also outline some mechanisms to improve the administration’s track record. Many of the city’s progressive planning voices (Hunter’s Tom Agnotti, the Pratt Center/NYIRN’s Adam Friedman, NYU’s Furman Center, et. al.) have published complimentary pieces raising flags over PlaNYC’s process, in a series of working papers and articles called Sustainability Watch.
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MAKING NYC ACTIVE
Last month, ASLA’s blog The Dirt interviewed Joyce Lee, Director of the Active Design Program at the NYC Department of Design and Construction, about the City’s Active Design Guidelines. The guidelines explore ways to take on the obesity and fitness crisis through interdisciplinary design of both indoor and outdoor environments. Lee goes into the framework behind the plan and points to ways that New Yorkers, despite their use of public transit, suffer from the car-related physical fitness problems that the rest of the country is dealing with. Lee describes the guidelines’ multifaceted approach, from covering sustainable construction and design to changing walking and movement habits. By connecting the design guidelines to the LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) rating system, the guidelines offer credit to developers for including things like bike storage areas and tree-lined streets. The design guidelines are being applied now to cities across the country and, although voluntary, are part of public discourse which will trickle its way into legislation. For more information about the Active Design Guidelines, look back at Samir Shah’s recap of the program’s launch last year or dive into the full Active Design Guidelines Plan at nyc.gov.
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EVENTS AND TO-DOs:

VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY | If Nina Rappaport’s recent Omnibus feature Vertical Urban Factory caught your eye, check out two related upcoming events. On Wednesday, June 1st, the New York Design Center is hosting a panel discussion on the future of manufacturing at Trespa, 62 Greene Street. Then, on June 2nd, a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an American model for sustainable urban manufacturing will meet at the York Street F subway stop at 5:15pm to board a shuttle bus. Suggested contribution is $35, to be paid online at verticalurbanfactory.org (under the “contribute” tab), or bring a check made to New York Foundation for the Arts to the event. The tour will end at Re-Bar in Dumbo for a drink. Rain or shine. RSVP by May 31 to: jamie.chan@gmail.com

Rainbow City at Art Basel Miami Beach | via friendswithyou.com

POP UP PLAZA PARKING LOT: FOOD AND INFLATABLES | The New York Times announced the latest development planned near the High Line’s 30th Street and 10th Avenue entrance. Currently a parking lot, the “Lot at 30th Street” will soon to be transformed into a multi-dimensional art and food mecca planned by Friends of the High Line. The space will feature public art installations, a 350-seat bar called Lot on Tap, managed by chef Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Colicchio & Sons. Collichio will also curate a rotating roster of five high-quality, lower-cost food trucks to compliment the bar. In its 20,000-square-foot eastern section, the Lot will also house a public art exhibition, “Rainbow City,” a collection of huge, brightly colored inflatables from Miami-based artists Friends With You.

BOB the Pavilion | via bobthepavilion.com

BOB the PAVILION | In line with the recent trend in inflatable art, Columbia is unveiling a “floating pavilion” named BOB. This “cloud” will float above a public pavilion and bathroom site, conceived by Columbia’s GSAPP and SoA students. Open June 1 – 25, the pavilion includes composting public restrooms, a projection screen, 12 student-designed seats and a bar. The pneumatic roof is re-pressurized by the toilets’ exhaust. Derived from the idea that “a society that does not provide public restrooms, does not deserve public art,” BOB pushes the link between the necessity for public space and provision of basic amenities. To learn more about BOB, click here.

Stillspotting NYC | via guggenheim.org

STILLSPOTTING NYC: SANITORIUM | The Guggenheim has launched its latest series of off-site, public installations called stillspotting nyc, in response to the idea that “ever-present cacophony of traffic, construction, and commerce; the struggle for mental and physical space; and the anxious need for constant communication in person or via technology are relentless assaults on the senses.” This two-year project will identify “stillspots” across the five boroughs and, every three to five months, will transform these areas with public tours, events or installations by artists, designers, composers and philosophers. The first installation of the series debuts in Brooklyn, from Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Sanatorium, a temporary therapeutic clinic offering visitors 16 distinct “urban therapies,” will be located at the storefront level of 1 Metrotech Center (entrance at 345 Jay Street) in Downtown Brooklyn. Thursdays, June 2 and 9, 2–10pm; Fridays, June 3 and 10, 2–10pm; Saturdays, June 4 and 11, 10am–10pm; and Sundays, June 5 and 12, 10am–10pm; advance tickets only.

ARCHITECTING THE FUTURE CONFERENCE | The Buckminster Fuller Institute is hosting a three-day series of events and lectures around the announcement of the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge finalists. The annual competition asks participants to design workable solutions to significant world challenges. Architecting the Future kicks off with a lecture from John Thackara on June 8th at 6pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; followed by “Urban Solution Sets —Visionary Strategies for the Future of Cities” at the Center for Architecture on Thursday, June 9th, from 2-4pm; and the announcement of winners and presentation of the selected solution at the CUNY Graduate Center on June 10th, from 6-8pm. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to bfi.org.

CALLS FOR ENTRIES | Now through July 4th, BOFFO is inviting architects to submit design proposals for the second annual Building Fashion, which pairs fashion designers with architects for a series of temporary installations in Tribeca that explore the interesection of architecture and fashion. See more details at Architizer. Meanwhile, at the intersection of architecture and urban agriculture, suckerPUNCH is hosting an international ideas competition for a Center for Urban Farming, to be imagined for a site adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Registration deadline is August 15.

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Photo by Kramer O'Neill | Courtesy of the Design Trust for Public Space

The Design Trust for Public Space has released a Call for Submissions for their 2011 Photo Urbanism Fellowship.

“Photography plays an integral role in the examination, discussion, and re-imagining of New York City’s public spaces,” the RFP states. “The Photo Urbanism program supports this role by offering fellowships to New York City-based photographers to produce new bodies of work exploring the city’s complex public realm in conjunction with active Design Trust projects.” This year, the theme of the fellowship is urban agriculture in New York City, to coincide with Five Borough Farm, an ongoing initiative to develop a citywide plan for urban agriculture (which you can learn more about in our recent interview with the project’s Policy Fellow Nevin Cohen). The Design Trust will provide access to urban agriculture practitioners and locations citywide, and in turn the photographs will help inform the ongoing initiative. The fellowship includes a stipend, a public presentation and a publication dedicated to the final work. Submission deadline: April 25, 2011.

For submission guidelines and more information, or to download a PDF of the Call for Submissions, visit the Design Trust’s site.

For more on urban agriculture here on the Omnibus, look back at Urban Agriculture: East New York, a five-part documentary video on the evolution of an urban agriculture movement in one neighborhood; Food and the Shape of Cities, an interview with the founders of the Foodprint Project about the impact of food systems on the physical city; and the aforementioned interview with food policy expert Nevin Cohen about the process of developing a citywide plan for urban agriculture and its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development.

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INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Also next week, an impressive collection of minds from technology, government, architecture and academia will convene for a conference hosted by the Economist entitled “Intelligent Infrastructure: the Architecture of Progress.” We’re not only excited about this event because the title manages to cluster some of UO’s favorite words, but also because we will be on hand to report on the proceedings. Of particular interest to Omnibus readers will be talks by Frank Gehry, Saskia Sassen, Carlo Ratti, Thom Mayne, Petra Todorovich, Jaime Lerner, Liz Diller and Cas Holloway. Check out a full list here. Stay tuned!
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EMERGING PLAN FOR NATIONAL RAILWAY
The Infrastructurist offers some historical perspective on the $53 billion high speed rail plan announced yesterday by Joe Biden. The piece compares the administration’s proposal to FDR’s study for a national expressway system that eventually became the interstate highway system. The new plan would be implemented over the next six years and aims to cross the country with a network of connecting rail corridors operating at different speeds: core express, regional and emerging (we question a passenger’s eagerness to hop aboard the “emerging” train from New York to Boston). Of course, such a large investment has been met with scrutiny in Congress, so we will keep our eye on how the debate between budget concerns and infrastructure priorities plays out.
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TRIUMPH OF CITIES
“Cities thrive because they host quality conversations, not because they have new buildings and convention centers,” writes David Brooks in a column praising Edward Glaeser’s new book The Triumph of Cities. Brooks cites Chicago as an example of a vital city fueled by updated housing stock, incentives to small business, strong leadership and — crucially — face-to-face political communication. In an age of global information flows, Glaeser argues for the increased need for dense city centers where creative citizens can clash and collaborate in person, generating ideas and productivity. But the social implications of density and diversity go beyond its financial yield. As an insightful UO commenter notes, many of the complex dynamics Suketu Mehta discusses in this week’s feature reflect the kinds of complex processes Glaeser analyzes.
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SENSORED CITY
Complain excessively to no one in particular and apparently the powers that be will do something about it. Parking, seemingly everyone’s go-to rant, is now being sensored on Roosevelt Island. The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is creating a smart phone application that alerts drivers to parking spaces near their destination. As an article in Capital magazine points out, cities are already laced with sensors, detecting everything from noise pollution to temperature to red light violations. Sure, it sounds a little Orwellian, but municipal governments are looking for new ways to translate crowdsourced urban data into programs that will increase the efficiency and comfort of navigating the city. First step, finding a parking spot.
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A BROWNFIELD FAILURE
New York’s Brownfield Clean Up program is largely ignoring the lower income and minority neighborhoods it was intended to aid, according to the watchdog group Environmental Advocates of New York (EANY). Instead of allocating tax credit to developers for resuscitating sites in areas with incomes below the poverty line and in neighborhoods with large African American and Latino populations, funds are largely going more economically stable communities, as detailed in EANY’s analysis.
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HESTER STREET OBSERVED
Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) and parent firm Leroy Street Studio get some much deserved attention in a Change Observer piece that explores their partnership as a paradigm of architecture for public good. Hester Street has had its hands in many public space projects around New York, like the Allen street “mall-terations” and People Make Parks. HSC interfaces between community groups and public agencies to realize design/build initiatives in neighborhoods traditionally underserved by architects, making them a perennial Omnibus favorite.
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FIVE BOROUGH FARM UPDATE
If last month’s Omnibus interview with Nevin Cohen of the Five Borough Farm project piqued your interest, read the Design Trust for Public Space’s project update. A post on their blog recaps the conversations from a December workshop on the current state of urban farming and gardening and future plans for urban agriculture. The workshop touched on everything from the goals of the farmers to how they evaluate their success, and generated one-on-one discussions to expand the resources of the Five Borough Farm.
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CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS
Friends of the Pleistocene (authors of “Geologic City”) are looking for brief writings and visual essays “plumbing the geologic depth of ‘now’” for their upcoming book, Making a Geologic Turn. As explained on their blog, this “geologic turn” is evident in the artists, philosophers, and cultural commentators who prove that geology is “not only an area of scientific study – it’s also a condition of daily life.” Intrigued? Visit Friends of the Pleistocene for more information.

Connections: The Gowanus Lowline is design ideas competition for Brooklyn’s Superfunded Gowanus Canal. Sponsored by the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation and juried by a commanding panel of architects and urbanists, Connections invites “speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engages with the Canal and the surrounding watershed.”
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CHINESE NEW YEAR PICTURES
If you missed last weekend’s Chinese New Year festivities, or just want to relive the joy of bringing in the Year of the Rabbit, check out Flavorwire’s New York City’s Chinese New Year Parade in Photos.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Five Borough Farm is a project of the Design Trust for Public Space, in partnership with Added Value, to create the first citywide, comprehensive urban agriculture plan for New York City. Over the course of this year, the Five Borough Farm team will be evaluating the city’s existing urban agriculture activity, establishing a set of metrics by which to quantify the benefits of urban agriculture and creating policy recommendations for relevant city agencies. The project officially kicked off in December with a half-day workshop that tapped the minds and expertise of 90 urban farmers and urban agriculture advocates. Two people have been selected by the Design Trust to lead the effort: Nevin Cohen and Rupal Sanghvi. Sanghvi, who specializes in program evaluation and public health, is the project’s Metrics Fellow and therefore is responsible for quantifying and measuring the impact of urban agriculture on the city and its residents. Nevin Cohen, an urban food policy expert and chair of Environmental Studies at the New School, is the Policy Fellow, which makes him responsible for surveying the existing urban agriculture landscape in New York City and identifying new opportunities and recommendations.

We recently had an opportunity to talk with Nevin Cohen about Five Borough Farm. Read on to hear Cohen explain the challenges of developing a unified city plan for urban agriculture and talk about its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development. -V.S.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

Urban Omnibus: What is the Five Borough Farm Project?
Nevin Cohen: Five Borough Farm is a project by the Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that operates one of the city’s largest farms, to create a citywide plan to support urban agriculture in New York City. The urban agriculture movement is booming here: demand for local food production is growing, and in every corner of the city New Yorkers are developing a broad range of community gardens, rooftop farms, composting projects, and farmers markets. But right now no one has a detailed understanding of all of these activities, or hard data or tools to evaluate the benefits of agriculture as an urban land use. So what you find is city officials are reluctant to adopt the many policy recommendations advanced by advocates, or to address local food production on a citywide scale. Often city agencies and the ever-growing number of practitioners – many of whom operate on city land – work largely in isolation, lacking the systemic resources to coordinate or scale-up their efforts. There are outstanding groups like the NYC Community Gardening Coalition and NGOs like Just Food but there isn’t yet an overall vision for how urban agriculture could really transform New York.

The benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Urban agriculture is a social justice movement.The Design Trust is engaging a diverse cross-section of experts and a network of hundreds of individual practitioners to move this project forward. Based on a detailed analysis of the city’s current urban agricultural landscape, we will develop an evaluation framework to measure, in quantifiable and replicable terms, the ecological, social, and economic value urban agriculture brings to the communities it serves and to the city as a whole. Together with Added Value and many other stakeholders, the Design Trust will help city government evaluate what their role should be, and identify specific opportunities for agencies to support urban agricultural activity. The project will also create an interactive website to allow everyone involved with urban agriculture (including practitioners, policymakers, and supporters) to use the project’s tools and findings and share their own expertise.

What is your role as Policy Fellow and Rupal Sanghvi’s as Metrics Fellow?
Rupal Sanghvi and I are working closely together on all aspects of the project. We’re examining what kinds of urban agriculture New Yorkers are practicing now, including the work of advocacy and other supporting organizations, by conducting in-depth interviews with people in all five boroughs, from relatively large-scale operations to individual community gardens, commercial farms to nonprofits.

My work focuses on the policy landscape of urban agriculture. I’ve been conducting case study research in other large North American cities — Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco — to uncover best practices in urban agriculture policy that might be adopted by New York. Over the course of the project, I will evaluate existing New York City-based and national urban agriculture initiatives (e.g. schoolyard farms, urban farming plots on New York City Housing Authority grounds) and policy recommendations advanced by urban agriculture advocates, and will work with New York City policy makers to identify realistic measures that would support urban agriculture citywide.

Rupal Sanghvi has been focusing on developing reliable metrics that can help practitioners to achieve their goals while also providing data on the diverse impacts of urban agriculture on individuals and communities. When the project is complete we will have a set of indicators that address ecology (e.g., the ability of gardens to capture stormwater that would otherwise overburden sewage treatment plants) and stewardship; public health (improved access to fresh vegetables); education and youth empowerment (changes in behavior and academic achievement); community building (residents’ use of a garden as a public meeting space); and economics (revenue from food sales, job creation in ancillary food businesses).

Together, we will be creating a shared evaluative framework and tools that can help practitioners and guide both legislation and on-the-ground programming.

But this is really a multidisciplinary effort. In addition to the Design Trust, Added Value, Rupal Sanghvi and myself, the team includes Thread Collective, an architecture and design firm, post-doctoral fellow Kristin Reynolds, and an advisory committee of experts in urban agriculture, planning, and policy. And we are working in parallel with researchers at Columbia University who are estimating the productive capacity of New York City’s open space.

Also, students at The New School have helped gather data on urban agriculture activity in New York City. (My students mapped this information as part of an urban agriculture exhibition I co-curated at The New School with my colleague Radhika Subramaniam, called Living Concrete/Carrot City.)

Students mapping urban agriculture sites for Five Borough Farm project at The New School's Living Concrete/Carrot City exhibition | Photo by Nevin Cohen

Tell us about the workshop that kicked off the project. Who participated? What was discussed?
In December, we convened a citywide workshop for growers, advocates, and funders to discuss the project and to learn how practitioners measure their success, what information would help them to carry out their work more successfully, and the types of policy changes that would enable urban agriculture to expand in New York City. We asked: Why do you do what you do? What resources (revenue, volunteers, funding, etc.) do you rely on in order to do your work? How do you track what you do, and what do you wish you could track? What would help you measure the benefits of what you do?

Right now, we’re reviewing hundreds of pages of transcripts from all of the small group sessions we held. But I can tell you one thing we heard over and over that day: practitioners want a better way to communicate with each other, whether it’s sharing information about resources (where can I get these tools this week?) or technical assistance (we’re starting a farm-based learning program in the fall at a local elementary school and want some tips on monitoring the students’ progress). I think that’s where the tools and the website for Five Borough Farm will be really useful to people.

Urban agriculture engages people in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole.It’s clear that the complexity of urban agriculture extends far beyond the prevalent images of rooftop gardens and community plots. Questions of land use, community engagement, city policy, ecological effects and farming expertise, among others, all have to be addressed. What activities fall under the scope of Five Borough Farm? How much of this is about growing and how much is about distribution and access to healthy food? How much is about something else entirely?
That complexity is precisely why we are engaging so many practitioners and advocates in the process. For many urban farmers and gardeners, food access is their main objective: it’s about the fresh kale and tomatoes they grow and the weekly eggs they harvest, for themselves and others in their community. But urban agriculture is about far more than that. Urban agriculture engages people citywide in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole. The scope of Five Borough Farm includes the youth leadership programs, school-based curricula, entrepreneurial rooftop farms, and related infrastructure – from composting projects to farmstands – that make urban agriculture such a powerful, multidimensional movement. The urban agriculture system — and it really needs to be addressed as a system — is a promising model of community development that has the potential to improve many aspects of urban life.

What are your ultimate goals for this project?
I hope that the tools we develop to measure the benefits of urban agriculture will enable gardeners and farmers to more effectively achieve their goals, whether it’s more sustainable food production, youth development, more revenue, or better health for the people in their neighborhood. We expect that reliable indicators of the impact of urban agriculture will also provide evidence to policymakers that urban agriculture is an important part of urban sustainability and should be supported like other municipal infrastructure. A broader goal is to influence City policy so that zoning, local laws, funding decisions, and City programs support the growth of urban food production.

What are the food security issues that urban agriculture can realistically address on a coordinated, large scale?
About three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with few or no grocery stores and supermarkets. These residents spend more of their limited income at bodegas and convenience stores for a narrow selection of poor quality food. While urban farms and community gardens are no substitute for full-service grocers, local food production can supplement the food budgets of low-income New Yorkers and enable people to eat healthier meals. A recent study in Philadelphia found that community gardeners in that city produced $4.9 million worth of summer vegetables alone, not including spring and fall plantings or fruits and berries. For low income New Yorkers, the ability to grow fresh, healthy food in the spring, summer and fall can be a godsend.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

What land availability does New York City have for urban agriculture use? What kind of supply and distribution can be achieved?
Our colleagues at Columbia University are evaluating the productive capacity of open space in New York City to estimate how much food could be grown in the five boroughs. New York City doesn’t have vast unused tracts of land, but we do have quite a bit of open space, including rooftops and some 52,000 acres of yard space. If we gardened just 10% of our yards we could grow enough vegetables to feed 650,000 New Yorkers. One of the key design challenges is how to weave together these small patches of urban farmland to achieve a large impact. BK Farmyards (in Brooklyn) has given this a lot of thought, as have entrepreneurs in many other cities.

But the benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Community gardens make neighborhoods more livable, and also increase property values. Innovative entrepreneurial urban farms create jobs and make underused spaces safe and productive. Non-profit urban agriculture projects teach young people about ecology, food and nutrition, and help build skills and confidence. Productive green spaces keep rainwater out of our sewer system, reduce the urban heat island effect, and recycle organic matter. The impacts are far-reaching — as many practitioners will tell you, urban agriculture is a social justice movement.

What can the City itself do to promote or support an urban agriculture system?
People are already discussing policies about long-term stability for existing urban farmers, the use of vacant and under-used land and rooftops for new farms, municipal composting of organic waste for city gardens, and financial and technical support for urban farm projects that provide substantial social, economic and environmental benefits.

Several months ago, the departments of Parks and Recreation and Housing Preservation and Development issued new rules governing the use of city-owned sites for urban gardens. These were the subject of public hearings and extensive participation by community gardeners, and resulted in the proposed rules being modified. In addition, the City Council’s FoodWorks plan recommends policies to ensure the stability of community gardens, as did Scott Stringer’s FoodNYC. The specific local laws to put the ideas in FoodWorks into effect will be developed and introduced in the coming year or so.

What are the barriers? What can the City do to overcome them?
Policymakers need evidence of urban agriculture’s impacts to move public policy forward — especially in this economy. That’s why the metrics we are developing will be so important. It will help people see the tremendous value of each community garden or small urban farm in more than anecdotal ways. At the same time, we also need a broad understanding of urban agriculture in New York City and how it can best fit into the City’s food system. With this big picture view, people will understand the cumulative impact of hundreds — and potentially thousands — of those small community gardens and farms.

In terms of practical barriers, limited access to land, clean soil, skilled gardeners and farmers, technical expertise and efficient distribution channels all pose challenges. Our research is identifying which are most important and to what extent these limitations restrict urban agriculture’s potential. Like their rural counterparts, urban farmers are able to overcome many obstacles, and the wide range of urban gardens and farms is evidence of this, but the right public policies and targeted support could really scale up the movement.

Five Borough Farm Workshop, December 2010 | Photo by Dan Honey

How does a scaled-up, systematized urban agriculture network accommodate different farming models?
The key is to recognize that urban agriculture is a true polyculture. It ranges from window boxes and planters to multi-acre farms that grow many different crops. The efforts can be led by individuals, non-profits, or public and private institutions, like schools or hospitals. Cities can accommodate the entire spectrum of food production by removing unnecessary barriers and supporting the infrastructure to make diversified food production feasible. This might mean expanding programs to enable the produce from school gardens to be incorporated into school meals, or providing funding for commercial kitchen incubators so that food producers can add value to the food they grow.

The model that is most problematic is the vertical farm. It is highly capital intensive, and material- and energy-intensive as well. Fanciful schemes of high rises filled with tomato plants and pigs just doesn’t make sense from an economic, environmental or social perspective.

Does a city-wide plan call for a market-based system of farming? A more cooperative one? One that is reliant on volunteer networks? All of the above?
My sense is that the most vibrant urban agriculture system will be a civic agriculture system, to use a phrase coined by the late rural sociologist Tom Lyson. It will involve pure for-profit farms that are embedded in their communities, neighborhood-based community gardens run by volunteers, and hybrids — for-profit farms that rely at critical moments on “Crop Mobs” for extra labor, and non-profits that teach young people how to make a buck growing and selling fresh produce.

What’s next for Five Borough Farm?
Within the next few weeks, the Design Trust will release a workshop summary. By March, we’ll have completed about twenty-five in-depth interviews. Our whole team will be working on synthesizing and sharing this information with people in the urban agriculture community. We’re talking to photographers and graphic designers about how to visualize our findings, and we’ll have more events like the December workshop. Ultimately, we’ll end up with a Five Borough Farm publication and a website that we hope people will start using for their projects all over the city.
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Nevin Cohen is Chair of Environmental Studies at The New School, where he teaches courses in urban planning and food systems.  Dr. Cohen’s current research focuses on urban food policy, particularly innovative planning strategies to support food production in the urban and peri-urban landscape, public policies to engage citizens in sustainable food production, urban planning and food access, and civic agriculture in cities and suburbs. He has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Rutgers University, a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell.

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, Greenpoint, Brooklyn | Copyright Adam Gol

What do you want from your city’s soil? There are many homegrown and local agriculture ideas in Living Concrete/Carrot City, an exhibition currently on view at Parsons The New School for Design, and they’re worth a look. The projects range from farm visits for families to bodega research, education and empowerment. There are mapping projects that do the basic chore of charting urban gardens and farms, and there are maps that gather information about harvests and how they translate into economic terms. There are rainwater harvesting kits and partnerships on water. There are sustainable food projects for kids in the Bronx and for adults on the Lower East Side (PDF). There are biological cocktails made out of frogs and gelatin, and there are sculptures of apples visualizing their carbon footprint. There is the ubiquitous traveling planter bag. And there are bees: beehives, bee sound projects, and bee videos.

The Living Concrete/Carrot City project is described as “a cross-institutional dialogue” between the newly produced Living Concrete, co-curated by Nevin Cohen and Radhika Subramaniam and featuring work by faculty and students at Parsons, Eugene Lang College and other parts of the New School, and Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, an initiative of the Department of Architectural Sciences at Ryerson University in Toronto that came to fruition under the green thumbs of Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar and Joe Nasr. Wall panels feature some of the projects shown at Ryerson, international in scope and conceived by students and design professionals alike, which are also listed in detail on the Carrot City website. The projects are organized by category: City, Community & Knowledge, Housing, Rooftops, and Products. We should hope that NYC designers will be inspired by projects from Berlin or other cities where urban agriculture used to be a necessity and has only become a privilege in its own right quite recently.

One of the things that is hard to reconcile in the realm of urban agriculture is the seeming lack of cohesiveness between certain groups ostensibly seeking similar outcomes. The accretion of projects in Living Concrete/Carrot City serves first and foremost to put everyone on the same page. In that vein, what becomes interesting is the partnership between Parsons and Ryerson. Nevin Cohen and Radhika Subramaniam knew an important piece of urban agriculture documentation when they saw it and decided to follow suit with their own version of the show, adding more projects, people, and media attention to the movement.

A pamphlet has been published to accompany the exhibition, which emphasizes the growing role of the university in the development of urban agricultural ideas and initiatives; Scott Stringer’s participation in the Food and Climate Summit hosted by NYU and Just Food last December is exemplary of this. The idea of urban farming as an educational utility is inescapable. The exhibition can be lauded for its efforts to create a visible, public platform for pedagogy, something that targeted local organizations sometimes miss. And the show is indeed down-to-earth, in the sense that it is not looking for the perfect vertical farm or the tomato of the future. Rather, they are testing how the existing urban landscape can be used to challenge the agro-industrial complex.

New York Tribune, April 29, 1917

Urban agriculture is not a new phenomenon. My friend Daniel who is trying to put a mobile vegetable garden in front of City Hall sends me articles from his research into the history of urban agriculture in the US. The latest was about an architects corps managed by our very own Architectural League in 1917 to till and cultivate 40 acres of urban farmland. Architects were encouraged to donate half of their vacation time over 3 to 4 months during the growing season to cultivating fields, or to pay the equivalent of $21 towards the effort. Over 100 responded for work, with the women in the offices handling the administrative work and the Mayor’s committee distributing the harvest.

Symbolically these things say a lot, but they are fraught with sexism, economic inequality, pro bono labor and problems of access. And what is sustained as a result of these efforts — before, during and after? Things like efficiency, value, health (one of the projects uses PVC planters – not on my plate, please), and inclusion need to be further investigated, which is why the Design Trust’s Five Borough Farm project exhibited is so important. Five Borough’s analysis of existing urban farming initiatives and the development of metrics for grading success will be key in assessing the long term viability of urban agriculture as a source of food, in addition to its pedagogical and community-building aspects.

But where do we turn journalism into activism, a documentation of projects into policy? The DIY or DIT (do-it-together) component is lacking in the project selection. Many require a city agency, a student (if not professional) design team, in part due to permits required and acquisition of land. But I wonder where Atom Cianfarani is, with her green-it-yourself roofing kit, and all the guerrilla gardeners out there — does their harvest count in the Farming Concrete total? I am of the opinion that urban agriculture is not a fad and will continue to inform community design and city-based health campaigns, but some people think the urban agriculture design trend will be exhausted, expire and we will move on.

But even if the urban agriculture design movement falls flat, the DIY/DIT urban agriculture movement will continue to grow. There is an enormous sense of community that goes with it. Picking up a CSA share once a week and exchanging recipes with people who are eating the same things is fun. Dropping off compost at the community garden is rewarding. Fresh herbs from the backyard are tasty and free.

In the meantime, while the urban agriculture design movement is booming, Living Concrete/Carrot City is presenting a tremendous opportunity to see some great designers and speakers who know a lot about these things, from New York City and beyond, every Wednesday night at the Parsons gallery on 13th Street. You can download the public program schedule here to join in the conversation. There is also a question-answer board in the gallery and a place to post fliers about your own upcoming food and urban agriculture events – don’t miss it.

LIVING CONCRETE/CARROT CITY
October 1–December 15, 2010
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
New York, NY

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Sarah Snider is the Executive Assistant at the Architectural League of New York. She has lived in London, Paris, and the Bay Area, and she works with Co-op NYC, a network for NYC based housing cooperatives.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.