While urban parks and green spaces often serve aesthetic purposes, urban agriculture is an example of a way these spaces can be productive as well as attractive. Colorful food crops, fruit trees and pollinator attracting flowers can be incorporated into existing green space to provide lovely, educational and delicious additions to traditional park spaces. At Romanowski Park in Detroit an urban farm and education center now exists alongside soccer fields. In cities across the country, community gardens and commercial farms have also sprung up on previously vacant lots, creating community spaces and healthy food on abandoned and neglected property.
Fresh, nutritious food grown right in a community is a powerful means for bringing people together. These farms not only grow food for people to gather and enjoy at the table, they also provide green spaces for people to congregate and learn hands on where their food comes from. Organizations across the country are using urban agriculture as a way to bring their communities together, to provide jobs for youth, and to teach people about sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. In Massachusetts, The Food Project provides internships on their urban farms to teach urban and suburban youth not only about farming, but also about responsibility and teamwork. In Oakland, City Slicker Farms builds backyard gardens for low-income families and provides them with supplies and garden mentors, and the chance to sell their produce at a weekly farm-stand. In Milwaukee, Growing Power runs a two-acre educational farm, complete with chickens, goats, greenhouses and a composting system, and leads workshops for city dwellers. An offshoot of Growing Power has begun in Chicago. A testament to the respect that urban agriculture is getting these days is that Will Allen, Growing Power’s founder and chief executive officer, was just awarded a Macarthur “Genuis” Grant. These are good times to be a gardener.
Of course urban agriculture isn’t without its challenges. Many urban soils lack nutrients, or worse, are contaminated with heavy metals. Luckily, there are affordable soil testing services that can alert city farmers to lead levels in their soils, and ways to deal with contaminated soil. Folks can plant in raised beds filled with uncontaminated soil, or add organic matter to contaminated land to dilute heavy metals. Urban composting is a winning idea on many fronts; it’s an opportunity to recycle food waste locally and to create nutrient rich additions to poor or contaminated urban soils.
