In defense of Urban Agriculture

[Stephanie]

I just sent this to Amy to perhaps help bolster her arguments for urban agriculture. Would anyone like to add to it?

In defense of Urban Agriculture.
          It is my belief that in the current political landscape, it is important for us in the 21st century to begin to move away from terms like community gardens. In the 1960s and 70s, when the back to the land movement was in full swing, the term "community garden" was useful. This is because after urban centers like Philadelphia experienced the effects of depopulation from the city to the suburbs, many of the communities here were left deplete of people. Labeling gardens as "community gardens" helped to give people a public space to reconvene and establish the firm community roots that an outdoor project offers. The term 'community garden', while direct, also isolates these spaces from being taken into consideration as a whole.

The political challenges of the 60s and 70s are a bit different from the current challenges we face in the United States as her urban centers prepare and gear towards establishing lasting, independent economies that the bereft legacy post industry has left us with. Community gardens were and continue to be the first bastions of creating a mindful and lasting infrastructure and citizenry for current and future generations. The reasons they must stay are part of the evolution of urbanity in the 21st century. If we see these spaces threatened, there is no way we will be able to tell how it will affect the ongoing and underlying issue of food access, nutrition, access to resource, jobs, education and food security.

To break down and get to the real nitty gritty starts to inflate to the levels of idealism, but with the practicality of recognizing our bioregion's capacity to provide, and to realize we are bound by the segment of Earth that we live on, Urban Agriculture (which includes community gardens) creates a viable, sustainable solution set for every single issue that we face as communities, cities, states, regions and nations. We are fortunate enough, as citizens of Philadelphia, to be living on a plot of Earth that has some of the most resilient soil in the world, to which we are indebted to the thriving forests that were here before industrialization. Furthermore, we are located on a dynamic piece of geology that includes two different types of landform: Piedmont and Coastal Plain. The Earth can do here what other ecosystems can not.  If this is not a resource, I honestly don't know what is. Furthermore,  within the past ten years, we have seen and experienced Philadelphia growing into her own as a strong and admired "foodie city". The restaurant industry here has done amazing things to promote the practice of locally sourcing, recognizing the integrity of quality ingredients and making lasting relationships with producers, sourcing mainly from Lancaster and Bucks Counties. And we must recognize, this is all coming from the ground.

The thing we often times do not realize is that beneath the urban hardscape, there is plenty of Earth that could be doing what it has always done: grow. We are also fortunate enough in this city to not have to worry too much about removing this hardscape, we have 40,000 vacant spaces, not to mention abandoned buildings and old factories that in conjunction with each other, provide us with all of the resources this city needs to become the greenest city in the United States. The country and 'industry at large' has been finding ways to monetize and benefit from greening endeavors since the 80s. And for at least 10,000 years, humanity as a whole has been finding ways to sustain their populations by working with the planet.

Urban Agriculture seeks to close loops in the ebb and flow of the exchange of goods and resources. If the efforts of gardeners, communities and urban farmers is allowed to progress organically and in tandem with the city's efforts to develop, there is an ample opportunity for us as a city to figure out, in layman's terms what we can produce, and what we need to purchase externally, thereby eliminating the waste of one resource that everyone is worried about: money. If communities are able to provide for themselves both the access to food and the education and the labor for which to make these things happen, how much money would the city itself save?

The philosophies presented here do not seek to separate urban agriculture from city politics or interest, but presents an insanely strong opportunity for collaboration and the democratic process of designing and allowing the city and her citizens to live healthy in the present and prepare diligently and knowledgably for an unforeseen future. We can all act in good conscience and good will with one another, and we can even seek to begin the strategies of monetizing all of these efforts for a branding of the City of Brotherly Love. This discussion at large is not Us v. Them but rather, how can we work together to make sure that as a city, district by district we are consciously and scrupulously observing our own resources in both land power and people power. I implore all councilmembers to consider this for each of their districts and to meet with the communities and neighbors in their districts, the bring forth the potentiality of recognizing the power that each district has on their own conception of commercial and residential space, and to honestly ask themselves: How is urban agriculture NOT part of a commercial endeavor, when viewed under the lens that it is inherently a means of production? The difference between urban agriculture and industry that is already established is that gardens take time, and are an actual investment because it requires much more than bureaucracy and the exchange of money.