Anna Shepard asks whether city dwellers can become more self-sufficient in food production
” We may dream of quitting the rat race and moving to the countryside, but the reality is that we are overwhelmingly an urban population. In the UK more than 80 per cent of us live in urban areas. Globally, it’s the same story, with the UN estimating that, by the end of this year, more than half the world’s population will be living in towns and cities.
The question of how we will feed these growing cities is an urgent one. According to Sustain, the food and farming alliance, the greatest challenge of modern agriculture is how to produce affordable food for everyone. “Growing Food for London”, a one-day conference that takes place on Monday at City Hall, focuses on urban food production in the capital. By drawing on efforts to develop agriculture within cities - from roof gardens in New York to community gardens in Havana - it is hoping to change the way that urban land is perceived.
“There’s a lot of space in our towns and cities that is just green desert. It’s there to look at,” says Ben Reynolds, one of the author’s of Sustain’s recent report, Edible Cities. “There are multiple benefits from making our cities more self-sufficient. The obvious one is security. The nearer food is, the easier it is to get at in times of crisis.”
We can also combat climate change by reducing how far food has to travel to get to consumers. When the WWF calculated an average personal carbon footprint in Britain, it found that food production and its transport accounted for our greatest use of carbon - 23 per cent of each person’s total, ahead of personal transport and home energy.
There are already signs that we would like to become more self-sufficient. Half a million families - 2 per cent of households in the UK - keep hens, waiting lists for allotments have never been longer and, for the first time since the Second World War, vegetable seeds are outselling flower seeds.
But just how self-sufficient can our towns and cities ever be? Jeanette Longfield, a co-ordinator at Sustain, says: “They will never rival rural areas in terms of production - there never will be wheat fields and large-scale livestock production - but we could produce a lot more fruit and vegetables.”
At present 80 per cent of London’s food comes from abroad. The rest arrives from other parts of the UK with only a fraction being produced within the city. Jenny Jones, a Green Party London Assembly member, says that the capital could produce as much as 25 per cent of its food, an ambitious target until you hear that there is 24 times the size of Richmond Park in flat roofs, ready to be turned green.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve done it before. At the height of the Dig for Victory campaign in 1943, 1,400,000 allotments around the UK produced 1.3million tonnes of food, half the nation’s fruit and vegetables needs.
Today, as the examples below show, we’re doing it again. What stands out about each project is how it has captured people’s imagination, demonstrating that urban communities can respond to a food crisis and eke out productivity from unlikely places.
On the roof
On his lunch hour, Dave Richards leaves his desk, walks up to the roof of his office and grazes in a 200sqm garden. Once he’s picked a few garlic chives or salad leaves to add to his sandwich, he finds a quiet spot and settles down.
Perched above the centre of Reading, he describes the urban oasis as “a beautiful space that you can eat”. It contains 180 varieties of plants, most of which are edible. “We eat the garden from the first nettles and wild garlic of early spring to the medlars, a spicy fruit, in October,” he says. It provides food for the café in the building below, as well as for staff and volunteers. “My daughters (aged 7 and 10) seem to eat most of it,” he says. “They come and strip it bare.”
It all started six years ago with a leaky roof. It was going to have to be redone, so Richards and other staff working for RISC (Reading International Solidarity Centre), the development education charity, decided they might as well ask for funding and do something different.
To prevent tree roots doing structural damage, a waterproofing and root-proofing layer was laid on top of the flat roof. Then a drainage layer, followed by thick fleece and, finally, a foot of soil. With a £50,000 grant from the Big Lottery Fund, they also put up a wind turbine and solar panels to provide electricity to pump the water collected from surrounding roofs and held in a vast 2,000-litre tank.
The emphasis was not so much on providing food for the town, but on showing how you can produce diverse crops in a low-maintenance way in the middle of a city. It is based on the forest garden concept, a productive and self-maintaining approach to gardening, founded by Robert Hart in the late Sixties. Fruit trees offer shade to crops that require it; other plants, such as strawberries, are planted strategically to suppress weeds, and the whole garden takes only a few hours a week to maintain.
Richards points out that rooftop gardens are also an essential part of “sustainable urban drainage” as they act as a sponge for rainwater.
He believes that all new-build offices and public buildings should have a roof garden. “The best thing is that it’s an extra room, an edible boardroom,” he says. “In a crowded environment it provides more space, so instead of everyone bundling into parks on a sunny day, they can go up and find a peaceful bit of green.” Read the full article on TIMES ONLINE
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