Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn
The compact city model is currently favoured as that most likely to support sustainable development. Its major benefit in relation to environmental sustainability is the reduction in travelling distances and hence transport, due to compaction and mixed-use development. We see Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) complementing compaction, by including the major contribution urban food production can make towards environmental sustain – abilty. Furthermore, we think that this combination will create a new kind of city, one with a richness of associations and experiences, to date found either in the city or the countryside. The CPUL model challenges the notion that all brownfield sites should be built upon, but does not challenge the principle that all land should be used to maximise its sustainable return.
The contemporary first world city is a facsimile for what and where it is not. Supermarkets, especially, manipulate people’s perception of the availability and cost of food: everyday, all year round, there are aubergines and Parma ham, bamboo sprouts and pineapples, oysters, oranges, kebabs and samosas, chocolate powder and kiwi. . . each a reproduction of somewhere else. Such separation from geographical reality is fantastic – as a treat, but instead it has come to characterise and epitomise the city. This unsustainable model is based upon the outdated assumption that anything can be relocated from one place to another at any time.
The CPUL vision of the city is one which celebrates the material and the real, one which ‘makes visible’. Within the contemporary European city many people are no longer conscious of the relationship between life and the natural processes required for its support. A CPUL city engages fully with elements such as a territory’s seasonality, climate, weather, topography and vegetation. It is based on the ecological principles of life and the space required to accommodate all its actions, reactions and interactions. City dwellers have become passive observers of seasons (which they still often miss) or weather (which they often fear). The collective loss of environmental memory makes the natural context and the sequence of its processes less and less comprehensible. People are losing touch with the reality beyond their city boundary.
CPULs do not require the complete rebuilding or demolition of cities, rather they suggest reconfiguring the city so it can operate within the envelope of its own environmental capacity and as far as possible make its own ecological footprint equitable.
In this context, the vision of the city is one in which the resources required to support occupation become visible, imprinted on the urban tissue. A sustainable urban ecology becomes a key indicator for the successful city. It will be a city which, although complex, is comprehensible and flowing.
CPULs will be what other elements of urban infrastructure are now: they will be extensive and complex, demanding planning, management and maintenance. Like other elements of infrastructure, for example the electricity supply network, they will best be introduced incrementally.
At the same time, CPULs will be different to familiar urban infrastructures which mainly deal with distribution and circulation, like roads, railways, networks for energy supply, water and waste disposal. Though CPULs will also provide a network for circulation, there will be productive elements embedded within them, which add directly to our positive experience of the city. They will be environmentally and socio-culturally beneficial and economically viable. The range of experiences and lifestyles that a city can offer will be increased. CPULs will be networks that expand to accommodate occupation and production. This is unique.
CPULs will only be implemented if their vision is attractive and seen to be viable. These cases can
be made, although the integration of CPULs will not be without difficulties and these should not be underestimated.
The English new town Milton Keynes provides one example of how CPULs might be funded, and the British Dig for Victory campaign during the Second World War shows that up to 50 per cent of fruit and vegetable requirements could be supplied by urban agriculture, although our own design research suggests that 25 per cent is a more realistic target for new development. Most of the remaining requirements could be provided by peri-urban agriculture. Urban agriculture will be a fundamental feature of CPULs, essential if the latter’s environmental benefits are to be fully achieved.
The international examples of urban agriculture discussed in this book, although each dealing with a very particular set of conditions, identify a range of benefits from urban agriculture within CPULs, such as reductions in food miles, organic food production, creation of wildlife habitats, transport networks, educational resources, and an economic efficiency by concentrating intensive infrastructures in designated areas zoned for buildings.
Balancing benefits with a number of factors related to land and geography, such as size of the city, urban density, land ownership, soil type, climate or infrastructure, will determine where urban agriculture is and is not appropriate. This balancing act is a common feature affecting the development of any large-scale infrastructural project.
If Cuba can manage to implement a procedure as radical as its urban agriculture programme and sustain it for twelve years in conditions of economic stress, should it not be possible for any country to instigate programmes as comprehensive as those found in Cuba?
The Cuban programme for urban agriculture demonstrates how it can extend to the promotion of healthy eating, sustainable urban development or environmental education. Organic certification has not been introduced in Cuba, but the urban agriculture practised in Cuba is, by any practical measure, organic. Cuba demonstrates the viability of organic agriculture allied with intensive maintenance by farmers.
While Cuba provides a working model for the extensive integration of urban agriculture, it does not necessarily provide the ideal model for the distribution, location and connections between plots accommodating urban agriculture. The conditions of stress under which Cuba introduced urban agriculture mean that sites were chosen for entirely pragmatic reasons. The patchiness of urban agriculture found in Cuban cities can be taken as typical of the first stages of a programme to integrate urban agriculture. These isolated fields are comparable to exiting urban parks and gardens, which can be thought of as spaces with specific characteristics, with the potential of being bound into a CPUL. As yet there are no CPULs in Cuba. Introducing CPULs would provide a coherence and structure to otherwise isolated urban agriculture sites and create a framework for articulating the spatial and urban qualities inherent in urban agriculture, and fully utilising their benefits as routes for circulation, occupation and Ecological Intensification. Beyond the environmental benefits associated with urban food growing, urban agriculture can act as a catalyst for revealing and intensifying the occupation of under-utilised urban areas. In so doing, cities would gain benefits arising from the provision of adjacent open space, communication routes ideally suited to cycling and walking, moderation of the heat island effect and a landscape which allows people to comprehend their relationship with the natural environment.
A number of urban characteristics noted below can be attributed to urban agriculture, and these are all significant within CPULs.
The informal, self-regulated use of sites for personal food growing, such as huertos in Cuba or allotments in the UK, raise issues in relation to how these interface with planned or formal networks. The opportunities for engagement across edges or boundaries may differ from those suggested by larger commercially viable urban agriculture sites. Issues of privacy and seclusion may be more significant for small-scale private growing when distinct communities may become established. The relationship between informal use and formal networks is important for CPULs.
Urban agriculture fields often act as bridging devices between areas of different occupation. They do this by making a visible and physical bridge between two places. By doing so they often define disregarded or hidden places as space within the city.
The occupation of edges alongside urban agriculture fields is evident, for example, as a place to dry laundry, accommodate shops or provide climatic comfort zones. Taking these examples seriously, and imagining the transformations and opportunities inherent in them, provides inspiration for architectural interventions, which provide places for public or semi-public exchanges. The occupation of edges encourages a connection with a pastoral environment.
Urban agriculture gives measure to a landscape. The way in which ground for planting is often terraced, faceted and shaped to accommodate undulating ground, articulates and makes visible the underlying topography. The actual dimension of crops, and of beds, provides another gauge for measuring landscape and allowing an individual to locate and position themselves within a particular territory. This ability to read a landscape and locate oneself becomes critical as contemporary globalisation makes environments more uniform.
Urban agriculture sites exist as urban climate and seasonal registers, and due to their characteristic marking of the ground read as urban ornament.
The open spaces of a city incorporating CPULs will alter the physical landscape and the landscape of occupants and occupation. On the ground, cultivators will sculpt a new urban infrastructure, ever changing, but ever familiar, as crops come and go. Adjacent to this, a landscape of circulation and movement will appear, as the population traverses tracts of an agrarian landscape, and others play on ground adjacent to fields. Toilers and thinkers will be placed in a rediscovered adjacency, one which is not about destroying the city or conquering nature, but one that enriches both by acknowledging their interdependence.
More experience for less consumption!
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Plate 2 |
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LeisurESCAPE allows a multitude of occupation, both professional and leisure for all age groups, social levels, genders…
It caters especially for population groups
which are often
excluded from conventional leisure activities.
LeisurESCAPE is commercially and socially viable reinforcing the ecology and sustainability of the proposal.
The continuous landscape which accommodates
LeisurESCAPE is laid out mainly
over existing roads based on the future vision of
reduced city car traffic.
Instead of the conventional usage of roads, LeisurESCAPE turns roads into a unique productive landscape growing fruit and vegetables for the city dwellers own consumption.
Agriculture fields in LeisurESCAPE are run both commercially and privately, thereby determining economic and social value.
LeisurESCAPE can provide new employment opportunities in its large areas of commercial agriculture or adjacent leisure facilities.
Half of Southwark’s population are pensioners. The number of lone parents is above the national average and rising.
LeisurESCAPE is adaptable and slow and
creates opportunities for the growing number of pensioners, lone parents with toddlers, the disabled or unemployed.
Successful precedents are, for example:
Cuba (commercial – Organoponicpos)
Austria (leisure – Selbsternte) or Germany (leisure – Schrebergarten).
Nevertheless, none of those combines explicitly commercial and leisure activities and not in a continuous landscape.
legend
continuous landscape
existing parks
underused open space
semi-buried existing large car parks, covered with productive landscapes
existing playgrounds and playing fields
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small specific leisure buildings
Plate 8
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Continuous landscape and productive landscape,
Orb Street Southwark, before and after.
The installation of LeisurESCAPE:
horizontal, vertical and espaliered vegetation, playing fields and a covered car park
CPUL infrastructure,
Munton Road, Southwark, before and after.
The installation of LeisureEscape:
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footpaths, cycle networks, market gardens infrastructural intensification
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Manor Estate, Sheffield:
View from a dwelling into walled garden with windows opening onto a productive landscape beyond.
Victoria Park, London:
Transitions between interior, exterior, private and public, in an elevated apartment set between a rooftop garden and a productive landscape on the ground.
Urban Nature Towers:
A proposal for a high density CPUL accommodating 450 persons per hectare. Vertical landscaping, created by attaching a framework to the building’s fagade, supports trained soft fruit plants and fruit trees. The vertical landscape supplements horizontal urban agriculture fields.
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1 Similar experiences were carried out during the 1980s allowing the selling of agricultural produces. Several factors contributed to the termination of these experiments. In this sense the free market is rather a saga of previous attempts.
package of emergency measures was established within a process known as Perfodo Especial en Tiempo de Paz (Special Period). To confront the problems, which included reduced food supplies and agricultural inputs, the government instigated a programme of reforms which included the redirection of its trade towards the world market and the introduction of some market style reforms in the domestic economy. Additionally, the process included the adoption of innovative approaches directed towards the downsizing of the central government and many industries; decentralisation and reorganisation strategies; import substitution and alternative approaches in many areas among other measures.
As part of these reforms a national alternative agricultural model (NAAM) has been developed since 1990. One important aspect of this model is the replacement of high levels of imported agricultural inputs with alternative, indigenously developed methods for pest and disease controls, soil fertility and other innovative issues. Other aspects have included the restructuring of the land property pattern of the large state-owned farms into smaller units with co-operative property, and the permitting of a free market1 for foodstuffs. The crisis had generated the immediate individual response of many citizens and groups and in parallel encouragement was given to individuals and/or co-operatives in urban and peri-urban areas to become vegetable producers. Several forms of exploitation of the open spaces within the urban frame but also of available areas within productive and services, educational, recreational, and healthcare facilities were established. In the period 1990-1994 it was estimated that more than 25 000 people were linked to about 1800 hectares of so-called popular orchards. These were set up spontaneously by individuals on open land in response to the food crisis. The present experience of urban food production has evolved
[1] Former Vice President of the National Group for Urban Agriculture.
[2] Fixed costs such as labour may not be relevant, since leisure is such an important objective and,
