Furniture Design Ideas

The emergence of the idea of sustainability, which was a defining feature of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, was instrumental in raising environmental awareness and provided a powerful rationale for reassessing contemporary design and development strategies. Within architecture, the major impact was on finding ways of reducing the energy consumption of buildings and thereby reducing […]

Since the 1970s, environmental awareness groups backed by local authorities, public developers and community enthusiasts have also been battling to safeguard, promote or improve open urban space. Whilst this might have been less important for the established urban parkscape, it encouraged a dif­ferent approach to the design of new types of open space, often benefiting […]

In Britain, the end of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign was followed by a sharp decline in urban food pro­duction. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a great deal of food growing land was returned to its origi­nal pre-war use or lost to new development. The combined effect of the new welfare state, effec­tively full employment […]

But it was not the ideas of architects that had the most dramatic effect on urban agriculture in Britain and Europe between 1900 and 1945 – the biggest stimulant to urban food production in Europe was undoubtedly war. In both World Wars, the real threat of starvation posed by blockades prompted campaigns to increase indigenous […]

The close relationship between urban populations and food production largely fell apart during the Victorian Industrial Revolution. At first, despite dra­matic population growth, poor transportation meant that the physical expansion of cities was limited. This changed from the mid-nineteenth century onwards with the building of the railways allowing people to live much further away from […]

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the absence of sophisticated, high capacity transport systems and Figure 13.2   of preservation techniques such as refrigeration, inevitably meant that people had to grow food close to where they lived. Consequently, for thousands of years, built and cultivated environments co-existed: homes, markets, public buildings, and sacred places were interspersed […]

Joe Howe, Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen Figure 13.1 In Britain, as in much of the developed world, the very idea of growing food in the city, to many, sounds naive or even perverse. By contrast, urban food pro­duction in other parts of the world is a central feature of everyday life. For many poorer […]

Dr Margi Lennartsson The Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA) is an organisation that deals with organic horticulture in its widest sense – from domestic gar­dening to allotments, landscaping, and commercial organic production. One of our key concerns is the composting of organic waste for use in urban horti­culture. Over the past decade we’ve seen the […]

The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens (FCFCG) is a UK-wide charity representing city farms, community gardens, a network of school farms, some community-led allotment groups, and community groups involved in projects in parks. In total, we represent 65 city farms, more than 1000 community gardens, 75 school farms and around 20 allotment groups. […]

The greatest need that projects have, especially when they are starting out, is local political support through committee and officer time: a clear sign that the project is valued and welcomed. Projects need clear support mechanisms through the coun­cil to develop a genuine partnership. This will help greatly with forward planning, credibility, and identi­fying funding […]