The Urban Experience (II)

The CBC covered the story of the urban garden going in in Vancouver this week. What is most interesting is to see how they are building the garden: pallets, cloth/tarp, boxes, soil. In doing this, I'm sure Concord Pacific is getting a great return somewhere along the way (although no one is saying where). But that's fine. What is important is how much food is expected to be grown on an unused parking lot--something like 100,000 kilos. SoleFood has their work cut out for them. Growing that much will be a lot of work--even if not grown in the most sustainable manner. But this is all to the good.
It is, of course, nothing really new. Cuba has been doing this since 1988 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Havana, the local government authorized people to use, free of charge, state-owned vacant lots in and around Havana. During the years 1990-1994 (the "special period" when food imports evaporated and the average Cuban lost 9 kilos of weight) it was estimated that more than 27,000 people were linked to some 1,800 hectares of community gardens. Cuba has made great strides in achieving food sovereignty since then.

The Urban Experience

From The Vancouver Sun website:

A parking lot is not exactly the place you might expect to see organic beans, bok choy and baby beets growing in abundance.

But part of the empty lot on the former Expo lands on the north side of False Creek will become a two-acre urban farm, bursting with 40 varieties of fruits and vegetables, if all goes according to plan.

“It’s an enormous leap,” said Michael Ableman, an urban farmer and director of Solefood, an organization that creates agriculture jobs and training for inner-city residents.

It’s the largest city farm attempted in Vancouver, and will be tended mostly by residents of the Downtown Eastside. The group plans to employ 25 people along with four farming apprentices and sell its produce to restaurants and farmers’ markets. The farm is portable, growing in containers above ground, because the site is on a three-year lease.

“We’re demonstrating this can in fact be considered a serious enterprise for urban areas. We’re not talking about community gardens any more. We’re taking it up a level,” said Ableman, who founded the Centre for Urban Agriculture in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1981 and now farms on Saltspring Island.