World Urbanism Day!

Guanajuato, Mexico

Today is World Urbanism Day, and a chance to reflect upon how we are planning and building our cities. With over half of humanity currently living in cities, there is a huge potential to positively impact their ability to live well, sustainably, just by consciously planning the communities these citizens live in.

Our built environment plays a huge role in how our lifestyles develop. It is also one thing that is so easy to take for granted, because its almost too close to see. But these cityscapes were and are still being planned. And we are living with the consequences. 

I was interested to learn what a Food Desert (wikiFoodDesert) was, and then amazed by how many times I have been travelling through suburban Canada, gotten hungry and only found junk food to eat. City planners can increase the health and food security of their residents by planning for food co-ops, farmers markets, community gardens and urban farms.

Vancouver

 I'm also always a little in awe when I travel back to my hometown (Calgary) and see just how unbelievably inconvenient it is to live in that city without a car. Calgary is a new city and it was literally built for the automobile, the distances between places there are unimaginable to residents in larger, more cramped up places, as is the abundance of free street parking.

New York

New York has been a world leader of urban development for many generations, and lately they have been taking drastic measures to reduce vehicular traffic into the downtown core, by implementing bike lanes, improving transit and taking previous streets away and turning them into pedestrian boulevards, streets like the high profile Broadway stretch through Time Square, visit http://www.streetfilms.org/ to watch videos on other exciting projects world wide.

Vancouver City Hall

It must be an exciting time o be a city planner,  I know that Vancouver's city hall was up until midnight one night debating whether to implement a separated bike lanes downtown or not. They voted to do it!

I am so thrilled and grateful for the extra support this gives to us residents to live a simpler, healthier more sustainable lifestyle, by getting more people out of the loud, expensive, anonymous, poluting, speed machines and into the face to face community of pedestrian and cyclist traffic.

I should note, cars are great for intercity travel, its the within city travel that I feel annoys everyone, drivers included.

The Farmhouse, finding space for foodcapes

City Gardens have City Neighbours, as I've mentioned before.
Check out the story of The Farmhouse, they are a group of roommates motivated to turn their rented garden into a foodscape paradise. Unfortunately one of their neighbours did not appreciate the aesthetic of their permaculture garden and called in the city to  make use of an archaic by-law Untidy Premises By-law no. 4548 which helps to restrict the type of landscaping residents of Vancouver can have in their lawns. I wonder if anyone has ever called in this by-law in regards to the plastic grass going in lawns around North Van?
Two Ends of the Spectrum.
 Vive el Jardin Libre!

City Gardens, City Neighbours

I believe Urban Gardening offers a future to agriculture and civilization. But it doesn't come without its problems, most of which derive from the BIG problem we are all facing, WASTE (aka pollution, litter, garbage.)
Most people have heard of The Broken Window Theory, I feel that it very much applies to Urban Gardening.
Flower gardens and Food gardens are different in their function, but also in their appearance, and in the wintertime, a food garden can look a little disheveled. I have found it important to keep my food gardens looking clean and neat, just to keep the neighbours respecting them. Somehow, sometimes, it happens that I get a little behind on cleaning up a bed and making it look neat and maintained, it never seems to take long until the garbage begins to accumulate. This fall one of my neighbours seems to have mistook my dead stand of quinoa as an inviting dumping ground for their excess bamboo clippings, I guess their Yard Trimmings Bin was full.
Its a piss off when stuff like this happens, but a nice reminder to keep everything looking spruced up. Because it can get much worse, digging up and around broken beer bottles is common in city gardens, finding doggy bags (not from restaurants) and cigarette butts is expected. But this spring, we cleaned up a "hobo" nest that was across the alley from my garden, and we found needles in it. Not what you want to see near to where so many children play. We will clean up any extra garbage around because we want to show people we respect this space, and hope that they will too.

NYC Urban Forage

Two years ago I had the pleasure of being caught between the moon and New York City. Made familiar to us through so many books, movies, and television shows, New York is one of North America's largest  urban experiments. I was thrilled to get a chance to explore it, and even more thrilled to learn about Steve Brill, www.wildmanstevebrill.com

Steve Brill is an expert food forager, he conduct tours throughout parks in the north east of the USA. I had the opportunity to catch him for a tour of Central Park, Manhattan.

At over 800 acres, Central Park was one of the first, and is still one of the largest landscaped city parks in the world. Surrounded by skyscrapers and the bustle of Manhatten, it is a welcome island of peace and nature, enjoyed both by tourists and locals. Check out www.centralpark.com/pages/history.html to find a good article on its creation. 

As I arrived in the middle of November, I was expecting the foraging tour to be short and sparse. I was wrong and Wild Man Brill had us hiking for almost two hours, finding new things to eat around every corner. Here are a few of the plants we saw...

Burdock root, roasted it makes a nice hearty tea, but it is also a recurring ingredient in many tasty Japanese dishes.

Wild onion, it is even got bulbs, easy to identify, both in the wild and on the plate

The Norths version of Persimmon, tasty, too bad the photo is so bad

Crab apples, don't even ripen in Central Park until November

Lambs Quarter's a nice mild tasting green that is tasty in winter salads.

This tour was a wonderful way to appreciate New York City, to learn about the plants of the north east and to learn more about foraging in general, as well. I highly recommend it for anyone travelling to the Big Apple!