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On wildness: Community and control in urban green space

Photo credit: Kristen Fahrig

The city is a structured place. Roads and sidewalks follow mainly straight lines, while houses, apartment buildings, offices and shops march dutifully alongside them, one after the other. Many of us live structured lives within our concrete, highly controlled world, following the schedules, routines, and norms of our workplaces and leisure activities. Urban green space is often no different -- processions of trees stand on manicured turf and garden beds are filled with neat lines of annuals. Community use of park space is defined and limited by a stifling array of municipal policies, bylaws, permits and red tape.

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community gardens community building seed saving design for democracy urban gardens Toronto parks arts programs

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Photo: David Widmann/flickr
Homegrown ingenuity brings nature to the city
By
David Suzuki
| December 2, 2014

Canada’s newest "national park" is a vibrant patchwork of green space meandering through dynamic downtown neighbourhoods in one of Canada's densest metropolises, along the former path of a creek buried more than 100 years. It's a welcoming space for birds and bees that's nurturing a new generation of city-builders. And it may spread to your city. Let me explain.

Authors Douglas Tallamy and Richard Louv originally proposed the Homegrown National Park idea. They advocated stitching together a diverse tapestry of green spaces to create a living corridor for butterflies, birds and bees. Ultimately, this connected pollinator pathway would become a natural space to rival traditional national parks.

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Eat local, find community: Ottawa's urban food projects bring neighbours together
By
Lori Theresa Waller
| October 6, 2013

The first day of rabble's Eat Local! food and sustainability challenge found me on my back step with a hammer, clumsily smashing open black walnuts collected last fall from a tree in Ottawa's Dominion arboretum and then forgotten in my freezer.

It's a shame I didn't have a nutcracker, and even more of a shame that I was working on this task alone, because I believe that the best part of this last decade's upsurge of interest in local food is its potential break us out of individualist mode and bring us together with our neighbours. A turn towards local food can re-connect us not only to the seasons, soils and plants of our home region, but also to each other.

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DIY projects: How to start a community garden
By
Emily Slofstra
| October 5, 2013

Last week our How To lesson was about canning, and this week we've also posted some rad reviews of food-related books: Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto and Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution.

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University of Windsor community garden empowers people, feeds community

Rita Haase, the founder of the Campus Community Garden Project

Some of Windsor's most vulnerable citizens are benefiting from a community garden that's been churning out fresh, local organic produce for the last several years.

But the mission of the University of Windsor's Campus Community Garden Project goes far beyond one branch of altruism.

"Feeding the community is very important, but even more important is empowering people and teaching them how to grow their own food," said Rita Haase, the project's founder and a sessional instructor in the university's Women's Studies department and Faculty of Education. "That's what we do here."

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local food gardening community gardens sustainable food urban agriculture university of windsor

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Start your own Window Farm

With limited spaces for gardening in cities, many urban apartment dwellers have sought alternative ways to grow their own food. Enter the ever innovative, window farm! With a large enough window and some DIY spirit, growing everything from herbs to tomatos to strawberries is possible.

All you need to get started are some plastic pop bottles, hardware store tubing, clay pellets and some cheap pumps typically used in aquariums. To get started, everything will run you around $30. Oh, and you'll need some guides along the way!

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open source community gardens urban farming
Redeye
Redeye

Tearing down Vancouver’s viaducts

September 28, 2012
| City council wants to remove two remnants of a never-completed highway system in Vancouver’s downtown core. But, in the process, two long-standing community gardens are threatened with demolition.
Length: 47:34 minutes (43.56 MB)

Video: Occupy Gardens at Queen's Park

On May 1, 2012, the first seeds were planted at Queen's Park (directly below Ontario's provincial legislature building) by a movement partly drawn from the wider Occupy movement called Occupy Gardens. The community took over a plot of land designated as a space for communal gardening and stewardship.

I recently visited this Occupy Garden a.k.a. The People's Peas Garden at Queen's Park in Toronto.

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gardening community gardens urban agriculture Urban Gardening

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A tour of Sky Garden at the University of Toronto

Here we get a tour of Sky Garden at the University of Toronto (St. George St.). Matt and Heather show us around their garden; it's agricultural system, fertilizer system, and various crops, including tomato, melon, pepper, raspberry, pumpkin, squash, etc. The organization acts as a student/volunteer run urban agricultural project in their community. For more information check out www.foodandwaterinstitute.org

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agriculture gardening community gardens university of toronto Urban Gardening

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We welcome your comments! rabble.ca embraces a pro-human rights, pro-feminist, anti-racist, queer-positive, anti-imperialist and pro-labour stance, and encourages discussions which develop progressive thought. Our full comment policy can be found here. Learn more about Disqus on rabble.ca and your privacy here. Please keep in mind:

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Locavore

locavores focus their diets on supporting local economies and farmers

Locavores are folks who only eat food that is locally produced and sold. It's an act of resistance to the commercialization of food production and a commitment to support local economies and farmers.

The idea of eating local was popularized by the ecologist Gary Paul Nabham in the early 2000s. Organized awareness campaigns in Canada and the United States brought the idea of the "100 mile diet" (only eating food produced within 100 miles) to kitchen tables worldwide.

 

What's local

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diet food security local food community resistance community gardens sustainable living
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