What could happen here?
Space Left Over After Planning
Archive for February, 2009
The Royal Festival Hive Project
Design by Paul Kelly
Mikey Tomkins examines the hive
The Royal Festival Hive is situated on the Roof of the Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London. It is the brain child of Andrew Hinton and Mikey Tomkins. The Hive is looked well looked after by John Chapple, of the London Beekeepers association.
The Royal Hive is an accurate scale model of the Hall, on which it sits, showing that architecture even in its model form can be productive. Andrew keeps a blog at www.royalfestivalhive.typepad.com/
The Edible Urban Landscape
The slide show below are a taster of my thesis entitled “The Edible Urban Landscape” Completed in 2006.
The thesis asks the essential question - How much open, grassed land, is available around for the Elephant and Castle to grow food, and how many people would this feed?
The full thesis can be read at http://www.cityfarmer.org/LondonEdible.html. Or email me if you specific question regaring urban agriculture in London.
Also, below this is a full copy of the abstract.
Elephant and Castle
Abstract
The Edible Urban Landscape: An Assessment Method for Retro-Fitting Urban Agriculture Into An Inner London Test Site
This thesis explores the practice called urban agriculture (UA), which attempts to cut down on urban food and non-food imports, by growing crops and products on land in and around cities. The practice is wide spread and ultimately necessary in many of the expanding cities of the developing nations, to ensure food security.
However, the prescriptive nature of UK planning laws leaves little, if any room, for self-organised UA practices to evolve, hindered further by the fragmented and undocumented nature of urban green space planning.
This thesis has developed a method, based around Geographical Information Systems (GIS), for retro fitting, measuring and evaluating, a vegetable growing, UA system, which could be integrated into green urban space. The results of the method should be in a format which makes them quantifiable for both architects and planners, so that UA food systems can be considered as a form of renewable energy, along side wind or solar.
This method will be tested in three central London locations. The results were evaluated, relative to their yields per square metre, how they would feed the surrounding population and the CO2 emissions saved on reduced food miles and by eliminating the need to maintain some grasser areas.
The results show that the central London test areas, together with its surrounding environs, are rich in traditional, as well as undocumented open space and that the conversion of 26% of this space to UA practices, could provide 27% of the daily vegetable requirements over a 259 growing period. The method established a ratio of yield of vegetables, per square meter per person, which would be suitable for architects and planners to incorporate into urban planning.
The impact on CO2 from food miles and ground maintenance equipment, was quantifiable but not conclusive, therefore a more comprehensive system of measuring emissions needs to be adopted for further work.
Key words: Urban Agriculture, Geographical Information System, food miles, CO2 emissions, Parks, grass, landscape, energy, density, yields.
Personal UA
People who do things where they are not supposed to.
The Photographs above were exhibited at The University of Brighton with the following text:
The soft edge between utility and productivity: something else is happening here.
Research subject
Urban agriculture (UA): the practice of growing food and non-food within or surrounding the boundaries of cities.
Research Title:
Urban Agriculture: East Croydon as an example of growing food closer to the urban consumer
This exhibition of photographs represents a visual fragment that has emerged from the overall research project into UA.
The core of the UA research is based in Croydon, South London, and is largely framed by the sustainable cities debate. It emerges out from the statement that food growing, processing and distribution is a major contributor to our current environmental dystopia. UA practice, with specific reference to oleri-culture, would re-localise food production, cutting food miles creating economic and ecological interdependence.
While the above definition of UA tries to encapsulate an urban practice that the UNDP has described as “essential to the economic and nutritional security of urban residents, on closer inspection not all UA practices fit neatly into productive discourses once you disaggregated UA into ‘urban’ and ‘agriculture’.
One such example is documented in this display of photographs showing the many small, personal yet public food growing activities that happen around the streets in East London. Clearly the activity shown in the photographs are urban - clinging to the gaps between buildings, however, it is hard to describe them as ‘agriculture’ since they do not actually feed the owner in way that we have come to expect modern agricultural practice to … therefore something else is happening here.
Trying to understand this ‘something else’ requires understanding the interrelationship between institutional planning and regularised practices of everyday life. This would require analysing the practice through interviews with the urban farmers, as a product of culture, knowledge, daily household life, gender difference, economic pressures, notions of play, memory and the reuse (or misuse) of planned public spaces. However, I have found making contact with these urban growers difficult and the only visible farmer is the woman in the blue saree in the image entitled ‘Goodge Place, 2007’.
Once you move away from the simple assumption that the food growing practice can basically be understood as a form of quantifiable ‘agriculture’, towards a socio-cultural analysis, then a great number of contradictions and explanations start to arise. It is these contradictions and answers, explored briefly in this exhibition that the PhD work will explore.
More?
Whats happening here?
Research
PhD research
AIMS OF INVESTIGATION
- To model East Croydon as an example of urban agriculture. The workwill consider what are the equitable environmental, social and geographic boundaries of East Croydon, as an example of an urban agricultural system.
- An assessment of how East Croydon currently supplies food to it town centre, looking at distribution, retail, transport and waste disposal, with relative to food miles and associated CO2 emissions.
- To systematically map the rooftops, grassed amenities, vertical faces and vacant indoor spaces of East Croydon Town centre, to assess the total area available for food production. Creating new ways to read this urban landscape by combining existing formal GIS information, borough statistics and related census data with bespoke GPS mapping, site visits, photography and questionnaires.
- To investigate suitable micro food growing systems, relative to energy use and how the yields would contribution to feeding a local urban population.
- To consider how urban agricultural practices can combine with current food distribution networks and retail outlets, to reduce food miles, processing and packing.
- The investigation will consider how the practice and theory of urban planning, architecture and agriculture can be combined together, to enabling a new understanding of the history and discourse of urban design and urban ecology.
ABSTRACT/ RESEARCH QUESTIONS
How much of East Croydon’s urban centre is suitable for growing food and how does this food relate to the surrounding social and economic superstructure?
By comparison with the existing food distribution system, would an urban Agricultural system necessarily reduce the embodied energy of food consumed in East Croydon.
What types of food-growing systems are suitable for the urban environment and how do they relate to the local ecology?
What is the scale of social and economic organisation, most appropriate to urban agricultural practices and does the use of formal GIS systems contradict any attempt at creating an holistic paradigm?
Projects
Work
- Beekeeping: Royal Festival Hive
- Film Work: Commercial and Documentary
- Photography: Anti-social
- Photography: Food Growing in Public Places
- Photography: Vacant Urban Space
- Research: Edible Maps
- Research: Food Growing + Elephant & Castle
- Research: MPhil/PhD
- urban agriculture research.blogspot