http://urbanagricultureresearch.blogspot.com/

I’ve set this site up specifically as a simple, one stop shop for those involved in Urban Agriculture Research and its practice. Please Join and add a blog - even if its only one sentence a year. From the response I’ve had so, its amazing the amount of people involved in research and the idea of the site is to make cross research contact easy.

Currently showing at the exhibition London Yields, Building Store, London is a documentary I made about the the Continuous Picnic, organised in 2008 By Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen, for the London Festival of Architecture.

For one day, a designated area in one of the most beautiful parts of central London will transform into a continuous picnic of infinite personal encounters and fresh food events. Located on Montague Place (closed for traffic on that day) and Russell Square, this is a free outdoor event for everybody to celebrate good food and company.

The day will kick off at 10am with an “Inverted Market”, when any member of the public can bring locally produced fruit and vegetables to Montague Place where it will be included in a 120-metre long Fresh Food market installation.

The idea of the Picnic is to bring locally produced fruit and vegetables (either self-grown or bought from local growers) to the “Inverted Market”,  which shows how far the food had travelled to get to Camden.

http://continuouspicnic.blogspot.com/

Please email mikeytomkins@gmail.com for details.

The first in the series is an Edible Map of Surrey Street car park, Croydon

While the importance of local food growing is fast gaining ground, the ability to conceive of urban food production actually happening within the bewildering array of structures and surfaces of the city is a difficult concept.

Walking the local neighbourhood with this Edible Map as a guide, the food-flâneur could start to picture a very different landscape of vegetable plots, orchards or beehives. Just add your imagination, and see the grassed areas around housing, the corners of parks, or the many flat rooftops of this quarter of Croydon spring into life with psychogeographic food.

But the Edible Map is more than a visualisation tool. It also attempts to investigate examples of agricultural yields that the immediate area around Surrey Street could produce. This will allow the itinerant urban resident or visitor to visualise what percentage of their current vegetable diet could be supported using a locally grown food.

Drawing over the usual cadastral A-Z map, the Edible Map intervenes with relevant data, icons and narratives, translating ideas of “local food” into tangible, interactive and playful stories, reconnecting people to a sense of place through local food growing. 

USE THE EDIBLE MAP TO VISUALISE HOW MUCH FOOD YOU COULD GROW IN CENTRAL CROYDON

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http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk/events/event_diary_details.asp?id=432