edible landscapes

Most attempts to contemplate the form that local development projects might take on in a modern urban context prove challenging. In Europe, for example, the City already delivers most basic services, creating the impression that as its residents, our material needs are already being met. This tends to leave little room, or inspiration, for community led initiatives.

That's why I really liked Pam Warhurst's talk on 'edible landscapes' in the above video. It shows that there is indeed ample room for community led 'development,' if we can learn to think creatively together about how to do things differently, in ways that bring our neighbourhoods, towns and cities more in line with principles that encourage community building, sharing between neighbours and the local generation and application of knowledge.

Warhurst describes a local food movement that took place in her small town of Todmorden, England. The idea Warhurst describes is rather simple at its core: transforming unused, or undercapitalised, public spaces into community maintained garden strips, made up of fruit trees and vegetable plots, and free to the community. The project is described as combining three 'plates' - the community; learning; and local business, and set out to answer the following question:

Can we find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them differently, think about the resources they use differently, and interact differently?

Community

We could perhaps see the 'community' aspect as being at the heart of the movement. Warhurst describes this as "the way we live our everyday lives." The project is certainly being pitched as participative, and seeks to encourage a change in community behaviour through the development of core common values, such as sharing, caring for the environment, building capacity, developing a local network of growers and buyers and increasing the community's ownership of its own development.

Learning

The learning aspect threads through the project at many levels. At the most basic level, the entire initiative is conceived of as an 'experiment' - as a way to reintegrate agriculture into the heart of urban life, in the hope of inspiring local planners to "put the food sites at the heart of the town and city plan, not relegate them to the edges of the settlement that nobody can see." In this way, the dichotomy between places of residence and places of food production that has come to characterise modern landscapes is brought into question, ushering us towards a new age of urban living where this aspect of life - currently hidden away in the rural outskirts - becomes organically reintegrated into our lived environment. Food growing, then, becomes a part of life, a real thing that solidifies our link with nature, instead of a detached product that we buy at the supermarket.

At a more complex level, learning becomes integrated as knowledge generated through the local high-school system, which has put agriculture back on the curriculum, linked to a local market garden training centre. The fact that the education system has adapted to the local context is a great example of learning becoming more relevant, so that knowledge generated and applied actually responds to and helps advance community life, in this case serving to "inspire the farmers of tomorrow." Schools thus can play a key role in helping to "create  a sense of purpose around the importance of the environment, local food, and soils" in order to "create a different generation" of more aware, more driven and more purposeful youth. The next stage is a local horticultural course being designed by the university.

Local business

The business aspect tries to generate a local economy movement and to increase residents' consciousness of the businesses they choose to support. These efforts started at a simple level with one local product - eggs - but gradually increased in degrees of complexity as community confidence in local produce rose in tandem with an increase in learning and in the number of actors involved. This not only means that individuals' talents and capacities are being developed and enhanced through meaningful work but also shows how communities themselves can find creative, resilient ways to respond to global problems, such as those concerning the environment.

Another characteristic of the movement worth mentioning is its increasingly participatory nature. As Warhurst notes, "this is a movement for everyone." The grassroots nature of the project has also helped to reshape the role that local institutions - such as the local government - is playing in supporting community life. Rather than simply providing services, the local government is now serving to support this community led initiative, such as by creating a register of unused land that can be used for community food growing.

Though this model is now being replicated and adapted in many other towns and cities, it would nevertheless be farfetched to describe it as blueprint for modern urban community development. Rather, it serves as a promise that such initiatives are not only possible but indispensable to usher communities to the next stage of sustainable urban development.

When I think about my own neighbourhood, I couldn't say what a community led initiative would look like quite yet. But I do think that here, as anywhere, as the community becomes more conscious, as our capacity develops, as we become more motivated and more united, we can except that such initiatives will organically appear and flourish right on our doorsteps, as the material manifestation of shared values like unity, justice, love, equality and generosity, towards the goal of a shared prosperity.

What I especially liked is Warhust's emphasis that these actions need not be grandiose, at least not initially. She is instead a strong advocate of the power of small actions:

We are starting to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity, each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future.

If anything, her example shows us that the future is ripe with possibilities. As communities become more empowered to take charge of their own development, we can only begin to imagine the fruits that these endeavours will produce - both literally, and metaphorically.

the neighbourhood gift economy

In a recent video posted on the Guardian's website, self-titled 'de-growth theorist' Charles Eisenstein provides an overview of his vision of the 'gift economy' - a model for an economy that could function within a locally-embedded community, which encourages neighbours to share common resources and to perform services for one another. Click here to watch the video, which is just a few minutes long.

What I like about Eisenstein's notion of the gift economy is that it is based on some different assumptions about what drives us as human beings. Far from the 'self-interested' rational economic man that underpins mainstream economic theory, Eisenstein paints a human nature characterised by service and altruism. This gives rise to a conception of the neighbourhood as a community of people who naturally care about one another, who want to help each other out, and who can rely on that support from others. 

Building an economy on these assumptions can include exchange models that don't depend exclusively on money - he gives examples of local trading schemes and 'time banking.' It can also imply pooling some resources instead of each individual family needing to own them, such as public cars or shared power tools. Not only do such schemes reinforce the value of community, but as Eisenstein points out, they compel us to rethink the current economic model, whose dependence on unbridled consumption is clearly at odds with these more sustainable, more affordable, more gratifying, and more natural notions of sharing. 

This also got me thinking how in order for endless consumption to work, it needs us to think a certain way about who we are, what motivates us, and how we relate to our neighbours. Eisenstein's view is at odds with the well-known idiom "keeping up with the Joneses", which assumes that our neighbours actually form the benchmarks against which we measure our own social status. The theory goes that our notions of 'rich' and 'poor' are relative, depending on the status of our neighbours, marked of course by their material possessions (and most often the car they drive, as the ultimate status symbol). According to the theory then, one's own non-stop acquisition of goods is a race to outdo the neighbours. 

Thankfully, the notion of sharing expensive goods like cars does away with society's obsession with possessing luxury goods, thereby restoring the car to its rightful function - to get us from A to B, while ensuring that our neighbours are no longer perceived as competitors, but as friends and co-workers.

We could say that the current economy functions by thriving off our lower nature - that part of us driven by our ego, which can be easily lured into the trap of competition. Eisenstein's gift economy, on the other hand, is built on - and in turn helps develop - our higher nature, that nobility within us that seeks expression through acts of kindness, love and generosity. 

Eisenstein's vision of work is also based on the assumption of these qualities in man. Freed from the demands of the consumer economy, work can take on its true meaning - as Eisenstein notes, "an expression of our gifts," producing goods and services "called forth by needs." He also criticises the perversion of a system that can reward acts of injustice while often leaving humanity's most noble acts uncompensated. Money, which has become an end in itself, does not repay someone according to the value of their work. This also implies that our notions of wealth accumulation need to change, from a strictly material conception to one that incorporates spiritual dimensions too. As Eisenstein notes:

In the gift culture, the more you give, the richer you are. Which is kind of opposite to the money culture. 

A geographic community - a neighbourhood - is the perfect setting for such an economy. Not only because of convenience (sharing a car or power tools would only make sense if these things were easily accessible), but because the notion of looking out for one another as the basis of an economy implies a network of relationships. It implies interaction, and it implies vicinity. 

This vision of the neighbourhood has implications for planning, too. Eisenstein feels that humanity's best planning and logic and technological solutions have led us to the disaster we're in. His musings on the shortcomings of humanity's best planning efforts brought to mind another thinker on the relationships between members within a locality: French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose text The Right to the City (Le Droit à la Ville) provides insight into how different approaches to planning affect the way cities are conceived and created - and ultimately the way we relate to one another within them. 

According to Lefebvre, one approach to planning is that of 'developers' - those who plan cities with the market and profit generation in mind (and hence extend the consumer model described above). In Lefebvre's view, such planners cater their designs towards a consumer society:

They will build not only commercial centres, but also centres of privileged consumption: the renewed city. They will be making 'legible' an ideology of happiness through consumption, joy by planning adapted to its new mission. This planning programmes a daily life generating satisfactions...A programmed and computerised consumption will become the role and the norm for the whole society.

This 'planned' and systematised consumption gets to the core of the 'norms' that Eisenstein seeks to overcome, particularly in the milieu of the community, including the superficial notion of 'happiness' that Lefebvre describes ironically. This would be replaced with the more powerful, genuine sentiment of gratitude, where members of a community experience true happiness through the gift of helping each other out, based on the principal of reciprocity.

Ultimately, the structures of our societies need to embody those higher aspects of human nature that we want to nurture and develop, the ones that reveal our innate nobility. In doing so, they won't only reflect these virtues but will become systems through which we can further develop them. We need more thinkers like Eisenstein who can find the simple logic in models that harness man's capacity for nobility.