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.