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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] From Vacant City Lots to Food On the Table
  • Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 19:28:48 -0700


>From Vacant City Lots to Food On the Table
How to grow food where we need it.
by Madeline Ostrander posted Sep 17, 2010
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-resilient-community/from-vacant-city-lots-to-food-on-the-table

The first time I went to Richmond, Calif., nine years ago, my friend, who ran
a punk music recording studio out of a converted warehouse, told us not to
park our car on the street. The day before, vandals had walked the block and
smashed several car windows.

At least a few things have started to change in Richmond since then: A berry
garden sits beside a bike trail in the Iron Triangle, a neighborhood at the
center of the city bordered on three sides by old rail lines. Once a month,
Latino and African American families–often people who live just a few blocks
from each other but rarely had a chance to meet in the past–gather at the
garden and have a barbecue. Tomatoes, chard, and corn grow in raised beds
across the street. Muslim families from the local mosque just a few blocks
away pluck fresh mint from the garden for making traditional Arabic tea. The
garden is the work of Urban Tilth, one of the dozen or so groups at the
center of Richmond’s urban garden movement. It was built by community
members, often young people, and is tended in part by students and teachers
from the elementary school next door. And it has become a community gathering
space.
People rarely get a say in what happens to land when their city falls apart,
but in the last five years, some Richmonders have taken matters into their
own hands.

Richmond boomed in the mid-20th century and now is like hundreds of other
places around the country where industry walked away. The city is isolated
from much of the cultural and economic life of the rest of the East Bay
region. Young people can’t find jobs, and they move away, or their
restlessness is channeled into all the wrong activities—vandalism, gangs,
crime.

People rarely get a say in what happens to land when their city falls apart.
But in the last five years, some Richmonders have taken matters into their
own hands. Often with official permission but sometimes without, they have
planted more than two dozen gardens in public lots and school grounds all
over the roughest parts of town. Urban Tilth calls them “farms,” and last
year grew 6,000 pounds of food, which went to dozens of local families.

Many Richmonders have gardening traditions that go back several generations,
brought by families from the rural South who came for shipbuilding jobs
during World War II and by more recent immigrants from agricultural regions
of Central and South America. But many of Richmond’s young people haven’t
been exposed to these traditions.

Now Richmond’s urban gardening movement is yielding a small but radical
cultural change. Urban agriculture has become a regular part of the
curriculum in two local high schools. Areas in and near the gardens that
seemed off-limits or unsafe in years past are becoming gathering places where
Richmonders throw picnics, play outside, pick berries, and ride bicycles.






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