permaculture

["Bart Anderson" <bart@cwo.com>]

Maybe it's time for permaculture to re-examine its emphasis on rural
homesteading.  Other groups seem to be taking the lead in developing green
solutions for the cities, as described in the following article.

According to the article, the United Nations estimates that 25% of the world
will engage in some form of urban agriculture next year.  (!!!!)

- bart


http://www.canada.com/components/printstory/printstory4.aspx?id=d62c8c59-17f
4-4f40-96ae-b09eb2ef0217

Turning slums into gardens
McgGill director leads 3-year project.
Objective is to show ways agriculture might be integrated into urban
planning

      SARAH STAPLES
      CanWest News Service

October 24, 2004


By 2050, more than half of the world's population will live in cities, and
the slums that house more than a billion people today will have more than
doubled in size. Relentless urbanization could condemn much of humanity to
the worst kind of misery. But an international research team led by a
Canadian is preparing to offer a different vision of their future.

Vikram Bhatt, director of the Minimum Cost Housing Group at McGill
University's School of Architecture, will oversee a new United Nations and
Canadian government-sponsored project to plant gardens in the slums of
Rosario, Argentina; Kampala, Uganda; and Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Rooftops of discarded tin will be covered with earth and seeded with fruit
trees and vegetables.

Balconies will be transformed into poultry pens, and crumbling tenements
will fall so that new "garden neighbourhoods" can be built in their place.

Making the Edible Landscape, a three-year, $1-million effort, this month
begins re-engineering cities that are the traditional centres of food
consumption into organized hubs for food production. It's based on an
uncommon philosophy: that trees and greenery in a city should serve to keep
people alive.

"Urban planners have tended to create landscapes for beauty, not utility,"
said Bhatt in an interview before heading to Colombo to oversee the first
stage of work. "We need to be envisioning something much richer and deeper
than that."

Although food has been grown in cities for centuries and the trend
continues, it's seen as either a fringe activity of the poor and
disenfranchised, or, in North America, as a hobby, he said.

Edible Landscape's objective is to change the attitude of key
decision-makers - architects and designers, municipal politicians and
managers - by demonstrating to them ways that agriculture may be integrated
into urban planning and housing design.

It's the ideological foundation of an emerging, multi-disciplinary field
known as "urban agriculture," whose recognized gurus are Bhatt and Luc
Mougeot, an academic and urban philosopher with the federally funded
International Development Research Centre.

Canadian experts in architecture, health and sustainable development will
help officials from the three cities decide how to transform roughly 25
hectares of land that will affect 500 families.

The results will be showcased before 200 city officials from around the
world at the 2006 World Urban Forum in Vancouver.

There is mounting scientific evidence of the benefits of urban growing. The
UN has estimated up to a quarter of the world's population will be engaged
in some form of urban agriculture by next year.

Montreal, which boasts Canada's most extensive network of community gardens,
says its 7,000 parking-space-sized plots yield an average of 100 kilos of
fruit and vegetables each.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2004