Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (18 page)

As Levenston returned to the porch after his television appearance, I
decided I'd better ask the person who saw the urban-agriculture revolution coming three decades ago if he knew how far it would go. Would we be sourcing most of our food from urban gardens in the foreseeable future Would we have commercial urban farming enterprises in cities all over North America? What did he think of the spate of “future scenarios” of urban farms on rooftops or glass-and-steel thirty-story vertical farms?

Urban agriculture, as seen by Levenston, is part trend, part necessity. It's cyclical, and it comes back when people get nervous about food scares, or the economy faltering, or the cost of food, or an energy crisis. “Obviously, today, people need it.”

Then he coolly added that for him, urban agriculture will always be about what individual households are doing in their back or front yards. Levenston was the first pro-urban farmer I had come across to put the movement into perspective. “You're going to take some veggies, soft fruits, and herbs. And you're going to either grow
this
much or
that
much. You're either going to have access to vacant land or not. But it's not going to be cows. It's not going to be rice fields. It's not going to be wheat.” Levenston then admitted that he doesn't even track the produce that comes out of the demonstration garden.

He worries that urban densification will actually hamper people's ability to grow food on a household scale. “A garden works when you have enough room to actually do something and be productive. So there's a conflict within modern urban agriculture.

“I have a lot of worries about it being real,” he continued, rather soberly. He pointed to the example of Vancouver's urban chicken bylaw change in the summer of 2010. The bylaw was put in place to track the number of urban chickens and their locations around the city. It could have been the proof that urban chicken activists needed that it was already happening in the city without any major downside. “Only seven people signed up to register their chickens with the city.” His point was that a wave of new policies are symbolic of change, but did they really amount to change in itself?

But then his cautiousness gave way to optimism. “It's hard to knock the enthusiasm and the productivity that I see on the blogs out there. It's good as long as people are reading critically.” He finally admitted, however, that the mood
is
different lately. “We don't know where our food system is heading. We don't know where our farming is headed. There seems to be support for the first time from municipal governments. The urbanization of the developing world is new and uncertain. We now have massive urban populations.” The variables have changed, so maybe the food system will change.

YMCA I
NTERCULTURAL
C
OMMUNITY
G
ARDEN

Levenston is a connector. After a morning spent at the City Farmer head office, I had appointments all over Vancouver with key people in the city's urban-agriculture movement. The very next morning, in fact, I was standing on the rooftop of a century-old hospital in downtown Vancouver talking with David Tracey, author, arborist, environmental designer, guerilla gardener, coordinator of the Vancouver Community Agriculture Network, and coordinator for the YMCA Intercultural Community Gardens Project at St. Paul's Hospital.

“It's unusual in community gardens, as it's not exactly about the food and the ecology, environment, nutrition, and all those other things we have community gardens for,” Tracey explained as we stepped out of the pastel-colored hospital corridors and into the July sunshine.
⁵
“This is one attempt to make Vancouver a more welcoming place.”

Vancouver is one of Canada's most multicultural cities. This is part of its appeal to newcomers and Canadians alike. While “everybody mostly gets along in Vancouver,” he continued, subtler types of racism obviously exist. There are not always intercultural exchanges among the different immigrant groups, even though they share so much in common. “So they get along, but they don't really do anything together. This project is an attempt to see if we can reshape Vancouver into a place that is actually
inter
cultural, where different cultures really are working together, and doing things together.”

Tracey's first job was finding a suitable garden space in downtown Vancouver. He lucked out. As it happened there was an enormous outdoor space, renovated in the 1970s, on an upper terrace at St. Paul's Hospital. There were already white window-box-style planters attached just below the perimeter railing where the terrace overlooked the skyline and glimpses of ocean beyond. In the middle, raised concrete planters with trees, bushes, and large grasses had been placed throughout the 21,500-square-foot (2,000-square-meter) area. But the boxes were at waist height, making them accessible to those in wheelchairs and to seniors; they were just a comfortable height to work at. Tracey secured a deal with the hospital administration to establish a community garden. Tracey acknowledged that it was a big step and quite unprecedented for
a hospital to invite a group like this to use space for food growing. That said, the community gardeners there have also helped the hospital with a couple of problems.

First, the space was being used inappropriately by drug dealers, as it was sort of a public space, and the park-like setting gave them a bit of privacy to conduct business. “Since we've been here, it's been a little less comfortable for the drug dealers. If there are gardeners hanging around maybe with kids, it's just harder to come and deal.”

The other service the gardeners provided was a landscaping service of sorts. One of the first activities the gardeners did was to remove forty yards—meaning 1,080 cubic feet, or 30 cubic meters—of old, spent soil from the planter boxes and then bring the same amount of high-quality soil up to refill them. “We had to bring this
through
a hospital! We started in the loading bay, rolled past autopsy, went into the elevators, and unloaded the soil up here.” Thankfully, the hospital was getting ready to dispose of some wheeled plastic laundry bins. “So we recycled their laundry bins for them.” They became giant dirt-filled wheelbarrows. Tracey pointed out a giant plastic laundry bin in the makeshift “garden shed.”

“Often when a new community garden starts up, a lot of people will turn out, but they tend to be established Canadians who understand how the system works. Often they tend to be white, middle class.” Language barriers and social inhibitions prevent immigrants from asserting their right to community garden space. This garden was going to be different.

According to Tracey, the “downtown peninsula,” the 1.5-square-mile (3.8-square-kilometer) collection of four inner-city neighborhoods where the community garden is located, is made up of 40 percent non-Canadian-born Vancouver residents. Yet statistics show that it can take up to ten years before immigrants to Canada feel suitably at home in their new city and able to fully participate socially and economically. Even then, as Tracey mentioned, there's often a lack of intercultural interaction.

This is why 40 percent of the spots in the garden are reserved for non-Canadian-born participants, to reflect the demographics of the surrounding area and foster some interaction between the various cultural groups that call the area home. The gardening participant guides were printed in Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, Farsi, and English. The garden's rules also required each gardener to complete training and education in intercultural communications, diversity, antiracism, and antihomophobia, as Vancouver's downtown peninsula has a large gay population.

In 2010, the community garden's inaugural year, fifty-three gardeners joined. Tracey admits that much of the first year was taken up with organizational and start-up activities. Part of the training process was also to educate the gardeners on how to become part of a self-governing body. Tracey needed to train them in how to set up their own nonprofit, how to establish bylaws, how to deal with gardeners who don't cooperate or work outside the bylaws. And then there was organic gardening training for many who had never sowed a seed in their life before this.

Each gardener was assigned two planter boxes, one in full sun, the other in partial shade. Each rectangular box holds just over seven square feet of soil, so each gardener has about fifteen square feet of space. The irrigation system was already part of the planters, though Tracey admitted that they were still working out the idiosyncrasies with the preexisting irrigation.

This meant that the gardens got a late start. Nevertheless, by mid-July, ripe tomatoes were hanging on plants, peppers were filling out, and a few ambitious blueberry and raspberry canes were already producing fruit.

There are hundreds of other boxes available for expansion if the gardeners wish, though some areas of the rooftop haven't seen sunlight for a hundred years and might never be viable growing spaces. Tracey's contract with this project was for only a year, so in May 2011, the group “graduated” to their own autonomous, self-organizing, self-governing, self-supporting community garden, and renamed themselves the Downtown Intercultural Gardeners Society (DIGS).

D
OWNTOWN
E
ASTSIDE
V
ANCOUVER'S
SOLE
FOOD
F
ARM

In 2010, a 17,000-square-foot (1,580-square-meter) farm sprouted from a derelict parking lot next to a run-down hotel in a notoriously rough part of downtown Vancouver. I decided to drive there, rather than walk the twenty minutes in the morning July sunshine, a decision that seemed silly on the surface. But this is Vancouver's reality. Just blocks from gleaming office towers and luxury hotels, countless Starbucks locations, and million-dollar condos, there are blocks where extreme poverty, mental health issues, the sex trade, and drug deals can be seen in plain daylight, and they
have changed the landscape entirely. It's unnerving as a visitor. I had visions of taking the wrong route and finding myself in a dangerous situation. Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is not for the skittish.

I won't dwell on the well-known social problems in this strip that stand out so boldly against Vancouver's overall image as a health-obsessed, affluent, cosmopolitan city. Moreover, I'm not qualified to judge why it is the way it is. I just know that “poverty tourism,” a strange type of voyeuristic tourism of impoverished areas of Vancouver, among other places, has become a source of annoyance to those whose home is the Downtown Eastside. My interest in the farm, though, happened to include the fact that it is located within a neighborhood that isn't otherwise associated with high-value market vegetables.

When I arrived at SOLEfood Farm, I circled the perimeter chain-link fence until I finally got the attention of one of the farmers. It took a few minutes for someone to find the key to the padlock to let me inside the farm. But as I stepped through the gate, the familiar smell of plant life hit me, and I realized how nervous I had been while waiting to be let in. Yet, once inside, it was a different world. A pigeon was taking a rambunctious bath in puddles that were left over from the morning watering. The acidic smell of wet pavement mingled with the sweet, rich smell of wet earth and photosynthesis.