Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (50 page)

Across the Atlantic, the collapse of the Soviet regime created an even more startling example of urban agriculture
in extremis
. The loss of its main trading partner turned Cuba from a dependent satellite into an isolated state virtually overnight.
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With a US trade embargo in place, the island, where 80 per cent of the population lived in cities, was forced to rely on its own resources. Over the next decade, it underwent an extraordinary agricultural revolution, as government-sponsored agriculture converted suburbs into community-run farms, and cities including the capital Havana into a maze of
organopónicos
, high-yield market gardens inserted into every available open space and tended by local residents. State-owned land was parcelled out to anyone willing to cultivate it, with amateur farmers given government training, advice, seeds and equipment. Crucially, the government also departed from its communist principles in order to allow farmers to sell their produce on
the open market. By 2003, over 200,000 Cubans were employed in urban agriculture, and although the island remained short of meat, grain and eggs, it was approaching self-sufficiency in vegetables, producing over three million tonnes annually – more than had been available before the crisis.
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The capacity of cities to grow at least some of their own food is beyond question. As the examples of London, St Petersburg and Havana demonstrate, even cities built on the assumption that their food will be coming from elsewhere can be adapted to become at least partially self-sufficient if the need is great enough. Since half of us already live in such cities, is there anything we can learn from them?

In Cuba, the accident of politics and geography combined to create a sort of urban-agrarian laboratory with many of the attributes – isolation, state ownership of land, strong community bonds – typical of utopia. Although the circumstances that brought it about could scarcely be called utopian, Cuba’s agricultural revolution has been enough to persuade the UK-based architects André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn that something similar could be achieved in the West. Viljoen and Bohn propose that underused urban spaces such as brownfield sites, car parks and grassy verges are reclaimed in order to grow food in cities. The new farmland would be designed to link existing green spaces together to create what they call ‘Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes’ (CPULs), green corridors woven into the urban fabric, connecting the city to ‘vegetation, air,
the horizon
’.
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Viljoen and Bohn argue that, with the right government support, cities as open-textured as those in Britain could not only produce a significant proportion of their own fruit and vegetables with CPULs, but through them could create valuable new recreational space for local communities.

The Vertical Farm Project, led by Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, takes the idea of urban agriculture one step further, putting it right at the heart of the city.
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The project’s aim, as
its name implies, is to explore ways of farming vertically: to develop specially designed buildings that can be inserted directly into existing cities in order to grow their food. Vertical Farms would effectively be high-rise ‘food factories’ such as those proposed for Dongtan, although on a much bigger scale: tall enough and high-tech enough to feed the entire urban population. Using data developed by NASA, Despommier and his team reckon that 30 square metres of intensively farmed land would be required per person using current technologies, although with true utopian optimism, they anticipate improving on those figures with the use of yet-to-be invented ones. On the basis of current data, Despommier believes that

one vertical farm with an architectural footprint of one square city block and rising up to 30 stories (approximately 3 million square feet) could provide enough nutrition (2,000 calories/day/person) to comfortably accommodate the needs of 10,000 people employing technologies currently available.
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Quite what London would look like with the necessary 1,000 vertical farms 100 metres square and 30 storeys high can only be imagined.
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Nevertheless, Despommier makes a powerful case for the principle of vertical farming: zero food miles, on-site waste recycling, urban job opportunities, and an end to farming’s oldest foe, the weather. For him, vertical farming is a way of freeing the countryside to return to something of its former state, restoring what he calls its ‘ecosystem services and functions’:

Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.
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The Dutch architects MVRDV also believe high-rise farming is the answer, although in their case they propose building entire cities devoted to it. Their 2001 project Pig City took a hard look at one of
the Netherlands’ oldest industries, pig farming, which remains one of the most intensive farming systems in the world.
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They worked out that if Dutch pork were produced organically at its current rate (16.5 million tonnes a year), it would take 75 per cent of the nation’s land mass to achieve it. That, they argued, left only two options. Either we all become ‘instant vegetarians’, or we find better ways of raising pigs. Their resulting proposal – both playful and serious in the best utopian tradition – was to build a series of ‘pig towers’ 76 storeys high, each with floor plates 87 metres square to house the pigs in a high degree of comfort, in ‘apartments’ with plenty of bedding, access to large open-air balconies, and apple trees to rootle under. The towers would be powered by bio-gas digesters run on pig manure, and connected to a central abattoir to which the pigs would be moved by lift. Until that last fateful journey, the pigs would live much as many humans do now: freeing the countryside for other things. Pig City has gone down well in the Netherlands, and there is some official interest in taking the idea forward.

Whether or not vertical farming can be made to work remains to be seen. But for the foreseeable future, urban agriculture – or agricultural urbanity – can only ever be part of the solution to feeding humanity. City and country need one another, and their relationship is what we should really be addressing. That means thinking about cities differently; not just those we have already built, but those we are yet to build in order to house the three billion or so extra people expected to be living in them by 2050.

While projects like Dongtan are clearly a start, even the city’s design team recognises the limitations of building eco-cities without being able to address their relationship with their regional and global hinterlands. It seems we have come full circle. We are entering a new geographical age; one in which our choices about where and how we live are becoming as critical for us as they were for our distant ancestors. Luckily, we have one advantage over them: hindsight. So what have
10,000 years of urban civilisation taught us? One could write endless books on the subject, but in the end they would all boil down to one thing: respect the land. For thousands of years, we have been building cities and letting the countryside take up the slack. What if we were to reverse the process? What if we were to return to the ancient custom of augury – in modern guise – as a way of choosing sites for our cities? The primary purpose of augury, after all, was to ensure that cities were built in favourable and sustainable locations through careful observation of the natural terrain.

For the Scottish biologist and geographer Patrick Geddes, that was precisely the right approach. Inventor of the word ‘conurbation’ (the professional term for large, urbanised blobs), Geddes was a keen student of the French geographer Élisée Reclus, whose concept of a ‘natural region’ inspired the Scot to create what now goes under the rather uninspiring title of ‘regional planning’. The dull name is misleading,
however, because for Geddes, the natural landscape was anything but boring. It was a vibrant, living thing that held the key to all human habitation. In 1905, he drew a diagram describing a universal ‘valley section’, stretching from mountain and forest to grassland and shore. Man’s response to such natural terrain, he argued, has always formed the basis of human culture. Cities, such as they are, should take their cue from this ‘active, experienced environment … the motor force of human development; the almost sensual reciprocity between men and women and their surroundings’.
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Geddes believed that modern technology (the ‘neotechnic era’) would release people from having to live in large conurbations, allowing them to live closer to nature, with all their functional and cultural needs near at hand. As for the ‘ink-stains and grease-spots’ of existing conurbations, they should be blended with nature: ‘We must bring the country to them … make the field gain on the street, not merely the street gain on the field.’
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Geddes, it will be recognised, was a utopian with the best of them. But there is something in what he says. Technology
has
released us from some of our geographical bonds – has at least opened up new possibilities for the way we live. The merging of city and country is far from a new idea; on the contrary, one could say it is endemic to civilisation. It is also one of the most enduring themes in utopian thought. So is there anything we can learn about how to go about it? As it happens, two utopians, Howard and Wright, provide us with two key paradigms, the compact and the spread. Howard gave us the post-industrial city-state, Wright suburbia; and when you consider the differences between the two men, it is not hard to see why. Howard was English; Wright American. Howard belonged to the age of steam; Wright to that of the motor car. Howard was no architect; Wright was. Howard was modest; Wright was not. And so on. No surprise, then, that Wright’s utopia assumes limitless land and transport and is all designed by him, whereas Howard’s assumes limited land and transport and is not.

Utopian visions tend to mirror their creators and contexts – so what does that tell us? All we have to begin with when we design cities are paradigms; notions of what might work and what might not. Until we actually try something, we can never know for sure how successful it
will be, and even then, we might have to wait years before we find out. Building cities will always be a messy business. It is up to us to use our knowledge, experience and instincts, and respond to the situation as best we can. On that basis, it must be said that Howard’s approach appears to have more practical applications for us today than does Wright’s. In modern parlance, his garden city presents us with a low-carbon-footprint model; Broadacre City with a high one. Yet opinions are divided among architects and planners over whether we should be building ‘cluster cities’ or suburbia. In his 1997 book
Cities for a Small Planet
, the architect Richard Rogers advocated building as densely as possible, utilising existing ‘brownfield’ sites rather than allowing cities to spread on to green belts.
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His arguments became enshrined in government policy through his work for the Urban Task Force in the late 1990s.
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Yet 10 years on, housing in Britain is still being built at an average density of just 40 dwellings per hectare, and suburbia remains easily our most popular residential model.
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Whether we build densely or not, there is no doubt that we need to find ways of living more sustainably. The British government recently announced plans for the construction of 10 new ‘eco-towns’ with the intention that they be ‘zero-carbon’, although quite how that is to be achieved if the towns are plugged into the same food supply networks as the rest of us is anyone’s guess. The Thames Gateway has also been named Britain’s first ‘eco-region’, with a masterplan by the architect Terry Farrell, although so far the parkland with which new urban districts are to be merged is to be of the recreational rather than the productive sort. Despite the fact that much of the land being developed is highly fertile – including market gardens that once provided London with much of its fruit and vegetables – the issue of food production has yet to appear on our eco-regional radar.