Urban Trends We Hope Die in 2014

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Guess it's time to refresh this thread for another year.


I'm going to re-nominate perjorative, exclusionary "greenspace". 2013 was once again chock full of proposals that betray total planning befuddlement at usage of open space by living, breathing humans.
 
Urban Farming.

Okay, yes, grow stuff on roofs, I'm all for it. But can we please STOP pretending that urban farming is ridiculously sustainable or beneficial? I'm tired of 'buy local' in general when it comes to produce. It's more efficient to have massive fields of lettuce in the middle of nowhere and bring it into the city by train than to have patches of farms on 495 that are all trucked everywhere.
 
Agreed. Nearly every "urban farm" zone is probably trading away housing in the city for housing on a sprawling subdivision carved out of nature.
 
Not sure I understand the hate for urban farming. There are urban areas in this country where

a) development is not feasible,
b) there is virtually no access to fresh fruits and vegetables,
c) families have no room on their own properties for gardens, and
d) children have little to aspire to, little opportunity to experience (quite literally in this case) the fruits of labor, and little beauty in their lives.

I think filling a vacant block with a small community "farm" in this case makes quite a lot of sense. In fact, I think it is extremely beneficial.
 
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Justin7 said:
Not sure I understand the hate for urban farming. There are urban areas in this country where

a) development is not feasible,
b) there is virtually no access to fresh fruits and vegetables,
c) families have no room on their own properties for gardens, and
d) children have little to aspire to, little opportunity to experience (quite literally in this case) the fruits of labor, and little beauty in there lives.

I think filling a vacant block with a small community "farm" in this case makes quite a lot of sense. In fact, I think it is extremely beneficial.
Click to expand...

Urban farming ≠ community gardens.

Community gardens are very good, for one because they take otherwise unusable strips of land--usually by the side of the road--and fill them with people who otherwise wouldn't be congregating on that land. And it is a good interim use for small lots of limited interest where there's not much you can build except a new triple-decker.

Urban farming is taking up large lots with lots of development potential and hinging their use on some sort of wider-scale food production. It's ripe for abuse and an anti-development NIMBY wedge. And the amount of production they can sustain is very dubious, because it's hard fucking work to grow beyond a few plants per plot's worth of food. Especially in the urban soil, which is very poor in nutrients because of the prior land usage.

If commercial fresh produce stands--the kind ubiquitous in the suburbs--haven't seen fit to migrate here on any of these unused plots because they don't see a sustainable way to make even minimal-margin money on it (and it's not like farm stands are high-margin operations), how is a totally crowdsourced farm going to justify the utilization for the pretty back-breaking daily labor required? That's suspicious right there.

I don't think people are against the idea so much as they see the transparent trojan horse at work here as a NIMBY wedge issue. It's perverted for anti-development leverage in a way that community gardens with a handful of plants per-person aren't. I think the risk is legit of it becoming a shitshow of local-vs.-local and local-vs.-developer bad behavior, and isn't an idea to jump headlong into without appropriate precaution against people abusing it to their own ends. I can just see the problems coming from a mile away with some of the constituencies pushing this hardest.
 
The only urban "farming" I ever would want to see would be vertical hydroponics. Other than that its a waste of land, both in the city and real farmland that will be cut up for displaced housing.
 
Agriculture is basically the least efficient land use possible. Any possible "urban farms" are not going to be serious food operations -- you could only feed a few people from them, if at all. There's a reason that subsistence farming is considered poverty.

This is completely different from gardens. Gardens are nice and can fit neatly into small spaces that are inappropriate for other uses, and can complement structures in the city. Urban farms are a way to block development of land that is already: (a) a brownfield, (b) given access to city services that we all have paid for, and that are needed by people, not by ears of corn.

Are you willing to tell people that they are being displaced, forced to live out in the far exurbs, because someone wants to play pretend-farmer and grow sickly tomatoes on a plot of land with good transit access?

Are you willing to see more farmland and natural reserves carved up into cookie-cutter subdivisions, because that development was not channeled into existing brownfields?
 
If I type "Urban Farming" into google or wikipedia there seems to be a general consensus that this includes small plots and community gardens (Check out the first dozen images), but it seems that any disagreement we have involves semantics rather than actual practice. Also see http://www.urbanfarming.org

I have never actually seen a large scale farm in an urban environment. Any specific examples?
 
Also...the environmental permitting for this is going to be a nightmare. You're going to use brownfields as a sustainable food source? OK...who's gonna pay for all the soil testing? Who's gonna pay for all the cleanup? Who's gonna pay the food inspectors before this stuff is distributed? Who's going to monitor pesticide levels?

It doesn't even have to be all that toxic; the soil regs for an industrial property are well below commercial well below residential, and edible food has to conform to the tippy-top regs for residential zoning. And on and on and on. If public funding is committed to this, it's going to be a slow-drain on funds for little annoyances on land that is contributing no tax revenue.

At least with community gardens you assume all liability for your two off-books personal use tomato plants, same as you would for your backyard garden that sits above the leaky oil tank. The liability's totally different if there's a commercial interest or public distribution chain involved.


It doesn't matter what the land size is. There IS a real difference beyond the semantics, and a level of abuse and entrapment of unwise public funds with urban farming that is a non-issue with community gardens.
 
I did not say there was not a difference beyond semantics. I said that our disagreement was semantic. I am saying that the term "urban farming" includes (I'd even argue primarily consists of) community gardens.

Again, google "urban farming." Look up "urban farming" on Wikipedia. Go to UrbanFarming.org.
 
The use of TOD potential to place public transit away from already developed places to parking lots in the middle of nowhere.
Also, Historical commissions, NIMBYS and SCR :p
 
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