UCL Development Planning Unit dpuIssue 51 June 2009news In this issue: As food security is under threat, is urban agriculture a move in the right direction? See Focus On, page 2 5375_UCL DPUNEWS_V3.indd 1 03/07/2009 10:28 Focus on Urban Agriculture By Robert Biel and Yves Cabannes The rise of Urban Agriculture the Transition Towns movement in Ireland Conceptual framework Previously marginalised, urban agriculture and the UK, which is a development of The struggle for land has always had a (UA) has recently been receiving increasing potentially historic significance which has dimension which explicitly challenges the recognition, and is moving higher on the UA as a central focus. ruling order. Capitalist development and urban agenda. At the same time, we are Urban agriculture contributes to a urbanisation are everywhere accompanied seeing a rapprochement between official sustainable form of development in a by the degradation and eviction of rural agendas and grassroots movements in number of ways. It reduces poverty and labourers, and in response, we find an advocating UA. What is the explanation? hunger, generates jobs and can increase uninterrupted tradition of fighting back, A serious urban food crisis is now hovering. income. Its contribution to inclusion of a running from the English Diggers of 1649 We will discuss the substance of this crisis wide variety of destitute social groups is through to the Brazilian landless movement in a moment, but the initial point to make significant. At the same time, its allows for a (MST). is that official development discourses recycling of organic domestic waste through But UA also has another side to it: dare not acknowledge that food security is compost and recycling of waste water and integrative, in the sense of encouraging under threat, so it is not openly discussed. therefore contributes to improving the people to accept their lot within an However, the increasing emphasis on UA environment. The evidence is that this new exploitative system. For the working class, constitutes a kind of coded recognition. trend is here to stay. But existing research urban/industrial life can be alienating and Thus, both many national policies and laws has been deficient in key respects: although oppressive; if workers can be made to calm in countries as diverse as Brazil, China much empirical work has been done, down and peaceably dig their allotment, and Peru, and many municipal policies, analysis tends to be restricted to assessing they are less likely either to get drunk, or such as that of Kampala (Uganda), are ‘best practice’, at the expense of any to radicalise and fight the system in their now UA-friendly. On the community side, understanding of the true significance and workplace or the street. This was the urban dwellers, finding their food security underlying logic of this crucial phenomenon. thinking behind official backing for the increasingly challenged, are unfolding many This paper is intended as an initial English allotment movement, and behind exciting new UA innovations, for example contribution to pushing the theory forward. similar programmes in France; in times the maraîchers (vegetable gardeners) in We define UA as the sum of food of severe crisis UA has been seen as a Dakar (Senegal), and Chinese mushroom production activities in the city and its source of ‘values’ and integration, which producing co-ops. These developments give peri-urban region. We emphasise not just attracted strong support from the Nazis. rise to new institutional forms, enabling land, but space (rooftops, balconies). In the It encourages the downtrodden to bear up official-grassroots dialogue, for example the third section, we will attempt a normative to the everyday oppressions of urban life, multi-actor committee in Accra (Ghana), or definition. without demanding a say in how the city Peri-urban mushroom farming in China 2 DPUNEWS: EDITION 51 5375_UCL DPUNEWS_V3.indd 2 03/07/2009 10:28 is run. There is therefore always a strong tension between the radical and co-opting facets of UA. In the current crisis, this historic contradiction is undoubtedly still present, but the bland ‘best practice’ discourse of much contemporary UA analysis serves to obscure it. It is this fudging which we need to clear away. So much for the continuity with earlier history, but today’s crisis also introduces many new features. Workers employed in the formal sector are probably now the minority, and the principal problem is to manage the disaffection and alienation of the more marginalised populations who theory that poor people lack ‘entitlements’ ABUNDANCE project subsist in an informal way. Official discourses (the wherewithal to access food). But to demonstrate estate also correctly – albeit from a social although Sen was right to attack the food-growing, on the Guinness Trust Estate, control motivation – recognise a link with Malthusian notion of an absolutely deficient Loughborough Park, nutrition: poor nutrition underpins cycles of food supply, there remains something South London. underachievement and exclusion. more profound underpinning the crisis: The above points would apply at an the actually existing global food system individual or family level, but becomes – squeezed between diminishing returns even more interesting when we move to a from chemical-based agriculture, peak community level. The sustainable livelihoods oil, insufficient resilience in the face of framework recognises the importance of climate change shocks, and a tendency for networks, and also, their vulnerability at a speculative finance capital increasingly to time of crisis. Once again, this recognition exploit the food sector – will soon genuinely is correct, but it can be pushed in an be unable to feed the people. exploitative sense: if communities can be encouraged to guarantee their own social A move in the right direction and economic reproduction in a low-cost In a normative sense, the fundamental way or outside the monetary economy, programme is to shift to a radical movement this will relieve a failing capitalism of of dispossessed and rightless. This will the responsibility of repairing the social be possible if producers’ movements and damage it continuously causes. Hence the urban agriculture co-ops can link up their ‘sustainable communities’ discourse, of struggles, and their initiatives, to a much which UA is an integral part. broader array of social movements. We can formulate in theory the This may be concretely expressed in an contradiction between a transformative or a agenda for change, addressing in a practical merely palliative UA, but the reality of how way the specific challenges facing an this plays itself out can only be grasped in urban agriculture which, in many respects, the concrete. For instance, the piqueteros stands today at a crossroads. The point is in Argentina are a social movement which to accentuate those already-existing facets radically questioned power relations locally of UA which can seriously contribute and globally. The movement has since been to humanity’s surviving the crisis. As a channelled to a significant extent into UA preliminary contribution, we would highlight activity, notably in the city of Rosario. It the following linked aspects. Firstly, the might be that this has anaesthetised it; but productivity of UA needs to be raised so as on the other hand, UA practitioners have to constitute a serious contribution to the retained their militance, so this could also cause of ‘cities feeding people’. Secondly, equally signify the birth of a new radicalised cultivation methods associated with a high form of UA. Only research on the ground output of food must still be not just organic, can answer such questions. but also low-input, including low input Let’s now add the dimension of the of labour (permitting the same individual wider food crisis itself. In its initial form, to combine UA with diverse livelihood this crisis seems to confirm Amartya Sen’s strategies), of energy and (a key point) of DPUNEWS: EDITION 51 3 5375_UCL DPUNEWS_V3.indd 3 03/07/2009 10:28 ‘Permaculture Training Course led by Graham Burnett and Mark Warner water, alongside low output of greenhouse gases and harmful waste. Thirdly, UA must be incorporated into a sustainable city metabolism, using methods similar to those of ‘industrial ecology’ to process things which would otherwise be waste (grey water, compostable material). Fourthly UA should become a laboratory of institutional experiments of wider significance to the new popular development project, e.g. regimes for the stewardship of common property resources. Finally, all of the capable of feeding the city’s residents is a unique contributor in embodying popular above imply a big development and input qualitative one. This is why the Garden City aspirations to overturn our alienation from of knowledge. This knowledge must aim manifesto launched by Ebenezer Howard the natural world. at empowering grassroots producers, in 1898, and carried forward by Unwin for example to select and save their own et Parker, remains a living issue. In many Supporting Urban Agriculture in seed and experiment with it. This is fully respects, the key is vision. This is why the practice: ABUNDANCE compatible with, and in fact requires, a Transition Towns (TT) experience is so The ABUNDANCE project (Activating major investment in R&D, as in the Cuban relevant, because a visioning exercise is Blighted Urban Niches for a Daring case (research on biological pest controls, central to it: in his day, Howard lacked the Agricultural Network of Creativity and etc.) benefit of permaculture knowledge, but as Endeavour), run by the DPU in partnership We will conclude by highlighting a the TT experience shows, the permaculture with Transition Town Brixton was initiated few trends to be emphasised in realising approach is applicable not just to agriculture in late 2007 and concluded (in a formal these goals. UA cannot be seen merely in a strict sense, but to its place within the sense) at the end of 2008.