For years we’ve heard the growing consensus, that we now live in the global village. The death of distance heralded by scholars (ushered in by the information revolution) was to transform our lives as the human family ascended the next flight of escalators in our collective evolution. Of course, it hasn’t been quite so triumphant a decade. Over the past few years economic chaos the likes of which Hollywood screenwriters could scarcely imagine have illuminated just how fragile local communities have become within this new global “village”. At the same time the income gap has grown larger as wealth is disproportionally accrued in the hands of a few who benefit immensely from the new global economics, while hundreds of millions in communities across North America and elsewhere have seen stagnant wages or lost their jobs altogether. As resources and wealth continue to be sucked upwards, those left on the ground are noticing who their neighbors are once again, and how they can be of use to their communities. Increasingly they’re getting back to providing basic needs, food for example.
An urban farm in Detroit
In Vancouver, and in cities around the world, a concerted effort to reclaim the local from the global is underway in communities. Many of these communities once relied heavily on ‘the global’ to create jobs and to bring investment. Now, like in Detroit and other US Midwestern cities, abandoned spaces are being slowly reclaimed in the wake of fleeing capital, turned green largely out of necessity but also out of opportunity. But this post is about why Vancouver is becoming an exception to the rule, and what implications it may have for urban farming in other cities that aren’t in decline or full blown crisis, yet.
There are a number of things that make Vancouver very different from Detroit, Milwaukee or Havana, but the two most striking differences are persistent high property value coupled with increasing high density development.
Metro Vancouver still experiences high property value thanks to a strong housing market and scarcity of land. As for Density, the City has identified it as a key pillar in its sustainability and planning goals, meaning competing uses of land which could otherwise be farmed on including Laneway housing and more high-rises or medium-rise buildings in the urban environment. Highrises in particular not only require land but they also block sunlight, essential for food production. The city’s view corridor policy ensures that long shadows aren’t cast on major 
shopping streets like Granville, at least during a considerable portion of daytime shopping hours , but with more highrises on the way more shadows will inevitably follow in the urban environment, but this isn’t the really pressing issue. The primary use of remaining lands for real estate development (like North East False Creek) is however. When considering land use options, the use with the highest economic return (and least public outcry or negative impact to communities) is usually what gets approved. This means that urban farmers are left with few other options but backyards or brownfields when competing against development in Vancouver; unless they want to plant their crops in Richmond of course…
Kwantlen Polytechnic University has graduated a number of enthusiastic and smart students from their Farm School who have gone on to take advantage of the farm incubator program offered through the University. With land available in Richmond, private owners have also welcomed these farm graduates onto their properties. But there’s hope that Vancouver proper can also welcome the coming crop of graduates too.
A group of 50 urban farmers and food security advocates meeting Nov 22nd, sponsored in part by Little Nest, Building Opportunities with Business and the City's Food Policy Council
Despite the inherent land use challenges Vancouver faces, similar to all major global cities, the City has been a strong ally for urban farmers and food security advocates. The Vancouver Food Policy Council was created in 2004 and it continues to support a number of initiatives within the broader food system of the City (and region), including an urban farm network which appears to be forming here. This network aims to build capacity through identifying collectively shared challenges and opportunities for urban farmers and help the City to identify trends in UF as well as develop sustainability indicators (economic, social and environmental) to help gaugue progress or challenges within this nascent but quickly emerging sector.
A working group session Jan 30th at the Mt. Pleasant Community Centre to further solidify the collective aims and purposes of an urban farm network in the city. Facilitated by Vince Verlaan of HP Lanarc it was also a delicious potluck
BOB has been working with a local urban farmer and soil science instructor at Richmond Farm School, Chris Thoreau, to convene and facilitate the stakeholders of this network which include 19 urban farms that vary in size and approach (from CSA models like Backyard Bounty to more intensive SOLEfood Inner-City Farm or Farmers on 57th) as well as experts from local universities and the private sector. The initiative has been funded with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC as well as the Organic Sector Development Program and is poised to receive further support from other organizations as it continues to moves forward.
But despite Vancouver’s current Mayor and Council gunning for this city to be the greenest in the world by 2020, the developmental patterns inherent within modern cities in a state of growth present a challenge to urban farming- no matter how friendly the policy environment. Farmland within other global cities, particularly ones poised for growth are under persistent threat from real estate development among other things.
There’s a reason why Detroit is poised to become an urban farming Mecca…it has few economic choices, people in need of food and a lot of abandoned land available. Havana Cuba provides another example of a city embracing urban farming as subsidies and crucial trade patterns with Russia were suddenly disrupted and in a matter of weeks the whole city (and country) needed to grow its own food again. Both of these cases were in response to crisis, both economic in nature.
Dr. David Harvey of City University New York succinctly summarizes the ongoing crisis inherent within capitalism that has led to the recent global economic meltdown affecting local economies in thousands of cities and towns around the planet. Click that link to see his 10 minute RSA video, it’s some food for thought. (no pun intended)
What an increasing number of urban farmers have said in Vancouver, is that cities don’t need to wait for economic collapse or a major crisis before urban farming should become an active part of the local economy and contribute to a more resilient food system. It can be a robust vehicle for community economic development unto itself within a globally competitive city, and it should be. The more poignant question one could follow with is whether community economic development and global economic development are in fact complimentary or at odds with one another? Looking at the recent trends in income disparity, the wealth gap, and the effect on urban environments around the world, this is appearing to be an increasingly important question. At the community economic development level a lot of the jobs we may see emerging will be ones dedicated to picking up the pieces (literally and figuratively) of our communities that fell prey to the global economic trends, and replanting the seeds of community building (once again literally and figuratively).
Growing food in an urban environment is nothing new, it has been done for thousands of years in towns and cities, in fact it was crucial to the formation of cities in the first place. The rise of industrialization and the profound effects it had on the urban experience began to push food production out of cities just a couple of hundred years ago, to the periphery or rural outreaches where it too became radically rearranged or reinvented by those same forces of industrialization. Over the past 40 years the cities of North America and Europe transitioned away from industrial manufacturing to services (secondary to tertiary or quaternary employment sectors) and the old industrial lands either languished, in need of remediation, or were reborn as condo lofts and retrofitted warehouse offices (Yaletown for example). Those industrial lands that haven’t been scooped up by development present some of the best locations for economically viable urban farming-meaning a large enough parcel and close to markets. But cities, including Vancouver, have to weigh the value of urban farms vs the value of development in the urban environment. Both have benefits and both provide challenges, only one has a strong lobbying voice and billions of dollars behind it at this point.
Nov 22 Meeting Summary and Project Intro – 20 Dec Version (First group meeting involving 50+ farmers and food security advocates last November that has led to the exploration of this urban farm network in Vancouver)
Urban farms are not only providing food, but environmental services ranging from carbon sinks (urban farming rarely requires industrial heavy machinery and is in close proximity to markets, so the sink potential is not offset) to cross pollination to reduction of noise pollution. Not only do urban farms provide food, but they provide jobs, including jobs to residents with barriers to employment and have great potential to create economic spinoff opportunities through the need for distribution, processing, packaging, storage, marketing and other services. These keep wealth in the community, a key pillar of CED, rather than send it spiraling upwards into the coffers of private banks and hedge funds.
As good as all this is, unless the real estate market cools here, urban farming in Vancouver is going to likely see continued land use challenges mostly from the competition of development (in particular luxury condo development in what little space the city has left and mega-houses on ALR land) which is inextricably linked to the global real estate market and other processes of globalization. Some economists believe the city’s real estate market is primed for a major correction (“but they’ve been saying that for years!” You cry) but until that happens backyard CSAs may constitute the path of least resistance -provided they can transport their soil and crops if tenure becomes threatened. Could they ever reach economies of scale collectively and contribute to the resilience of our regional food system though? This could be debated, and is.
For Vancouver this is an interesting dilemma, and if dealt with right could be an even more interesting case study. The City wants communities to have access to local food, which has low margins of profit in many cases and needs economies of scale or high margin products to be economically sustainable. But the City also benefits from its property tax base so it can’t just turn its back on development. While the attractiveness of land to developers and investors creates high property value, making large scale farms difficult due to land costs incurred. Not to mention that urban farming is still in contravention of Vancouver City bylaws, which means if there is a land use complaint from a resident, urban farming will inevitably come out on the losing side.
So farms need economies of scale to be economically viable but no policy exists to protect them, meaning investment or financing in large scale projects on private land, let alone brownfields, is once again made more difficult. Conversely, high end products that increase the production value per square foot are attractive from a business point of view for urban farmers, but they don’t contribute substantially to the resilience of the local food system- one of the chief reasons the City supports increased urban farming in the first place. Often times the most profitable types of urban produce are sprouts or high-end salad greens, not necessarily your staples of food security and these rely on a high-end customer base that can purchase these items (farmers markets, restaurants and in some cases hotels) because the urban farmers also need to pay rent or mortgage in one of the the least affordable cities in the world. But if Vancouver can do it, if it can continue in its pattern of dense urban development while increasing the sustainability and economic viability of urban farming, it could very well make heads turn once again and provide a model that other cities could build on in the future.
The Vancouver situation presents a unique, but what is probably going to be an increasingly common, set of circumstances. A city wants to attract foreign direct investment and develop land which in turn adds to the City coffers through taxation. As local governments are increasingly seeing responsibilities and costs devolved to them but not the matching funds from the Provinces or Ottawa to deal with increased responsibilities this is one of the best sources of revenue, at least for Canadian cities. The city then experiences high land costs fueled by a speculative real estate market that looks to develop unused or under-used land in this place which aspires to be a global city. The city also has a local government that is aware of food security issues but also supports densification of the urban environment at the same time, as smart growth and new urbanism continue to gain in popularity within the planning industry. This means that more than ever, urban farmers in cities like Vancouver (meaning growing cities that are still attracting capital, investment and Richard Florida’s Creative Class) need to work together to ensure that they have a voice that can speak to power, so that positive sum scenarios can be produced moving forward. Vancouver can once again be a leading model of planning, design and implementation if it can find the way to do this.
Members of the emergin urban farm network in Vancouver enjoy a Q&A session with Will Allen of Growing Power, January 2011
Sharing resources and skills, identifying policy gaps, developing mentorship programs, professional development, community engagement, food education, soil propegation, marketing and communications, collectively managed projects, these are the kinds of things many urban farmers and those who support them have been looking at in Vancouver’s emerging Urban Farming Network. As long as this city remains an attractive place to invest and live, urban farming will need to be resourceful, creative and well managed in order to be sustainable. This attention to entrepreneurial resourcefulness received a big boost of energy with the recent talks given by Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power USA, who spoke to urban farmers and policy makers at several venues throughout Vancouver this January.
The entrepreneurial spirit and the creativity is here among those practicing urban farming in Metro Vancouver. What remains to be seen is whether Vancouver can enable urban farming to reach those scales of production needed for economic sustainability and a real impact in the resilience of our regional food system when densification through real estate development is such a key pillar of its sustainable development goals. I have faith the City can do this, but no illusions that it’s going to be easy. Having an urban farm network to engage the city on policy and land use issues, and to work with communities to ensure farming is welcomed as an asset to urban spaces and those who live in them is definitley a good step in that process.
