When I made presentations there was no generally accepted term, no name to frame these disperate initiatives and ideas. The nearest to an inclusive, collective name we had was ‘food security’, but this said little about the contribution to regional economies made by the urban food supply chain and the future of city fringe market gardeners, orchardists and poultry producers. Then, along came ‘food sovereignty’ with its implications of control over one’s food supply and the right to choose to eat food prepared, sold and distributed in a way acceptable to the eater. This introduced a political element and supported fair economic returns to farmers.

Bringing the food to the city... farmers' markets offer an option to the supermarket for authentically fresh food.

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Food security… food sovereignty… it might seem that we’re playing with words, and that’s true. But words are important. Naming imparts meaning to a practice or set of ideas and positions it in the social marketplace for ideas. Chosen carefully, the names given to ideas and practices frame them in a context and can create a positive mental image around them. Carefully chosen names makes ideas comprehensible to people, to those in professional practice as well as to those engaged in community-based education and advocacy.

In doing those talks around our food systems, what I needed was a term that gathered together the concept of urban food security and the right of people to make their own food choices—the ‘food sovereignty’ element—added the idea of the need for a secure and resilient food supply for our cities towns—and to link this to the practice of urban planning that plays a role in either disabling or enabling viable, regional food economies and the access that people have to fresh food. The name, the term I sought would have had to be acceptable to those making decisions about urban landuse and economy – local governments and planners – as well as to community and small business food enterprise and to the public interested in such things.

Just as tagging digital files offers up a broad range of material when you make a search on your computer, so should the tag we give to this diversity of practices, planning concepts and community initiatives. Urban food security, nutritional health, urban planning, social and economic innovation and the sustainability and food resiliency of our towns and cities would all have to be included. The tag—the name—would have to offer urban food advocates and sustainability educators in local government and community education a convenient, meaningful and timely term to bring together discussion of the plethora of community-based and mainstream food initiatives and ideas about the food system now starting to vie for the attention of the public.

Something new

Not properly recognised as an important element in our socially and ecologically sustainable future until a few years ago, food and the security of its supply is now regarded as of equal importance to energy, water, transport and waste by a growing number of sustainability thinkers, educators and urban planners.

The importance of food choices to sustainable cities was emphasised by the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab (VEIL), part of the University of Melbourne, in a report a few years ago. The report, Safe and Secure Food Systems for Victoria, made the link between food, waste and resource use. Food choices, the report stated, account for:

• 50% household water use; this accounts for the water used to grow or produce the food plus that consumed in processing; this volume of water embodied in food has become known as ‘virtual water’; its total can be compared to the 11% of water used in the house and garden
• 28% household greenhouse gas emissions compared to 20% attributable to direct household energy use and 10% to transport; the total includes emissions from food production and transportation through the food supply chain
• 40% of household food waste to landfill in Melbourne, made up of food organics.

These findings place food choices as some of the most important to sustainability and turn those seemingly simple choices into keystone choices. Just as a keystone is critical to holding up an arch, so food choice is a keystone consideration in holding up our future sustainability.

Food education

Many local government sustainability educators work in waste education and when they include food in their work focus mainly on food waste. This is not to deny that food waste is a mammoth problem, as the NSW government’s Love Food Hate Waste program disclosed when in reporting that the state wastes 800,000 tonnes or more than $2.5 billion of food a year. Add to that the totals for the other states and you have a major waste of both food and money.

Focusing on food waste is important, especially if we can highlight ways to compost it into fertiliser and return that to the market gardens on the city fringe.

Loal government sustainability educators and their counterparts in community oganisations are doing more than focusing on food waste. Many, such as groups gathered around the Transition Towns idea and Permaculture design, encourage food production for household self-provisioning in home and community gardens. This constitutes a renewal of the long Australian tradition of home gardening… the vegetable patch and chook run in the backyard. In our big cities however, there is diminishing opportunity for this as urban consolidation and higher density living—which are planning responses to curbing the urban sprawl that destroys the city-fringe market gardens that feed the city—reduce the size of home gardens and eliminate them entrely. For urban centres in our big cities, the work of local government and community educators may need to start to include more on food distribution opportinities than food production.

If food really is to become a core component in sustainability education and planning then we need to a whole systems approach that looks at the food system in its entirety from farming, through processing and distribution to consumption and on to dealing with food waste.

There has been no framework for sustainability educators to adopt such a whole food systems approach and no simple way to context their educational work within urban food systems, the structures through which food arrives on the tables and in the takeaway containers of eaters in town and city. Until now.

FSPUD

Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design is a concept that combines food and its acquisition with the planning needs of cities. The name plays on that of Water Sensitive Urban Design, WSUD, which moved rapidly from good idea to adoption by planners and local government. Hopefully, FSUD will follow a similar trajectory.

Enabling this will be a new concept document from the VEIL team called, in a play on acronym, Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design—FSPUD. Get it? As in potato.

According to the publication, planners seldom consider food and the security of its supply in their work. “They see food as someone elses’ responsibility and so it falls through the cracks… there is no explicit recognition of food in planning documents”, says the authors.

Clearly it really is time for planners to think about the security of our own urban food supply. Reinforcing this are a number of facts:

• agriculture uses between 65 and 70 percent of Australia’s fresh water supply, giving food production and distribution an important role in a country that suffers periodic drought that brings water use restrictions to our cities
• the global food crisis of 2007/08 when costs rose so astronomically there were food riots in around 32 countries and some grain producing nations ceased to export so as to retain their crop for their own use
• the near-loss of the food productivity of the Murray basin several years ago when drought threatened the food supply of our south-eastern cities
• the emergence of ‘food deserts’ in parts of our cities where nourishng – as opposed to fatty fast foods – are not in easy reach of households, a failure of both professional and local government planning.

Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design is more than a concept paper. It is an introductory text to the topic and a scoping document that explores its parameters. It’s where planners and food system advocates can start their reading to educate themselves on the potential of food production and distribution as well as the food security of the city and the food sovereignty of its residents.

Challenge and opportunity

It’s not that there are no opportunities to do this. Planners and local government can incorporate food sensitive urban design by combining food production and distribution with other planning goals to create attractive, liveable surroundings.

Additionally, food sensitive urban design offers an opportunity to strengthen community interactions in diversified, shared places such as parks when it incorporates community food production initiatives like city farms, community gardens and food swaps. The evidence that people want to participate in activities as simple as food swaps and community food production is the popularity of these initiatives… perhaps they’re a means through which people get a sense of the place where they live, a sense of belonging and inclusion and of community, a need identified by Australian social researcher, Hugh Mackay. Including these things in urban place design is best seen as diversifying recreational, educational and community engagement options on public land along with traditional, city parkland uses of the land.

“There is increasing evidence that involvement in the provision of food, be it growing, cooking or social eating, can improve healthy eating behaviour, increase opportunities for social engagement and connection to nature and help foster increased self-esteem and a sense of achievement”, summarises the report.

The VEIL document proposes that planners think about including opportunities for food systems in city planning by local government and the private sector:

• creating the option for food production in city farms (which serve educational and recreational needs as well as offering a DIY or commercial approach to food production) and in community food gardens; these can also build social capital through the cooperation necessary in managing them
• incidental food production such as productive (selected nut and fruit) street and parkland trees for shade, amenity and neighbourhood character
• incorporating access to fresh food sources via public  transport, a need highlighted by organisations like the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance
• resource recovery from urban food waste as an agricultural input.

The report found that socially and economically advantaged neighbourhoods have a greater number of supermarkets and fruit and vegetable retailers within close proximity to residences. In contrast, low density urban growth such as that occurring on the fringes of our metropolitan areas and in the exurbs, the report points out, ” …results in communities with limited financial resources being more car dependent and have longer travel times to access food”. This is especially the situation in communities where residents suffer financial hardship as well as those marked by low density development, itself a contributor to reliance on private vehicles and to the limited economic viability of public transport.

Integrated into the urban environment, food sensitive urban design promotes health, improved access to fresh food, supports urban livelihoods and economic opportunity in the urban food system, creates a sense of community and participation in the management of public land, furthers urban sustainability and contributes to resilient cities.

“There is increasing evidence that involvement in the provision of food, be it growing, cooking or social eating, can improve healthy eating behaviour, increase opportunities for social engagement and connection to nature and help foster increased self-esteem and a sense of achievement”, summarises the report.

Food sensitive urban design offers a great opportunity for the more innovative in the planning and design professions, for the civic entrepreneurs in local government and for the social entrepreneurs in communities.

Making it happen—advocacy

Food sensitive planning and urban design sounds like a good idea that could open new possibilities in our cities, but how do we make it a reality?

First, say the authors, circulate the Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design concept document among those whose work could be informed by it. In addition to councils and planners this could include community-based sustainability groups and educators such as those gathered around climate change campaigns, Transition Towns and Permaculture design.

Many of the food-related initiatives of these community groups are piecemeal… a home garden here, a community garden there and a Permablitz that brings people together elsewhere but that offers no ongoing program of participant education and engagement. Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design, if adopted as a good idea, has the potential to provide the framework through which their efforts are integrated into a greater urban whole. It could scale-up these worthy but individual efforts by positioning them in a broad urban continuum and linking their participants to other community-based, local government and small business/social enterprise initiatives.

Then there’s the option for FSPUD advocates to host workshops and advocate to local government how food sensitive urban design could be integrated into policy and practice. This would include facilitating active transport links with food retail and community food systems such as food cooperatives, community supported agriculture, community gardens and other community self-help initiatives as well as to food retail. Promoting particular projects to local government is good because when it is posible to work constructively with councils projects can move from idea to reality. A  focus on policy advocacy creates opportunity for a greater number of initiatives to happen.

Integration in the planning process

If food sensitive urban design is to influence strategy and policy development in local and state government it will have to become something that is considered at different stages of the planning process. It will need to

influence budgets and to be positioned as a valid consideration when it comes to setting priorities. Thus, FSPUD advocates will need to educate desision makers as to why food issues are an appropriate focus for the planning system. Best impacts, say the authors, will come from having food sensitive urban design enbedded in state planning frameworks. The same could be said for local goverment planning instruments as it is councils that influence the type of development in an area.

“In the face of complex and unpredictable change, FSPUD seeks to support the development of adaptable and responsive settlements and communities”

In enlarging the role of food sensitive urban planning, the paper says: “Well designed integration of food production can help make urban environments more comfortable… eg. by mitigating the urban heat island effect… as well as more enjoyable and safe”.

One way this can be done is to regard community-based food production opportunities on public or private land as ‘placemaking’ initiatives. Placemaking is a planning concept that refers to making public places, such as parks, into safe, family friendly, diverse, innovative and attractive places catering to both traditional park roles such as passive recreation and to new uses such as community gardens.

Opportunities—putting FSUD into practice

Putting FSUD into practice will require the cooperation of  communities and councils and, preferably, state government.

“In the face of complex and unpredictable change, FSPUD seeks to support the development of adaptable and responsive settlements and communities”, says the authors.

Local government can start by identifying and removing barriers. The ease with which water sensitive urban design was accepted by councils suggests food sensitive urban design could likewise become accepted.

But it might not be so easy. There was considable community sentiment in support of water sensitive urban design and the employment by councils of environmental science and environmental management graduates as resource managers and as sustainability educators paved the way internally for acceptance of the concept. Water has been accepted for a longer time as a critical resource and the droughts and urban water restrictions in Australian cities of the first decade of the twenty-first century reinforced its primacy. This legitimised state and local government putting budgets and staff behind water conservation, education and planning.

There is nothing similar by way of tertiary-educated state or local government staff in the area of food to drive an internal agenda, so the adoption of food sensitive urban design by councils would rely to a large extent on environmentally-qualified sustainability educators being familiar with food issues and their links to the common focus areas of sustainability education of energy, water, transport and waste.

Strategies that integrate productive landscapes including fruit and nut trees with other landscape objectives can open the door to new ways of seeing streetscapes

Unlike other countries, Australia has not experienced a food crisis as it has a water crisis. Price increases for grain staples resulting from the food crisis of 2007/08 were absorbed by a bouyant economy and there was sufficient household financial padding such that people could afford to pay a little extra. In other words, affluence insulates communities from an increasingly volatile global food market and does not highlight food as a critical resource to the security of our cities.

Contributing to the illusion of food plenty are well-stocked supermarket shelves. Most shoppers simply don’t realise that there is considerably less than a week’s food on these supermarket shelves, assuming no panic buying. Little stock is held by supermarkets which rely on frequent delivery by trucks from regional distribution centres through the ‘just in time’ system. Natural disasters can easily disrupt this vulnerable system, turning just in time delivery to just too late.

Positioning and validating food security and food sensitive urban design in local and state government, then, may not be as easy as was water sensitive urban design.

Making the link between community development through enabling community-based food systems, ensuring city plans include FSPUD opportunities and that fresh food retail is easily accessible to those without a car goes some way towards creating the conditions for an effective urban food supply chain. Food outlets need to be located where they are connected by public transport, walking and cycling. The problem with the big mall developments in the suburbs, surrounded by huge parking areas, is they encourage car use and local traffic congestion. Buying food becomes a high-carbon-emission activity. This is the realm of retail planning policy. Rather than huge malls isolated in a sea of parked cars, a healthy urbanism requires variety in food retail in easy access to where people live.

There’s also the role of urban fringe councils in using planning laws to reduce the loss of urban fringe farmland to urban development. There may also be need for a ‘right to farm’ policy when it comes to making decisions on complaints by residents in new urban developments about the noise, odour and hours of operation of adjacent farms.

The authors of Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design, as well as other urban food system advocates propose that councils consider:

• mixing large and small retailers with street frontages
• accessable via active transport (walking, cycling) and by public transport
• favouring fresh food retail rather than fast food takeaways—green grocers, butchers, fishmongers, bakeries with wholesome choices
• eating-out opportunities such as cafes and restaurants to give greater choice than accommodating only fast food outlets
• urban design guidelines that integrate productive landscapes including fruit and nut trees on streets and in parks with other urban landscaping objectives; “Strategies that integrate productive landscapes including fruit and nut trees with other landscape objectives can open the door to new ways of seeing streetscapes… “, the authors state in making the link between public place plantings and productive urban plantings; many councils are yet to be convinced of the multi-purpose values of what we might call edible landscaping, however there are a few that have done so
• housing strategies that increase density and that support the viability of local, smaller food retail outlets
• subdivision guidelines that embody food sensitive urban design, public and private garden space
• public open space and recreational strategies that integrate food opportunities into outdoor spaces, such as community gardens, city farms, farmers markets, cafes etc
• public health plans that have a component of nutritional health linked to the regional food supply chain
• rural land strategies to ensure the continuity of market gardening, orcharding and poultry production at the urban/rural interface and that avoid the loss of farmland to urban development and the conversion of productive agricultural land into unproductive urban lots
• the adoption of council food procurement policies that support regional farmers and food enterprises and that stipulate the purchase of food that has been produced by environmentally and socially ethical methods; we must recognise, however, that a barrier to buying regionally produced foods is the lack of a certification scheme identifying regional production.

How to proceed

Food Sensitive Urban Planning and Design outlines a local government agenda for a year:

1. research an area’s food system to identify the most effective interventions
2. devise new strategies and policies to integrate food sensitive urban design
3. undertake capital works to create and improve assets for the production, preparation, distribution, exchange and celebration of food
4. appoint staff to plan and implement food sensitive urban design.

One or two of these points might take longer than a year, however a year would suffice as a timeframe to make a start. The proposed year program, I believe, might better be used to produce a local government food security policy, given the absence of anything from state government despite lobbying for such by food advocacy groups in the states. Councils have developed – and are developing – such policy, the first believed to be that adopted by South Sydney City Council in 2007 and entitled What’s Eating South Sydney?

A local government food policy would:

• identify demographics at risk of food insecurity
• plan how fresh food retail would be linked to public and active – walking and cycling – transport
• identify and plan for the multiplication of community-based food initiatives such as community and home gardens on the production side, and distribution systems such as food cooperatives and community supported agriculture schemes
• looks at resource recovery of food waste and at increasing the volume of food collected are redistributed by food salvage enterprises
• consider the potential for small scale intensive, commercial food production and the potential for innovative food production technologies such as commercial scale aquaponics as small business or social enterprise opportunites
• introduce internal food procurement policy for council events and services.

A food security policy can be a metapolicy, an umbrella inclusive of council food procurement, community gardens, small business start-up assistance, grants, street tree planting and aspects of social policy.

A powerful start

Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design is a powerful articulation of a new idea. It is both a document to kick-start the integration of food as an urban resource as critical as water and energy to the sustainability of our cities and it is an exploration of an emerging topic.

Communities and small businesses have already made a start in making our cities more food secure and in realising the social benefits of the community-based approach to doing this. Here and there around Australia brave and innovative councils, too, have seen its relevance and its potential to create opportunity for community building and in reinforcing local food economies.

Most importantly, Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design is an advocacy document proposing that the time has arrived to incorporate food security and food-related opportunities into the planning profession and into state and local government policy.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Strategic questions about proposed development

The authors of Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design suggests a number of strategic questions that state and local government planners could ask about proposed urban development:

1. What is the impact of the proposal on the amount and viability of productive land?

• loss of land could impact future food supply and economy
• can productive capacity be retained within rezoned landuse?
• what are the opportunities to redevelop existing urban areas to produce food? Edible streetscapes, community gardens etc.

2. Are there interface issues between agricultural land and other uses?

• does residential land directly adjoin rural?
• could less sensitive land be used as the interface?
• could stormwater, wastewater etc be used on adjacent agricultural land?

3. How will people access food and the food choices important to them?

• where are nearest sources?
• are these car reliant sources?
• can changes be made for active transport?
• is there space for community gardens, markets etc?

4. Does the area increase positive exposure to food?

• integrate productive space into public places
• establish food-value productive street trees
• food production features that contribute to amenity and opportunities for community participation
• accessibility of public places
• celebration of local food efforts such as verge garden competitions, front garden competitions etc.

5. Does the space encourage development and use of diverse food outlets?

• food exchanges, markets
• are food outlets and community food activities perceived as attractive, safe, friendly?
• opportunities for preparation and sharing of food… community kitchens, BBQs
• shelter in open space for communal meals and family gatherings?

Like nuclear energy and the genetic engineering of crops, geoengineering is a topic guaranteed to provoke heated responses. It is also a topic that splits opinion within the broad sustainability movement.

This became clear to me during an online conversation on the topic. Under discussion was a proposal that an organisation I am affiliated with sign a petition opposing geoengineering. It became clear that most of those in the organisation supported signing, but there were those who weren’t so sure.

“The petition ignores the fact that we have got into the climate mess in large measure via agricultural geoengineering (land clearing, over grazing, overcropping, river diversions, swamp draining, dam building and so on)”, wrote one correspondent.

“The mere reversing of the damage by large scale adoption of agroecological farming methods will also be geoengineering, and large scale adoption is being encouraged by many of the signatories.

“In other words they are shooting themselves in the foot by encouraging geoengineering via agroecological farming on the one hand, and signing petitions against it with the other. Whilst I sympathise with the intent of the petition, it concerns me that the organisations have not thought this through well enough to see their internal contradiction.”

We are already geoengineers

Many in the sustainability movements would surely agree that agroecological geoengineering would be preferable to other types. Those other types include the deliberate manipulation of the earth system to change the climate using high risk technologies such as mimicing volcanic eruptions by seeding the upper atmosphere with light reflective particles (volcanoes put a lot of particulate matter into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and produces a temporary cooling of the atmosphere) and seeding the oceans to encourage plankton blooms to sequester atmospheric carbon.

How geoengineering could be done or whether it really is feasible remain unknowns. What those opposing it have done, however, is have trials of the idea banned. Once again, this discloses differences of opinion within the sustainability movement and shows it to by made up of quite a diversity of tendencies rather than being the solid block it is sometimes portrayed as.

our enterprises on such a scale that they geoengineer the global ecosystem intentionally or not

What we can agree upon, now that the seven billionth person joined the planet on 31 October this year, is that human numbers are so large and our enterprises on such a scale that they geoengineer the global ecosystem intentionally or not. And they have done so for thousands of years. This was what permaculture co-developer, Bill Mollison, was getting at when he said that agriculture has transformed the world and is responsible for the degradation of the land that supports the growing human numbers.

He also said the ‘everything gardens’, by which he meant that life alters its environment to better support itself, including humans. It is what I was getting at when I said that we are already geoengineers, that we have been running a millennia-long geoengineering project that has completely transformed the world… and rather than denying it we should accept it and learn to do it better.

This attitude reminds me of the passage on the back cover of the original Whole Earth Catalog of 1968: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it”. I paraphrase that to: “We are as terraformers and might as well get used to doing it properly”. With seven billion people we have little other choice.

Beyond monochrome

Bold ideas like geoengineering are seldom simple or black and white. Proposing a ban on them, as some of the sustainability movement wants, is to offer a seemingly simple solution to a complex problem. The trouble with this is that complex problems often need complex solutions. We see politicians throwing simple solutions at complex problems and we see the results. The smart intervention is one that comes from insight into the behaviour of systems, for systems are what we are dealing with here.

Driving the acceptance of geoengineering by some sustainability advocates is the recognition that we have achieved a degree of success in civil society adopting climate amelioration behaviours voluntarily, however without similar action by industry and institutions voluntary action will prove too little. Government continues to prevaricate and the time remaining in which to take action is running out. Someone at Sydney’s Green Capital business breakfast last week said that we have only a decade in which we can take action. To put it into the language of the popular cliche, the window of opportunity in which to act is closing. Soon, many fear, it will slam shut with such a bang that things will never be the same afterwards.

Fallback

Geoengineering is a fallback position, a place where humanity can take time-buying action to start to get things under control, if that is possible.

In strategic planning it is not wise to discard your last resort even if you don’t like it. It is wise to keep it in the cupboard until it is really needed… until all other solutions have failed. Then it is deployed although it might be less effective than we would have liked and might cause collateral damage. We use it because to take no action could lead to developments that are worse than those of taking action.

In this scenario, lobbies opposing geoengineering would see that it was not deployed as a substitute for ameliorating and of adapting to climate change. This is important because deploying geoengineering solutions will interfere in the geosystem and, as we know, intervention in a system is likely to produce often-unknown consequences at some place and at some time… collateral damage, that is. Hopefully, one of those consequences would be the preferred global cooling effect but there would likely be other, damaging consequences, too. Which is why geoengineering should be deployed only as a final measure. I fear that the reality is that the impact of not deploying geoengineering solutions would lead us down an equally destructive path with with consequences perhaps worse than those its critics predict for deploying it.

nonlinear change would not give us the time we need because it would be an accelerating positive feedback loop, essentially feeding on itself

The consequences of not acting would be due to the climate system lurching into a positive feedback loop accelerated by methane releases from the melting of northern permafrost and from ocean bed clathrates outgassing methane due to warming oceanic temperatures. For climate change, that would take it away from the linear model that is easier to understand and to intervene in into a nonlinear model in which changes occur less predictably and where the best point of intervention is anybody’s guess.

Depending on the rate of rate of change, linear change might allow the more or less orderly shift over time of agriculture, such as grain production moving to presently cold regions of northern hemisphere continental land masses and dryland grain cropping in areas shifting to drier conditions (whether this would be done by using existing varieties of already-adapted species, by breeding new hybrid varieties by conventional cross breeding, or by genetic modification is a current discussion among those who follow these things). An abrupt lurch into nonlinear change would not give us the time we need because it would be an accelerating positive feedback loop, essentially feeding on itself

Anti-science of just cautions?

The seemingly sensible act of proposing a ban on geoengineering can lead to the perception that those  proposing the bans are part of the anti-science movement most prominent among fundamentalist religious constituencies in the US. This is about public perception and, in advocacy, perception can count for more than can truth, something I learned from a one-time newspaper editor I worked for. We need to avoid these perceptions becoming more common by engaging in an open, public conversation around geoengineering… while there is still time.

We also need to move beyond banning new technologies and engage creatively with issues. Banning this and banning that sounds just like the environment movement c1979. That’s why the permaculture movement parted from it… because of its ingrained, oppositionist negativism and failure to actually articulate and create the things it wanted to see. It became a movement against, not a movement for. It would be sad to see the sustainability movement go down that path.

We have to get used to the reality that we have changed the planet and have greater capacity to do so now… and are still doing so. Once a new technology is developed it is out there for all with the technical capacity to use. Geoengineering won’t be stopped by merely banning it… someone, somewhere will start using it unilaterally or as a coalition of nations when things get tough. Our experience with nuclear weapons demonstrates this all too well.

It was my turn to show a video and lead a discussion afterwards in September and I chose Urban Orchard, a production of colleagues in Adelaide about the community food swap of the same name and other food swaps in their city. This was followed by a structured conversation about food swaps and was preceded by the shared meal which is cooked in the kitchen of the Chapel by the Sea, the premises in a commercial building made available to Transition Bondi but with which the organisation has no religious affiliation.

I came close to my culinary limits by chopping vegetables for the meal under the supervision of competent cooks Beatrice and Kim, both on the Transition Bondi team. The food itself comes from the Sydney Food Connect weekly collection that precedes the shared meal and video. Transition Bondi operates the weekly http://pacific-edge.info/urban_orchard/ City Cousin at the Chapel by the Sea, the distribution of the weekly boxes of Sydney region organic food to members. Attendees make a small contribution to cover the cost of the food.

A structured discussion

I had earlier worked out a number of key messages about food swaps that I wanted to get across during the event:

• food swaps are a proven and viable structure to swap your excess food with others to contribute to a nutritionally diverse diet (I provided evidence by naming examples and by referring to the video)
• food swaps are relatively easy to set up and run
• food swaps are community self-help initiatives
• food swaps are part of a wider system of community-based trading and exchange that goes under the name of the ‘collaborative economy’
• food swaps, because of the social interaction they involve, are convivial events that contribute to a sense of belonging in an area.

The option with these key messages is to start the conversation by writing them on the whiteboard, then going through them with examples and ideas,. Alternative, leave them unstated and addressing them within the structure of the guided conversation.

At 35 minutes, Urban Orchard is a good length to follow with a structured conversation about food share initiatives. Some feature length videos doing the rounds of the sustainability video circuit are too long for a follow-up conversation with the audience.

How to stimulate imaginations?

The question for me was how to use the ideas in the video to stimulate imaginations in the discussion.

I decided to make use of the structured conversation format known as Public Narrative. There are a number of ways to conduct conversations that lead somewhere, such as ORID, which leads participants through a sequence of objective, reflective, interpretive and decisional questions. There’s also Fran Peavey’s Strategic Questioning, Appreciative Enquiry and more.

The Public Narrative process begins with the ‘story of me’, leads into the ‘story of you’ and links to the theme of the conversation. It starts, for example, with an anecdotal structure about how the presenter got into whatever it is they do that is related to the theme of the conversation.

Following this structure, I told a brief story of how my interest in food and the issues around it started when I did Robyn Francis’ first ever Permaculture Design Course in the mid-1980s. Then, permaculture was largely  focused on food production in the home garden but I was inspired by the statement of one of permaculture’s founders, Bill Mollison, that you didn’t have to garden and grow your own food to practice permaculture. What you should do is buy your food from someone who has produced it ethically, in the environmental and social justice sense of the word.

My interest in food issues, I explained, grew with my association with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network from the time it started in the late 1990s and while working in project management and development education with an international development NGO, APACE, that was engaged in food security, small scale farming training and rural livelihood development in the Solomon Islands.

I went on to describe how circumstance and accident led to my becoming a consultant on local government policy development for community gardens and associated ventures.

The story of us

That was the ‘story of me’ component in the Public Narrative framework. Next came the ‘story of us’ in which the story of me segues into the story of the audience.

This is done by eliciting their reasons for attendance and, from that, their interest in food issues. You can use questions and answers and mini-conversations based on some of the responses. These are necessarily brief. It’s a process of following-up responses that address the theme of the video and the discussion as entry points into the community initiatives in food theme.

Strategic questions

By briefly exploring how the audience understands food issues through their responses to questions about what brought them to a video and discussion about food, by having a few respondents to the questions tell their own mini-story, the issue or theme—in this case about community intervention in their own food supply through food swaps and other mean is explored.

One of my questions was whether anyone knew of food swaps other than those in the video—the Urban Orchard swaps in Adelaide and Melbourne. Fortunately, there was someone in a leadership position with a community garden in south west Sydney who works mainly with social housing tenants and who has established a food swap. Having him tell the story of the swap reinforced some of my own key messages. I explained that there are food swaps at the North Wollongong Community Garden, in the Blue Mountains and that one was being planned for Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Some of the strategic questions I asked were:

• what in the video stood out as a good idea… what did you find interesting?
• have you heard about or been to food swaps like Adelaide’s Urban Orchard or the others in the video?
• do you think food swaps are useful initiatives in the city?
• how would you summarise the main messages in the video?
• what would it take to set up an Urban Orchard food swap in this part of Sydney?

The purpose of this last question was to stimulate any interest there might have been in setting up a food swap and to provide the opportunity for anyone who specifically came to the evening with the intention of starting a swap to put forward their ideas.

To explore this question I used the whiteboard and led brainstorming around a series of linked questions based on a simple systems thinking approach:

• what would be the needs or inputs to set up a food swap?
• what would be the functions or processes needed to run a swap, including those regular tasks that would be needed to make it happen?
• what would the yield or outputs of the food swap be and how would we use them?

I used two sets of terms in these questions—those familiar in systems thinking—inputs, processes, outputs—and those that might have been familiar to people who had a backgroubd in the permaculture design system which I knew some of those present had—needs, functions, yields. These are different terms for the same things and, as you usually do, you would choose those most understandable to your audience.

Here’s some of the responses to those questions that the audience brainstormed and that I wrote on the whiteboard as they were offered:

• inputs/needs—food to swap; a venue; organisers; publicity to attract swappers; tables to display food for swapping; a structure and process to facilitate the swap
• processes/functions—set-up and take-down; cleaning up after the swap; doing something with leftovers; communication to attract participants to the swaps
• outputs/yields—access to a diversity of swapped food; a sense of belonging to an interest group; social interaction.

The collaborative economy

Food swaps, like the clothing swaps happening nationwide, the second hand Saturdays and the other initiatives that make up community-based goods redistribution initiatives, are part of what is becoming more widely known as the ‘collaborative economy’. It’s all about peer-to-peer exchange.

As it turned out, no proposal emerged to set up a food swap in Bondi. The reason that came out of the evening’s proceedings was that there would be too few growers of food in the area, a reflection of the medium density nature of this part of the Eastern Suburbs which has a high proportion of its population living in apartments. There are a couple community food gardens in the area including that which was wrapped around a Bondi Road apartment block by Transition Bondi and which is open to public.

The evidence from the Sydney Food Connect weekly food box collection earlier in the evening is that community-based food distribution stytems, like Sydney Food Connect CSA (community supported agriculture), may be a more viable means of participating in community food systems. For permaculture design practitioners, this gets back to Bill Mollison’s statement about it not being necessary to grow your own food to participate in permaculture, but to buy it from someone who has produced it ethically.

By bringing people together in an informal setting around food for a focused conversation or video, Transition Bondi’s Wednesday events are one of those initiatives that have an important place in making our cities stimulating and good places to live.

IT WAS ON A SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING

It was also the day that the garden team acquitted their Matching Grant from the City of Sydney. The City provides the grants as start-up capital to community gardens and other community initiatives. There to acknowledge that was Ashley Heath, who administers Matching Grants for the City of Sydney, and her predecessor in the role, Lynn Welch.

Also invited by the gardeners was City of Sydney CEO, Monica Barone, who in her speech emphasised how the community garden was a local element in the Sustainable Sydney 2030 plan, the City’s blueprint for the next 30 years. The same could be said for all of the City’s community gardens and the civic engagement that comes with them. a

Monica spoke about the value of community initiatives to the City and urban contexts such as the income gap and other sociological matters related to living in Australia’s global city.

Celebration is important to community gardeners and to all community-initiatied projects, especially those that create places in our cities where families and individuals can gather and cooperate in some common project. And the James Street Reserve C0mmunity Garden has much to celebrate, having repurposed under-utilised city land for a productive garden where both food and social relationships are gardened.

The current edition of House and Garden magazine was provided to all at the dinner. It featured photos of the community garden and is just the latest in what has been quite a lot of media coverage. The day after the garden’s first birthday dinner, the James Street garden appeared on television. In the garden, the crew have also adopted an educational role, hosting visits by groups intetested in starting their own gardens, tours for local government staff and overseas visitors engaged in urban agriculture.

From right... Janet Verden (community garden team), Lynn Welch, Monica Barone (CEO, City of Sydney), Ashley Heath (grants manager, City of Sydney), Russ Grayson (community gardens, Landcare coordinator City of Sydney).

Some of the James Street Reserve Community Garden crew at the birthday celebration.

FORTUNATELY, THE SUN WAS SHINING in Sydney when two overseas visitors enjoyed a stopover before flying back to Canada. Fortunately, that is, because they had just flown up from Melbourne the day before where their visit to CERES took place under the grey skies and chill winds of that bewintered city.

(from left): Nathaniel and Bert von Einseidel and Russ Grayson at Randwick Sustainability Hub.

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Rain gardens are a technology designed to intercept and filter polluted stormwater before it finds its way into our waterways. The gardens are being installed by local government in a number of areas.

Rain garden in Chippendale

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Stormwater flows into the top of the rain garden and is then filtered by strata of soil, sand and gravel before being discharged into the stormwater system. Hardy, deep rooted, pollution resistant native plants are established that can cope with both inundation and dry periods. The soil surface is covered by a stone mulch.

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You occasionally find that some enterprising person has planted edible species into the rain garden, however this is a questionable practice as the system is designed to take in and treat polluted runoff.

City of Sydney has installed educational signage in some of their Bay Street, Ultimo, rain gardens to educate the public about what’s going on there.

Rain garden showing overflow inlet to stormwater. Someone has planted a pawpaw .

Rain garden planted with grasses and pumpkin... planting edibles is perhaps a questionable practice because of the polluted water entering the device.

This was the second National Permaculture Day to be called and was one of a number of events in the Eastern Suburbs. National Permaculture Day is an annual event at the start of May, a day when permaculture homes and centres across the country open to the public. Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living that can be applied in densely-packed urban areas, like Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, as much as it can be in rural areas and on farms.

Transition Sydney's Peter Driscoll leads a permaculture workshop using the energy efficiency house model.

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New type of public open space

The Permaculture Interpretive Garden (PIG) is a component of the retrofitted Randwick Community Centre, the buildings and grounds of which have been refurbished for energy and water efficiency, including a grid-connected wind turbine and photvoltaic panels. The retrofit demonstrates simple design modifications and technologies that are commercially available. Having them accessible in a public place, and having guided tours and interpretive signage (designed by Rob Alsop who illustrated Rosemary Morrow’s book, Earth Users Guide to Permaculture) provides visitors with take-home ideas that they can implement. The Randwick Sustainability Education Hub encompasses the retrofitted building and grounds plus Randwick City Council’s Living Smart, Native Haven, Early Childhood Environmental Education and Sustainable Gardening courses, all free events that are held there.

The PIG itself is a new type of public open space that combined the functions of a public park and serves at the same time as an educational facility for council courses and as an activity centre for local community organisations whose focus is sustainability, food initiatives and community development. The Hub serves as a Sydney Food Connect City Cousin, where subscribers to the community-supported-agriculture scheme collect their weekly boxes of seasonal, affordable organic food.

Even though there remains work to be completed in the PIG, such as installing tables and benches, roofing the pergolas, establishing the orchard and building the balcony/courtyard demonstration, there was plenty on the day to inspire visitors. Transition Sydney’s Peter Driscoll provided an introductory workshop on permaculture design, Solarch’s Terry Bail, an architect specialising in solar design who designed the community centre energy retrofit, took visitors for a tour of his work and Russ Grayson, who was on the Waterwise Trail steering committee for the project and is affiliated with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network to advocate the value of such enterprises, led a tour of the PIG and grounds. The Spots, presumably named for the cafe strip nearby, offered a harmonious accapella of environmental songs.

Announcing outreach

A significant event at National Permaculture Day was council sustainability educator, Fiona Campbell, announcing the Hub’s outreach program. This will see community organisations hold monthly events on a Sunday afternoons. Led by well known sustainability education planner and trainer, Graham Collier, a group of graduates from the council courses and others have been meeting over the past couple months to develop a program of activities based at the Hub. Significantly, some of those graduates were involved in the planning and management of the day, all part of Fiona’s idea to develop the ability of Eastern Suburbs people to skill-up to make things happen for themselves.

This was an auspicious day for the Sustainability Education Hub and just seeing all of those people milling around the raised planters in the PIG, clustered in tour groups inspecting the energy and water efficiency retrofit of the centre and engaged in convivial chatter around the food and coffee provided by council demonstrated that there exists a keen community interest in these sustainability initiatives. Thanks go to those who attended, to the Hub outreach volunteers, to Randwick Council and, especially, to National Permaculture Day for making it happen here under the blue skies and on the sandy soils of the urban east.

See photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150263696374175.379931.46128279174