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?

Food shapes cities. The supermarkets and their attendant shopping malls now define how we interact with food. Their stacked shelves of prepared and cooked foods draw thousands of car-bound travellers from far away to their enclosed worlds. Their pulling power suppresses opportunity for smaller traders and contributes to the suburban food deserts where sources of fresh food are non-existent within reasonable travel distance.

What a contrast to the traditional town centre market. The malls are enclosed spaces lacking, from inside, any geographic reference point. Few offer any view of their surroundings, few have a clock to tell the time of day. It could be midday or midnight—these places with their enclosed worlds are time-independent. They’re like those enclosed settlements you see in science fiction movies, habitats isolated from some hostile environment and that offer their own internal, brightly lit, closely managed and controlled social space.

Food production in the city, an increasingly rare sight. Photo: Scarborough Park, Kogarah NSW.

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Carolyn Steel, architect and writer, drew the contrast between traditional market and supermarket at her July appearance at UNSW. She also provided her audience with a little historic perspective on food sysyems, alluding to writings from Classical Greece and describing how Imperial Rome derived its food supply from across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and from parts of what us now Europe, including getting oysters from England. Rome’s food came from wherever its shipping could reach and, in its own limited way, its was the globalised food supply of its day, drawing its sustenance from all over the known world. Food shaped the Roman world just like it shapes ours.

 only grain crops have the productive capacity to feed urban populations

Earlier cities took the form of self-sustaining city states fed from their immediate hinterland and the harvest was the most important event of the year. Once, livestock was walked into the city market and grain came by river. Then came technological innovation and this, in turn, started to reshape our urban food supply. The railway enabled food to be brought into the city from greater distances, distances beyond the immediate urban hinterland that had traditionally supplied the city. The food supply chain began to diffentiate from its earlier close asocation with people, said Carolyn.

Grain feeds cities

”Grain is the food of cities”, Carolyn emphasised, going on to describe that only grain crops have the productive capacity to feed urban populations.

“We are now moving into an urban age after 10,000 years of urban development”, she explained. This gives rise to the ’urban paradox’—with increasing urbanisation comes increasing distance from our food sources. It’s part of the industrialisation of food, not a new phenomenon but one long underway. This industriaisation favours a limited range of food varieties as these can withstand the rigours of transportation, unlike the more delicate types.

A contemporary aspect of urbanisation is that it deskills the countryside because it attracts rural people to town and city. With the decline of the rural population comes a decline in the number of people with experience in and a knowledge of farming.

Carolyn took the audience through her set of food values: eating, cooking, buying, saving, growing. She described her contemporary food fundamentals: land and soil degradation, climate change and emissions, water, energy, labour. Then she went through the food production cycle from farm to factory, market, kitchen, table, waste… and, ideally, waste-to-farm so as our urban food left-overs fertilise our future meals. She spoke of  ’the civilising power of the meal’… the meal as shared time around one of our basic needs, a type of communion in its own way. It is a theme I recall Australian chef and author, Stephanie Alexander speaking about.

Planning—the right place for food security

“Food has not been part of planning”, Carolyn explained, and this is why food production opportunities are lacking in our suburbs and urban areas.

That, however, seems to be changing. More planners as well as urban agriculture advocates are recognising that the security of urban food supplies, as well as the thousands of livelihoods that are part of it, are a critical planning focus as important as housing, transportation, water and energy. Local government is starting to Carolyrespond by assisting community gardening and farmers’ markets. A sign of this change was the University of Melbourne’s Victorian Eco Innovation Lab and National Heart Foundation’s Food-Sensitive Planning and Urban Design, a conceptual framework for a sustainable and healthy food system, which was aimed at planners and government. It’s likely we will be hearing more on urban food security and planning.

Community action

Having covered history and current trends, Carolyn spoke of the many and varied citizen initiatives in food procurement.

There is limited opportunity to grow food in cities, she acknowledged. However, we have allotments—more commonly known as community gardens in Australia—and we have the experience of the Victory Gardens when public open space was turned into food gardens to increase food security during World War Two. We also have some potential for growing on urban rooftops, she said.

Carolyn went on to mention community-based food procurement other than garden agriculture—food co-ops, community supported agriculture—and the work of food planning advocacies. In this country they would include the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, Coffs Coast Local Food Alliance  and Sustain Queensland. In the UK, Carolyn may have been familiar with the work of Sustain and other food policy orgnisations that have a much longer history than Australia’s comparative newcomers.

And Carolyn’s advice for people seeking involvement in sny of these initiatives? “Pick any point and get going”.

Carolyn is author of Hungry City-how food shapes our lives. Vintage UK, 2009.

View Carolyn’s TED Talk.

The event? None other than an appearance by that animated telegardener, Costa (SBS Costa’s Gardening Oddyssey). The day? At Saturday afternoon at the end of October 2010. The topic? Growing in small spaces, a relevant topic considering the limited growing spaces in our inner urban areas. The venue? Top floor of Waterloo Library. To get into the event, attendees had to walk past the fruit and vege display set up by the folk from Alexandra Park Community Garden, one of the 15 community gardens in the City of Sydney area.

Megan, Sarah, Costa and Russ

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Costa gives away vegetable seedlings

City of Sydney sustainability events organiser, Megan  Craig, not only planned the event but opened the afternoon and made people feel welcome. Russ Grayson, who provides support to the City’s community gardens and community food initiatives and the policies that enabled them, had a few words about what was happening on those topics in the city and their link to Sustainable Sydney 2030, the long range city plan. The City’s waste projects coordinator, Sarah van Erp, provided invaluable backup support in her usual quiet and competent way.

Then it was over to Costa who told stories, gave away vegetable seedlings and demonstrated how to make a no-dig garden on the library’s floor (on a piece of cardboard, not the carpet, fortunately) and encouraged the audience to support the council.

Costa got across the message about urban food security and growing food and other plants in the city in an entertaining way, a sign of an effective communicator. This, his second appearance at the library on the theme, took the message that sustainability can be grown at home, in community gardens and public places to an audience likely to act on what they heard.

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.

Taylor Square Market

A FARMERS’ MARKET, the Transition Towns movement and Sydney’s emerging collaborative economy come together with live music, good food and the smell of freshly brewed coffee on Saturday mornings at Taylor Square in Darlinghurst. This is Sydney Sustainable Markets. It’s small but diverse. The market is hard to miss as it occupies the plaza on the northern side of Taylor Square where Oxford Street’s traffic diverges to the Eastern Suburbs or continues towards Bondi Junction and on to Bondi Beach. This is a busy crossroads for both traffic and pedestrians and it’s a prime location for a market. a

Michael Champion Organics from Mangrove Mountain just north of Sydney.

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Here you find Michael Champion’s organic herbs and vegetables grown in the Mangrove Mountain area just north of the city—with Kurrajong Organics one of the fresh vegetable and fruit sellers at the market. There’s Sydney LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System), the community trading exchange; apiarist Doug Purdie’s urban honey, including authentic Darlinghurst honey produced in his inner city hives; Michelle Margolis selling her permaculture diary and calendar and doing a talk on the permaculture design system; sellers of artisan preserves and jams; a range of food that you can sit and eat at one of the hessian-draped tables and, today, the Great Aussie Swap organised by Transition Sydney’s partner Driscoll and partner Christine. The Swap and LETS make up the collaborative economy part of the market. This is an emerging community economy based on monetary exchange of goods and sevice as well as redistribution initiatives like the swap.

Swap day

Today, people have brought what they want to swap… things such as the clothing, books, music CDs, children’s toys, tools and other stuff laid out on the long tables.

Contributors are given a number of tokens (sourced from Reverse Garbage on the other side of Taylor Square). The market opens with an explanation of how it works and participants then have a set time to take a look at what is on offer. Swapping then starts with tokens handed in for each item taken amid a flurry of activity.

Where more than one person wanted the same item, a scissors/stone/wood game determines who gets it. It’s all amicable. While the City of Sydney provides assistance to the market, it’s people like Peter Driscoll and Christine who help make it happen. The couple live nearby, high above Oxford Street in an apartment and are active in the Green Strata organisation (Christine was on the panel

Urban beekeeper, Doug Purdie, with his authentic Darlinghurst honey.

for the launch of the City of Sydney’s Green Apartments program in September 2011).

Location

As it is for all businesses, location is important to Sydney Sustainable Market. Located on the crossroads, it is also on the main pedestrian and cycle route connecting Sydney’s central business district with the Oxford Street shopping strip, the cafe cluster along Crown Street and the Paddington commercial strip further along. Its location makes the market both a destination and a fortuitious find for passing foot and bicycle traffic. The market’s location eliminates the need to provide car parking. The car-bound few might find limited parking in the side streets if they are lucky, however this is a market for the self-propelled and those capable of getting on a bus.

Sydney Sustainable Market is more than shopping destination. It’s a place to linger and this is what people do, buying morning tea and a fresh coffee from the stalls and sitting around one of the tables to talk or, this morning, to listen to the young guy with guitar providing the live music.

It’s the the stay-and-linger ambience and the opportunity to participate in the swap that makes Sydney Sustainable Market a temporary ‘place’ in the placemaking concept used by planners and advocates of urbanism. It’s a place for people and a place to find good food whether that’s the basics of fruit and vegetables from one of the organic growers’ stalls or value-added basics such as the preserves, jams and honey.

Small in size it might be, Sydney Sustainable Market is a human scale intervention in the inner urban streetscape that brings the vitality and interest to our urban areas that they need to become convivial and desirable places to visit and live in.

Annette from AusLETS

Living Colour display at Taylor Square Markets

Have you planted too much spinach? Are you inundated by lemons and rosemary? Then bring the along to swap and share with other local gardeners at the Watershed’s Urban Harvest Food Swaps at Marrickville Street Fair on Sunday 23 October 2011 and Newtown Festival on Sunday the 13th November.

The Urban Harvest swap is a chance for community gardeners and backyard growers to come together to celebrate and share the rewards of their activities. If you’re a backyard or community grower please come along and bring excess fresh produce, seeds and seedlings from your backyard or community gardens.  You may even swap a gardening tip or two.

Find the Watershed’s Urban Harvest Food Swap at:

• Marrickville Street Festival in the Marrickville Council tent, Sunday 23 October 2011 between 11:00am – 3:00pm
• Newtown Festival at the Watershed Swap and Eco Zone (near the children’s playground) Sunday 13th November between 10:00am – 12:00pm.

Future swaps could be held at The Watershed or at Addison Road or the Eveleigh markets, at Telstra Square in Newtown or one of the community gardens on a rotating basis.

Regards, Dianne Moy, Program Manager.

Within a month of returning to Sydney I witnessed another exciting move in community food systems—the launch of Sydney Food Connect. At last, it seemed, the idea of community supported agriculture (CSA) was catching on across the nation.

Sydney Food Connect's superb birthday cake... fruit and vegetables tumble from the horn of plenty as they tumble from the fields thanks to the hard work of Food Connect's farmers.

Fast forward a year to late-April 2011 and I find myself on a minor street in Rozelle, a street of industrial buildings quite close to the old coal burner that once fed electricity to the city. That power station lies dormant now, its windows smashed and its monolithic facade a testament to a fading age.

That street is deserted on a Sunday afternoon but follow the music and inside an anonymous industrial building you find festively and celebration. The occasion—the celebration of Sydney Food Connect’s first birthday.

Social business, social outcomes

Food Connect is no ordinary business… it’s what’s called a social business or a social enterprise… a business that has social goals. This gives it a value that run-of-the-mill businesses don’t have, a special social value. Social business uses business methods to achieve worthwhile social goals.

It takes time to establish a small business and Sydney Food Connect is still striving to establish itself as a viable economic entity. The purpose of Food Connect is to make the produce of regional farmers and food processors, such as bakers, available to city people who subscribe to the weekly box of mainly organic, local food. Sure, some foods like avocados and bananas come from further north in NSW, but as organic food entrepreneur, Tsung Xu—one of the people who has assisted Food Connect says—to some extent you have to supply people with what they want and those fruits are not farmed near Sydney.

Unlike other community supported agriculture (CSA) start-ups, Food Connect sources its produce from a larger number of farmers. This provides security of supply and avoids seeing the system collapse when a farmer who is the sole supplier to a CSA decides its time for a career change or to move on. This happened to an earlier CSA in Sydney.

This farming family supplies Sydney Food Connect from their urban fringe market garden.

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When farmer’s produce comes into the Rozelle packing facility a convivial crew divide it into small, medium or large boxes and these are taken by refrigerated truck (to keep it fresh and reduce wilt in Sydney’s summers) to the City Cousin pick-up points throughout the city. There, in the early evening, subscribers collect their boxes of organic, local food and in many City Cousins enjoy a few minutes of conviviality with other subscribers. Some bring their young children—at our Randwick City Cousin, the young boy of a subscriber usually insists of being taken outside to see the ‘windmill’, the wind turbine that spins high above the community centre.

The Sydney Food Connect crew.

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Pure permaculture

Avocado farmer, Sandra Fishwick of Red Plateau Organic Produce on the Comboyne plateau, supplies organically grown avocados to Sydney Food Connect. Comboyne is the closest supply of avocado to Sydney.

From time to time I get disappointed with environmentalists. You would think that they would know that food is a keystone resource and that food choices have a direct impact on the generation of greenhouse gases, on waste going to landfill (where it breaks down to release methane) and on water consumption, and that they would rush to join Food Connect because food procured closer to where it is eaten and that is grown organically reduces these impacts. It’s good that some do this—the Greenpeace office in Ultimo, Sydney, is a City Cousin and that makes a pleasant change to the organisation’s usual hobby of attacking Apple. What’s not good that many environmentalists don’t, either because they have no local City Cousin or they’re happy to shop in the supermarket.

Environmentalist failure to support social business is not new, as the case of EcoForest Ltd showed some years ago. Rather than invest their surplus income in an ecologically-managed forestry operation, they preferred conventional investments.

The argument that permaculture people should support Food Connect is a no-brainer. Food Connect epitomises permaculture founder, Bill Mollison’s statement that it can be better to buy your food from someone who has produced it ethically than to try to grow your own.

Because Food Connect buys from regional farmers (returning up to 40 centre in the dollar to the farmer, in comparison to the supermarket’s five of so cents) it supports Bill’s edict that we should return food production to the city, in this case to the market gardens on the urban-rural interface.

Bill and permaculture co-founder, David Holmgren, also said that permaculture initiatives should be financially viable. And, as a permaculture-influenced enterprise (Julian Lee, founder of Sydney Food Connect, is a graduate of the Permaculture Design Course), that is exactly what Sydney Food Connect is attempting at the moment. Food Connect is precisely the sort of social enterprise the two were talking about.

Music, food and a good time

Social entrepreneur and founder of Sydney Food Connect, Julian Lee.

Old industrial streets in the Inner West take on an empty, forlorn aspect on a quiet Sunday afternoon in mid-Autumn. But everything changed once I walked through that door… here was live music, dancing, the conviviality of the good company of fellow City Cousins, of Food Connect staff and Food Connect subscribers an their children and partners. Here too was more food than could be eaten at the event—the left overs were packaged as take-aways—here were brief and unplanned testimonial speeches and here was the Food Connect’s superb birthday cake.

That cake, I have to say, was more an edible sculpture than a common cake. The cabbage with its veined leaves was a true work of fine art…  culinary art, and the carrots were made of carrot cake, the lemons of lemon cake… it was a case of having to destroy the art work in order to enjoy it and its varied flavours.

So, one year on and Food Connect has built its own social network of City Cousins and city eaters but there remains more to do to increase the number of subscribers and recruit new City Cousins to take this innovative social idea into the suburban heartland.

Food Connect Sydney: http://sydney.foodconnect.com.au/

Food Connect accountant Margaret, on left, presents Lena, now leaving Food Connect, with flowers.

Bondi Food Connect City Cousin, Lance Lieber.

Robert Pekin, from the Food Connect foundation, started Food Connect in Brisbane in 2004.

Fiona Campbell, Randwick's Food Connect City Cousin, has a few words.

Food Connect Foundation's Robert Pekin conspires with Randwick City Cousin, Fiona Campbell.