Costa Georgiadis - host of ABC Gardening Australia

The stories we tell make sense of and give meaning to our lives.

Costa’s father tells the story of the chook leaping into the feed barrel as he opened it. He tells the story of his flying days too, and of life in the countryside.

His son, Costa Georgiadis, tells stories about our food… how it is grown and how people are taking that into their own hands.

Storytelling was vary much on the agenda last night at the squash club in Bondi Junction where Fiona and I had been invited to join others for the launch of the new edition of ABC Gardening Australia, hosted by Costa.

Hubbub of animated ambience

As you would expect, there was the hubbub of people talking… what could only be described as an animated ambience within which excitement and anticipation seemed to vie for dominance.

But come 6.30pm, it was anticipation that prevailed as the room hushed and ABC 1 filled the big screen.

A bucolic sunset tints the sky and fills the screen with textures of red and pink… fade to a waterfall in the bush and a slow zoom takes us down towards its plunge pool far below where a character stands in the shady defile that thousands of years of running water has carved into the rock… you notice that he is soaked by the spray – and probably cold down there too – then that familiar voice starts and it tells us that we are part of all this… this land both old and new… it says we must care for all this to care for ourselves. Then, a cut to Costa’s Sydney Eastern Suburbs home and we are invited to follow him through the gate and into his backyard of fruit, vegies and chooks.

Another cut, and it’s out onto the footpath as Costa tells of its coming transformation from sandy soil and bland lawn into an agriculturally biodiverse ecosystem of food, flowers and habitat plants. The figure from the waterfall walks towards the camera talking about this – then there’s the slightest of pauses as he looks into the camera to mark the end of his monolog… and makes the transition to launch the program – “Hello… I’m Costa and this is Gardening Australia”.

The four minutes of that introduction, that transition from the wild nature of the bush to the cultivated nature of the city… well, it worked… and it made a fitting entry to this new series of the popular ABC program. As Costa’s welcoming words faded into the program introduction theme, viewers across the nation surely knew that something new was afoot.

Over the following 30 minutes viewers were swept electronically from Hobart Botanic Gardens below the blue bulk of Mt Wellington to a garden in Melbourne and onto rural NSW and over to that Sydney Eastern Suburbs footpath about to undergo transition from landcape poverty to garden plenty.

Continuity, pace and content

Why did the program work? What held it together during its vast sweep across the continental east? Continuity. Pace. Content.

Continuity created by the linking device of references to sandy soils and asking the state-based hosts what you could grow on that footpath in Sydney and elsewhere. The continuity of repetition. And pace. The different sense of pace and dynamic given by those state hosts.

Creative presences

Looking around at those gathered there that evening I realised that there were a lot of expectations around the new program. Community gardeners and permaculture promoters would have their own expectations and hopes, yet these must be tempered by the knowledge that the program has to cater to a broad range of gardening interests. I realised, too, that out there would be those who disliked the new feel, the new direction. But that’s the package that comes with anything new… the detractors, the supporters, the uncertain. Even though I don’t have a television, count me as a supporter.

Present were creative types like Costa’s production people, the two digital mavens from the College of Fine Arts setting up a website for Costa, the elegant Gina Lopez carving out a niche for herself in the business around sustainability, Megan Chatterton and her family… Megan is community workshop organiser from the City of Sydney with whom I used to enjoy working there… Sandi Middleton from the Centre for Sustainability Leadership and so many more. To all these people, to his sister and father, Costa gave due acknowledement in his speech following the program.

As we stood talking, Stan – Costa’s father – said that his son would now be busy in his new role and he would likely see less of him. Coming and going, though, is something Costa has been doing since his days as host of SBS television’s Costa’s Garden Odyssey.

As evening became night people drifted off, and stepping out onto the street a small group turns towards the Bondi Junction commercial district. There, among them, is a fuzzy silhouette soon to become even better known around the country. The good news, though, is that the silhouette is an authentic one with its hands and feet firmly planted in the good soil.

Costa and gardener planting the footpath planter at Waterloo Community Centre

Put to me in such convincing terms by Sophie from the City of Sydney’s SAVE program (Sustainable Action and Values for Everyone—quite a mouthful and an acronym-driven name if ever I heard one), how could I refuse.

First off, Sophie and I made the short journey out to Waterloo in a City Prius so that we could measure the footpath to see if it would be wide enough for the Salvation Army Waterloo Community Centre to build their footpath garden on. Plenty of room, it turned out, for the four proposed planters.

The planter construction crew with the finished product.

I asked Sophie to make sure the builders consulted Dial-Before-You-Dig to check whether there were water or gas pipes, electricity or other cables below the footpath. Had there been and had the gardeners built a footpath garden directly on the ground itself, it would have had to be rebuilt had the utility needed to dig up the underground service for maintenance. That was the thinking behind the model of raised garden planter the City was proposing in its draft policy—something with a base that could be moved out of the way and later returned, was access to underground services needed.

Next, I thought, why not try to prototype the type of planter the City was proposing in its draft Footpath Gardening Policy and locate it on the footpath to demonstrate the preferred offsets from the kerb?

The guys from Hobo-Gro, who mentored TAFE Outreach participants in the course that constructed the planters, assist to align the planters on the footpath.

The project got underway with TAFE Outreach teaching the participants, clients of the community centre, how to construct the raised planters made of marine ply reinforced with wood salvaged from freight pallets and with drainage holes in their base.

A few weeks passed and the planters were complete. I made an inspection to check them and found them strong and—in their bright orange paint—colourful… just the thing to brighten up a dull streetscape across the road from the Waterloo Estate, a large social housing conglomeration of 1960s tower blocks that, in the open space around them, features three well-used community gardens.

To make his talk more memorable, Costa brought along a feathered teaching assistant.

Lasagne gardening

Meanwhile Sophie and her colleague, Megan—who was with the City’s Sustainability crew—has arranged two workshops during which the planters would be installed, filled with growing medium, planted and mulched, two per session. That process would be led by none other than ex-SBS and now ABC Gardening Australia host, Costa Georgiadis. The workshops quickly filled.

Megan and I did our short talks, then Costa started with one of his food-focused dialogues, demonstrating how to make a wicking planter from a two litre plastic drink bottle by cutting it in half and rearranging the pieces, and discussing the value of non-hybrid seeds and other things. Then it was out to the footpath for the day’s garden construction.

Watching Costa describe how to fill the container gardens, as willing workshop attendees did the work, was like watching a garden chef make a vegetable lasagne.

A scatter of rocks was place in the base to aid drainage (drainage holes had already been drilled through the base), covered with a thick layer of sugar cane mulch, then cow manure spread over it. Next, in went a layer of lucerne, a leguminous straw that embodies in its fibre the nitrogen that plants need to grow. Following that, a powdering or rock dust to supply needed minerals to the growing plants then a layer of chook manure followed by a layer of cow manure followed by another layer of lucerne mulch, rock dust and yet more chook manure and, finally, a layer of lucerne mulch. Quite a lasagne garden indeed, and one full of varied animal droppings—not the sort of lasagne that you might be tempted to eat for dinner.

Nothing like seedlings to create interest

The layers were watered as they were placed in the container garden then seedlings planted through the mulch layer after Costa demonstrated the technique.

That done, the gardens were finished. It was quite clear that participants had enjoyed themselves as they stood back to admire their good work.

Dimensions and offsets

The planters are 1.2m in length, 0.6m wide and high. There is a base in the planters positioned 0.43m down. The purpose of this is so that they can be moved out of the way if council or some other entity imagines that it needs to dig up the footpath. With no services located below the grassy verge here, this wasn’t strictly needed as it would be were there pipes or wires below the footpath.

The planters could have been made a little longer—the draft policy stipulates that there be no longer unbroken access to the street than three metres, though that would be too long for a single footpath planter. Their height lifted them well about that which could be a trip risk, as are many of the low roadside gardens that civic-minded people construct for themselves, many built around tree bases much to the annoyance of council tree managers who think that microorganisms could transmigrate from garden soil into tree trunk and weaker their trees.

The idea in the draft policy of creating a colour contrast with the surrounding footpath area so that passers-by can avoid colliding with the planters was more than adequately taken care of by their bright orange paint job and the reflectors stuck on the planters.

An offset from the kerb to the outer edge of the planter of 0.6m was maintained as per the draft policy to allow access to and from vehicles, especially important for our ageing population and for those with mobility aids. The planters were located 1.5m from transmission wire poles to allow access for their servicing and replacement. The same consideration is made for street furniture such as seats. Plenty of space was left between the garden planters and the nearby bus stop, which is used by a small community transport bus. When we measured the footpath before the project started we realised that the required minimum 1.5m footpath width, to allow unimpeded pedestrian passage, would be more than adequately accommodated.

When the adjacent seating area with its native plants is completed, along with a tiny community gardening area for community centre clients, a rather uninteresting and unremarkable strip of street will have been converted into a biodiverse and very interesting learning and local food source, just the sort of thing we need to spice up inner urban streetscapes in a way that offers food, environmental, social and learning opportunities.

With all of those benefits, a better example of tactical urbanism would be hard to find.

Planting out could get kind-of crowded.

The planters with 0.6m offset from kerb and clear of the footway. The height of the planters lifts them above trip hazard and the colour also contributes to that by contrasting with its surroundings.

Job nearly done—a workshop participant waters the completed and mulched planter garden.

The seedling give-away was a popular part of the event.

City of Sydney Waste Projects Coordinator, Sarah van Erp, led workshops on compost making and wormfarm management at the event.

Organising crew—presenter, Costa Georgiadis (left), event organiser Megan and the author.

The author at Bourke Street Park Community Garden site with a garden bed hastily constructed and planted in time for the official opening of the park makeover of which the community garden in a component.

And go well they did over the first two meetings of the team that will set up the Bourke Street Park Community Garden, the second community garden in Woolloomooloo. That number would have been three had Housing NSW not demolished the informal (‘guerrilla’) community garden that locals started on its unused land , without permission, and operated for some time. Their idea was to put to productive use unused land in an inner urban area where public open space is in short supply. The state government department said they planned to build on the land and so the community garden must go. Go it did, but that was years ago and at the time of writing there is still no sign of Housing NSW building anything at all. What could have been a productive garden managed by local people is now a wasteland covered in the saplings of London plan trees.

The other community garden, Woolloomooloo Community Garden in Sydney Place, was established over a decade ago on its present site and before that was a tiny patch located below the Eastern Suburbs railway viaduct. It is now full, so a new community garden seems to be just the thing that is needed for Woolloomooloo, the densely populated area occupying the valley and its sides between Potts Point and the central business district.

Preparation for gardening

I had been warned that the Woolloomooloo demographic could be a difficult one, however I found the people at the meetings easy to get along with and encountered no difficulties. Woolloomooloo has a preponderance of social housing residents who are supplemented by those in private accommodation. It is what demographers call a ‘low-income demographic’ but the area is dotted with pockets of private home owners.

I worked with two smart, enthusiastic City of Sydney staff on this preliminary work—Kristin and Yvette from City Engagement, the team that organises and runs community engagement. They, with their competence and cheery attitude, were a pleasure to plan and engage with in my role, which was to assist the team of people interested in using the area set aside for community gardening get started through two meetings:

• one, to come to agreement on what their needs from community gardening might be—what in formal moments we call the ‘needs analysis’
• and at the following meeting to work out how they will make decisions, solve disagreements and communicate—what is formally known as ‘governance’, though I avoided using that term.

Social design component done, I arranged for a landscape architect experienced in designing community gardens and training community gardeners in the skills they will need to lead a participatory site design. The process will be to take the garden team through a site analysis so that they get to understand the site and what influences conditions there, then to draw up a concept plan, negotiate this with the garden team and come to agreement on any changes, then produce a working drawing that will guide construction.

The City will purchase the required number and size of galvanised iron planter boxes and these will be installed as per the plan, as will an area set aside for composting that will make use of the rodent-resiatant domestic Geddy composters.

Later, the City plants to relocate one of its old trams in the same area as the community garden and retrofit it as a activity shed for local people, what s commonly known as a ‘men’s shed’ but has been given the name of ‘men’s and shiela’s shed’ in Woolloomooloo… perhaps we should just stick with ‘activity shed’. This was not part of the original plan for the site but after it was raised and I did a simple social ROI (social return on investment analysis to estimate the idea’s potential value to local people—what they could get out of participation in it compared to the cost of installing the thing) I realised that social return—social benefit—would be analogous to that from the community garden and therefore the shed should go ahead.

A unusual mix

The garden group will be an unusual mix. There are people from both social and private housing, however the interesting inclusion will be the nearby Ozunan Learning Centre that wants to use the garden for horticultural therapy with Woolloomoloo’s homeless men.

TAFE Outeach, too, has indicated interest, offering the opportunity to create something quite innovative with the community garden, the activity shed and this diverse mix of community gardeners and social agencies.

For me, taking the project through social ensign and up to sit design stage has been interesting and rewarding. Now, its up to the gardeners to create something new in Woolloomoloo.

The crew... and the garden before starting its makeover, still infested with agapanthus.

The garden at the end of the day—free at last from agapanthus and ready to prepare the soil for vegetables and herbs at the next working bee.

Day 1

Steve Batley removes an agapanthus.

This was day one of two to repurpose Randwick Council’s footpath garden bed, at the end of the commercial strip on Frenchmans Road, from a low-biodiversity agapanthus plantation into a high-biodiversity herb, vegetable and fruit patch.

It didn’t take long for the energetic crew to remove the agapanthus outside Barrett House, the retrofitted, energy and water efficient building shared by Randwick, Woollahra and Waverley councils and used as a meeting place by community groups and for council workshops.

The day started as all such events should, sitting around the table, coffees in hand, discussing how to proceed. Day one—this cloudy and, later, rainy Thursday morning—was to bring the clearance of agapanthus from the garden bed in preparation for next Thursday’s installation of path, compost, mulch and edibles.

It was decided that the community compost bin, an Aerobin type, should be emptied but that the fruiting lemon tree planted at the opening of Barrett House by the three eastern suburbs mayors should be retained.

Agapanthus… we’ve probably all seen it because it’s quite common as a public place planting. It’s a perennial with long, dark green straplike leaves and clusters of colourful flowers on a long stalk, and it is favoured by councils for its ease of maintenance. Removing it is sometimes easy, sometimes more difficult, especially when it forms a large root mass and is quite heavy to free from the soil and lift.

The agapanthus removed, the question was what to do with them… they were offered to passers by but nobody seemed interested… so what about composting them?… that was a possibility but wouldn’t it be better to replant them somewhere? A call to council’s nursery solved the problem—they would take them all… which meant that creation of the new garden would be a zero waste operation.

Fiona Campbell cleans out the community compost bin. The Aerobin model was found to be infested with cockroaches and was removed in favour of the simpler Geddy bin which has fewer nooks and crannies where the creatures can breed and is easier to maintain and clean.

Community compost bin

The community compost bin situated in the footpath garden is used by people living nearby, and as as soon as the agapanthus was removed from around it Fiona set to work, removing its panels so as to empty it out.

As is found in other community composting systems there was a preponderance of kitchen and food scraps in it but not enough of the carbon materials that make for a balanced compost mix. Compost requires a mix of dry, brown carbon materials and moist green, nitrogen-rich material for effective breakdown.

Providing dry carbon materials has proven to be something of a challenge with community composting bins in some Sydney installations, with one group of community composters sourcing coffee husks from a nearby coffee roaster as carbon material.

The day after the gardening session, Richard and Fiona, from Randwick Council, installed a rubbish bin adjacent to the composter to hold a supply of dry leaf sweepings. It is planned that, when council maintenance staff sweep the fallen leaves from below the adjacent native fig trees in the park, they will put them into a bin from which community composters could scoop a handful to add to their kitchen wastes.

At the same time the two replaced the Aerobin with a couple of the domestic, black plastic Gedeye compost bins (also known as Dalek composters because their shape is reminiscent of the malevolent Daleks that appear in the BBC television series, Dr Who). These are easier to use that the Aerobin and compost is more easily removed.

The things you find in compost—a whole coconut would take quite some time to break down.

Community composting is a new idea presently being trailed by Randwick, Waverley and Leichhardt councils as well as by the Sustainable Chippendale team and, in Melbourne, by the City of Yarra. It’s a means of reducing household green waste for people living in apartments instead of consigning the stuff to landfill.

Footpath gardening, too, is something new, presently being done in the Randwick, Waverley, City of Sydney and Marrickville council areas.

The design and plant list for the revived footpath garden is being developed by Steve Batley from Sydney Organic Gardens, who provides garden design and education services to Randwick and other councils. The project is facilitated by Three-Council Ecofootprint Project Coordinator, Richard Wilson and by council’s sustainability education coordinator, Fiona Campbell. They were assisted this day by a Permaculture Sydney east member, Cecelia, and the author.

And next Thursday? We start on soil preparation, mulching and planting out… at the end of which the conversion of the agapanthus monoculture into a shiny and tasty new vegetable and herb garden will be complete.

The construction crew. Lower left is City of Sydney Community Worker, Urban Renewal, Cara Levinson, and behind her is the author.

I met with the City of Sydney’s Green Square Community Worker, Urban Renewal—Cara Levinson—who assists this group and another, Friends of Victoria Park who work n the social side of things there. Cara informed me about what the group had in mind and I took these ideas back to the City of Sydney at Town Hall House. My role? To facilitate what it was that Green Square Growers wanted by clearing the bureaucratic bumps so that the Growers could get on with building their first project. My other role was to ensure that materials for their project were on hand, at the right place at the right time.

It was my brief in working with the City to take this pro-community approach, to ease things through the decision making structure, source funding, materials, skills and training so that people could get on with that it was they wanted to do. In this, I was encourage by what Ernesto Sirrolli, the social entrepreneur from the US-based Sirrolli Institute, said about the role of people working with local government—that they, too, could take an entrepreneurial approach and facilitate communities taking action, a role describes as that of ‘civic entrepreneur’.

Small project, big achievement

Green Square Grower’ first project was the construction and installation of a raised garden bed in the plaza outside of The Tote, an old building repurposed as a library and community centre. It was to be of the wicking bed type, a self-watering garden consisting of a garden built over a rock-filled reservoir which is periodically topped up with water.

Adding an educational diagram is always a useful passive educational device for public place installations.

A commendable criteria for the project was that it be made of recycled and reused materials to that it could serve as a model for others. A visit to Reverse Garbage sourced the timber for the raised planter, which was assembled off-site and brought on-site in prefabricated form on the morning of construction.

The location of the planter had been worked out over the preceding day and this was confirmed when the group of 12 or so turned up.

First, the planter was installed then a layer of sand was spread over the brick paving. A double thickness of builders’ plastic was laid so that its it lapped up the sides of the planter box for about 30cm or so. This contains water in the reservoir which is connected to the soil surface, added later, by a perforated tube of agricultural pipe used to top up the water supply in the reservoir. A cap is placed on this to prevent the tube filling with leaf litter. Next, recycled concrete aggregate was tipped carefully (so as to avoid puncturing the plastic liner) onto the planter base—this stabilises the reservoir which holds the water that irrigates the garden above. The aggregate was covered by a geotextile layer, the purpose of which is to prevent soil particles moving into the aggregate-filled reservoir and blocking it. On top of that compost was lid to round 30cm sep, close to the maximum depth through which moisture will wick by osmosis. Straw mulch was laid and seedlings planted through tho into the soil below.

The wicking bed built and now in use, you can only wonder what Green Square Growers next project will be. Whatever it is,Victoria Park will steadily go from empty to edible.

A level is placed across the planter to ensure it is installed straight.	Shovelling concrete rubble into the base of the planter, on top of the plastic liner.
Sabena's (left) daughter fills the rubble-filled reservoir.	The worm tube is installed. The tube was populated with worms and food scraps added. The worm waste will fertilise the garden.
One of the gardener-children places a banana skin into the worm tube.	Construction almost complete, there's only watering the seedlings planted into the mulched garden.

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.

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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.