I’M FILLED WITH INSPIRATION as I write these words after spending two hours with about 60 others at Town Hall House in the presence of Ernesto Sirolli.

I first encountered Ernesto in the ’90s through his book, Ripples in the Zambesi, which I think I bought from Permaculture International Journal when it was based next to the Lismore City Farm.

Aid can be anything but

The title of Ernosto’s book comes from his time working for an Italian NGO in Africa. Without consulting the local people who the NGO was supposedly helping, they planted a tomato crop on the banks of the Zambesi River. But one morning they woke to a surprise…  all of those tomatoes they had planted… they were gone… as if some animal… some tomatovore… had eaten sneaked up and eaten them in the night. But where were the clues as to the fate of the missing tomatoes? There was nothing… all there was were ripples out there in the river as if there was something just below the surface… but surely that had nothing to do with the disappeared tomatoes?  Though… just what was that out there? What it was, was a wallow of hippos, their big eyes just breaking the surface… hippos no longer hungry but replete after a good and rather unanticipated feed of freshly-planted tomatoes. The NGO workers had failed to do the obvious—ask the locals about local conditions, and whether there was anything out there on the plains or in the Zambezi that would look kindly on a feed of fresh vege fruit.

As Ernesto tells the story, their misadventure with the tomato crop was the start of his seeing the whole aid enterprise as a bit of a misadventure. Disillusion quickly followed , disillusion with foreigners telling locals what they needed, what was good for them, not even asking local people if they wanted to receive aid.

Ernesto is a passionate man and he tells the story with a great deal of emotion. Listening, you come to understand how his experience in the aid industry was formative of his later work. Aid in general, he said, has been a disaster.

You don’t show up with a briefcase full of solutions when you do not know the problems

Those ripples in the Zambesi was what Ernesto started his Sydney Town Hall House presentation with and he expanded on the aid theme by warning against turning up in some lesser developed country and assuming you have the knowledge, the right even, to start to tell locals what they should do for their own good. Who do you think you are to do this, he asked.

Two things have to happen before you engage in aid work, said Ernesto. First, you have to be invited into the community. Second, you have to listen to people. This means disregarding any belief you entertain that you have the answers when you barely understand the problem. When people ask for your help, then you ask them how you can help. “You don’t show up with a briefcase full of solutions when you do not know the problems”.

But how do you get invited into communities in other countries? “You do something fantastic in your own neighbourhood”, he said. “You do something here in Sydney that people in other cities will call you and ask how you did that… then they will say ‘Please come and teach us’”.

As I sat there listening to Ernesto, that message about starting aid work at home, where you live, resonated with me because I had heard it before. That would have been around the time I had the good fortune to encounter Ernesto’s book on the shelves there in the Lismore office of Permaculture International Journal.

The person I heard it from was Badri Dahal, at the time the manager of the indigenous NGO, Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Nepal (INSAN). INSAN is one of those largely forgotten permaculture projects, you don’t hear much of it now, but it was pioneering and it had an impact of those of us who had the fortunate chance to meet Badri. What Badri said was similar to what Ernesto told the audience that day—start by helping yourself, in your own country, before dashing off imagining you can help people in less developed countries. It was a warning against allowing a very limited amount of knowledge imparted by a permaculture design or other course, especially if there is little practical work to follow it up, leading to the belief that it would be sufficient to teach people how to grow food or to do something else with their lives. It’s like the cliche says—a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

As for dashing off to help people in lesser developed countries, Ernesto put it this way: “If people don’t want to be helped you leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid”.

Working in Australia

Ernesto is a middle aged man with thick, wavy hair and a strong Italian accent despite his years in Australia and, currently, of living in the US. Dressed in his suit and tie, he looks like someone who has just left a business meeting.

That might not be an erroneous assumption, for his work with the Sirolli Institute is training people to set up businesses, whether for-profit social businesses or not-for-profit social enterprise, as a means of making things happen.

He tells the audience the story of his enterprise facilitation work in Esperance, where he facilitated the setting up of small businesses when the town was headed full speed along the economic downhill run following government limitations on the tuna fishery that put people out of work. It was a cascading disaster, as he tells it. Catch limitations meant fewer fish which affected the fish processing plant which led to redundencies which flowed through to the other businesses in town and suddenly once-employed people found themselves in poverty. They couldn’t sell up and move to Perth because their properties lost value as the town’s economic prospects nosedived.

Council staff and other social gatekeepers explained to him that people in Esperance didn’t want to help themselves and, anyway, ” …no one wanted to do anything. The government employment service said I would make a fool of myself… people in Esperance didn’t have any ideas of heir own”, explained Ernesto. In the end, it was these gatekeepers who proved devoid of ideas and imagination when Ernesto facilitated new, small businesses among people who had lost their livelihoods.

Beginnings

For Ernesto, it started in 1975 when he picked up a book by an English economist. This book, he explained, chaged his life… it changed how he saw the world and how he acted in it. By the time he reached the last page and closed the book, his life was set on a new course, a course that he is still following. What book was this that could change lives so easiy? None other than EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

If evidence that Schumacher’s messages are as relevant today as they were when he wrote the book in the late 1960s, there is none better than it having been in print for all of those years from first publication. It affected many of us and gave us a new framework through which to act in the world, and it led to these setting up of the Intermediate Technology Development Group in the UK.

Following his disillusion with the aid industry and long before he landed in Western Australia, Ernesto had gone to South Africa to study and here he came under the influence of thinkers like Maslow, Rogers, Fromm and others who influenced Humanistic Psychology. Coming to Australia, he was supervised in his PhD, itelf influenced by Schumacher’s ideas, by the now-noted urban planning educator and author, Peter Newman. Newman has written extensively on planning and sustainability, including his recent book, Resilient Cities. Ernesto’s studies led him to the belief that people have a wish to improve themselves in some way, to be a better person. This, Ernesto says, is not culture-specific but is universal and is to do with self-actualisation.

Changing the world one passion at a time’

It is not ideas that change the world, according to Ernesto. It is passion. And you find this even in ghettoes, he says, citing the Esperance example for his notion of ‘changing the world one passion at a time’.

Those working in the social sector know of the perils of reliance on grants to keep their projects going and some, such as social entrepreneur, Nic Frances (who described the evolution of his thinking and his work in his book, The End of Charity), realised that the small business model, whether that was a for-profit business with social goals, what is known as a ‘social business’, or a not-for-profit social enterprise, offered a solution to getting off the grant applciation writing cycle.

In urban development, he says, he would like to see ‘urban hubs’, centres for enterprise facilitation in new developments where we can help each other find what we need. This would be a convivial intervention in the urban environment “where people get to know each other”.

This is Ernesto’s realisation too, and in presenting his ideas to the audience he said there are three things necessary to setting up and running a business, whether for-profit or a social enterprise:

• the product or service has to be ‘beautiful’
• marketing and sales have to be ‘beautiful’
• financial management has to be ‘beautiful’.

Business is team work

The challenge: an individual cannot do all of these things themselves. They might try, but unless their passion is in all of them, those lacking passion are likely to be only part-done. The implication of this is that small business is teamwork, it is a social activity. Look at the well known businesses that were garage start-ups and you find that two to four people were involved.

“Form the team”, Ernesto tells the audience. “Don’t force people to do what they dont like”. This suggests the wisdon of allowing specialisation. He suggests we can now find people with the needed skills online.

“Even the word ‘entrepreneur’ has been hijacked. It is not necessarily to do with business. What it really means is an entrepreneur is someone with initiative, someone who seeks opportunity”.

To help people make things happen and to fulfill his proposal that “the more of us that create the future the better we all are”, Ernesto offers the Enterprise Facilitation model of training. In urban development, he says, he would like to see ‘urban hubs’, centres for enterprise facilitation in new developments where we can help each other find what we need”. This would be a convivial intervention in the urban environment “where people get to know each other”.

Addressing the question about urban development of a council staffer in the audience, Ernesto said he ” …despairs of rules set up never to be changed… planners are the people who stop things happening… rules are made to be changed… we need to facilitate, not regulate… use your power in your work to do this”.

Reclaim the economy

The economy and the language of economics has been hijacked and we need to democratise these things. according to Ernesto.

“Even the word ‘entrepreneur’ has been hijacked. It is not necessarily to do with business. What it really means is an entrepreneur is someone with initiative, someone who seeks opportunity“. The word’s association with the excesses of the 1980s and the business eladers o that time has given it a negative meaning.

“Entrepreneurs are the pioneers, the explorers, the adventurers…

Ernesto says it is necessary to understand the difference between entrepreneurship and management because the two groups see the world differently and act differently in it.

“Entrepreneurs are the pioneers, the explorers, the adventurers. Managers are the settlers who come with their seeds and herds”.

In referring to the role of entrepreneurs, Ernesto’s  closing remarks were motivating: “Break the monopolies… find suport… and storm the citadel”.

From public servant to civic entrepreneur

I asked Ernesto a question during the time set aside for that after his talk. It was this: How can we working in local government adopt roles as ‘civic entrepreneurs‘, which is like a social entrepreneur role within councils?

What he said was that we can become facilitators of what communities need and in that way make things happen.

It reminded me of something I had thought about some time ago—the difference, on being asked whether some idea should go ahead, between asking ‘why?’ and asking ‘why not?’. One response seeks justification while the other seeks ways to make it real.

I thought Ernesto’s talk would be inspiring and that is exactly how it turned out. Now it’s for us to decide whether we’re social entrepreneurs or managers, for there’s a dire need for people who are good at either. Entrepreneurs and managers are a natural team and we need to realise which we are at so that all can work for the common good.

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?

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

I was here to check out a park in which someone wanted to set up a small community garden. It was essentially a swarth of lawn, a corner site with tall shrubbery along the sides on the property boundaries. There was good exposure to sunlight with an absence of shading from taller buildings and trees that is common in the city. Crops would grow here, I thought, especially if the garden was located in the area adjacent to the street corner. It was a flat site and a small community food garden would still leave plenty of lawn for people to use and walk their dogs on, and it would still leave unimpeded the paved path that transects the park.

Something in the shadows

The ability to do a rapid site assessment like this is useful in my job. It’s no substitute for a detailed site analysis which would be done as a participatory event were the garden to go ahead, but it gives me some idea of whether the site’s suitable. Thanks to an app I downloaded, my iPad comes in handy to check sun angles through the year… if I can be bothered bringing the thing. It’s another tool and it’s handy for this work, I guess.

I look for things like exposure to sunlight, soil, drainage, existing vegetation and structures like paths, site safety and whether there are at least two lines of sight from adjacent streets, homes and businesses so as to provide passive surviellance for community gardeners and visitor  safety. I also look for how the site relates to its environment such as access to public transport and bicycle routes, whether the streets are conducive to pedestrian traffic and how the site links to local shop and cafe strips and schools—all considerations in the ‘placemaking’ role of community gardens.

I stood in the corner from where I could take in this small park all at once. It was typical in scale of inner urban Sydney parks, which is to say that it was small. Then I noticed something… over in the opposite corner tucked in a half-hidden sort of way into the shade below the shrubbery. It was black and rectangular. I wandered over.

The feral wormfarm tucked under the shrubs in a Redfern park.

Crouching down, I realised what it was that I had seen…  a wormfarm… one of those black plastic stack of trays that household composters seem to have so much trouble using effectively. And, on its lid, someone had taped instructions for use.

Placing it in the shade below the shrubbery, I realised, would protect it from the heat of the sun, and providing instructions about how to use it would ensure only the right kitchen wastes would be added to it. This was a maintained system and its presence in the park suggested the presence of something quite unanticipated… guerilla composters were at large in Redfern!

Judging it a worthy use of public land and having completed my rapid site assessment, I walked on.

Streets in change

Signs of demographic change were all around. In a number of these old, tiny houses—some freestanding in small yards, others duplexes or rows of terrace houses of double or single storey—had the walls of their small, pokey rooms removed to create the more spaceous interiors preferred today. The architecture still presented a mix of building styles and states of renovation. Some had been done up and finished with a coat of paint while others retained the weathered finish they had presented to the world from wayback when this was a down-at-heel, rough and downmarket working class neighbourhood.

This will never be another Paddington where gentrification will totally re-create the suburb. The demographic that started to occupy the old working class homes some time after gentrification began its transformations elsewhere is seemingly less affluent here, and there are a lot of renters. Perhaps its some of them who are the mysterious feral wormfarmers.

Streets here are narrow and much is learned by walking the lanes. I went along one that runs parallel to Bourke Street, past fences of multicoloured, sometimes rusty, galvanised iron or weather-worn boards, past the faded weatherboard of house walls with their flaking paint, past a house whose owners had colonised the less-than-a-metre wide footpath with potted plants and one of those wide, narrow plastic rainwater tanks, past a street corner that someone had made into a tiny triangular garden.

In this lane I encountered a weatherboard house from the side garden of which spilled a fruiting orange tree and above which rose a tall avocado tree whose canopy shaded the house’s roof. In have encountered fruit trees growing in the tiny yards of inner urban houses elsewhere with citrus most frequently encountered. As I turned out of the lane I found a cactus growing from a narrow planter flush with the building’s wall. This was the second such planter supporting the same vegetation and I wondered if it was the same people responsible for the two I came across.

Serendipitous find in the dead-end

Nearby was another of those wall-clinging cacti, but what I found most interesting was the short dead end strip lined by two-storey terrace houses and ending in the back entrance to a park. Here, between low street trees, locals had planted footpath gardens with a few herbs and vegetables. I realised that out here on the kerb the gardens would get the sunlight that might not be available in the small backyards.

The gardens were not in full use, the vegetable plants appearing more like what was left over from an earlier harvest, but with a little soil improvement and management these could be productive verge gardens.

Then, it was almost a case of deja-vu. There, at the end of this short strip of dead-end street was sometning black, something made of plastic, but unlike the feral wormform in the park, this was out in full sun. I wandered over.

No wormfarm, this round, black plastic thing with a domed lid sitting atop. But just like the wormfarm in the park it had instructions for use taped to the lid. What was it? Nothing other than one of those domestic compost bins in which people turn their kitchen and garden wastes into garden fertiliser… not a feral wormfarm this time but a guerrilla community compost bin.

It was now evident to me that there was a band of green guerrillas loose on the streets of inner urban Redfern. Who were these people? What motivates their civic mindedness when it comes to waste? Do we need people like this loose on our streets? Yes, we do.

Sarah van Erp, City of Sydney Waste Projects Coordinator, inspects a guerrilla compost bin at the end of a dead end street in Redfern. Note the instructions for use on the side of the bin.

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Walking the streets

Much is revealed to a walker of the inner urban streetscape. I have found lanes that residents have turned into vegetated places with a plethora of vegetation growing in colourful, recycled pots… I have come across fruit trees occupying most of the space in tiny gardens…  small front yards turned into productive vegetable gardens… and in that part of Redfern near where Redfern becomes Surry Hills, evidence of green guerrilla composters.

It seems that people will colonise any nook and cranny where something can grow in public places. It’s almost as if nature has recruited people as its agents to revegetate the built landscape of the inner suburbs and, in doing do, trained them as guerrilla gardeners, composters and wormfarmers to carry out its work.

But us this a good thing for our streets and our city… to have freeranging bands of freelance growers and composters at large conducting their nefarious urban regreening activity in public places and home gardens? I, like many others, many of them out there on the streets right now, know that it is.

Lessons for community action

I wondered how it is that Planet Ark, a community-based organisation, could bring out numbers like this and realised that it is the result of a long period of attracting people to an easy-to-participate-in event presented by an organisation that has built a record of credibility and acting in thenation’s interest (environmental interest in Planet Ark’s case).

Doing this requires a level of funding, personnel and organisational capability that is beyond that possesed by many community-based groups. If we are to draw learnings from the National Tree Day events across the country so that we can apply them to other types of community organisation, we might start by looking at their  characteristics:

• institutional support (such as local government and sponsorship by business)
• professional organisation
• events that are easy to participate in
• inclusive of families with young children
• provide a means for individuals to do something small but important (revegetation) about a situation that needs remedying, that is in the national interest and that has clear benefits, thus making the link between individual action and the big picture
• that encourage a sense of fun.

For community-based organisations, the question is how they can replicate this on a smaller scale. The challenge is how to make the message and the events sticky enough to stimulate the interest of the general public. That calls for targeting something that has meaning for the public, that is important to them. It has to offer involvement in simple action that is a means of addressing something larger in scale than the individual but not so large that its scale discourages people because it is too big. Simpler, smaller achievements first encourage people to take on bigger issues together later.

Participation in the city – an opportunity

If it’s an engaged citizenry we want, then events like National Tree Day are a means of creating it. Creating something like that calls for city government to make the necessary investment in funds and staff time and to engage with community-based organisations to make things happen.

National Tree Day makes it possible for families and individuals to do something physical that improves the city, that makes it a better place to live. It is the sort of communal action that encourages the type of urbanism we need to make our cities dynamic and inclusive places to live. It also assists the City of Sydney revegetate Sydney Park and other places, setting up a constructive link between the public and city government.

It was a good day in the unexpected warmth of late winter. National Tree Day 2010 and those who participated in it left a legacy in the form of a diverse planting with benefits as wildlife habitat and in the form of the environmental services those plants will offer—filtered air, carbon sequestration and a cooler city environment.

…Russ Grayson worked with Planet Ark to organise National Tree Day in the City of Sydney

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

Rain garden in Chippendale

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

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

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

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

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

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.