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.

a

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

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

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

Something new

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

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

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

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

Food education

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

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

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

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

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

FSPUD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenge and opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it happen—advocacy

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

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

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

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

Integration in the planning process

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities—putting FSUD into practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to proceed

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

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

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

A local government food policy would:

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

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

A powerful start

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

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

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

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Strategic questions about proposed development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Does the area increase positive exposure to food?

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

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

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

I found that an exciting time… a time of social and technological change when the oil crisis stimulated a search for renewable energy systems and there was a lot of social innovation going on, especially among young people and especially those in the subcultures on the creative edge of society… not the so-called ’hippies’, but those energised by the ideas on intermediate technology coming from Fritz Schumacher and the discovery of the innovations, such as Whole Systems Design, and the other work of Buckminster Fuller a generation earlier. Despite the shock of the oil crisis to the Western world, despite an economy on the verge of change, despite the political crisis brought on by the dismissal of the Whitlam government, this was a good time.

Together, we collaborate to act on our shared circles of concern.

a
Years later, when I was working as editor of an environmental business journal, many of the ideas that emerged during the seventies had moved closer to the social mainstream… you could see this happening… things such as conservation of the natural environment with the social movement that had coalesced around the idea and its rise to political influence… the focus on the nation’s forests… on waste management… on industrial pollution. I think it was no accident that the nineties was the decade when the Australian environment movement reached it’s peak of political power. That was a collective response to the trends of the day.

What I found disappointing was that the debate over these important issues would quickly polarise people… they would immediately take up their positions for or against. The argument would then go into a sort of statis with opposing groups bunkered in their ideological and attitudinal silos. There would be little forward movement towards realistic solutions and the result would often be the emergence of a stubborn dogmatism.

I’m disappointed that this is still the situation today on many issues, but what I am happy about are the newer groups that have emerged and that are  trying to develop innovative solutions.

Not long ago I came across two books that illustrate this. One is Kunstler’s The Long Emergency which I and others have found an interesting but somewhat despairing read. Kunstler sees a period of scarcity and collapse coming as we deplete many of our most important resources such as oil, and this he says will possibly last for hundreds of years, hence the ‘long’ emergency.

He writes that people will have to move out of big cities into smaller communities with arable land and a reliable water supply in a favourable climate for agriculture. He sees little prospect of otherwise adapting to change.

The other book, and this is the one that inspires me and fills me with hope and stimulates what I do, is Thomas Homer Dixon’s The Upside of Down. Why it left me with hope was that Homer Dixon examines the seriousness of our challenges head-on but, instead of wanting to run away to the countryside, he sees the problems brought by the big challenges of energy supply, climate change and all the others as the trigger to creatively adapting our cities and our lives to the changing trends.

His argument is that converging energy, environmental, economic and political stresses could cause a breakdown of global order but there are things we can do now to keep this from being catastrophic. Some kinds of breakdown could open up opportunities for creative and bold reform of our societies if we choose and act to exploit them.

What I found intriguing about Homer Dixon’s book when I first picked it up was the subtitle—catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization.

He doesn’t itemize the ways by which we can creatively respond to change but I imagine that those ways are what some of us are already engaged in within our groups and communities. What Homer Dixon does offer, however, is a useful summary of the challenges we face.

This brings us to the question of how we take action in our lives. A key to taking creative action and to make it achievable is to understand where in life we can act.

Acting in circles

Imagine each of us as an individual in society. Immediately around us are people and circumstances we can influence and, possibly, change. This might be the food choices we make, the people we surround ourselves with, our workplace or household, the community groups we participate in… things and areas where we have even some small measure of influence. Here, we can make important, creative and enjoyable changes that do make a difference although that might be a small difference. Let’s call this our circle of influence.

But we are more than individuals surrounded by a limited circle of the things that we can influence. We are interested in the bigger things in society, things we as concerned individuals cannot influence. This circle of concern wraps around our circle of influence… you can imagine yourself as a dot with a circle of influence around you enclosed by a broader circle of concern.

So, we can act within our circle of influence to bring important and positive change to our lifestyles, to our homes and to the way we make decisions and treat others. But how do we exert influence in our circle of concern, on those bigger trends and things beyond our immediate, personal influence?

The answer to this is called collaboration. It’s the joining, it’s the cooperating with others to bring positive change into reality.

Let’s look at a few examples:
Sustainability Street in a neighborhood improvement arrangement through which people cooperate to reduce their energy and water consumption and to improve their shared street. In Waverley, local Sustainability Street people got together to convince their council to let them build a small community garden in their adjacent park.

In Chippendale, locals associated with the Sustainable Chippendale initiative, some of whom had already improved their homes with energy and water saving devices and by adopting personal behaviours, took the initiative to get together and gain council support to plant their footpath verges to citrus and vegetables, native and exotic plants. They then started a community composting system in a city park and are working with council on other innovative, creative ideas.

In Port Kembla, local people planted weedy, unruly road verges along a secondary road to subtropical fruit, olives and pumpkin. They grew so much pumpkin they had to organize the Port Kembla Pumpkin Party to eat it all.

In Byron Bay, local social entrepreneurs created a solar energy bulk buy program to purchase in bulk and  install photovoltaic energy systems at lower cost.

In Randwick, people acting in their circle of influence found that by getting together and acting in their circle of concern they could buy the organic food they preferred at an affordable price. Randwick Organic Buyers was created as a solution that brought social interaction as well as good food.

In a Sydney Eastern Suburbs apartment block, residents interested in food and gardening decided to collaborate within their circle of concern by planting a herb and vegetable garden and some fruit trees in the apartment block’s open space.

There are numerous examples of people linking their circle of influence—what they can do personally—with their circle of concern by working collaboratively with others to create something new and innovative that brings something positive to their and their family’s lives.

This is the creative imagination at work. This is how we develop those creative solutions that Thomas Homer Dixon speaks of when he says there can an upside to down, that what could be catastrophe could also be renewal.

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

Megan, Sarah, Costa and Russ

a

Costa gives away vegetable seedlings

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

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

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

The big hint was a big sign attached to the front fence of a house. In a big, bold font it pushed its message of opposition to accommodating more people in Randwick to the street. The cause of the householder’s displeasure seems to be the prospect of a greater population density, a statement of displeasure at the state government mandated increased population numbers for Sydney’s local government areas.

Valid concern… or common NIMBYism?

Is this another example of the NIMBYism commonly encountered whenever changes to urban landuses are proposed, or are there valid concerns? Well, there always are valid concerns because there are valid planning considerations to take into account – increased traffic flows, impact on parking, overshadowing, energy and water efficient design and so on. Why these are valid concerns is because they have been so badly done in the past, and it is this that is often behind the NIMBY response. Opposition to proposed changes in urban landuse has become the default setting, and given the history of how urban development has often been done in the past, opposition is understandable.

The recent controversy over medium density apartment development in Ku-ring-kai demonstrates how accommodating Sydney’s growing population can become a hot political issue. That development was cancelled, however that won’t stop development. It will merely drive it elsewhere. It might be good news for those northsiders who don’t want change to their suburbs but will it be good news for areas that are developed to accommodate the people who might have lived there? Like Randwick.

Lifestyle—vague concept or lived reality?

That sign at The Spot, though… it played on emotion as do most effective messages and it made reference to intangible and often vague concepts. For instance, it raised the notion that development and more people would lead to the loss of the area’s lifestyle. Just what this is puzzles me. What makes lifestyle? Isn’t that something that is experienced individually? Is there some collective lifestyle enjoyed by those living around The Spot? If so, what is it?

I live in an apartment quite close to The Spot but I have yet to identify any particular life style associated with the area that would distinguish it from other areas nearby. For me, lifestyle around The Spot is made up of things like walkability – being able to walk from home to The Spot, to Randwick’s commercial strip, Coogee Beach or Randwick Community Centre with its workshops that skill-up the community; the availability of public transport to the city; the local availability of cafes with good but moderately priced food; good neighbours.

These things might contribute to lifestyle but they are not unique to the area around The Spot. If you take a look around you find the place is one of mainly middle class people living in low-rise apartment buildings dating back to the 1920s, residents in a nearby block of social housing apartments and duplexes and detached houses set in small gardens. It’s what you would call medium density and it is all the better for being so. I don’t see how accommodating more people in the area is going to change that. A denser population can only make local businesses and public transport more viable and create the opportunity for new, specialist retailers and service providers.

Population density is the crux of the issue and I acknowledge that badly designed and built apartment accommodation can be both an eyesore (though that’s down to personal perception) and can create traffic snarls and other difficulties. At the same time, if we don’t increase densities across Sydney’s local government areas, where do we put the city’s increasing population? More than likely it will go to the expanding outer suburbs and to the exurbs that are eating up the city fringe market gardens and reducing the security of our urban food supply. If residential development is forced out of one area it doesn’t go away. It goes somewhere else.

This is where NIMBYism, although sometimes understandable in particular circumstances, fails the city as a whole. It merely displaces development. Comfortable middle class people might drive it out of their suburb but in doing so they force it onto someone else. Perhaps this doesn’t matter to them and, if this is so, then I have to ask whether this is just another manifestation of selfishness.

The trick in increasing population density in an area is to design it so that it retains what is good with the old. But first, you have to identify what it is that is good about the existing character that is worth keeping.

For those adverse to high rise, we can do medium density with only modestly scaled buildings. A friend, a designer familiar with the medium density cities of her native Germany, told me that the optimum height for an apartment building is that from which you can recognise the face of a friend in the street below. This works out at something like five to six or so stories. Good, thoughtful design can deliver human scale urban residential development that accommodates an increasing population at this height and that complies with energy efficiency and provision of open space.

The need for open space

With medium density development we come to value our open space more and development should allow for a good swarth of it.

As populations grow so do the range of demands for public open space. The traditional, nineteenth century idea of city parks as lawn-covered expanses modelled on the estates of the British aristocracy is giving way to uses that combine childrens’ playgrounds, BBQs and picnic tables, seating for quiet recreation, lawn for picnicing or kicking a ball about on, bushland reserves and community gardens.

My point in itemising these things is that the demand for them is likely to grow with population increase and that new medium density development needs to include open space for all of these options in its planning.

So, I appreciate the fears of the person who erected that sign on their fence near The Spot, but I disagree in principle. But their fears are shared by others and placating them will be the job of local government but mostly it will be the job of the developer. If they deliver a poorly designed product to house Randwick’s growing population then those fears will be vindicated and opposition to further development will likely be more vigourous.

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

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

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

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

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

We are already geoengineers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond monochrome

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

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

Fallback

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-science of just cautions?

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

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

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

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

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

Find the Watershed’s Urban Harvest Food Swap at:

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

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

Regards, Dianne Moy, Program Manager.