(DWWKH&LW\

p fm p,
j f pb p , p,
bm. m pj..

Eat the City

The case for civic agriculture.

RICHARD

INGERSOLL

JUNE

2013

Truck Farm Bed, DC Central Kitchen,

Washington, DC. [Photo by
DC Central Kitchen]

Urban development during the past half century has eaten away the clear edges of
cities, leaving ambiguous empty spaces. While the resulting disorderly appearance
betrays the expectations of coherent urban morphology, I have come to realize that
one must have compassion for such patchy areas. They are part of the lived
experience of at least half of humanity and for this deserve attention as spots of
potential quality. The essayist Philip Lopate, who, like myself, spent several years in
academic exile in Houston, described that sprawling city as a smiling face with a lot
of teeth missing. European cities tend not to have the same dental mishaps, at least
not in their historic centers, but on the periphery the fabric of streets and buildings
starts to fray and begins to look more like suburban Texas, more like the global
condition of sprawl. Here infrastructure prevails over buildings, and areas
historically reserved for growing food get bullied by new constructions, torn to pieces
by fast roads and parking lots, and splintered into useless gaps overgrown with weeds.
These leftover spaces which belong neither to a natural ecosystem nor to a
landscape design fit Gilles Clments provocative theory of the Third Landscape.
1
While they may contradict the aesthetic sensibilities of landscape professionals,
such untended sites represent for Clment an important evolutionary habitat as a
refuge of biodiversity.

KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

Perhaps when we are confronted by a gap in the urban fabric, rather than thinking
about how to fill it, or correct it, our first instinct should be to investigate its potential
as a Third Landscape. What species of flora and fauna have survived here? Does it
already have a formal character? When Clments Manifesto of the Third Landscape
was published in 2004, it seemed a perverse invitation to indolence, to letting things
go, so contrary to the ambitious reshaping of the land that animates the design
professions. The danger of his theory was that it could be read as condoning the urban
decay of sprawl. That indolent spirit fortified Clments extraordinary Isle
Derborence, in Lille, a man-made butte occupying an area of 3,500 square meters that
rises sharply from the flat lawns of the Parc Henri Matisse to a height of 7 meters.
Completed in 1992, the inaccessible landscape achieves poetic status as a marvelous
conceit, replicating the desert Island of Antipodes, south of New Zealand, in its
extruded, irregular shape. After two decades, this unnatural island, now capped by
tall trees, has produced an autonomous ecosystem, inviolable by humans, and a
superb asylum for birds in the center of the city.

Top: Gilles Clment, Isle Derborence,

Parc Henri Matisse, Lille, France, 1992.
[Photo by the author]. Middle: Isle
Deborence. [Photo by Velvet] Bottom:
Alan Sonfist, Time Landscape, New
York City, 1978. [Photo by the author].

A similar, though much smaller, sanctuary in New York City anticipated Clments
call to inaction. In 1978, the artist Alan Sonfist erected a cast-iron fence around an
empty lot owned by New York University, marking the site off-bounds in perpetuity.
His conceptual artwork, Time Landscape, sits amid the dense blocks of Lower
Manhattan on a standard-size lot, 25 by 40 feet, seeded with a hierarchy of
autochthonous species, ranging from low grasses to saplings and fruit trees to taller
oaks and elms, that represent the islands ecology before settlement. While Clments
Isle has acquired a monumental presence in Lille, Time Landscape usually goes
unnoticed, like a leftover scrap of land too small for an entrepreneurs attention.
A much more ambitious example of the art of leaving things alone can be found in the
suburbs of Florence at the Oasis of Focognano. This reconstituted wetland and
wildlife preserve occupies an unlikely position between a ziggurat-shaped hill, once
the citys dump, and the Firenze Nord entrance to the Autostrada. Not far from it
spread the concrete warehouses of fashion companies like Gucci and Roberto Cavalli,
horizontal boxes separated by vast parking lots. Biologist Carlo Scoccianti, backed by
KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

the World Wildlife Foundation and the municipality of Campi Bisenzio, acquired 63
hectares of land, and in the late 1990s began to reshape the site into a series of small
lakes. Renaturalized with reeds, canes and other native grasses, the fenced-off site has
become a sort of suburban Galapagos, full of fascinating rare species, now safe from
hunters and urban intrusions. Visitors must be accompanied by a trained volunteer
guide and maintain total silence. Funding came from environmental compensations
exacted from local enterprises by the river authority, which needed to build
catchment basins to mitigate floods. Scoccianti promotes the project as a work of art
(see his website Artlands) that involves human design actions to be developed by
2
nature itself.
Each of these landscapes is now deliberately unmaintained, but they initially
required complex site preparation and selective planting. While they may appear like
wilderness, they are highly artificial products of design. As such, they are not far
removed from the Second Landscape maintained by farmers and gardeners. I bring
up these examples in order to suggest a vision for designers and activists working in
that second space. For despite the appeal of Third Landscape artworks, it seems
unrealistic to apply strategies of programmed abandon to the innumerable gaps left
by urban sprawl. I sympathize with Christophe Girot, who writes: A scruffy nature
left to grow unattended at the edge of some old brownfield site does not convey the
same positive sensual emotion as a vertical garden (i.e., Patrick Blancs very
unnatural hydroponic planting of walls), despite all its inherent ecological merits.

Carlo Scoccianti, The Lakes of

Focognano, Florence, 1998-2005.
[Photo by the author]

For the last decade I have advocated an alternative approach to landscape in urban
4
environments that I call Agricivismo, roughly translated as Civic Agriculture. All
cities, even the densest ones like New York (which supposedly has 700 community
KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

gardens), have the potential to be reconceptualized as agricultural zones, supplying

many different scales and genres of food production. Urban farmers and gardeners
around the world are identifying abandoned lots and recovering them as edible
landscapes. While I have yet to find examples of agricultural interventions that
possess the majesty of the Isle Derborence or the grandeur of the lakes of Focognana,
I believe vegetable patches and productive farms in urban situations can aspire to
that level of art. The benefits are well established: land recuperation with few
maintenance costs; heightened security fostered by citizen-gardeners who take
responsibility for their places of cultivation; improved health, thanks to the physical
activity of gardening as well as the consumption of safe, biologically superior local
produce.
Agriculture played a central role in preindustrial cities and continued to serve
industrial cities through the Second World War as the famous Birmingham
allotments attest before the hegemony of oil-powered agriculture and the
pressures of real estate speculation banished food production ever farther from the
urban core. In suburban California, where I grew up, I never saw a live chicken or a
vine-grown tomato. Globalization has further alienated consumers from their food,
but lately there has been a shift back toward urban farming, due partly to a growing
ecological consciousness and partly to economic necessity. The,has decreased the
value of urban land and opened new possibilities for urban agriculture. Detroit, which
in the late 20th century lost more than half of its population, has welcomed farming
initiatives on its vacant lots. Agriculture in some cases can increase the value of land.
In the Bordeaux suburb of Pessac, famous among architects for Le Corbusiers
intervention for workers housing, the cost of land for growing wine grapes currently
runs higher than that for building development, which has helped to conserve urban
land. Specialty crops in other urban contexts may keep land out of the development
market.
Another major initiative was launched at the 2010 Internazionale Bauaustellung, held
in seven cities of the former East Germany that have been losing population since
1989. IBA planners proposed removing superfluous Plattenbauen housing and
creating better urban connections through allotment gardens. Their seemingly
contradictory slogan Progress without growth launched a profound challenge
to the design professions. But despite new networks of orchards and grazing lands in
places like the Paunsdorf Siedlung, on the outskirts of Leipzig, the IBA proposal
attracted scarce attention: it failed to address an aesthetic agenda that could spur the
collective imagination.

Carl Theodor Srensen, Nrum

Allotments, Nrum, Denmark, 1948.
[Photo by Sebastiano Brandolini]
KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

While urban farming should not be reduced to a question of aesthetics, I believe

planners and activists give too little thought to creating a meaningful landscape.
Tending an urban orchard should be about more than subsistence farming. Yes, you
can grow food in the city, but farming within the public realm begs for art. I always
return to the finest example ever built, the Nrum allotments north of Copenhagen.
In 1948, landscape architect Carl Theodor Srensen (1899-1979) designed 50
allotments, enclosing each 500 square-meter lot within an elliptical hedge of
hawthorn and privet. The two-meter interstices separating the ovals remained for
public use, while each allotment had its own tool shed and could be organized as the
individual tenant desired. Within the hedges, the gardens acquired their own
character according to the tastes of each gardener, but the grassy intermediary public
areas, conditioned by the uniform, head-high pruning of the hedges, enforced a
strong formal unity for the site that resonated with traditional oval constructions in
the region. Nrum remains after more than 60 years a stunning public park
maintained by 50 private gardeners.
I focus on the scale of the allotment for two reasons: 1) a regional agricultural park,
which would be desirable for all cities, requires herculean bureaucratic and political
organization to negotiate and sustain; and 2) I am more confident of the
unconditional participation of small scale gardeners. Several Mediterranean cities,
including Pamplona, Milan and Barcelona, have initiated regional agricultural parks,
attempting to bring public access and awareness to areas within the metropolitan
urban system where traditional agriculture is still practiced. Pamplonas Aranzadi
Park, designed by Aldayjover Arquitectos, is the smallest and the most coherent, a
network of bicycle paths linking a variety of cultural and farming activities, including
an ancient pilgrims bridge and the bullpens that supply the famous corrida.
Milan hosts Europes first agricultural park, the Parco Agricolo Sud, first conceived at
the Polytechnic University in the late 1970s. Design professionals analyzed the
geographic and hydrological resources of the region, cataloguing the location and
scale of farming activities. The 46,000-hectare park gained official recognition in 1990
under the aegis of the Province of Milan, involving 63 municipalities and more than
1,400 farms. But its existence remains a mystery to the broader public. With the
exception of a well-organized public park, the Bosco in Citt, it is difficult to know
how to visit the larger Parco Agricolo, or even how to locate it, and real estate
pressures are a constant threat. Barcelonas agricultural park derived directly from
Milans example and shares similar problems: multiple authorities and limited
accessibility. Occasionally one finds a sign in the towns near the Llobregat River,
claiming that land belongs to the park, but most areas within its jurisdiction are not
connected or accessible. The likely places to begin creating links are the water
courses, streams and canals, which legally are protected as fluvial parks. The
examples of Pamplona, Milan and Barcelona do not lessen my belief that all cities
KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

should declare their edges part of an agricultural park, but they demonstrate the
difficulty of managing design processes and outcomes at the regional scale.

Left: City wall and garden, Andernach,

Germany. [Photo by roll_pix] Right:
Dianna Grant, East New York Farms!
intern, Brooklyn, New York. [Photo by
East New York Farms! via USDA]

Allotments, by contrast, have fewer intermediaries: the municipal government,

citizen groups, and sometimes private businesses. They can serve individual families,
as at Nrum, or can include educational institutions, botanical societies, hospitals
and prisons, and ecological testing grounds. In 2010, the small German city of
Andernach decided to plant public lands surrounding the town castle with vegetables
that citizens were invited to pick and take home. Municipal staff tend the garden, and
townspeople do the harvesting; they can literally eat their way through the city.
Elsewhere, school gardens provide proven benefits to education, but they typically
require professional care when students are away for the summer. One of the most
successful school projects, East New York Farms!, was organized in 1998 by
professors from the Pratt Institute. Set in an economically disadvantaged
neighborhood, the program took over empty lots and paid a small stipend to children
aged 12-14 who gardened a few hours a week. The transformation of both the lots and
the children was astounding, leading to the establishment of a Farmers Market and
launching several careers in urban farming.
Germany has the greatest number of allotment gardens per capita in the world, and in
many German cities, in particular Mnich and Berlin, the demand far exceeds the
supply. Associations have developed, such as Nomadisch Grn (Nomadic Green),
which pursues a strategy of mobile gardening. In 2009, founders Marco Clausen and
Robert Shaw created Prinzessinnengrten on a derelict site in Kreuzberg, Berlin,
assembling stacks of plastic beer crates, vinyl gunny sacks and cardboard milk
cartons, and filling them with topsoil. It was conceived as a temporary garden, but
now a group of 40 volunteers participates in these mobile landscape transformations,
bringing the portable planters inside the local market hall for the winter. The project
has generated a restaurant using food grown on the site and attracts continuous
5
cultural events. These nomadic tactics inspired a spinoff when dozens of people
occupied the abandoned runways of Berlins Templehof Airport with spontaneous
gardens. Mobile gardening has been taken to an even further extreme by American
filmmaker Ian Cheney, who in 2009 parked his pickup truck on Manhattan streets
KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

and filled the back with soil to create a Farm on Wheels. It has inspired a fleet of 25
6
similar Truckfarms.

Marta Donati and Richard Ingersoll,

Nomad Garden, Montevarchi, Italy,
2012. [Photos by the author]

Allotments enrich urban sites socially and environmentally and can happen almost
anywhere, as Michelle Obama proved in 2009, when she dug up 100 square meters of
the White House lawn for the First Garden. In May 2012, with my colleague Marta
Donati, an agronomist who works on therapy gardens with ex-drug addicts, I
prepared a nomad garden in a medieval cloister in Montevarchi, in the Province of
Arezzo, Italy, as part of an arts program devoted to greening the city. Since it was a
historic site that could not be altered, we designed a garden made completely of
portable elements. We gave it formal structure with a pergola of bamboo using a 9square grid, which allowed for eight chambers for different horticultural types
surrounding a central void, and positioned many of the plants at a height of one meter
so they could be observed or touched by children or people in wheelchairs.
Visitors entered on a path through cut broom, and in the second room rose a column
of laurel leaves, symbolic of the residue of nature gathered and allowed to decompose.
The third room displayed crates (an idea borrowed from the Prinzessinnengrten)
with seasonal vegetable and grain seedlings. The fourth room housed an exotic ficus
set in a pyramid of bamboo poles. The fifth was lined with gunny sacks stuffed with
soil and planted with aromatic herbs (a practice copied from the ghetto of Mathare in
Nairobi). The sixth room had a bench for resting and a hibachi grill. The seventh
offered a spiral of cabbage seedlings watered by an upturned demijohn and a slowdrip hose, loosely inspired by Smithsons Spiral Jetty. The final room set up a bed
covered with carnations, literally a flower bed. The Nomad Garden cost 67, took four
volunteers six hours to build, and thrived in the cloister for three weeks without
causing damage to the place.
Allotments can be made almost anywhere, and they do not need to be permanent. A
display of growing plants, made accessible to all and cared for by conscientious
gardeners, provides an alternative to sterile development and derelict spaces and
offers a vision of hope for the city.

KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

p j pp b .
p bb .

'

A version of this article appears this month, in Italian, as Citt commestibili in

the Swiss magazine Archi. It appears here with the permission of the author and
publisher. For related content on Places, see Notes Toward a History of
Agrarian Urbanism, by Charles Waldheim; The Productive Surface, by Mason
White; and Digital Farm Collective, by Matthew Moore.

Richard Ingersoll, Eat the City, Places Journal, June 2013. Accessed 05 Sep 2016.
<https://placesjournal.org/article/eat-the-city/>

Richard Ingersoll

Richard Ingersoll is an
architectural historian at
Syracuse University in Florence.
His most recent book is World
Architecture, a Cross-Cultural
History.

KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL





(DWWKH&LW\

KWWSVSODFHVMRXUQDORUJDUWLFOHHDWWKHFLW\"JFOLG &MZ.($MZXR%5''ZV[//K6-$%('X)5K&ZZ4[L'4R=/[FS%F%3UF6*=BG8RYLOX6%R&YL