Urban Agriculture Best Practice From Around The World
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Spaces Techniques People Places www.agri-spaces.eu
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SPACES SPACES 1 – CHANGING THE PLACE OF AGRICULTURE If cities and other urban areas are to become food secure and therefore more sustainable, they must produce more food locally while preserving their green spaces (or at least not over-industrializing them for agricultural purposes). This is quite a challenge. As the diagram below shows, only approximately 25% of a large town or cities food requirement will come from the urban and peri-urban area
A typical ‘food zone’ in Europe. The aim of urban agriculture would be to expand the innermost circles, increasing and diversifying production within and close to the urban core, while diminishing supply from the outer circles, thus reducing ‘food miles’.
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SPACES 2 - URBAN ORCHARDS Planting fruit, nut and other harvestable shrubs and trees can be done by individual community groups on small sites, on a number of sites with different trees on each to create integrated, complementary growing and on large, single sites, usually parks and common land that would benefit from a new use. Fruit trees are well suited to the urban environment as they can be trained or grown on dwarfing rootstocks to fit into small spaces. Once the trees settle in, they require very little maintenance compared to annual vegetables
SEATTLE FOOD FOREST http://beaconfoodforest.weebly.com/index.html At the top of the scale would be something like the Seattle food forest, seven acres planted with edible plants such as apples, herbs, walnuts, and more exotic species like pineapples and guava and where anyone can go and harvest fruits and vegetables for free. The Beacon Hill Park, close to downtown Seattle, is being designed and will be built with help from the local community. "Our goal is to design, plant and grow an edible urban forest garden that inspires our community to gather together, grow our own food and rehabilitate our local ecosystem," says the team behind the proposal. It will include an edible arboretum with fruit varieties from around the world, a berry patch for canning, gleaning and eating right off the bush, a nut grove with trees providing both shade and food, a community garden where families can grow their own food, and a children’s area. The Forest also makes intelligent use of vertical space as well as the land itself (see diagram below)
LONDON ORCHARD PROJECT www.thelondonorchardproject.org The London Orchard Project (LOP) has planted 37 community orchards over the last three years, organizes fruit harvests involving hundreds of volunteers and rejuvenates neglected orchards to keep heirloom apple varieties alive. Each orchard has about ten trees in each, some are in public parks and others on spare ground in schools, housing estates and community centres, some in schools, housing. “New community orchards create growing spaces, promote community production, green the urban environment and create habitats for wildlife. In an era of increasing food insecurity and climate change, orchards can help build food security and community resilience”.
ABUNDANCE PROJECT SHEFFIELD AND ABUNDANCE NETWORK The Abundance project was created in Sheffield in 2007 by Grow Sheffield. Abundance aims to reconnect communities with local food resources and provide skills, training and practical advice to develop new food resources for the benefit of everyone. Project volunteers plant fruit trees, offer workshops on fruit tree pruning and grafting and run chutney and jam making workshops. Fruit trees are planted as orchards in small spaces or offered to local people to plant in their gardens, the crop is harvested and the surpluses donated to schools, hospitals and other organisations on a not-for-profit basis. Abundance Sheffield (http://growsheffield.com/abundance/) is part of Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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a wider UK network (www.abundancenetwork.org.uk).
SPACES 3 – ROOFTOP FARMS Lufa Farms in Montreal built a 31,000sq ft greenhouse producing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers on an inner-city rooftop in Montreal, Canada; it’s one of a developing trend towards rooftop farming. Montreal, like other cold-climate cities, has local organic farms nearby. But they are restricted to a 24- to 28-week growing season. A rooftop greenhouse farm can produce crops all year round. New technologies, demands for locally-grown organic produce, hydroponics and more efficient greenhouse systems has re-shaped the market opportunity and is encouraging entrepreneurs to set up new urban businesses. Most rooftop gardens use hydroponics and natural pest control rather than pesticides, irrigating with recycled water and reducing energy consumption in the building beneath them. Lufa Farms recruits customers into a co-op and sells directly to them. Other rooftop farmers are building farms on the tops of buildings like supermarkets and selling produce directly to the customer below. The capital cost to get started are higher but operating costs are much lower; rooftop farms need less labour, land, water, fertilizer and heavy equipment and can eliminate shipping costs by selling to local markets. In the US, for instance, it is not unusual for lettuce to travel more than 1,500 miles over 5 or 6 days to reach the supermarket, which can cost 50% of the final selling price. Another barrier could be planning law: few densely populated towns or cities will have included agriculture as part of their zoning or urban master plans. By improving the energy efficiency of food production, urban and rooftop farms can change the economics of farming. Rooftop farms can ask for similar or higher prices for their produce but the biggest advantage is an urban location giving it easy access and the ability to deliver to thousands of customers. A leading exponent and commercial leader for rooftop farming is Brightfarm Systems in the US. It estimates that its business will be turning over £1bn by 2020. In 2009 it designed a 10,000sq ft roof farm fully integrated with the newly-refurbished affordable housing complex below. The greenhouses use left-over heat from the residential areas of the building and water collected from the greenhouse roof. The farm provid es fresh, perish Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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able vegetables to a local non-profit food cooperative.
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SPACES 4 - MAKING USE OF DERELICT INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS THE BIOSPHERE, SALFORD UK As part of the Manchester International Festival during 2013, innovators hope to create a ‘biosphere’ in a disused printworks in Salord, a deprived area of the city, creating a state-of-the-art urban farm and research centre. Over the next ten years it will educate communities about sustainable food production while acting as a hub for the development of new enterprises. But perhaps its greatest contribution will be to help re-imagine and help market Salford as a vibrant and successful city of the future. Local people will be able to visit a space demonstrating sustainable food production using open air, roof gardens and aquaponics technology. After the festival it will then convert into a hub for social enterprise, with a wholefoods shop being launched and a 'veg-box' scheme currently run by local residents. The site will also provide training courses and welcome schools in an attempt to inspire young urban farmers. At a time when people are growing increasingly distrustful of their food suppliers, the not-for-profit initiative is attempting to reconnect inner-city dwellers with agricultural methods, by providing them with the skills to grow their own food in their back yards. Its creator, Vincent Walsh says: This work will help to challenge contemporary thinking about urban food production and ecologies within the innercity, exploring how cities can develop greener infrastructure and more resilient communities for the future. The Biosphere Building Before Conversion
THE PLANT, CHICAGO The Plant is a ‘vertical farm’ in a 100,000sq ft renovated meat-packing factory in a heavilyindustrialised and polluted part of Chicago. The Plant intends to provide its economically distressed community with locally produced food, as well as creating 125 local jobs. It will provide local produce to the neighbouring community via an urban vertical farm but also plans use half of its floor-space to house small businesses that will sell their products within The Plant while feeding their wastes to an anaerobic digester that in turn will generate sustainable energy for the building. Reusing an industrial complex in the heart of an economically distressed community, not only provides necessary food production, but solves the problem of useless and derelict industrial structures; though renovation rather than new build, Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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The Plant hopes to use 80% of all materials found in the building. Seasonal changes in weather and will not be relevant so farmers can expect to be growing crops all year-round. With a growing population in urban areas, multiplestory structures are a much more efficient use of space. Crops are shielded from the elements allowing for predictable yields. www.plantchicago.com/ The Plant, Chicago
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TECHNOLOGIES & APPROACHES In this section, we provide examples of the different kinds of urban agriculture that could be applied, from the small-scale and simple to the larger-scale and more complex. It is important to realise that the techniques and technologies applied are often themselves a product of a) What is in demand or what is local or community need b) Available spaces in the urban environment c) The availability of finance d) The type and speed of return (if any) required.
1 SMALL-SCALE INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE This kind of agriculture is ideally suited to the urban environment and there are many different approaches and ways of doing it. The main things to bear in mind are to choose crops with a high demand and devise a planting scheme that maximises crops throughout the year. Other issues include: • • • • •
The Size of the site, its topography and the physical conditions affecting it The Condition of the soil Sunshine/Rain: When and How Much? Site access (including vehicles) and water access/rights Relationship to the community & neighbours, whether buffer zones exist or can be created • Site Security (actual and perceived) • Terms under which the land can be acquired or utilised
2 AQUAPONICS Aquaponics is the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating system. It avoids the negatives of hydroponics (expensive nutrients and Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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need to periodically flush the system) and aquaculture (which needs excess nutrients removed from the system by getting rid of some of the water). Crops like salad greens or tomatoes are grown on raised beds. Beneath or alongside fish are raised with their waste being filtered by gravel beds and the toxic ammonia converted to nitrogen. This nutrient-rich water is pumped up to the raised beds feeding the plants before flowing back into the fish tanks. Bacteria that live on the surface of the growing beds convert ammonia wastes from the fish into nitrates that can be used by the plants. The plants extract the water and nutrients they need to grow, cleaning the water for the fish. It is a completely closed system, needing only heat and a circulating pump. Done on a small-scale, high value fish such as Tilapia or Yellow Carp, fish that for instance restaurants. Aquaponics Water cleaned of nitrates by the plants above (which have extracted other useful nutrients as well) is re-circulated back to the fish tanks below, aerating the water at the same time
3 MUSHROOM FARMING Growing mushrooms and other edible fungi could be a major urban farming industry, taking advantage of local demand, low-cost buildings and the heat effect of urban landscapes. Urban farmers could go in for bulk mushroom farming or specialize in products that meet local demand. A prime example in this latter category is Back To The Roots in California, USA which was founded by two Berkeley University graduates, introduced to the idea of growing gourmet mushrooms using coffee grounds. They experimented in the kitchen, growing a test bucket of tasty oyster mushrooms. From there, with a $5000 grant and initial interest from deli shops and restaurants, they tried bulk mushroom farming but soon realised that their true passion lay in creating well-designed and effective educational tools to make food personal while promoting sustainability. Their first product was a Grow-at-Home Mushroom Kit producing oyster mushrooms in a little brown box. Their second product, The Aquaponics Garden, is a closed-loop eco-system in which edible plants clean the fish tank while feeding on the waste the fish produce. This is an example of an urban agriculture venture which adapts itself to the people involved and the local market and which has found a way to add value to its basic product by presenting it to the market in different, higher-value and more easily-marketable ways. http://www.backtotheroots.com
4 RAISING ANIMALS Keeping animals in urban environments as a food source or for the local market is rapidly increasing in the UK. In the UK more than 750,000 households keep chickens but animal husbandry, particularly pigs, is a growing phenomenon. The advantages Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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are that by choosing particular species and breeds – exotic ducks or pigs, turkeys, quail or goats for instance - high nutritional or economic value can be achieved in relatively small spaces. A space as small as 30’ x 30’ can be utilised for hen houses, bird coops, a pair of pigs, goats or beehives. For instance, an eight week old piglet will cost £60 but can sell for around £300 at market. Once established, pigs can be bred for food, for the market or for re-sale to other urban farmers. It is legal to selfslaughter animals so long as the meat is not given to other people or sold; in this case, animals must be sent to an official slaughterhouse. This sort of activity can become significant if people keeping animals organise co-operatively to recruit new members, raise animals on spare ground and develop collective processing and distribution systems. Such activities also help to re-connect people to the environment and promotes humane husbandry as opposed to ‘soul-less’ industrial methods of rearing and processing animals.
5 – VERTICAL AGRICULTURE There are dozens of ways to think of vertical agriculture and farming, from large skyscrapers used as growing platforms down to very simple ways people can increase their growing space in small gardens or greenhouses. The main requirements to consider are: a) light – a lot of vertical farming occurs indoors in old factories for instance b) growing mediums and nutrients – inevitably root systems are constrained and soil is not enriched naturally c) water – being indoors, in vertical arrays and closely planted both the supply and disposal of water is an issue d) care and cropping – access and working at heights presents a problem as does the replacement and cropping of plants e) space – how can production be maximised but operations remain efficient f) markets nearby – this will determine what should be planted and when; remember, indoor vertical agriculture can be a allyear-round activity Vertical gardens – small-scale and using things to hand
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LOCAL FOOD HUBHUB – RESOURCES, ACTIVITIES LOCAL FOOD – CUSTOMERS, PRODUCTS, USES
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LOCAL FOOD HUBS – COMMUNITY, GROUPS, USERS
Farmers Markets
Craft & Speciality Foods
Retail, Direct, Box Schemes
Farm Shop and Pick Your Own
Shops Cafes and Restaurants
Community Growers
Waste To Biomass Energy, Composting
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PEOPLE 1 THE CITY AND THE PEOPLE Urban agriculture is integrated into the urban economic and ecological system, embedded in and interacting with the urban ecosystem. Urban residents are growers, use urban resources like organic wastes or wastewater, sell to other residents as consumers, affect the environment locally and compete for land alongside other urban needs. Many of the people involved in urban agriculture are the urban poor. They are usually part of the settled community of an urban area, most often women who can combine growing, processing and the marketing of produce with other tasks in the household. Urban agriculture is growing both in scale and importance. Municipal authorities are beginning to create plans and frameworks within which it can take place. Integrating urban agriculture into a comprehensive plan gives notice to the community of a city’s support of agriculture and gardening. Berkeley, California has 17 community gardens, 11 of which are publicly owned. Its comprehensive plan gives gardens and open space the highest priority in a 14-block area of City with a higher priority than affordable housing. It encourages neighbourhood groups to design and manage community gardens, encourages growing through partnerships with other government agencies, and supporting school-based gardens. As well as designating spaces, the city supports urban growing through developing food systems that include seed distribution, encouraging rooftop gardens and providing sites for local farmers’ markets and community gardens. Several cities in Canada are also leading the urban agriculture movement largely because of concerns about food insecurity, leading them to develop ‘Food Charters’, acts of social justice creating frameworks and priorities for urban agriculture. Such actions are policy responses to growing organised pressure for public authorities to either deliver food security and justice or to make resources available for the people to do so themselves. In North America, the Food Charter Movement has lobbied for and succeeded in persuading municipal authorities to form Food Policy Councils which bring together stakeholder groups to develop policy and action around food. One good example is that of Toronto, Canada. Established in 1990, the Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC) has a diverse membership including the business community, farmers and community groups. The mission is “to end hunger and the need for food banks in Toronto and to work with all sectors to establish a food system that is just and ecologically sustainable.” Its Toronto Plan, written in 2000, points out that many cities have a sizable “food economy” making food security an economic as well as environmental issue. The Plan covers five areas: • • • •
Urban intensification and agricultural land preservation. Further development of agricultural initiatives. Making quality food retail an essential service. Developing an affordable housing policy.
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• Integrating ecology into the urban infrastructure. The Plan does not just address issues of food justice but seeks to address other issues. Access to good food is a vital component of health and no or poor food adversely affects the poor, elderly, students, the disabled or those in precarious employment or illegal immigration status. Affordable housing mixed in with more expensive homes ensures that local shops must cater for all income levels and not either offer poor, low-priced food which is nutritionally less than good or higher-priced food the poor cannot afford.
PEOPLE 2 – REGATHER LAND, SHEFFIELD Regather LAND Sheffield is an initiative within Regather Trading, whose mission is to give people the choice and opportunity to live, work and play co-operatively and create a mutual local economy. Regather LAND believes in access to quality, healthy, organic food for all Sheffielders. It works to create a local Sheffield food system that is good for the local economy, people & environment. All its food-related projects actively encourage a vibrant, shared food culture and support for local producers. Regather believes that there should be fair trading in the UK as well as with producers abroad and that it is possible to have good food and high animal welfare standards. Its food sourcing policy is local and organic unless there’s a good reason otherwise. Regather LAND is a network of local organisations and food growers seeking to support each other by intertrading and working collaboratively. Local small producers needed to develop new sources of income and sustainability but owing to their size, they struggled to present themselves as credible suppliers to many retail and processing outlets. The challenges were not only in terms of the range and quantity of produce, but also on price. They joined with other local food enterprises to form a Local Food Action Group to explore how these challenges could be overcome. The group partners were interested in trading directly with local customers rather than wholesale markets which were focussed on the price and quantity rather than the quality and provenance of produce. The group worked together to co-ordinate activity and to create an attractive offer for their local customers, caterers and retailers taking into account their different standards and expectations.
Push & Pull Strategies The group also explored how they could work together to create ‘push’ and ‘pull’ strategies to stimulate local demand. Regather LAND targeted local food retailers with their offer (‘push’), and also encouraged consumers to ask for local produce on the menus (‘pull’). Regather LAND explored the barriers to local food supply and demand: problems around consistency of supply, quality, logistics, communications and understanding seasonality. It identified that the key factors in winning supply contracts is getting to know customers and offering informal supply agreements. Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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This builds trust with the customer and it is also a lower risk for them, which makes it easier to subsequently formalise and develop the contracts, once the benefits of using them have been proven. www.regather.net
PEOPLE 3 – INCREDIBLE EDIBLE, TODMORDEN www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/
Incredible Edible is the brainchild of Pam Warhurst who co-founded the initiative in Todmorden in 2008. A team of volunteers turned plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, changing the narrative of food in their community. Incredible Edible is going worldwide, helping build resilient, kinder, more aware communities confident in their own ability to create a better world for future generations. Incredible Edible began with herb gardens but quickly moved on to plant and grow vegetables and trees round town. They approached public bodies – like the fire station, the local doctor's and the car park at the railway station – to use their land or supported organisations like Penning Housing to develop their own ideas. Every school in the town is now involved and so are local restaurants. It’s easy to think of Todmorden and towns like it as exceptions, being small and in a largely rural area. But because of its geography it is also quite congested with few flat open spaces. Incredible Edible has therefore made use of dozens of micro-sites, often only planter-sized or a little bigger, but done it on a large scale. The Big Idea: the power of small actions on a community Since Incredible Edible was launched, Todmorden has enjoyed a reduction in antisocial behaviour and criminal damage. The increase in volunteers out and about around town makes anti-social behaviour harder to get away with. People do not often vandalise food or growing things. And there is an improved relationship between the public and public institutions because of their involvement in this high-profile community project. The police station for instance has its own incredible edible garden. Incredible Edible promotes food-based learning for the community as a whole. There are Incredible Edible groups in 37 towns all over the UK. Incredible Edible is more than just a food project. It’s a way of changing an entire communities' behaviour, using food. "Simply by using the language of food, we have opened up conversations, new ways of looking at space, new ways of working across our communities”, said Pam.
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One of the strengths of Incredible edible’s approach is that it is small-scale and can therefore be understood and done by anyone. It didn’t need permissions to get going, the early activists and volunteers simply did it, which can be tremendously empowering, building confidence and momentum. And it is a focussed activity, benefitting people in their own areas and avoiding a scattergun approach (with a loss of focus and opening the initiative to arguments and challenge) or the employment of concepts and arguments that go over the heads of many people, leading to disengagement.
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PLACES PLACES 1 – MAPPING The ABUNDANCE project in Brixton, London, aims to create a ‘low input, high output’ community garden and evaluate how productive urban agriculture can be. The project will map cultivatable green space, mapping sites spatially and institutionally with information about land ownership and land use collated along with location. A key challenge to urban farming on unused sites are the policy and planning arrangements locally: do residents have the right to grow things on land owned by social housing providers? How to create shared ways of managing space and distributing food grown? Surveys suggest that a very significant amount, as much as 60 per cent, of food needs could be met within cities if all available space - rooftops, balconies, allotments and urban green space - were to be cultivated. Key drivers are the developing global food crisis and the need to reduce food miles, with food and fuel prices soaring and global urban populations now outstripping rural ones. Countries, communities and people are looking for new spaces and methods of agriculture. In Argentina community gardens were originally created to mitigate the effects of the 2001 economic collapse but as the economy recovered, government-supported urban agriculture now provides the unemployed with food and an income. Mapping is important in terms of allocating land for use either for: • Individual use (gardens and balconies for instance) • Individual use within collective management arrangements (community gardens and allotments) • Individual use but collective processing and distributions (for instance, sharing out surpluses amongst producers and nonproducers or joint production facilities) • Joint ownership and involvement (community gardens and urban smallholdings) This in turn raises question of but also help to resolves issues around: • Ownership • Governance • Management • Inputs (work/time) and outputs (food) and how benefits are allocated The project aims to establish a sustainable institutional structure to manage the land and other sites around the area, once the project ends. http://www.rudi.net/node/20705 Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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PLACES 2 – GUERILLA GARDENING - VANCOUVER Planners and people often favour the creation and improvement of green spaces to enhance the urban environment but have been less supportive of urban agriculture and growing food in cities on urban green spaces. In Vancouver participants and stakeholders try to negotiate with each other while building a greener city, grow awareness of food security and develop community. Guerilla gardening, or any attempt to acquire or reallocate land use for urban agriculture provokes local discourse about health, the environment, social justice and equity. How these conversations and negotiations play out determine whether grassroots gardening gains mainstream acceptance and support or remains a marginal activity. Guerilla gardening takes many forms: it can be individualistic and spontaneous, a oneoff activity or protest or something more sustained and challenging to those in authority. One example of this is disused railway sidings in Vancouver that began with a local apartment dweller whose balcony was not sunny enough for the tomatoes he wanted to grow and has developed into a guerrilla garden covering two city blocks. Guerilla gardeners In Orestad, Denmark It can either aim to change minds or perceptions or to change the uses we put the land to. It is almost always illegal and usually stems from the previous prohibition and denial of access to land or a fear of the complexities of local bureaucracies or the heavy hand of regulation. It challenges the public and private use of space, the authority public and private actors claim to control the use of land. And in this challenge lies the opportunity to create engaged and active citizens, individuals who participate in the public domain and are socially engaged in learning about food production and consumption habits and – beyond the individual – a sense of community and solidarity. Urban agriculture can transform public space into places for activism and education about food systems, how food is produced, processed, distributed and allocated; creating connections between people and the environment is critical to this form of food activism.
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URBAN AGRICULTURE IN CUBA – CREATING SUSTAINABLE CITIES Urban agriculture in Cuba has a role providing food within communities, improving public health and the preserving the health of the soil and the environment. It focuses upon native crops as part of its sustainability, as these are easier to grow using the organic techniques that are likewise favoured. Most importantly, urban agriculture is a central component sustainable development. The key factors within Cuba’s urban agriculture strategy are: • Using methods that encourage people to produce food and to develop their skills • The rational and intensive use of all available land, with each area having its own programmes and specialities • Encouraging maximum diversity of species and varieties in each site to create a guaranteed source of seeds for future growing. • Spreading the appreciation and knowledge of food and the environment through education of the public and food producers. • Developing a wide basis of support and co-ordination on a national level. Beyond these aims, urban agriculture in Cuba makes use of certain ideas and approaches to maximise impacts: • Inclusive participation at all levels • Offering education across all sectors and in all areas • Driving excellence in skills and increasing knowledge both through research and the sharing of techniques both within Cuba and abroad (in both directions); never rejecting useful knowledge from whatever source • Making it easier for growing to generate income quickly and easily, incentivising people to start producing • Investment in research to improve methodologies and approaches. Urban Agriculture in Cuba is regarded as a crucial part of the sustainable development of cities which are conceived as being living entities existing in a series of cycles that must be made sustainable, rather than as places simply receiving inputs (of power, water, people, goods etc) and pumping out outputs (of goods, pollution etc). Cuban agro-ecology complements and supports this approach in a variety of ways: • By optimising the use of locally available resources and reducing the use of external resources or resources that do not add to the health of the producer and the consumer. • By tackling the causes and not symptoms • By encouraging self-reliance and self-determination • By always considering contexts and results, the relationship between the design of cultivation, its productivity and effect on the local environment. • By protecting biodiversity and making best use of this diversity to maximise production • By valuing the practices and knowledge of local people irrespective of its formal validation Agri-Spaces Grundtvig Partnership Project
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Agri-Spaces is a partnership project that has created a network of organisationa that share techniques and mangement approaches used in urban agriculture, and developed ways of increasing the benefit of such schemes to the communities they serve. The partnership is made up of 3 countries, Lithuania, Romania and the UK and have examined the most effective ways of initiating urban agriculture schemes. Urban farming methods from the partner countries have been explored in order to find the most efficient and effective approaches. Case studies and a resource bank collected from all partners is now available on-line. Partners: •
Pacificstream Enterprise Ltd - UK
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Liverpool Vision - UK
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Taurages verslo informacinis centras - Lithuania
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The Society of Geography -Suceava, Romania
www.agri-spaces.eu
[This project was funded with support from the European Commission. This document reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.]
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