Vancouver is a city already well-noted for its urban agriculture project, and recently made national news by very openly coming up with a new bylaw for keeping chickens for egg production within city limits. Its most established promoter has been City Farmer (two parallel sites), an organization that has been promoting urban agriculture for thirty years. They teach, put workshops about composting or vermiculture on and, interestingly, operate an online map whereby people in Vancouver may attach their name and situation to a map of the city and indicate whether you have room in your backyard to share the chores with, or whether you have the desire to do that work at someone else’s backyard. Sharing Projects is a fairly advanced Google Map site, offering more in-map information such as the ability to respond to “sites” directly. In some ways, it is e-dentifying Space in reverse, but it still is attempting to identify (privately-owned) community assets for agricultural purposes.
While riding German intercity or S-Bahn trains, one often notices that alongside the tracks large swaths of land are devoted to very intense agricultural and garden plots. These allotment gardens were originally intended to serve as a way in which to help and give food and fresh air opportunities for the poorest members of urban populations who increasingly lived in crowded, unsanitary and unsafe conditions in newly industrialising cities (Drescher 2001). Allotment gardens played important roles during and following the two world wars, offering cities a greater food security, and today, some 1.4 million organized allotment gardens still exist in and around cities, and while many plots are used for recreation, food production is still seen as being an important outcome.
City councils provide the land and a watering system, while individual garden owners (who must be members of the German Leisure Garden Federation) pay a small rental fee every year for use of the plot and often erect small sheds on site to store individual garden tools. These gardens are an excellent way to provide urban dwellers who otherwise would not have access to garden space a chance to practice their green thumbs, while doing so in a friendly, social and natural setting on land that otherwise would not have been used for anything as productive.
At a more extreme and hypothetical end, Front Studio architects out of New York City envisioned a transformed Philadelphia as its empty lots and abandoned buildings were transformed into its own “agricultural urbanism”. From their website, Farmadelphia intended to create “juxtapositions between farm and city that challenges its residents to revitalize their surroundings and daily lives.” It “empowers”, creates “localized centers of activity” and strengthens “an overall sense of pride and commitment in the community”.
Toronto's Agricultural Potential 