SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development

Chapter I

Introduction

Community gardens ... an innovative kind of urban renewal, one undertaken with the cheapest of resources: seeds, soil, and the sweat equity of inner-city people. This low-cost, low-tech urban renewal relies on intangibles like beauty and a sense of place, as well as tangibles like food and neighbourhood security. Phrases such as open space, green space and urban amenity--the professional argot of urban planners--fail to convey the potency of these garden movements. Urban renaissance comes closer to capturing the complex effect of these community gardens which nourish the body and also the soul. (Hynes, 1996, p. viii)

The quote refers to the growth of community gardens in North America, and how these gardens have, in turn, helped to revive inner-city areas. While since the last war the concept of 'urban food production'(n1) has been treated as something of a contradiction in terms, Hynes (1996) demonstrates that community gardens and urban production of food has done much to revitalize inner-city neighbourhoods. We should remember also that growing food in urban areas is hardly a new phenomenon. In the UK, 'guinea-gardens' existed in urban areas during the 18th century, providing recreation for middle-class families who grew flowers and vegetables. The later migration of rural labourers to urban areas following industrialization led to the demand for urban allotments--similar to their rural counterparts--in order to provide the opportunity to supplement low wages by growing fruit and vegetables. Early urban allotments became a statutory provision by local authorities under the Small Holdings Allotments Act of 1908; and by 1918 there were between 1 300 000 and 1 500 000 allotments. War-time conditions led to a continued growth, and by 1944, as a result of state encouragement to 'dig for victory', some 300 000 acres of allotments and gardens were producing around half of the nation's fruit and vegetable requirements (Garnet, 1996a).

As the war-time priorities dwindled and the pressures for urban development and regeneration grew, the urban allotment culture in the UK became marginalized. The post-war compromise between a planning policy of rural protection and urban containment, and an agricultural policy stimulating rural productionism (Marsden et al., 1993), tended to reduce the significance and much of the collective will which lay behind urban food initiatives.

Such conditions have, however, again begun to change through the slow recognition by national government and local authorities that urban food growing can stimulate more sustainable forms of development. Moreover, as the recognition grows of the diseconomies involved in the distances industrial food travels between rural areas of production and the largely urban consumption spaces, it becomes increasingly clear that new synergies between production and consumption of foods are needed. The measure of the ecological impact of this consumption is known as the 'ecological footprint' (Barr, 1997). London's footprint extends to 125 times its surface area. Garnett (1997a) has estimated that one quarter of transport in the UK is food related, and that 12% of the nation's fuel consumption is spent on packaging and transporting ...