Garden City Donut

Figure 1: Howard’s “Donut” scheme from Garden Cities:

strictly urban lands surrounded by strictly agricultural lands

Figure 2: The organic creation of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes in an Edgeless City,

from VIljoen’s book on CPULs.

From the Garden City Donut to an Integrated Landscape;

An Analysis of the Garden City Movement’s Influence on Urban and Peri-Urban Farming and A Case for the Reintegration of Agriculture into Urban Life

as Reconciliation of Urban and Rural.

Introduction

In his book on visions of the town and the country in English history and literature, author Raymond Williams writes that even though “The country and the city are changing historical realities” and “our real social experience is not only of the country and the city, in their most singular forms, but of many kinds of intermediate and new kinds of social and physical organization,” “the ideas and the images of country and city retain their great force” as we tend to “reduce the two to symbols and archetypes.”[i]

To a modern-day Westerner, Williams’ analysis could not ring truer; in our minds and in those of many planners, the country and the city are completely separate entities, and the idea of a rural land use such as farming in an urban setting now seems laughable on a large scale. In reality, however, Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture, changed in the last century from main components of the urban food supply to struggling movements, are nothing novel. Historically, before the advent of the railroad, rapid urbanization, and industrial farming practices, to complement substantial urban farming most municipalities used "a distinct rural area around their boundaries for food production,” and even the largest cities were small enough to permit most residents to have some direct contact with agriculture.[ii] Today, according to UN estimates, 800 million urban residents are still engaged in agriculture.[iii] Chinese cities continue to independently produce 85% of their produce needs, with Shanghai and Beijing growing all of their vegetables within the city or directly outside.[iv] In the West, the two World Wars brought about huge spikes in urban farming, with “Victory Gardens” springing up in many cities to cope with food and transportation shortages. In both England and the US, this method supplied half the nation’s produce during WWII, with more than 20 million Americans planting Victory Gardens.[v]

In developed countries, however, and particularly in the United States, large-scale urban and peri-urban agriculture have both all but disappeared in the last century as food production is moved to intensive industrial landscapes and farmland is voraciously consumed for urbanization and suburbanization. It is estimated that in the US an area 2/3 of a mile wide stretching from San Francisco to New York City is converted from farms to urban sprawl every year, with 41,324,800 acres of rural land (the size of Illinois and New Jersey combined) converted to developed uses between 1982 and 2007.[vi] Worse, for every acre of farmland consumed, up to another acre becomes idled as farmers anticipate conversion.[vii] As the value of land for agricultural use decreases, the value for urban development shoots up, and global food suppliers outcompete local growers, farmland disappears, banished from the urban landscape. As cities and regions around the world grow in population and lose arable land, their transport networks are becoming unable to handle the sheer volumes of food imported from elsewhere.[viii] Cities are growing into single-use agricultural deserts, endangering their own food security and ecological stability.[ix]

As early as 1898, Ebenezer Howard, a British inventor and stenographer, put forth what seemed to be one good solution to the never-ending expansion of the city and a proposal to reunite the town and the country, agriculture and industry, in a new urban form called the Garden City. Surrounded by an agricultural belt, the Garden City would hypothetically produce much of its own food. Did Howard’s proposal help us move toward a solution to the disappearance of farming in and near cities and a reintegration of agriculture into urban life? Howard presented us with a convincing united vision of a utopia. Unfortunately, conditions in the real world to which bits and pieces of Howard’s vision were applied were hardly similar. Ironically, the legacy of Howard has been the opposite of his intended “marriage of town and country”; instead, Garden City-inspired Urban Planning has created an enforced system of zoning and separation of uses that has increasingly divided country and city, effectively squeezing agriculture out of the city to create the “donut,” or “Green Belt” model of an entirely urban city surrounded by a hypothetically “rural” Green Belt which unfortunately in reality contains very little viable agriculture, with no interaction between urban and rural. In this paper, I argue for an alternative approach that emphasizes the role of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, a term coined by architect André VIljoen, which involves a more multifunctional urban and rural land use and a reintegration of agriculture into the urban experience on a deeper level. As an alternative to the Garden City prototype and its planning legacy, I will present a policy framework and several successful examples of urban-rural integration. Ultimately, I propose a reassessment of our food and land value systems and argue for the ability of consumer pressure and government involvement to correct for the market system’s failure in evaluating the importance of local food production and ensuring our cities a more sustainable future.

Howard’s Garden City: In Theory, in Practice, and in Effect

In creating the Garden City, Howard’s stated purpose was to create an alternative to the two “magnets” of pleasant yet lifeless countryside and bustling yet disgusting, crowded city by joining the two: “town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”[x] To achieve this, Howard would acquire a piece of virgin farmland to be placed in the collective ownership of the town, and build the town itself on a sixth of that land, leaving the rest as an agricultural estate. Ideally, industry and agriculture would be perfectly integrated, with the city of 30,000 people providing both a source of labor and a market.[xi] The infrastructure expense and municipal services, such as expansive parks, schools, and cultural amenities, would all be covered by rent paid by all residents and farmers.[xii] It was Howard’s belief that farmers would be willing to pay extra rent for the advantage of a local market and the farmer education and cooperation initiatives organized by the city.[xiii]

The two garden cities eventually built more or less along Howard’s main ideas, Letchworth and Welwyn, demonstrate that Howard’s scheme was, to some extent, feasible, but the success of their alleged integration with agriculture is less certain. Andres Duany claims that "Letchworth, in Hertfordshire, is an

applied example of Howard's theory, complete with a surrounding greenbelt sized to feed the community. Some food in Letchworth may well derive from the surrounding farms, but the town's urban pattern is indistinguishable from that of a well-designed suburb attached to a transit-oriented town center. It does not support engagement in agriculture beyond conventional purchases at the markets.”[xiv]

According to Duany, there is little integration in this Garden City between the farming aspect and the urban residents. Of course, one could claim that the fact that farmland has been preserved at all (albeit with a Green Belt much smaller than 5/6 of the total area) is an achievement in itself, until one considers the context of Letchworth Garden City. From an aerial view of the surroundings, it quickly becomes clear that Letchworth hardly differs from any of the other small towns around it. Too far north of London to be a suburb susceptible to urbanization pressures, Letchworth, like every small town around it, is made up of a core surrounded by agricultural fields. As Thomas Adams, speaker at a conference on agriculture at Letchworth in 1904 warned, a Garden City in such a context could hardly be as different in terms of offering incentives for agriculture from other similar towns of 30,000 as Howard suggested.[xv]

Of course, Howard’s proposal is quite openly based on full acquisition of virgin land in a context much like Letchworth’s, and Howard himself proudly wrote that “better results” could “be obtained by starting on a bold plan on comparatively virgin soil than by attempting to adapt our old cities to newer and higher needs.”[xvi] As a matter of fact, Howard believed that the construction of a Garden City would set off a cascade effect that would naturally alter existing cities, and thus did not apply his theory specifically to existing urban forms. Nevertheless, numerous planners succeeded in stripping Howard’s theory of its social reform aspect, as Brett Clark suggests, “dropping its most important characteristics,” and applying it piecemeal to urban situations most unlike Garden Cities.[xvii] As the introduction to the Second Edition of Howard’s book explains, “It is of interest to note that every one of the components of Howard's Garden City proposal has had in recent years its band of devotees, though many of them have ignored Howard and his movement.”[xviii] From Letchworth architect Raymond Unwin, who adapted the principle to building Garden Suburbs, keeping only Howard’s aesthetic principles,[xix] to Le Corbusier, who incorporated Garden Cities as suburbs of his larger radiant city and embraced the machine-like design,[xx] numerous architects and planners have absorbed Howard’s thinking; even those planners, as Jane Jacobs notes, “with no interest in the Garden City, as such, are still thoroughly governed intellectually by its underlying principles."[xxi] It is in these larger effects that we can begin to see Howard’s influence on the modern relationship between country and city.

Zoning: Expanding the Principle of Single-Use

While it may seem ironic considering the Garden City’s stated purpose of integration, one clear and lasting legacy of Howard’s is single-use zoning. The famous anti-modernist author Jane Jacobs traces the roots of zoning to Howard, blaming him for seeing the city as a fixed plan rather than a living organism.[xxii] In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she asserts that “Howard was envisioning not simply a new physical environment and social life, but a paternalistic political and economical society” According to Jacobs, "Howard set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas: he conceived that the way to deal with the city's functions was to sort and sift out of the whole certain simple uses, and to arrange each of these in relative self-containment." Despite its impracticability, she claims, “virtually all modern city planning has been adapted from, and embroidered on, this silly substance."[xxiii] According to law professor Desmond Manderson, Australian zoning derived its vision of planning from “a distorted version of Ebenezer Howard’s ‘garden city’ model — notably without its collectivist aspirations.” This model, “a classic example of urban planning’s bureaucratic rationality,” works “by dividing space into zones, imposing a certain homogeneity within them, and hierarchically arranging” them.”[xxiv]

Figure 3: The “Zoning” plan for Howard’s Letchworth Garden City

Looking more closely at Howard’s plans, it is not difficult to see where the idea comes from. The map of Letchworth Garden City featured in his book, for example, looks exactly like a zoning map, with special shading for Residential, Industrial, Shopping, and the Green Belt.[xxv] His theoretical diagram is even more specific, indicating what homes, businesses, and factories are to be placed where.[xxvi] While this separation may have made sense for some manufacturing in the dirty industrial era context, it has the detrimental effect of separating citizens of the city from the agriculture occupying the green belt. While there is some indication of small kitchen gardens within the city, it seems that allotments for residents, as well as all larger-scale farming operations, would be located outside the outer ring of the city, on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the green belt.[xxvii] While it is promising that the town itself is multifunctional, it seems counterproductive to force citizens to live in one place, work in another, and farm their vegetables in yet another. Such a practice comes under the direct fire of Andrew Duany, who likens planning with “segregation now applied to every use,” where “nothing can be on the same land,” to an “unmade omelet,” with “everything consumed in turn, raw.”[xxviii]

Thanks in no small part to Howard’s influence, zoning has now become institutionalized in much of the world, and the effects on agriculture have been devastating. 20^th century zoning at best ignored agriculture, setting it into land reserves for future development, and at worst “sought to exclude it from the ideal of the clean, hygienic, and modem city on the grounds that it was unsightly or unhealthy.”[xxix] This planned division of agriculture from cities was certainly a large factor in the decline of urban agriculture in the West.[xxx] In Planning on the Edge, Gallent, Anderson, and Bianconi complain that instead of creating harmonious landscapes at the rural-urban fringe, “the rationale behind much land use planning has been the need to keep different uses apart […] to keep everything away from agriculture” by “designating, compartmentalizing, and separating.”[xxxi] In reality, this “a separation that reflects more the underlying ideologies of the bureaucrats and politicians than the realities of incompatibilities between the two elements.”[xxxii]

Green Belts

A particular example of zoning, and one that exemplifies the modern application of the Garden City concept, is the Green Belt. So powerful is this idea that New Urbanist Peter Calthorpe is quoted as saying that “planners tend to forget […] that there’s more to Howard than a Green Belt.”[xxxiii] Howard’s original idea was simple: in the Garden City model of public land ownership, citizens would refuse to develop on the agricultural belt around Garden Cities, and therefore all new growth, instead of messily mushrooming out, would form its own planned city on the other side of the belt. Howard envisioned London, caught in the huge wave of social reform his movement would cause, eventually decentralizing into a collection of garden cities separated by Green Belts.[xxxiv] As Bryant and Johnston write, “the potential was there for the development of a tool that would not only involve integration of rural space within the broader urban region, but also the integration of various functions in a multiple use approach.”[xxxv] In reality, the results have been rather different.

The first implementation of the Green Belt was in London in 1938, when the Green Belt Act was passed, allowing the government to purchase lands and form development restriction covenants with landowners. The subsequent Greater London Plan and post-war Town and Country Planning Act affirmed the designation of a huge swath of land around London as an official Green Belt, within which urban development was generally prohibited and whose inner border designated an urban growth boundary. Since then, Greenbelts have appeared in cities throughout the world, including Seoul, Bangkok, Berlin, Toronto, and Boulder.[xxxvi] While Greenbelts have certainly limited development within the greenbelt area itself, they have not consistently enforced development boundaries. Amati and Yokohari report that while the belt is somewhat effective at the urban fringe, “At the regional scale,” spurred by high housing prices and development constraints, “development ‘leapfrogs’ the green belt into deeper rural areas,” and “such development has been linked to a higher car use and longer car journeys,” straining infrastructure and defeating any ecological intentions.[xxxvii] These outer agglomerations, too close and too lifeless to be their own cities (as Howard had hoped) but far enough from the main city to cause traffic headaches, can eventually overwhelm and defeat the purpose of the Green Belt, as happened in Beijing.[xxxviii] In addition, Wu and Plantiga show that the amenity value of the Green Belt itself serves to draw development away from the city center and closer to the belt, serving to spread rather than compact the city.[xxxix]

Figure 4: London’s Adopted Green Belt in Dark Green,

Greenbelt Revised or Adopted in 2004, in Pink (Greenbelt lands are subject to 20-year revisions)

(image courtesy of Decisions, Decisions Decisions Blog on British Urban Sprawl)

Perhaps Green Belts are not perfect at relieving development pressure and halting development, but do they accomplish the important task of protecting agricultural land and ensuring some food security for the city? Unfortunately, here lies what is perhaps the most tragic alteration to Howard’s legacy. While Howard envisioned his belts as containing some recreational space, he did see them largely as places for food production. Initial plans for the London Belt also called for it to have an agricultural function, but amid public pressure for more recreational space, the Regional Planning Committee began to look at the Belt as a place to put playing fields and parks. By the time of implementation in the Abercrombie Plan of 1944, recreation came to be seen as the primary amenity value of Green Belt land, something F. J. Osborn, in his preface to Howard’s book, seemed rather peeved about, suggesting that such designs be called “Park Belts” instead to avoid confusion.[xl] In a pre-1945 and modern-day comparison of land use maps of a portion of the London Belt in Shepperton which the authors say is representative of the larger area, Gant, Robinson, and Fazal found that agricultural land use had fallen by 70%, replaced with golf courses, equestrian facilities, schools, playing fields, allotments, and public utilities. As the authors point out, local authorities have permitted for fairly extensive changes to occur in the Green Belt.[xli] Even in Howard’s own Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, recreation became a hugely important part of open space, so much so that Welwyn now chronically runs into maintenance budget problems.[xlii] In Letchworth, a “Greenway” path was built through the fields, forests, and golf courses of the Green Belt, turning the whole loop into a recreational amenity.[xliii] Urban dwellers understandably want recreational space, but it has come at the expense of productive farmland.

Even Green Belts with explicit pro-agricultural intentions, such as Toronto’s, run into difficulties, as stricter land-use and environmental regulations within the protected area, as well as the issues associated with urban proximity, prevent farmers from expanding and encourage hobby farming. As a local magazine complains, “just because you save the land doesn’t mean you save the farms.”[xliv] That sentiment is echoed in Mark Lapping’s assessment that “put simply, farmland without farmers might be irrelevant. Methods to retain farmlands have been successful only to the degree that they were part of a larger effort to enhance the economic viability of agriculture.”[xlv] Green Belt farms, especially sustainable family farms, need additional incentives, and require a “critical mass” of infrastructure and support to exist (see “Creating a Network of Periurban Farmland” section below for more concrete detail).[xlvi] One solution is to violate the Green Belt separation-of-uses doctrine and permit some farming-centered residential development that makes agriculture more economically viable—This is precisely the solution offered by Agrarian Urbanism (see “Case Study 1: Agrarian Urbanism” section below for more on this). In the absence of these policies, many parcels in the London Green Belt experience issues with Impermanence Syndrome, as landowners make their land an eyesore in an attempt to convince governments to take it out of the Green Belt and let them make a profit on its sale.[xlvii]

If Green Belt land itself lacks agriculture, what does it contain and what does it connect? Gant, Robinson, and Fazal refer to this zone as the “edgelands,” a “chaotic set of land uses” filled with service functions unwanted in the city such as reservoirs and gravel pits, artery roads, golf courses, and degraded agricultural land.[xlviii] These single-function land uses hardly interconnect.[xlix] Dr. Susannah Hagan puts it best when she calls the Green Belt “a vast divide between city and countryside, but an empty divide, like a ditch or a moat, an absence rather than a presence.”[l] In short, rather than being the productive countryside itself, as Howard envisioned, the Green Belt instead “fulfils the function of a firebreak between more genuinely appreciated landscapes rather than acting as a stimulus to the development or enhancement of the land uses and landscapes in the edgelands.”[li] Ironically, the very thing that was to bring the country closer to the city has become a wall in between the two, a status enforced by Howard-influenced single-use planning.

Wedges, Stars, and CPULs

Criticism of the sharp divide caused by the Green Belt has resulted in several alternative proposals. Both Andres Duany and prominent planner Jac Smit call for a “continuum of food production capacities” rather than the “tight, linear, prophylactic boundary” enforced by the Green Belt.[lii] Many planners have also questioned why the Green Belt randomly preserves subpar land on the outskirts while leaving inner-city brownfield sites of higher ecological, agricultural, and recreational value open to development.[liii] A solution that addresses these concerns is the Green Wedge model for Countryside Preserves, as promoted by Andrés Duany. The reserves would be “drawn using objective environmental criteria,” independent of their relationship to the city, and would thus be “not as susceptible to the development pressure straining against a typically arbitrary edge.”[liv] Green Wedges would drive preserved land down green corridors that penetrate deep into a city. According to Gallent, Andersson, and Bianconi, such a star-shaped system of “fingers” would “increase the length of the rural-urban perimeter,” allowing for and encouraging much more interaction and fluidity between urban and rural landscapes. Unlike the perfectly circular, arbitrarily drawn Green Belt, the wedges would be adaptable to site-specific needs.[lv] If it were revised in such a way, Amati and Yokohari conclude, “though the original function of the green belt was to separate the rural from the urban areas, in the future integrating the urban and rural areas could become a new function.”[lvi]

The ultimate, ideal landscape created through such an approach, the agriculturally and socially beneficial alternative to the misguided Green Belt, would move toward a CPUL, or Continuous Productive Urban Landcape, a concept advocated by architect André Viljoen. The concept of a CPUL embraces a city’s unboundedness and formlessness; as Jac Smit writes in the preface to Viljoen’s book, "The emerging 21st century city can be identified as the ‘Edgeless City.’ The concepts of city boundary, greenbelt, and suburb are all obsolete… Cities are becoming formless, edgeless, and seemingly endless."[lvii] Viljoen wants to take advantage of this edgelessness by injecting networks of productive landscape across the urban space.

Ideally, this will become a new kind of growth containment mechanism; when cities become integrated with agricultural land, the hope is that land will become such a part of citizens’ daily lives, much as it was two centuries ago, that they will naturally recognize the need to protect it.[lviii] The problem with the Green Belt model, in other words, is that in isolating urbanites from rural land, it makes them care much less about its preservation. A citizen in a Garden City could conceivably live in a zoned “Residential” area and care less about agriculture. Howard’s only suggestion of locating allotments on zoned Residential areas was during phases of construction, as a generator of revenue.(AB: Garden Cities of Tomorrow 71) With the implementation of a successful CPUL, however, a reintegration of productive land back into citizens’ lives occurs naturally.[lix] In proposals like the London LeisurESCAPE, Viljoen and his colleagues demonstrate the possibility of interlinked urban landscapes permitting uninterrupted networks of public space, likened to “Venice with the canals transformed to become fields.”[lx] (see Figure 2 for a visual depiction of a CPUL). Ultimately, what is created is “a new kind of city, one with a richness of associations and experiences, to date found either in the city or the countryside,” one that works together with density to support sustainable development.[lxi] What kinds of changes are needed, both in the countryside and in the city, to allow for the creation of these networks?

Figure 5: A Depiction of a London Inner-City CPUL, part of a proposal for an Urban Farm at Clerkenwell (image courtesy of Royal Institute of British Architects)

Creating a Network of Periurban Farmland

Given that 55% of farm sales still occur from farms at the rural-urban interface, preserving near-city agricultural land and integrating it into the CPUL network is of the utmost importance.[lxii] As the above section on Green Belts showed, the modern-day application of Howard’s theory to existing urban areas—fairly arbitrary zoning of Green Belts—has not succeeded at keeping farmers in business, only fragmenting land use further. The issue with agricultural zoning on its own is its mutability, as a piece of land is unlikely to keep its zoning status in the face of growing economic pressure and agricultural disinvestment, something even Howard’s contemporaries pointed out.[lxiii] A true farmland protection policy needs to make farming viable and to protect it in the long term, and it needs to be strategic about the land it preserves, guiding urban growth along corridors and saving farms in agriculturally and ecologically valuable areas. As William Lockeretz writes, with the help of wisely crafted policies, the disadvantages of farming near cities can easily be turned to advantages: the proximity to large urban markets and even to consumers’ homes opens great economic opportunity, higher land prices also mean more capital, higher local wages mean more opportunities for supplemental income, and smaller plots allow for more intensive produce cultivation for local markets and fewer monocultures for export.[lxiv] Farmers in stable situations near metropolitan areas have been found to consider themselves better off than those in rural areas.[lxv]

Ultimately, most economists argue for a combination of policies to be used. One important tool is Purchase of Development Rights: under this mechanism, landowners voluntarily agree to sell development rights to their land to a local Land Trust. Depending on the legal framework, the agreement can simply prohibit development on the land or can even require a certain type of agricultural operation for perpetuity.[lxvi] In the context of Green Belts such as London’s that devolve into recreational uses, binding agreements that keep land in farm use are critical. A similar strategy, Transfer of Development Rights, allows developers to exchange development rights for a parcel targeted for preservation for development rights or higher density allowances on a different, less sensitive or more strategically located parcel.[lxvii] Given that from 1982 to 2007 the U.S. population grew by 30 percent but developed land increased by a staggering 57 percent, it makes sense for governments in the US and other sprawl-inclined countries to encourage much denser future development and farmland preservation in such a manner.[lxviii] Moreover, allowing smarter, more compact growth in strategic areas while maintaining “Green Wedges” is a more effective economic policy than Howard’s strategy of simply banning all growth beyond the city plan, leaving it to hop over the Green Belt or leave the region altogether. A seemingly contradictory, but overall effective tactic which has found much success in Sonoma County’s lucrative grape fields but less in other regions, is imposing Minimum Lot Size requirements that force landowners to acquire such large chunks of land at a time that farming becomes the only logical use.[lxix]

To keep preserved farmland economically productive, Right to Farm Laws become essential; these laws protect farmers near urban areas from urban neighbors’ nuisance claims and lawsuits as long as they comply with basic regulations.[lxx] Studies show that the existence of these laws does influence farmers’ outlooks, making them more likely to continue farming in the face of urban encroachment.[lxxi] Furthermore, Agricultural Use-Value Tax Assessments that reduce property taxes for agricultural uses, as well as direct marketing support programs, have been shown to help keep farmers on a firmer financial footing(See “Reassessing Food and Land Values” section below for more on developing direct sales and local markets as a way to support local growers).[lxxii] One particularly successful program is New York State’s Agricultural Districts, which have preserved some of the state’s best farmland through a combination of the above-mentioned tactics and strategic planning.[lxxiii]

Encouraging Urban Agriculture

In urban areas, on the other hand, perhaps the biggest challenge for CPUL creation is not the preservation of existing farmland but the acquisition and conversion of inner-city space. Viljoen envisions the land coming from undeveloped sites, vacant lots, land due for redevelopment, portions of existing open space, and (here is where his ecotopian strains truly come through) the conversion of road surfaces to fields. This is not as ludicrous as it may first sound—as Duany demonstrates well, suburban settings have an enormous amount of underutilized paved surfaces. Their conversion, coupled with densification, can positively repair the sprawl that killed agricultural production in the first place.[lxxiv] Corbusier-style housing projects, with their ample fenced-off park space, can also be converted to productive landscapes, as Toronto has demonstrated. Another obvious source of land is lawns—at 23 million acres, lawn turf is the US’s most cultivated crop (corn is in second place at 7 million), requiring more water and chemical treatment than any major crop. Replacing just some lawns with gardens would result in enormous water savings and ecological benefits.[lxxv]

Even city cores, especially those in the US, have plenty of vacant land available. As new construction continues to outpace population growth, land in cities is inevitably left vacant.[lxxvi] While an average of 15.4% of land in US cities is vacant, the number is highest in deindustrialized cities of the Northeast.[lxxvii] In cities like Trenton and Detroit, there are more vacant lots than can realistically be filled with tax-generating businesses and homes, leading to the possibility of their redevelopment into productive landscapes.[lxxviii] Economically depressed areas often double as fresh food deserts, making urban agriculture infill particularly urgent.[lxxix] In Detroit, where both vacant land and limited access to fresh food are key issues, it is estimated that just 570 of the 5000 vacant acres could produce 70% of the vegetables and 40% of the fruit the city consumes.[lxxx] Even with limited space, new technologies such as vertical farming, regulated greenhouses, and hydroponics would make infill Urban Farming feasible.[lxxxi]

Furthermore, municipalities can go a long way toward promoting and enabling urban food production. As Pothukuchi and Kaufman write, the traditional “dichotomization of public policy into urban and rural” has meant that in a city, “food issues are hardly given a second thought,” even though agricultural policies impact cities heavily.[lxxxii] The authors thus suggest that cities create Departments of Food to craft food supply, nutrition, and local production policy, and that they involve the planning agency in reforming planning codes to incorporate and encourage agriculture, giving or negotiating for security of tenure for urban farmers, and developing agriculture as part of a larger green space network.[lxxxiii] This is indeed something that many cities, from Vancouver to San Francisco, have done in recent years, and the American Planning Association has followed suit by adding a food planning component to its guidelines.[lxxxiv] City-sponsored seed houses and educational resources are also very effective.

The largest “bottleneck in maintaining, expanding, and scaling up” Urban Agriculture, according to Dr. Yves Cabannes, is financing.[lxxxv] Contributors to the book Cities Farming for the Future suggest that while government loans are helpful, a more stable program less dependent on government shifts would involve the establishment of an urban farmers’ cooperative bank or peer lending system, much like the one in use in the highly successful urban farming community of Rosario, Argentina.[lxxxvi] Beyond simple loans, many already-available government resources can be channeled into urban agriculture, including rural agriculture loans, housing loans, redevelopment and slum improvement funding. In fact, the new USDA Community Gardens Act actually compensates community gardening groups for up to 80% of their expenses.[lxxxvii] A highly successful program in Shanghai insures urban farmers against losses and subsidizes equipment.[lxxxviii] Most importantly, city governments must allow and encourage residents to break even and make money by selling their products, and an increasing number of laws do just that, including a new San Francisco law that provides allows residents to directly sell food grown in urban gardens.[lxxxix] For an example of many of these policies in action, see Case Study 3: Cuba.

The Industrialized Food System

Of course, proposals for large-scale urban and periurban food production must also inevitably clash with the industrialized food system. Much as the US government, through home loans, mortgage assistance, large lot zoning, and tax policies favoring private home ownership, has subsidized conversion of periurban farmland to suburban subdivisions, so the industrial food behemoth is kept alive by its own entrenched bureaucratic system. Peter Ladner, author of Urban Food Revolution, writes that “the market [...] has been amazingly successful in delivering abundant, cheap, not-always-good food to those who can afford it. But it has only been able to do that in a world of subsidies, protectionism, publicly funded research, supply management, land use restrictions, and freedom from huge external costs like soil erosion, water depletion, runoff pollution, and healthcare."[xc] In the US, target price programs for commodities like corn and soy encourage monoculture fields for export and discourage the production of fresh, local food.[xci] Cheap oil and a disregard for greenhouse gas pollution fuel an environmentally unsustainable industrial system in which more than half of our produce is discarded, not eaten; a British study fairly conservatively estimated that the cost of food would be 12% higher if social and environmental costs were taken into account.[xcii]

The entrenched American food system is designed to lock out the competition and consolidate profits; five companies control 90% of the grain produced in the country, a single company controls 70% of the soybeans, and Monsanto GMO corn accounts for 85% of US corn acreage, and under industry pressure, the FDA and USDA make it especially difficult for small farms to comply with safety regulations.[xciii] Meanwhile, half of an average supermarket’s 30,000 items are made by just ten multinational corporations. These industrial behemoths often stand in the way of the consumer-farmer connection, both psychologically and financially; in the last century, the share of money spent on food going back to farmers has plummeted from 40% to 7%, which means much of the money we spend on food is no longer going to those who produce it but to those who market, package, process, and sell it.[xciv] At the same time, nutrient and mineral levels in food have fallen drastically and the ratio of the average product’s calorie content to the energy input required to produce it now stands at 1:10.[xcv] Meanwhile, the amount of food being shipped around the planet has quadrupled in the last 50 years as we have abandoned local food production in favor of a global economy.[xcvi] The absurd European consumption of California lettuce results in a staggering 1:127 energy ratio.[xcvii] Food has become standardized and stripped of any local context. As a case in point, in 1965, Britain was still self-sufficient in dessert apples, with over a dozen seasonal varieties offered in turn throughout the year. Now, the majority of apples are of just two varieties, with only 25% coming from Britain itself.[xcviii] And along with the loss of seasonality and connection to the farmland often comes the loss of local farmland itself—no wonder the Green Belt around London has lost most of its orchards.[xcix]

The implications for regional planning, of course, are quite huge. Under the industrial order, food systems are no longer confined to compact regions, and agriculture becomes a way to grow globally lucrative cash crops rather than a way to feed the local population. Lacking the multifunctionality potential of a small farm, “the industrialization of agriculture, particularly in the U.S. and other developed countries, has resulted in landscapes that are strongly production-oriented, often neglecting the cultural and ecological functions that had previously been supported by agricultural activities.”[c] Industrial Agriculture thus exists best in a world where it is separated, by zoning or Green Belts, from consumers. Consumers no longer know who is growing their food—and that may be because farmers are a dying race in the US, where there are now more prisoners than full-time farmers, and the food sector is dominated by processing and marketing.[ci] In the context of this food system, so clearly unsustainable and highly inequitable, establishing deeper connections between the city and the countryside through CPULs can go a long way toward breaking the barrier, whether a Green Belt or a huge global distribution system, between where we live and where our food comes from.

class=Section10>

Reassessing Food and Land Values and the Role of Consumers

A change in the current order will entail a reassessment of the value we place on the food we eat and the land we use, a change that by necessity involves the consumers who fuel the industrial system. Many values of land and food are simply not accounted for in market system prices, but sufficient consumer interest coupled with government involvement can correct for the current system’s failures. Today’s prices, based on cheap oil and transportation and commodity subsidies, aside, local and organic agriculture makes a convincing case. Despite the higher price, local, organic food generally contains more nutrition per dollar spent, contains much less embodied energy and fossil fuel pollution, and adds a huge boost to the local economy.[cii] Family farms, while requiring more labor, have been shown to have a better output per acre than corporate farms.[ciii] Additionally, smaller, local farms have been shown to make for better, safer, and more economically healthy rural communities, and access to fresh, local food most certainly brings down health care costs associated with obesity and malnutrition.[civ] And urban farms in food deserts and poor city neighborhoods can not only give residents a source of sustenance and an occupation, but can also save parks departments, correctional facilities, and health centers money. Are the artificially low costs of industrially, globally produced food worth the social and environmental costs incurred from it?

A similar reevaluation has been proposed for land prices of agricultural parcels near cities. In her paper “Evaluating Benefits of Peri-Urban Agriculture,” Catherine Brinkley lists the many benefits, both economic and ecological, provided by peri-urban farmland, and concludes that “the loss of farmland is a result of market failure to appreciate these benefits.”[cv] She proposes a new framework for looking evaluating farmland, including several important undervalued aspects: open space, she says, both provides an amenity and increases land values around the land that is protected.[cvi] Agricultural tourism has been shown to provide a huge economic boost to farming communities and a valuable resource for urban dwellers.[cvii] Finally, farmland’s ecosystem services are a critically undervalued component of the hidden price: preserving a parcel as farmland provides waste management, water retention, animal habitat, and heat island effect and air pollution reductions, and many composting and livestock systems can also produce natural gas for energy.[cviii] Along Brinkley’s lines, a study in British Columbia found that the ecological benefits of preserving land added up to $29,000 per acre, while residential lands cost taxpayers $13960 per acre.[cix] While we have yet to see this new price framework integrated into real estate, New York City’s decision to restore rather than develop a large piece of property in the Catskills citing ecosystem services is a textbook example of the principle in action.

The above propositions may seem rather utopian and idealistic within a consumer society focused on short-term savings, but the last few decades have proven that consumer attitudes are a powerful market force. More consumers are beginning consider all costs—both upfront and hidden—when making choices about the food they eat. Surveys show that 80-90% of American consumers would prefer to buy locally grown and processed products, there is a growing “agri-food” movement in many communities to connect back to the land and buy local, and organic food sales have grown steadily every year in the US and Europe.[cx] As Ladner writes, “the new passion for local food is an economic lever that has the potential to ignite the economic benefits of buying local. A better mix of local and imported food is coming back within reach--along with economic benefits to match the environmental and social ones.”[cxi] Meanwhile, even large retailers have responded to consumer demands for local produce, as Walmart and food distribution giant Sysco have committed to offering it.[cxii]

But supermarkets, despite their convenience, are still part of an indirect, globalized distribution network; what is most promising in removing the barrier between food and consumer, rural and urban, is direct sales. Farmers’ Markets are exploding in popularity in the US, with growth in sales of 55% between 2002 and 2007, giving urban dwellers a chance to meet local farmers.[cxiii] Meanwhile, Community Supported Agriculture, a system under which members pay a farm a yearly due in exchange for weekly deliveries of seasonal produce, is on the rise, with 12,500 participating farms in 2007.[cxiv] In fact, a survey of farmers in over a dozen peri-urban counties in the US found that most farmers believed the “biggest future” and “hope” for agriculture was in direct local sales of fresh produce, and a recent study on exurban communities concluded that direct sales by small farms will become the “backbone of a resilient future peri-urban industry.”[cxv] Perhaps, as Brian Halweil suggests, the most successful distribution strategy will be something “in between” the big, faceless Sysco and small-scale, personalized CSAs.[cxvi]

The government has a large role to play in the leveling of the playing field and in promotion of local food markets. As Oosterveer and Sonnenfeld write, in order to grow from a “successful niche experiment” to a lifestyle, the local food movement needs to get institutional support.[cxvii] At the small scale, this can mean local procurement ordinances such as San Francisco’s, which stipulate that a portion of the city’s food purchases—at schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.—be local.[cxviii] Farm to School programs in particular have already proven to be very effective.[cxix] On a larger scale, this involves important policy changes that must be demanded by consumers of their government: the elimination of commodity payments, a restructuring of government-funded agricultural research to support sustainability and small-scale farming, a tax on fossil fuels, and, ultimately, a reform of world trade rules.[cxx] Given the fact that agriculture “of the middle”—in between direct markets and vertically integrated commodity markets—is dying out, the choice is becoming much more clear-cut; concerned consumers must vote for change—both with the money they spend on food and at the ballot box.[cxxi]

The following are three brief case studies of developments that support the theories and ideas proposed in this paper.

Case Study I: Agrarian Urbanism and Prairie Crossing

With his concept of Agrarian Urbanism, Andres Duany aims to simultaneously tackle both the industrial food system and suburban sprawl. He writes, “As Michael Pollan argues, our food production must change; and as Leon Krier argues, so much our sprawling communities. Agrarian Urbanism addresses these two great concerns simultaneously. We cannot overcome the machine-enabled efficiency of agribusiness unless we enable more hands to tend food.”[cxxii] In Duany’s mind, local food production can only begin to compete with the industrialized system when an entire community becomes involved in the process. Combining New Urbanist principles with the integration of agriculture, Duany argues for the development of communities centered on working farms, with social interaction built around food. He proposes making a Market Square featuring a local produce market the center of this kind of development and touts a variety of building types and densities that can support agriculture. Though it does entail residential development on agricultural land, this approach may be what ultimately guarantees that areas protected for farming actually sustain it. This was something realized years ago by Thomas Adams at the 1904 conference in Letchworth Garden City, when he criticized Howard by maintaining that "it is necessary for the commercial success of the agricultural belt that certain parts of it should be let for suburban or rural residences."[cxxiii] It’s still true today, and as Peter Ladner confirms, these kinds of “conservation developments” allow struggling urban-edge farmers to get new sources of funding and thus stay in business.[cxxiv] The town benefits financially as well—the authors of a study on municipal service costs that found that residential lands require $1.16 for every tax dollar contributed while agricultural lands require $0.27 suggest that a mix of farmland and urban development may be the best model for peri-urban communities.[cxxv] And as Hodgins, the developer of the Duany Plater-Zyberk-designed mixed-use Southlands development in British Columbia, attests, agriculture can’t be viable on expensive suburban land near Vancouver without an innovative source of revenue.[cxxvi] The Howard-influenced approach of putting the farms out in their own belt zone does not do justice to the economics of peri-urban farming.

Although Duany claims it does not go far enough in integration, Prairie Crossing, near Chicago, is a famously successful early example of the principle in action. There, a suburban community is woven in among fields and restored native prairie. A Community Supported Agriculture system lets local residents receive a share of the harvest, and an “incubator” system recruits and trains local farmers.[cxxvii] More and more developers are realizing the attractiveness and instant popularity of these kinds of developments. Senebe, a development in Georgia which built an attractive town center with restaurants that source food from adjacent fields, spent nothing on advertising and quickly became a local sensation.[cxxviii] While these developments are growing in size and number, they still fill a boutique niche, much like golf course or ski condo communities. Preserving peri-urban farming in this manner, while an appealing proposition, is something that may be more difficult given the large investment required.

Figure 6: A snapshot of DPZ’s Southlands proposal, integrating housing, businesses, and agriculture

Figure 7: DPZ’s idea of transects and the continuum of productive landscapes

(courtesy of Center for Applied Transect Studies

Case Study 2: Fairview Gardens: A (Sub)Urban Farm in Santa Barbara

In his book On Good Land, organic farmer Michael Ableman documents his experience as the manager of a small organic farm in Goleta Valley near Santa Barbara. During Ableman’s twenty years there, all the surrounding fertile agricultural land was sold and turned to traditional suburban development of single-family homes and shopping malls, but the owners of Fairview Gardens held onto the land. Ableman describes the transition as a rough battle, with the farm spending “an inordinate amount of time defending our right to be.”[cxxix] Nuisance and smell complaints, pet damage, theft, and littering were just some of the problems the farm faced. Nevertheless, Fairview Gardens persevered, and eventually established a symbiosis with the suburban community that had engulfed it as residents became regular customers and formed a culinary network. “Together we were figuring out what a farm could mean to a suburban population,” writes Ableman.[cxxx] In a fortunate twist of fate, the dying owner of the land agreed to sell to a land trust that kept the land in a farming nonprofit’s possession for perpetuity.[cxxxi] The farm eventually established a popular CSA, community education programs, and events and concert series, and is now a West Coast hub for urban agriculture and a model for how seemingly conflicting uses—typical suburban development and animal, fruit, and vegetable farming—can not only coexist but reinforce and complement each other in unexpected ways and form a new “successful business model.” This unexpected result is actually supported by other economic research proving that peri-urban farmers can find ways to benefit from adjacent suburban subdivisions.[cxxxii] Ableman writes: “I felt that if we could preserve this land in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, then our example could be used anywhere.”[cxxxiii]

Figure 8: Fairview Gardens in its suburban context

Case Study 3: Havana’s Incredible Transformation

In the past twenty years, Cuba’s agricultural system has undergone an incredible transformation. In 1989, Cuba was a heavily import-dependent, cash-cropping country, with a third of its land dedicated to sugarcane production.[cxxxiv] After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba lost 75% of its petrol supply and 78% of its chemical fertilizer supply.[cxxxv] What happened next is nothing short of a miracle: within a few years, Cuba reinvented its agricultural system to become self-sufficient and, in the absence of chemicals, largely organic. Encouraged by a government decree allowing residents to use all vacant lots for farming free of charge, the citizens of Havana quickly developed a complex agricultural system. By the year 2000, urban agriculture in Havana covered 12% of the city’s land, provided 70% of city residents’ vegetable requirements, and consisted of a mix of government-sponsored intense cultivation gardens, farming cooperatives, and tens of thousands of individual plots, made possible by various government initiatives, from Seed Houses to financial support.[cxxxvi] As agriculture transitioned from basic sustenance to cultivation for trading, a complex economy developed, giving food traders and farmers an estimated 160,000 jobs with comparatively high salaries.[cxxxvii] Today, though Cuba is once more in a position to import food, the tradition of urban farming remains just as strong, with plots only growing in number and quality.[cxxxviii] Havana’s transformation is not only widely acknowledged to be a model for the radical transformation of an industrial food system into a locally-based, sustainable model, but also serves as a reminder of the change all countries will face when cheap fuel runs out.

Figure 9: An Intensive Urban Farm in Havana

Conclusion: Multifunctional Landscapes for Resilient Cities and Regions

Ultimately, a new approach to the relationship between agriculture and the city will involve a combination of intensive urban agriculture, CPULs, and Agrarian Urbanist developments. Such a landscape, with its intermingled uses, probably would not have conformed to Sir Ebenezer Howard’s vision. After all, Lewis Mumford said in his introduction to Garden Cities that we are not to “mistake Howard's programme for one of breaking down the distinction of town and country and turning them into an amorphous suburban mass,” but that Howard’s plan is to create a “compact, rigorously confined urban grouping.”[cxxxix] Certainly, a placeless suburbia is nobody’s desire, but in the context of today’s edgeless cities, the approach evolved from Howard, of rigorous land use “confinement” and neat division between urban and rural, has only served to erect barriers between our cities and their crucial food systems. Through the course of this paper, we have seen the consequences of Howard’s proposal for urban and peri-urban agriculture. We have assessed alternative strategies for the creation of continuous productive landscapes through the strategic preservation of peri-urban farmland and the activation of urban agriculture in cities. Finally, the framework for developing a local food system, based on consumer desire and government action, was discussed.

As numerous examples demonstrate, cities and agriculture can not only coexist, but also reinforce each other in ways that are socially and economically advantageous. Agrarian Urbanism provides a successful model for future development, Fairview Gardens demonstrates how suburbia can form a relationship with organic farming, and Cuba’s rapid transformation shows how a food production system integrated into the urban environment can successfully supplant an entrenched industrial order. Howard’s goal, the “marriage of town and country,” remains as pressing as ever in the context of the urban and food system issues we face. As Magdoff, Foster, and Buttell write, some may question whether Urban Agriculture and local food production are really a solution or “something that will produce only a minor irritant to corporate dominance of the food system.” But these movements, they counter, are necessary components of any reform toward a “more humane, just, and ecologically rational society.”[cxl] It is only a matter of time before humans run out of resources to fuel our current lifestyle and food consumption habits. When that time arrives, and transportation and production regain their true prices, there will be cities that have prepared to be agriculturally sufficient and that have embraced food production as essential to their citizens’ well-being. Those cities will be the multifunctional, resilient cities that planned ahead.

ENDNOTES

[i] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 289.

[ii] André Viljoen and J. Howe, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities (Oxford ; Boston: Architectural Press, 2005), 98.

[iii] Peter Oosterveer and David A. Sonnenfeld, Food, Globalization and Sustainability (London: Earthscan, 2011), 113.

[iv] Ibid., 97.

[v] Viljoen and Howe, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, 101; Wessels Living History Farm, "Victory GardensDuring WWII," http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html (accessed 11 Nov, 2012).

[vi] Peter Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2011), 25; American Farmland Trust, "Farming on the Edge Report," http://www.farmland.org/resources/fote/default.asp (accessed January 3, 2013).; Peter Bibby and John Shepherd, "Projecting Rates of Urbanisation in England, 1991-2016: Method, Policy Application and Results," The Town Planning Review 68, no. 1 (Jan., 1997), 102, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40113442.

[vii] Arthur C. Nelson, "Preserving Prime Farmland in the Face of Urbanization: Lessons from Oregon," American Planning Association.Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 4 (Autumn 1992, 1992), 469, http://search.proquest.com/docview/229625073?accountid=13314.; William Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities (Ankeny, Iowa: Soil and Water Conservation Society, 1987), 264.; H. J. Brown, Robyn Swaim Phillips and Neal A. Roberts, "Land Markets at the Urban Fringe New Insights for Policy Makers," Journal of the American Planning Association 47, no. 2 (04/01; 2012/11, 1981), 131, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944368108977098.

[viii] Brian Halweil, Eat here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 92.

[ix] American Assembly, The Farm and the City: Rivals Or Allies? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980), 14.

[x] Ebenezer Howard and Frederic J. Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow [Tomorrow.], Vol. MIT23 (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965), 48.

[xi] Brett Clark, "Ebenezer Howard and the Marriage of Town and Country;An Introduction to Howard's Garden Cities of to-Morrow (Selections)," Organization Environment 16, no. 1 (March 2003, 2003), 93.(A: Ebenezer Howard and the Marriage 93).

[xii] Howard and Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow, 94.

[xiii] Ibid.,64, 21.

[xiv] Andres Duany, Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism (U.K..: Duany Plater Zybrek & Co. : The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, 2011), 8.

[xv] Thomas Adams and H. Rider Haggard, Garden City and Agriculture; how to Solve the Problem of Rural Depopulation (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent, 1905), 38-39.

[xvi] Howard and Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow, 146.

[xvii] Clark, Ebenezer Howard and the Marriage of Town and Country;An Introduction to Howard's Garden Cities of to-Morrow (Selections), 95

[xviii] Ibid.,18.

[xix] Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution; an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (New York: H. Fertig, 1968; 1915), 409.

[xx] Le Corbusier, The City of to-Morrow and its Planning [Urbanisme.], 3dth ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), 202-06.(AB: City of Tomorrow Corbusier 202-206),

[xxi] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Modern Library ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1993; 1961), 18.

[xxii] Jay Wickersham, "Jane Jacob's Critique of Zoning: From Euclid to Portland and Beyond," Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 28, no. 4 (Summer 2001, 2001), 552, http://search.proquest.com/docview/233574236?accountid=13314.

[xxiii] Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 598.; RW.ERROR - Unable to find reference:1961(AB: Death and Life 18-19).

[xxiv] Desmond Manderson, "Interstices: New Work on Legal Spaces," Law Text Culture 9, no. 1 (2005).(A: Interstices 21)

[xxv] Howard and Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow, 105

[xxvi] Ibid., 52

[xxvii] Ibid., 54, 61.

[xxviii] Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: North Point Press, 2010), 10.

[xxix] Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar and Joe Nasr, Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture, 1st ed. (New York: Monacelli Press, 2011), 12.

[xxx] Diana Lee-Smith and others, "On the Past and the Future of the Urban Agriculture Movement: Reflections in Tribute to Jac Smit," Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 1, no. 2 (Dec 2010, 2010), 22.

[xxxi] Nick Gallent, Johan Andersson and Marco Bianconi, Planning on the Edge: The Context for Planning at the Rural-Urban Fringe (London ; New York: Routledge, 2006), 166, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip065/2005034762.html; http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0654/2005034762-d.html.

[xxxii] C. R. Bryant and Thomas Johnston, Agriculture in the City's Countryside (London: Belhaven Press, 1992), 204.

[xxxiii] Ruth Eckdish Knack, "Garden Cities," Planning 64, no. 6 (06, 1998): 4, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=761191&site=ehost-live.

[xxxiv] Howard and Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow, 140.

[xxxv] Bryant and Johnston, Agriculture in the City's Countryside, 183.

[xxxvi] Jun Yang and Zhou Jinxing, "The Failure and Success of Greenbelt Program in Beijing," Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 6, no. 4 (11/15, 2007), 288.

[xxxvii] Marco Amati and Makoto Yokohari, "Temporal Changes and Local Variations in the Functions of London's Green Belt," Landscape and Urban Planning 75, no. 1–2 (2/28, 2006), 127.

[xxxviii] Yang and Jinxing, The Failure and Success of Greenbelt Program in Beijing, 292.

[xxxix] JunJie Wu and Andrew J. Plantinga, "The Influence of Public Open Space on Urban Spatial Structure," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 46, no. 2 (9, 2003)303, 307.

[xl] Amati and Yokohari, Temporal Changes and Local Variations in the Functions of London's Green Belt, 128-131; Howard and Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow, 27.

[xli] Robert L. Gant, Guy M. Robinson and Shahab Fazal, "Land-use Change in the ‘edgelands’: Policies and Pressures in London's Rural–urban Fringe," Land use Policy 28, no. 1 (1, 2011), 275.

[xlii] Town and Country Planning Association, Re-Imagining Garden Cities for the 21st Century: Benefits and Lessons in Bringing Forward Comprehensively Planned New Communities, 2011), 29.

[xliii] Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, "Letchworth Greenway Map," http://www.greenway.org.uk/downloads/maps

[xliv] Chelsea Murray, "How Ontario’s Greenbelt is Failing Farmers—and the Local Food Movement," This MagazineAugust 19, 2011, 2011.(A: How Ontario's Greenbelt)

[xlv] American Assembly, The Farm and the City: Rivals Or Allies?, 163.

[xlvi] Nelson, Preserving Prime Farmland in the Face of Urbanization: Lessons from Oregon, 484.

[xlvii] Gallent, Andersson and Bianconi, Planning on the Edge: The Context for Planning at the Rural-Urban Fringe, 35(AB: Planning on the Edge 35)

[xlviii] Gant, Robinson and Fazal, Land-use Change in the ‘edgelands’: Policies and Pressures in London's Rural–urban Fringe, 266, 272, 275.

[xlix] Gallent, Andersson and Bianconi, Planning on the Edge: The Context for Planning at the Rural-Urban Fringe, 204.

[l] Viljoen and Howe, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, 54.

[li] Gant, Robinson and Fazal, Land-use Change in the ‘edgelands’: Policies and Pressures in London's Rural–urban Fringe, 269.

[lii] Lee-Smith and others, On the Past and the Future of the Urban Agriculture Movement: Reflections in Tribute to Jac Smit, 20; Duany, Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism, 48.

[liii] Amati and Yokohari, Temporal Changes and Local Variations in the Functions of London's Green Belt, 126.

[liv] Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream143-44.

[lv] Gallent, Andersson and Bianconi, Planning on the Edge: The Context for Planning at the Rural-Urban Fringe, 171, 206.

[lvi] Amati and Yokohari, Temporal Changes and Local Variations in the Functions of London's Green Belt, 140.

[lvii] Viljoen and Howe, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, x.

[lviii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 42.

[lix] Viljoen and Howe, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, 54.

[lx] Ibid.,16, 252.

[lxi] Ibid., 266.

[lxii] Dick Esseks and others, "Sustaining Agriculture in Urbanizing Counties: Insights from 15 Coordinated Case Studies," University of Nebraska: Reports and Studies (2008), 14.

[lxiii] Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities, 204; American Assembly, The Farm and the City: Rivals Or Allies?, 34; Adams and Haggard, Garden City and Agriculture; how to Solve the Problem of Rural Depopulation, 517-18.

[lxiv] Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities, xviii.

[lxv] Ibid., 98.

[lxvi] Esseks and others, Sustaining Agriculture in Urbanizing Counties: Insights from 15 Coordinated Case Studies, 8.

[lxvii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 27.

[lxviii] American Farmland Trust, Farming on the Edge Report.

[lxix] Esseks and others, Sustaining Agriculture in Urbanizing Counties: Insights from 15 Coordinated Case Studies, 76.

[lxx] Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities, 100.

[lxxi] Esseks and others, Sustaining Agriculture in Urbanizing Counties: Insights from 15 Coordinated Case Studies, 9.

[lxxii] Ibid., 8.

[lxxiii] Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities, 234.

[lxxiv] Duany, Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism, 17.

[lxxv] Lee-Smith and others, On the Past and the Future of the Urban Agriculture Movement: Reflections in Tribute to Jac Smit, 37; Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 45.

[lxxvi] American Assembly, The Farm and the City: Rivals Or Allies?, 53.

[lxxvii] Rosalind Greenstein and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz, Recycling the City: The use and Reuse of Urban Land (Cambridge, Mass.: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2004), 19, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0421/2004017919.html.

[lxxviii] Ibid., 177.

[lxxix] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 220.

[lxxx] Ibid., 22.

[lxxxi] Ibid., 69; Sarah Taylor Lovell, "Multifunctional Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Land use Planning in the United States," Sustainability 2, no. 8 (4 August 2010, 2010), 2506.

[lxxxii] Kameshwari Pothukuchi and Jerome L. Kaufman, "Placing the Food System on the Urban Agenda: The Role of Municipal Institutions in Food Systems Planning," Agriculture and Human Values 16, no. 2 (1999-06-01, 1999), 216.

[lxxxiii] Cities Farming for the Future : Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities, ed. René van Veenhuizen (Ottawa, ON, CAN: IDRC Books, 2006), 60.; Yves Cabannes, "Financing Urban Agriculture," 24, no. 2 (2012), 681, 218.; María Caridad Cruz and Roberto Sánchez Medina, Agriculture in the City: A Key to Sustainability in Havana, Cuba [Agricultura y ciudad.] (Kingston, Jamaica; Ottawa, ON, Canada: Ian Randle Publishers; International Development Research Centre, 2003), 172.

[lxxxiv] Lovell, Multifunctional Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Land use Planning in the United States, 2506.

[lxxxv] Cabannes, Financing Urban Agriculture, 681.

[lxxxvi] Cities Farming for the Future : Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities, 97.

[lxxxvii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 87.

[lxxxviii] Cabannes, Financing Urban Agriculture, 672.

[lxxxix] John Upton, "New San Francisco Legislation Will Jump-Start Urban Farming," Grist.Org (2012).

[xc] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 240.

[xci] Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities, 121.

[xcii] Julia Wright, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba (London ; Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2009), 20, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0825/2008033034.html.; Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 102.

[xciii] Ibid., 2.

[xciv] Halweil, Eat here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 15, 45.

[xcv] Wright, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba, 12.

[xcvi] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 29.

[xcvii] Ibid., 29.

[xcviii] Ibid., 84.

[xcix] Gant, Robinson and Fazal, Land-use Change in the ‘edgelands’: Policies and Pressures in London's Rural–urban Fringe, 275.

[c] Lovell, Multifunctional Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Land use Planning in the United States, 2249-50.

[ci] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 61.

[cii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 98.

[ciii] Barry Solomon, "Farmland Protection: A Case of Quality, Not Quantity." Land use Policy 1, no. 8 (October 1984, 1984), 364.

[civ] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 68.

[cv] Catherine Brinkley, "Evaluating the Benefits of Peri-Urban Agriculture," Journal of Planning Literature 27, no. 3 (August 2012, 2012), 260.

[cvi] Ibid., 262.

[cvii] Ibid., 263.

[cviii] Ibid., 264.

[cix] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 40.

[cx] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 4; Oosterveer and Sonnenfeld, Food, Globalization and Sustainability, 109.

[cxi] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 117.

[cxii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 255.

[cxiii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 169.

[cxiv] Oosterveer and Sonnenfeld, Food, Globalization and Sustainability, 116.

[cxv] Esseks and others, Sustaining Agriculture in Urbanizing Counties: Insights from 15 Coordinated Case Studies, 36 170.

[cxvi] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 114.

[cxvii] Oosterveer and Sonnenfeld, Food, Globalization and Sustainability, 109.

[cxviii] City and County of San Francisco, "San Francisco Healthy and Sustainable Food Policy," http://www.sfgov3.org/index.aspx?page=754 (accessed January 3, 2013).; Oosterveer and Sonnenfeld, Food, Globalization and Sustainability, 114.

[cxix] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 119.

[cxx] Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 135.

[cxxi] Lydia Oberholtzer, Kate Clancy and J Dixon Esseks, "The Future of Farming on the Urban Edge: Insights from Fifteen U.S. Counties about Farmland Protection and Farm Viability," Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 1, no. 2 (Fall 2010, 2010), 61, http://search.proquest.com/docview/907073108?accountid=13314.

[cxxii] Duany, Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism, 2.

[cxxiii] Adams and Haggard, Garden City and Agriculture; how to Solve the Problem of Rural Depopulation, 86.

[cxxiv] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 54, 123.

[cxxv] Brinkley, Evaluating the Benefits of Peri-Urban Agriculture, 265.

[cxxvi] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 58, 123.

[cxxvii] Vicky Ranney, Keith Kirley and Michael Sands, BUILDING COMMUNITIES WITH FARMS: Insights from Developers, Architects and Farmers on Integrating Agriculture and Development, 2010), 10.

[cxxviii] Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way we Feed Cities, 54, 123.

[cxxix] Michael Ableman and Cynthia Wisehart, On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 57, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0722/97030801-d.html; http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0738/97030801-b.html.

[cxxx] Ibid., 60

[cxxxi] Ibid., 134

[cxxxii] Lockeretz and Tufts University. School of Nutrition, Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities, 24, 34.

[cxxxiii] Ableman and Wisehart, On Good Land, 136.

[cxxxiv] Cruz and Sánchez Medina, Agriculture in the City: A Key to Sustainability in Havana, Cuba, 3

[cxxxv] Wright, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba, 68

[cxxxvi] Ibid.; Cruz and Sánchez Medina, Agriculture in the City: A Key to Sustainability in Havana, Cuba, 4; Danish Architecture Center: Sustainable Cities, "Havana: Feeding the City on Urban Agriculture," http://www.dac.dk/en/dac-cities/sustainable-cities-2/all-cases/food/havana-feeding-the-city-on-urban-agriculture/?bbredirect=true (accessed January 3, 2013).

[cxxxvii] Wright, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba, 85; Cruz and Sánchez Medina, Agriculture in the City: A Key to Sustainability in Havana, Cuba, 81

[cxxxviii] Danish Architecture Center: Sustainable Cities, Havana: Feeding the City on Urban Agriculture

[cxxxix] Howard and Osborn, Garden Cities of to-Morrow, 34

[cxl] Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel, Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 188, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0807/00056000-b.html; http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0807/00056000-d.html.