Urban agriculture: an interview with Joe Nasr and June Komisar

This is an interview I did a couple of months ago with Joe Nasr, Co-coordinator at MetroAg (Alliance for Urban Agriculture) and June Komisar, Associate Professor at Ryerson University’s Department of Architectural Science. They both curated Carrot City, an exhibition that ran in Toronto last Winter and showed how design, architecture and urban planning can facilitate food production in the city.

Is there really an urban agriculture trend?

Joe Nasr: Beyond the general trend, there are specific professions that can contribute each one from their own side. That itself is maybe a trend. Five years ago certainly we would have had a far smaller show, because so many of these projects are brand new.

What is the part of responsibility of professionals and city governments?

JN: Some of the examples that we’re showing cannot happen easily. The Egglu, the urban chicken coop, cannot be used legally in Toronto. You can display it, but you can’t have chicken in it. This is just one of many examples in which governments can shift to becoming an enabler. That reflects on some of the professionals and what they can or cannot do.

In Canada, are city governments usually open to hearing new ideas?

June Komisar: Yes, they are. Toronto has a food policy council, and it has been instrumental in pushing forward certain initiatives. One is to provide access to a larger variety of food in the carts. Different departments work together to try to make certain things happen. The fact that they have a food policy council means that certain initiatives can be brought forward.

JN: In Montreal, the city is well known as an enabler of the community garden movement. In Vancouver, they’ve developed new guidelines to enable or even encourage developers building condominiums to integrate food production in them. Governments are starting to realize how they are often hindering, limiting the development of it, and starting to figure out what they can do about it.

JK: This Artscape Wychwood Barns, this was city property.

JN: Yes, it’s a new city park. But to get to it, it took eight years of planning and a lot of debate. A city councillor was supportive of it and was committed to make it happen, as well as a number of groups. The neighbours were very divided on different visions of what to do with that park, it was a very difficult project to make happen. The city played a crucial role even if most of the funding was private donations.

JK: Cities are looking towards each other for ideas: what has worked in this city, what has worked in that city…

Is it easier to transform the infrastructures and buildings that already exist or is it more efficient to build something from scratch to grow food?

JN: It’s easier when you don’t have to deal with existing conditions, but at the same time, the power of this movement is that it’s about transforming existing cities more than anything. That means dealing with existing roofs, existing backyards and existing older buildings that need a new use. This is were some of the richer, most exciting examples are. Including the vast amount of underused roofs and so on, these exist, these don’t have to be invented. That’s a question of figuring out how to make some urban agriculture work on these existing roofs rather than creating new roofs.

JK: Not withstanding the historical value of buildings, which can be really important. Buildings have embodied all the energy, all the materials and labour that when into building them in the first place. It keeps the urban fabric lively.

Is it safe to grow food in the middle of the city?

JN: This is a very common question that we get. It depends on what you grow and where you grow it. There’s some conception that food growing away from the city is necessarily safe, but it’s actually grown with a lot of pesticides, so it’s a question of how you grow it. In the city itself it depends if you grow close to a street or in the backyard, that alone makes a difference. What you grow does as well; some plants are more susceptible to hold various pollutants and others are not. It’s not inherently safe or unsafe, it’s much more contextual.

JK: In certain urban conditions where there is either no soil, or where making it clean would be prohibitively expensive, or the land doesn’t actually belong to the people who want to do the growing, they created things like these big growing bags. In some of the Detroit community gardens and in Cuba, they have huge raised beds.

How many people can a rooftop garden feed for example?

JN: There’s a lot of research that still needs to be done. We don’t really know yet how many rooftops can be used and using which techniques, so if you take that alone there’s huge uncertainty. Real investigation needs to be done on the types of roofs, what would be appropriate on these types of roofs, what kind of access can we arrange in respect with insurance, liability and regulations, as well as how to access them, who would get up there… A lot of these things have to be sorted out, so the potential is enormous. But we don’t know what it amounts to, because there’s a lot more that needs to be found out.

JK: One of the questions is how do you extend the season, especially in Canada, where it’s cold. We went to a presentation by some spin farmers from Saskatchewan who are very strategic about when they start their planting. They say as soon as the snow is gone, they’re in the ground with hardy vegetables. Spinach will start to grow even when it’s extremely cold still. If you’re strategic about what vegetables you plant, you can really extend the season.

Do you think architects and urban planners have a responsibility to educate the public about issues like this?

JN: Anyone who has access to a backyard can do a little bit of gardening, anyone who has access to a balcony can put a couple of pots. But when things are to become more serious, that’s when I think there’s gonna be more and more need for technical expertise and that technical expertise needs to be shared. There can be an important role by professionals, not just to develop techniques, but to help communicate them. Some of it may not be very complex, some of it may be simple. For example Alternatives developed a manual to go along with the containers they created. That’s a good example of where you have a technical development, but more importantly accompanied by communication.

JK: I think the design of houses or buildings is always evolving. We live in a 19th century house that was designed without a bathroom. You think about how house design has evolved so much, possibly in the future every house will have some sort of southern orientation, will have a greenhouse area off the kitchen or something like that. It’s always an evolving design process that responds to the needs of the time that they’re in.

Does it come from a need from the public or the will of architects? Where does it start?

JN: There’s a spreading belief that new solutions are needed for the food system, and within this movement design professionals are starting to say wait, maybe we have some role in this. At the same time you have more and more projects, like the Wychwood Barns, which are is being set up and then need designers to help make them happen. Some are working on projects after projects and are developing an area of expertise. Just like you have some housing specialists and some transportation specialists, you’ll have some food or food production specialists. It will come from professionals themselves, being interested in these issues, but also because there’s a market for their projects. And as it becomes better known, it doesn’t become just a specialty, but rather a skill that’s added to everything else designers do.

JK: Five years ago when I started teaching at Ryserson, no student would put a green roof on a building, they didn’t even think of it. And now, we don’t even have to mention it as a possibility, it’s just a given. If you can, you put a green roof on your building. And I have a feeling in a couple of years, it will become a given that that green roof is a productive green roof.

JN: Planners had started being interested in food issues a few years earlier, so now it’s become accepted in their field. Designers have started more recently but are now catching up very fast.