Seattle is often known as one of the world leaders in sustainability through initiatives such as local grass roots activism. This is also reflected in the many cyclists throughout the city, bike lanes, bike share programs (as well as pick-up and drop-off helmet program), various bioswales, and numerous community gardens. One of these community gardens is called the Belltown P-Patch Community Garden. A P-Patch, a term specific to Seattle, is a parcel of property used for gardening (otherwise known as pea-patch). The P-Patch program started decades ago and has gained much momentum by inspiring a local movement of urban agriculture.

Today, Seattle has over 80 community gardens with thousands of volunteers actively involved. The land that Belltown P-Patch sits on today was purchased by the City of Seattle in 1993 and transformed into a community garden. Today the community garden is surrounded by residential buildings, high-rises, and a close walk to the City centre. This community garden is quite artsy, with many local artist enhancing the space through mosaic walls, stone paths, decorative railings and garden decorations. The three remaining cottages in the community garden are also used for meeting and educational rooms. It is a joy to wander through this garden, and experience the artistic taste of local artists, and the various vegetation and flowers planted here by the Belltown neighbourhood.

Evidently, Seattle is learning from other communities and cities about adapting themselves to increasing population densities by creating more greenspaces, rooftop gardening, and natural drainage system. More and more people are creating impromptu community gardens, a focal point for community engagement, ecological thinking through public education, and sustainable agriculture.

We live in a small space just shy of 700 sq feet for the three of us so we spend a lot of time out of the home as a necessity. Adjacent to our new home are the abandoned Canadian Pacific Railway rail tracks along West 6th Avenue. Much of the corridor nearby has been transformed into vibrant gardens where hundreds of people stroll through and enjoy with their friends or pets each day.

Arbutus Corridor photo by adamdoneill

Unfortunately, there weren’t any available spaces in the existing gardens close by for us to jump in and get gardening. High in demand and with limited space, this growing and increasingly densifying neighbourhood has few options for fellow apartment dwellers to get a little dirty and try to grow their own food. On my frequent walks down the tracks, I met some like minded folks in the neighbourhood and we quickly transformed a piece of the blackberry, weed choked and garbage strewn land that remained into one of the city’s first community orchards. Over the next several years we literally built community through the continued development of our community garden space.

Arbutus Corridor photo by adamdoneill

It’s been a remarkable experiment in local social capital development as people have shared their garden ideas, lessons and experience and offered others a chance to try their luck at gardening. In our particular garden we have a diverse group of folks, which keeps it interesting and accessible. There is now a varied group of people who contribute to maintaining the lands as an attractive and welcoming community amenity. Local service groups use some of the garden space for therapy or skills development. These service groups offer members with mental health issues a chance to garden with other community members, or teach others to grow herbs for cooking classes. I’ve met grandparents who bring their grandchildren to the garden to pass on their garden knowledge in Italian or Cantonese, new parents who show their toddlers where their food comes from and students having fun with their first garden experience.

Pretty much every visit I make to the garden I am reminded on how fortunate we are to have such a place when people passing by comment on how much they appreciate the gardens.

Canadian Pacific Railway has recently posted notices and no trespassing signs next to the gardens. The Railway claims they are considering “regular rail operations” on the overgrown and rotten rail tracks. The railway wants us (and you) to stay off the abandoned property and remove the verdant trees, shrubs and flowers by July 31st, 2014. It is hard to conceive that there is any viable place to transport goods along this corridor. We’re also a little surprised that after 14 years of no activity or sign of rail work that Canadian Pacific Railway needs to resume in the middle of the summer with the gardens in full bloom.

Arbutus Corridor photo by adamdoneill

Garden Gathering on July 26

There will be a gathering on Saturday, July 26th/2014 (11-5) in the gardens along the tracks between Fir and Maple. Local gardeners will be offering tours and speaking about their gardens; some of who have been gardening here close to 25 years. This may be your last chance to enjoy this much loved community space.

What you can do

If you like what you see I encourage you to write to both Canadian Pacific Railway and Vancouver City Council to preserve this important community space.

- Adam Vasilevich, VPSN Member and Gardener

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Also, on August 9

VPSN is planning on hosting an ‘communal cross-town stroll’ along the entire route, from Granville Island to Marpole, to enjoy the beautiful gardens and pocket greenspaces that have been nurtured next to the tracks, and to explore the diversity of verdant neighbourhoods that the Arbutus Corridor passes through. We’ll also be on the look-out for what changes CP has made to the gardens since the July 31 deadline. Stay tuned for more details on this important corridor in the Arbutus neighbourhood.

Vibrant food cart life in Portland: Could food carts revitalize Vancouver's underused parks? / Photo by Christopher Cotrell

I read a great article this morning over at Project for Public Spaces blog that combines some of the best things about life in the city: parks and food carts.

The article, “The Power of Food Trucks to Calm a ‘Turf War,'” highlights an underutilized park in Evanston, Illinois. A chief reason people gave for avoiding the park was that it was dominated by residents of a nearby mental health facility, making it uncomfortable for other groups to use the space.

To encourage people to use the park, the Evanston Parks Coalition rolled out the oldest trick in the book: they lured them with food. They invited a variety of food carts to set up for a one-day food festival, supplied music and entertainment, and sat back as the park teemed with people who had previously avoided it. The resident mental health patients didn’t disappear; in fact, the food and festivities drew them to the park in far greater numbers than normal. But since the park had been transformed into a destination, no one group was dominating the crowd and everyone was able to feel comfortable in the space.

This story brought to mind a great space in Vancouver: the My Own Backyard Community Garden at Commercial and 11th. Before the garden was established, it was an empty lot frequented by drug dealers and other intimidating characters. Today, it is a vibrant oasis of greenery where families tend their garden plots before playing on the new playground across the street. But, interestingly, the “unsavoury” residents who once frequented the space haven’t been pushed out. You will still find the same characters sitting on the concrete dividers, looking out at a beautiful garden rather than a trash-strewn lot. A few years ago, I helped build the garden’s cob shed, working alongside young families, university students, and residents of a nearby substance-abuse rehabilitation centre. We were drawn together in a project to grow food – imagine how many more people we would have brought together if we had food there to enjoy in the moment!

What do you think of this? Should we start stationing food carts at our problematic parks? I suggest we station a food cart at the Commercial Drive entrance to Clark Park. Where would you place a food cart?

“New Urbanism has been so successful that it has a lot of dinosaur DNA. The honchos are on board — you’ve seen them here. They want us to join them. Do we want to run among the dinosaurs, or among the mammals? I want to be is among the mammals.” – Andrés Duany, in “New Urbanism for the Apocalypse“

Is it time for a new new urbanism? Just as cities, state agencies and nongovernmental groups across North America incorporate neotraditional approaches to (re)-building walkable, public and people-oriented communities, some of its key founders are calling for a reboot.

Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler spoke at the 18th Congress for the New Urbanism last year. Fast Company covered the event, critically rendered in the article “New Urbanism for the Apocalypse“.

It’s an excellent summary of new urbanism, its growing influence, and the new rejection and re-imagination by its founding fathers.

Here’s the gist: It’s time to get ready for the collapse of complex systems (cities, food, energy, government, etc.) brought on by a series of converging crises well-described by writers like Kunstler, Tainter or Canada’s Thomas Homer-Dixon. Duany’s response is a new new urbanism, an agrarian urbanism.

Agrarian urbanism, [Duany] explained, is different from both “urban agriculture” (“cities that are retrofitted to grow food”) and “agricultural urbanism” (“when an intentional community is built that is associated with a farm).” He was thinking bigger: “Agrarian urbanism is a society involved with the growing of food.”

His idea is to produce an intentional community organized around growing food, organized by the homeowners’ association. A “market square” replaces the strip mall, complemented by education and services for the local food economy. Duany imagines these communities employing “Hispanic laborers”, repurposing an economic underclass from ornamental landscaping and golf course maintenance to productive cultivation.

Kunstler’s collapse thesis lays the ground for this new style of urbanism. Peak oil, climate change, financial instability, and the probable weakening or collapse of familiar institutions, like national governments and welfare systems, compels some alternative path.

From Kunstler, in Fast Company:

“I have a harsher view of the situation we are actually in,” he informed the audience, before declaring that “techno-grandiosity” and “organizational grandiosity” will not be enough to save us from the Long Emergency. “Farming, at one level or another, is going to be your occupation.” Walking through historical forms of agrarian communities — plantations, prison farms, hippie communes and Soviet collective farms among them — he dismissed vertical farming as impractical and dense cores like Manhattan as impossible in the coming age without oil.

I am critical of Dunay’s approach to Kunstler’s (and other’s) collapse analysis, especially as it concerns public space and democracy.

The agrarian urbanism imagined by Duany (or at least as described in Fast Company) brings many of the likely factors of collapse into his response. Today’s income inequality and our broken labour system will find a new home in a world dominated by this sort of feudal homeowners’ association. Consider the problems of a landless, economic underclass employed by strata councils and condo boards in food production in a world with scarcer food and energy. Such a system might address the “food problem” but could make worse our inequality crisis. Alongside current and future problems in the real estate sector we should be very cautious in imagining how property relations are structured a decade or two from now. Do we imagine our families in the homeowners’ association meeting or toiling in the quinoa crops of the former strip mall?

It’s possible, of course, that this system doesn’t end up being all that different from what we now have — only a few of the pieces and goals get moved around. The money to pay for the new farming class is already available in developers’ landscaping budgets, Duany says. It seems conventional enough: switch your ornamental grasses to edible crops, “re-landscape for the apocalypse”. True indeed, but his proposal imagines the collapse of banks, industrial agriculture and the nation-state. What is the role of community here? Of democracy? And could agrarian urbanism end up as a new “road to serfdom” while society restructures in the absence of cheap, available oil and stable global trade?

As Kunstler notes, agrarian urbanism — or urban agriculture or urban farming or what have you — will take many forms. There are spaces for community farms, and feudal condo boards and stable city-states in the post-oil, post-collapse world they imagine. Already urban agriculture is undergoing an explosive blossoming of creativity, entrepreneurship and humanity. We should look there for inspiration, not to the destructive and uncomfortable system of migrant and rights-less labour in California, Washington or British Columbia.

I’d rather see a food system built around public space, community, and stewardship than one that duplicates some of the worst aspects of the current social and economic structure.

If we are imagining responses to the collapse of our current system is Duany’s conception of agrarian urbanism really the best answer? Surely, if Duany can do no better, than we must.

Mike Soron is a VPSN volunteer and an Urban Studies graduate student at Simon Fraser University. Follow him on Twitter.