GREEN BLOG

Designers and Food? Look at Detroit.

POSTED MAY 05, 2010

After sharing my initial thoughts from watching the film, Food Inc. (http://kbbcollective.com/film-review-food-inc-5-stars.html), I received a flood of responses about the connection between interest in Green Building and Eating Healthy. While I am still convinced that you cannot design a great kitchen without an appreciation and understanding of how to cook, I have some additional thoughts to add.

I had so many thoughts, in fact, I went on The Approachable Architect Podcast (http://residearchitecture.com/2010/03/026-approachable-architect-podcast-why-are-architects-talking-about-food/) to discuss with my friend (and great architect) David Doucette. List now (http://residearchitecture.com/2010/03/026-approachable-architect-podcast-why-are-architects-talking-about-food/) and I urge you to subscribe to his free podcast series while you're at it.

Architects and designers need to care about food for a number of important reasons:

1. Our next generation of American cities cannot survive without farming.
The city of Detroit has been hit with nearly 30% unemployment, a disintegrating manufacturing base and a corresponding population. What was once the 4th most important city in the United States has, in just 50 years, declined to the point where Detroit could just vanish.
A third of the city of Detroit is now vacant land, leaving the remaining residents dispersed over the 139 square miles. The city was once home to 2 million people, and now is less than half of that (nearly the same amount as tiny San Francisco). In fact, you could fit Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco within the sprawling limits of Detroit and have space leftover.

Because of this blight, every produce carrying grocery store has left town. Detroit has become a "food desert" requiring most of it's residents to purchase their food from liquor or convenience stores. Imagine the lack of quality and selection you'd have if forced to buy all of your food from a 7-11!

The only hope for Detroit's survival is to embrace urban farming on a large scale, and that is exactly what is slowly happening. On the site of burned down homes are growing small half-acre farms. Larger 5 and 10 acre farms are taking root. Hantz Farms (http://www.hantzfarmsdetroit.com/) has become the largest land owner in the city teaching residents how to grow their own food. Currently, 15% of all of the food in Detroit is locally grown - if only out of necessity.
Detroit is the canary in the coalmine. Every other Rust Belt city faces the same eventual fate. You can read more about these efforts here. (http://ecomattersdaily.com/2009/11/little-house-on-the-urban-prairie/)

2. The employment crisis cannot be solved without Urban Farming.
Urban farming turns out to be a great economic catalyst. Urban farming produces $5 of job growth for every dollar spent on food. Best of all, it keeps the money in the hands of the local community where it belongs. Workers of a range of skills can be involved and the startup costs are minimal.

A city like Detroit only has a four month growing season. If they start to convert some of those abandoned buildings into make-shift greenhouses, they could extend that season to ten or twelve months.

Imagine the jobs and economy created from converting the thousands of vacant buildings into farm facilities. Picture fields of tomatoes on growing on vacant lots, acres of orchards thriving on former school grounds, trays of healthy mushrooms in damp basements and high-rise vertical farms on the walls of old hotels. The factory assembly lines that once produced cars could easy produce farm equipment (or better yet, wind turbines!).

3. Soon, buildings will produce their own food in the same way that (some) produce their own energy.

Just as we can now easily add solar panels to the roof of any building to produce electricity, so too should we use the building to grow food. Vertical gardens can repurpose and redesign the facades of buildings. Companies like Vert Landscapes (http://vertlandscape.com/) are showing people how to do this easily. Not only does this create food and jobs, but these vertical gardens help insulate and shelter the buildings and absorb carbon dioxide. If a city wishes to meet any carbon reduction goals, the energy savings from green roofs and vertical gardens are vital to achieving them.

New buildings should incorporate these concepts from the design inception. The real opportunity is to retrofit our existing buildings.

James Howard Kunstler (http://www.kunstler.com/), the oft-controvertial author of several books, including the brilliant Geography of Nowhere (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671888250/ref=ase_rkeytexDESIGN) has an interesting take on it. He once told me he expects everyone will be involved in growing a portion of their own food in the near future. "Not me!" I thought. I hate gardening and dismissed him as a dystopian dreamer. Now I understand what he meant. In the future, out of necessity, we will all have to take part in harvesting our own food. After all, the average item on your grocery store shelf traveled 1800 miles to get there. That is simply not sustainable.

I encourage you to rent the Oscar nominated film that began this thread, Food Inc.
RENT IT NOW NETFLIX (http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Food_Inc./70108783
PURCHASE IT NOW ON AMAZON http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0027BOL4G/ref=ase_rkeytexDESIGN). For those of you interested in more, a companion book, Food Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer — And What You Can Do About It (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1586486942/ref=ase_rkeytexDESIGN), cover much more than the film could possibly present.

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